Javato, a small artificial island in South Pacific, 24 December 2291 AD

I looked at the strange coffin-like device in front of me with mixed feeling. Fear? Surely I felt it. How couldn’t I? Nobody could tell for sure what it did. Excitement? Yeah, I felt it too. How couldn’t I? This device might be the only thing that could let me escape from death’s grip.

Anyway, my name is Mikael Tosa, a 37 year-old second-rate scientist, majoring in biotechnology, a common person in the UN research lab here. I was also a person recently diagnosed suffering Zephyro, a non-contagious yet deadly disease caused by mutated bio-weapon virus we developed here, Zephyr. I looked pretty healthy now, but I knew that I would not last for more than three more months. And expecting a cure for this disease to be discovered within three months was, I knew, completely delusional. This device in front of me, the SC-capsule, might be my only chance.

I looked around. It was quite dark and completely silent. Nobody but I was here. Who wanted to stay in this laboratory on Christmas Eve? And furthermore, this place was in the forgotten zone, where, at least in the last decade, none but the maintenance drones entered.

I turned on the strange device… strengthening my determination, before entering the coffin-like machine. It was a gamble, but one I was pretty sure I wouldn’t regret. I had no direct family nor close friends, not anymore. I surprisingly, in this not-so-old age, outlived anyone I had ever cared of. If the device worked as I had deducted… it would be great. If it didn’t… well I would die, but… I would still die soon anyway.

The SC-Capsule… My mind quickly replayed the information I knew about it as I entered the machine. This device was created twenty years ago by the greatest mind of the twenty third century, one of the few people I really looked up to, Windell Fremde. As it looked similar to the Virtual Reality Capsules he had created before, people assumed that it was a further advanced console for virtual reality games.

At that time nobody knew how wrong they were. A thousand two hundred beta testers of the capsules all over the world, including Fremde, disappeared without a trace when they test-drove the devices for the first time. I could still remember vaguely how the incident became an extremely hot issue in any kind of media for several months.

Since then, as far as I knew, a lot of researches had been done to the machines… without any meaningful result. Not even one, out of the hundreds of top scientists in the world, knew where the energy source for the devices came from and how the devices actually worked. And worse yet, when the researchers in New York City tried to disassemble one of the machines, it triggered a nuclear-like explosion which destroyed almost a quarter of the city.

Since then, the governments of various countries had seized the capsules and sealed them in many secure places. This UN laboratory here was one of such places. Within the forgotten zone I was in now, there were about two hundred SC-Capsules arranged haphazardly. For years, no living person touched these machines.

I would never touch this machine either if not for the fact that several years ago I incidentally discovered an incomplete scientific journal written by Windell Fremde in Greek about the device. Well, actually it was my department head who acquired the journal through… whatever auction, and showed it to all of his subordinates to... well, just show off I guessed.

The journal mentioned a lot of, what-seemed-to-me, incomprehensible nonsense on how the device worked and how it was built. However, there was one thing that attracted my attention on the journal at that time. It was the original name of the device: the Metensárkosi Kápsoula… the Reincarnation Capsule.

The Second Chance Capsule, if my deduction was correct, would transfer the user’s consciousness to another person and replace the person’s consciousness, which simply meant that the user would live in another person’s body. That was my rough… very rough deduction, which I personally was not even sure of.

Taking over other people’s body was definitely immoral, I knew that. I would never do it if I were not this desperate. I would probably suffer a guilty conscience forever because of this… but, well… I didn’t want to die.

“Sigh…! Let’s do it.” I braced myself, lay inside the coffin-like capsule, closed the lid, and waited.

…

For a couple of second, nothing happened. Then, I heard a hissing sound. Dark gas was pumped inside the coffin from who-know-where. I knew it was to be expected, but I, against my own judgment, was panicked and tried desperately to push the lid of the device. Yet, I had no power to open the lid. Quickly, I lost the ability to control my body. And… my consciousness… slowly… faded… away…