There’s a quote from a 1992 New York Times article on Cormac McCarthy where McCarthy says that he doesn’t like authors who don’t “deal with issues of life and death.” This was an opinion that McCarthy returned to often in the scant press he took part in over the decades of his public career. “If it doesn’t concern life and death, it’s not interesting,” he says in a 2007 Rolling Stone article that uses the quote in its headline. And again, in a 2005 Vanity Fair article: “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is.”

Simon Jarrett, protagonist of Soma, is dying. We all are, of course, only he is acutely aware of it. He’s been in a car crash, which killed his girlfriend and left with him a bleeding brain and a quantifiable number of months left to live. We assume his viewpoint as Soma opens, guiding him around his apartment and a markedly inaccurate looking Toronto subway ride to a neuroscientist who hopes to extend his life with an experimental brain scan. From there, Simon wakes up far in the future, his brain having been digitally preserved and installed into a mechanical body. He explores a series of abandoned research stations deep beneath the Atlantic. He learns that the surface of the Earth has been destroyed by a comet, that the station’s staff are all dead, and that the only hope for humanity’s continuation is to launch a database of their scanned brains into orbit called the Ark.

Soma is plot heavy, twisting constantly in its opening hours to provide startling revelation after starting revelation. Simon is constantly discovering momentous new facts that he has little time to process, kept busy by moving through a series of rundown substations and eventually descending, in Dantean fashion, toward a final destination on the ocean floor where the Ark waits, ready to be shot into space.

Throughout his journey, Simon is barraged with existential questions, coloured by the headiness of sci-fi technological theory, that ask the player to consider what, exactly, constitutes human life and what, exactly, makes us who we are in the absence of our organic bodies. The first time through Soma is likely to engage mostly on this intellectual level. But, knowing where the plot is heading eases the weight of its surprises, making, as Ed Smith notes in his article for this issue, the more instinctual horrors of its story stand out. These horrors are drawn in part from the animal fear that comes from guiding Simon deeper and deeper into the expansive depths of the Atlantic—a scene in which he descends a kind of elevator into the seemingly infinite void of the ocean, at one point having to climb atop the structure and restart its descent as the blackness of the waters stretch out on all sides; one in which he walks across the desert-like abyssal floor, following guidepost lights while the waves rage chaotically, is as good a portrayal of hell as any yet made.

The real, gut-churning horror of the game, though, comes from the most direct question it asks—one uncomplicated by the flimsy, reassuring blanket of sci-fi theory: what will it be like to die?

As Simon prepares to fire off the Ark, he wonders with terror if it will be his current consciousness or the digital copy he’s about to launch into orbit that will experience the virtually conjured bliss of the database’s inner world. At this point, the busywork of preparing the launch finished, the fear takes him. All of the tasks and seismic revelations that he’s been faced with throughout the game so far suddenly narrow to a fine point. Like a life in miniature, Soma’s version of the distractions that characterize our days suddenly hits a terminal point. No more power rerouting puzzles for Simon to solve, no more grocery runs or appointments to schedule for us.

Soma ends with one version of Simon alone at the bottom of the ocean, sitting at the controls of the massive “gun” used to launch the Ark up through the Atlantic and into orbit above Earth. He realizes his copied personality, not his current consciousness, has made it into the Ark. The version of him that remains hears the radioed voice of his companion vanish. The lights on the gun and its controls blink out. Simon is left to contemplate the nothingness of the void that surrounds him until his artificial body eventually powers off. The other version of Simon walks along a river trail on a sunny day, perceiving the world as a kind of paradise within the Ark, and meets up with that same companion. There is prolonged, blind isolation deep beneath the waves or companionship and joy in the Ark.

It's the former of these options that sticks in the mind—not just for the indelible awfulness of the imagery the ocean floor outcome entails, but for the fact that it more closely resembles the likely end result of our own lives: a period of awareness that we are alone in a terrain where nobody can help us, and that the only future destination that expanse offers, short or long as it may feel, is the cessation of everything.

That’s the real horror.

That’s the crux of the whole thing, the stuff for nightmares to draw from and the fodder for unwelcome midday preoccupations. It all ends, and we have to live our lives with that “major issue” reckoned with or ignored.

At one point in McCarthy’s final work, the diptych novels The Passenger and Stella Maris, the character of Alicia Western recalls contemplating how she might kill herself. She’s struck by the unpleasantness of most options, describing in vivid detail how the body and mind reacts to drowning. The act is recounted with such precision—with such a convincing mixture of the naked facts of science and the emotional context of poetry—that this section of dialogue has lodged itself, apparently forever, into a corner of my mind. Both books are about, in part, the absurdity of our individual lives within the grand workings of history—about the impossibility of understanding who we are or getting what we want, other than a bit of temporary love perhaps, when we exist as small parts of societies and eras so multifaceted and seemingly bent toward a cruel type of entropy that they stagger the mind.

Soma, in its own way, points our attention in this direction, though with a broader focus.

Simon will never drown. He will, perhaps, rust and moulder for what seems like eternity, a strange god growing lunatic in the loneliness of an expansive blackness and the prison of his own body. The rest of us will be forced to contemplate something nearly as horrifying: the slow bleeding that will leave our brains inert and our own consciousnesses fading back into the enormity from which we emerged. And, knowing this, the stark question that follows.

What then? What then?

***

Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.

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My Brain Is Bleeding