Savestate: A Soldier Who Remembers Every Life He Died In

Here's a confession about this one: I wrote it down twice. Once in July 2024 as Savestate, and again a month later as a concept called Eternal Battlefield. Same soldier, same war, same trick. When I lined up every project side by side this year, the two sat right next to each other and the overlap was obvious. So they're one post.

The premise

There's a cluster of planets, Earth among them, that the notes call the reincarnation bucket. When someone dies on one of them, they're reborn on another, and they go right back to fighting. That's why the war never ends: the soldiers and the generals keep coming back for another round, with no idea they've done it before.

Jack is the exception. He dies in a brutal battle and wakes up on a new planet remembering everything: every life, every battle, every loss. A freak accident in one of his past lives did it. He was fighting an alien species with technology far beyond anything in the bucket, something malfunctioned, and he came out of it able to keep his memories. No one else can.

That makes him an outcast and a very good soldier at once. He remembers tactics everyone else forgot. He also carries lifetimes of war that nobody else has to.

The Eternal Battlefield version came with a tagline: "Rebirth is just the beginning of the battle."

The cast

• Lira, a pilot from the planet Xerion, fierce and loyal, with no idea she's lived before.
• Dr. Zephra, a scientist who studies reincarnation and wants to know why Jack is different.
• General Korgon of Valthar, who has thrived in the endless war and wants to win it outright, Earth included.

The plan runs from Jack's death and rebirth, through Jack, Lira and Zephra hunting the truth about the cycle, to a showdown with Korgon and a shot at breaking the cycle.

Why "Savestate"

The name comes from games, and so does the thinking. The project summary describes it as a story about memory and identity told through gaming ideas: save states, checkpoints, respawning. The influences are Edge of Tomorrow for dying and coming back knowing more, Mass Effect for the politics between planets, and Halo for the scale of the fighting. One of the reference notes even talks about "the game's soundtrack", as if it were a game all along.

If that sounds familiar, it's because the checkpoint idea turns up again, played for laughs this time, in Continue?.

Where it stands

It's a sketch. A prologue, five chapter beats and an epilogue, plus short files on the plot, the cast and the rules, about 1,500 words in all. The two versions don't agree on everything, including how it ends, so merging them means picking one.

Note

The aliens who caused the accident are barely in the notes. Their culture and motives are "largely unknown", and the notes flag them as something to build out later.

Update: this one has a working page now, and the chapters will show up there as I write them: Savestate.