The Park:

Halloween was an excuse. I loved my leviathan symbol pointed hoody, any excuse to wear it was a good one. I love how the symbol rubs people the wrong way, especially religious folks. I dressed up as a devil worshiper for the last couple of years, but whatever, Hail Satan.

My friends loved to dress up too, one wore a Mickey Mouse mascot head, one wore a skeleton mascot head and one wore a devil mascot head. The costume store that went out of business last year had some great mascot rentals. Little Shania wore her pumpkin jacket and leaf leggings.

We all lived on the same street, our families had a general impression of each other. Little Shania’s parents trusted me to take her out for Halloween, I cleaned their garage this summer and occasionally baby sat. Shania was smarter than she looked, she banked parents points with thoughtful consideration and was trusted to hang out with older kids on Halloween. I never planned that far ahead when I was younger. We were going to meet by the park entrance at 8:30 and trick or treat at the rich neighborhood.

The devil worshiper makeup was easy, dark circles, upside-down cross on the forehead and a plastic ritual dagger. Devil worship was one of those adult moments we had as kids, it was just like Santa, another adult delusion that never paid off. Turns out you can’t really sell your soul to the Devil or summon demons with geometric rites or words. We tried like four different times, no Satan, nothing but the feeling we had been duped by adults.

The 5 of us arrived within 2 minutes of each other, me with Shania first, the Devil and Skeleton together and Mickey Mouse was last. We hung out by the park often. The park was halfway between my house and Mickey Mouse’s house. We walked 15 minutes to the richer houses, like creatures in a nature show. A narrator could have pinned down our behaviors from an overhead perspective: “Here you can see the Halloween tribes returning after a long year of isolation, eager to consume the fresh resources of the suburban oasis.”  We eyed other gathering groups, whole legions of pop-culture icons, some already carrying bags of delicious sugar variants.

They went from house to house collecting the larger than typical candy bars until their bags were full. The kids finished their collection and headed back to the park before heading home. The park was dark when they stumbled to the entrance. They were taking their time, they had the evening to themselves. They found themselves walking around the park, their sugar-filled legs knowing the paths and trails in headless habit.

In one of the clearings, behind a fallen snag, little Shania had found a body.

A man was slumped over, dirty hair and neglected clothes said they were homeless. The eyes were closed, and at first the shadows made the body look like a pile of leaves. Wisps of white hair were found around the body, the silver strands reflecting in the moonlight.

The Devil had flashlight and the kids all watched as one spotlight driven eye. Mickey Mouse and the Skeleton poked her with a stick, he was soft still.

Little Shania was the voice of reason. She whispered softly, breaking the silence “If anyone finds this, we won’t have Halloween anymore.” The kids all looked at each other, the shadowed flashlight revealing the doubts and thoughts. Shania elaborated, “They won’t let us go out without supervision if they find this body in the woods. They will be too afraid.”

The kids sat in the nighttime stage, the air growing colder. The flashlight reflected the thoughts of the group. At first the flashlight was glued to the man’s body, scanning his exposed skin. Then the flashlight scanned nearby flat areas, places with branches or tree limbs. Dirty sneaker was found nearby and a large empty canvas backpack. The flashlight wandered a little, but came back to the body, the moment had snared the children.

The crossroads was before them. At one turn there was the easy way, do nothing, go home and wait for their world to grow smaller with the limitations of adults. The other turn was dirty. Like with firecrackers and spray paint, you had to get rid of the evidence. 

Little Shania was the only one that spoke, “Grab the backpack and shoe and throw it over here, we need to bury him.” There was no argument, the Pointed Hoody and Mickey Mouse got to work, they were the oldest and strongest and the least overwhelmed by the sight of death. Both had seen dead rats, dogs, and cats. 

This was the first time the Devil had seen a dead body, it was the first time seeing a dead person. The Devil held his little tail and the flashlight as the scene burned into his brain, disposable people, death and the first step into adulthood, a shared secret.

The kids buried the body in the forest, returned home with the first seeds of the experience planted inside them. They told no one. The cold image of the woman decayed over the years inside the heads of those kids, fertile soil for the creatures of suburban forests. 

The Great Threshing Gort:

Rolling green fields surrounded the rising hillsides. The mountains creeped in the background and the clouds flushed the sky in a thick gray curtain. The rain animated the leaves with occasional droplets, and the bright green underbrush glowed with the radiance of new growth. The streak of life flowed, up to the tree line of the mountains, where, at the crest of the peaks, the spires turned to darker shade of stone.

The woods surrounding the mountains displayed patches of cutting. Like a rushed haircut, the scalp of the hills reflected a spotty rash of civilization. The barber in this case was a homunculus, an automated tree cutting and planting machine. Life and death dispensed with a single machine, rotating the foliage of the green fields. The animals moved from one section of the forest to the other, keeping out of the way of the tree-cutting machine.  

In addition to the normal inhabitants of the forest, creatures like cats and cows and a few dogs, there was a small band of human beings. They lived in the shadow of the machine. The tree-cutting machine was indestructible to any attempts of the human beings, a high-powered juggernaut fueled with the technological sophistication of an omnipotent corporation. They scurried from hillside to hillside, year after year to avoid the threshing teeth of the machine.

Like most human beings, they a developed superstition that gestated over the years. The dogma decayed and percolated with each generation until the rot was a savory poison. The human beings started to revere the machine, calling it things like “Forest Spirit” or “Gray Beast”. Some devolved into naming the mechanical gardener “Great Threshing Gort”. The human beings recorded the movements of the terrible creature.

The prediction of the machine was easy, it moved every 3 moons. Charging through the forest with relentless and destructive force. Then it would settle at a location, outlining the patch first and then processing the trees within the outline. Once the mature trees were harvested, the machine would re-plant trees whose timetable involved future harvesting. The generations of life continued for the trees with automatic assistance, wholly separate from its normal cycle of seeding and dying.

The human beings that lived in the shadow of The Great Threshing Gort did not use machines for their life cycle. They did use other animals, plants and the barren places that Gort created. They planted crops in the space, using the machine as opportunistic farming equipment. They lived and died without explicit automatic assistance.

4000 circles around the star later….

The Great Gort still patrolled the hillside and mountain valleys. The human beings were long gone, the trees were still gently swaying in the wind, and the clouds rolled by with the same opaque gray curtain. No one said anything about the trees or the missing people, no one called the machine Gort or marveled at the ingenuity of the machine’s construction.

The machine and the forest had slipped into indistinction. No longer was the green rolling flush of life appreciated. The silence of plant life offered no exhalation, no superstition or guesswork. All that remained was the meaningless turning of gears and levers, cogs and branches, bark and splinters. The harvest continued for no one, the trees grew and died, never expanding outside their contained area. The Great Gort tended the garden of Eden, empty of any inhabitants.

The trees perhaps offered a small offering of life and death, providing a small threshold of difference. Not that the difference was recorded by anything, nor any consideration for its relentless continuation. The green hillsides were no different than the gray stone tops of the mountains. Their differences went unnoticed, unseen by any creatures, even the cows and cats and dogs were long since gone.

The Great Gort churned and hissed as the machinery continued its busy work, following the program immaculately.

Keyhole:

There are 12 Sundays remaining before she left for Xerxes 7. Then she would be isolated from society for a good long while, free to work on her research. Having spent the last 3 years writing grants for this expedition, preparing, rewriting, and presenting. The task list was a necessity to continue the quest.

The quest was something she had to hide under the official research. The false front was a systematic searching for potential drilling sites for mineral and petroleum resources. There had to be a monetary gain, a vision of profit before the solo expedition could be approved.  

The event in question, a hypothesis that life came from an external planetary source. She dreamed about, obsessed about it, and thought of little else. Through all her research there was this suggestion, a picture forming that underneath the ice lay the original crater, 44.29 billion years ago, the catalyst for all life in the galaxy. Something, some durable bacteria or virus or some small decomposed material had survived the trip through space and billions of years hibernation. She suspected there was a great crater under the ice, a crescent shaped mountain range created from an ancient meteor. The original ancestors of life in IC 1101 may in fact be stowaways of an alien Armageddon. 

She thought perhaps if she could drill down into the ice she could find this ancient form of life. She wanted to be the first, she wanted no others with her, no devices, no assistants, she wanted to be the first to see the ancestral progenitor of all life in Galaxy IC 1101. Her mania was secret, and her plan calculated. There was nothing else in her life that mattered.

The 12 weeks went by quickly, preparation occupied her life. She had to fly in, get escorted to the location and then she would be left alone for 6 months while she took samples, ate out of cans and tried to keep warm. She had every high-tech piece of safety equipment, every location, gamma satellite, and X-ray radio connection possible in case of emergency or food/hydrogen shortage. Every fail safe was planned and redundantly organized.

She brought additional hardware, no one questioned it, the grant was already approved. Once the greenlight was given, there would be very little consideration, other than receipts and a well written evaluation. She had anticipated every requirement for this trip to Xerxes 7. 

The fly in was clear and calm. There was no small talk with the pilot. The landing, unloading and set up was smooth and predicted.  Within 4 hours the drill was being powered up and tested for use. There was no time to waste, 6 months might not be long enough to find the sample. The grant didn’t cover any expenses outside the approved time frame. If she found a nice deposit of uranium it might help fund another trip.

The drill was prepared, and the recording instruments hummed a little. The makeshift shelter settled from the bustle and the air warmed a little as the information started to trickle in. Complete analysis was filtered through advanced machines. If there was something of note, something that was within certain predetermined margins, they would notify her instantly. She waited and reviewed rejected information, momentarily stopping for sustenance. She didn’t trust machines to do all the pattern recognition, they didn’t have any skin in the game.

Her persistent mental raking paid off in the 4^th month. The drill machine discovered traces of life, it was sub-atomic. The scanners showed a symmetrical behavior, small homeostatic corrections. A tiny shell, like the cover of an escape pod. The behavior was intentional and pattered, an easy find for the machines. The real question seemed: How to unlock the homeostatic behavior, what does the pod contain?

The static pod was put inside another monitoring container while the drill continued. Machines and the scientist started attempts to unlock the pod, trying all kinds of photon decay modulations or reverse boson agitations. Like picking a lock with hair-thin needles. The sophistication of the lock was apparent, displaying all sorts of cognitive markers. After a long week of sleep deprivation induced mania, she unlocked the symmetrical behavior.

The unwinding took 10 minutes, she locked the machines out while the pod became exposed. Those 10 minutes were filled with half hallucinations. The paralyzed machines didn’t predict for this contingency and simply recorded what they could. The pod billowed out a thin green smoke, flashes of light sparkled out with the turbulence. She squinted as the brilliance stabbed out from the pod. The light grew and sharpened, growing brighter each passing second. The photonic cascade breached out of the makeshift shelter, pouring over the surrounding ice. The refraction and complexity amplified the disorientation the scientist had. She let out a scream, the machines measured the stress at 36% beyond biological capacity.

The light burnt the next minute into the scientist’s brain. Unforgettable, nothing short of brain removal could erase the neuron configuration. The blindness and swirling light passed. The green smoke dissipated slowly. The sub-atomic pod door was open. The scientist scanned the void, keeping the machines locked out of the details.

Within the void of the pod was a snarling swirl of currents, tiny flecks spinning into large plumes of atomic configurations. The scanner recorded less than 30 seconds of the snarl, before the sound of the fractured the gamma lens could be heard. The swirls grew as the moments passed, the configurations turning into lines and angles, forming visible structure. Squares, then cubes, followed by colors and sounds. The configurations spilled out into the makeshift shelter. Little shadows of indistinct shapes scurried across the floor. Some winked out of visible existence, and some turned into objects next to the scanner.

The scientist backed up, reaching for the decontaminator. An electric snap released a sub atomic cleanse, complete photonic sterilization. The configurations faded and dissolved. The void was silent.

The scientist had come face to face with some sort of progenitor, some creature sealed in an atomic prison. The quest was complete, the ancient life had been annihilated.

Brainless in Paradise:

His hands were calm, folded slightly on his lap with fingernails hidden beneath baggy leather gloves. This was very out of place for a tropical location, the heat and sun offered no excuse for the gloves. He sat comfortably in the shade under a half moldy umbrella, he wore sunglasses, a white linen shirt and shorts that let everyone know he was a tourist.

The leather gloves glimmered a little with the condensation from the margarita glass. He had been nursing the same drink for the better half of the morning and would probably suckle from two more before the sun went down. They were a little sour, heavy on the booze and allowed him to sit unbothered by the local staff.

The place he was staying at had midrange accommodations and left him alone with his drinks in the shade. The man stared blankly over the ocean as thoughts washed over him. Back at his room he had money and a passport and receipts for his trip but, while on the beach that all fell away. His identification had his name listed as Samuel Ferrington, and his receipt had a time table of 10 days before checkout.

For the last couple of days, Samuel stared at the ocean as silently as possible. He kept his hands folded on his lap and said very little to anyone. Samuel had a secret of sorts, something not easily shared with people. The hands on his lap, covered in baggy gloves were covering large unretractable claws.

He had them since he was a teenager, they grew very quickly and were impervious to most cutting or grooming tools. He had an electric sander, it worked for reducing his fast-growing claws to nubs. Samuel’s life had been fairly tedious and typical other than his freakish finger nails. His claws were probably the sole thing that let him think of himself as separate from society. The claws had become that single defining factor, the accent of stylization that gave him a sense of self.

Samuel had come to grips with his difference in his 20s and stopped cutting his claws. He let them grow, even shaped them a little into sharp points. His wardrobe and life took on an enigmatic glow, the attention, the questions, but more important the self-confidence. The claws felt empowering, 10 daggers grown from an unknown birthright.

However, there was more under his skin than fast growing claws. A year ago, he had been mugged, someone pulled a knife on him. They hadn’t seen his claws, they only wanted money. A nervous and aggressive junkie saw him as an easy mark, someone with a life to lose or at least comforts to protect. The knife was a little thing, but the eyes of the mugger screamed violence.

Samuel froze at the request and then some popped inside him, like a small water balloon or a fragile vase. The shatter inside echoed in his eyes and they turned dark. The claws instinctively eviscerated the mugger, leaving much of the inside of his body displayed on the outside. It was a quick and effortless reflex, something done so easily that a guilty pleasure snuck in.

He had been cleared of murder, even labeled a hero by some. People who knew him regarded his claws much differently after the mugging. Now they looked at him with fear, as if the claws represented a beast they couldn’t see. His friends melted away and his career dissolved. He contemplated cutting his claws again, but the guilty pleasure argued for self-defense.

He sat on a tropical beach, trying his best to come to grips with the creature inside him. Some part of him was a killer, it twisted and purred, it begged for that effortless power at the tip of his claws. “Just a little slash, perhaps a scalpel cut with the index finger”, the beast inside begged. Samuel had to reserve a growing amount of attention to contain this urge. The tropical vacation offered a peaceful horizon and warm wind.

The 10-day stay did little to ease the nagging. No amount of margarita mix pleased him, nor the pleasant march of orange and purple sunsets. His brain seemed occupied with slashing the beach goers, polite waiters and anyone within view for longer than a few moments. It became more distracting trying not to think about clawing people’s eyes out than any diversion of the tourist variety. Samuel saw himself doing all the things his imagination told him.

The vacation became overbearing by the end, each temptation reminding him of his failure to relax and get away from those nagging ideas. He stopped going to the beach, stopped drinking, stopped trying to enjoy the vacation. He sat awkwardly in his hotel room trying not to focus on anything, especially not shredding the bed, the curtains or the dry wall.

Frustrated, Samuel’s brain got desperate, both wanting to slash everything and not to think about slashing anything. Another part of his brain hatched a plan to resolve both of these issues at the same time. This part of Samuel’s brain was rarely given a chance at the wheel. Normally this part of the brain is kept hidden away except in times of desperation. Now it was making deals, vowing results, promising an end to the frustration. 

The plan bubbled out in low words that Samuel wasn’t sure were his or not. The plan was a self-assisted lobotomy. Just a small stab through the inner eye, directly behind the left eye. Samuel put his clawed hands on the bathroom mirror, thinking this plan through. The thinking was cut short by the enthusiasm to use the claws, any chance to slash something. The right index claw severed a cluster of harp strings connecting the different hemispheres of the brain. The desire to claw things was isolated to an oubliette, a locked basement room of the brain, now with no door.

Samuel gave himself a lobotomy with surprising success. He returned from his tropical vacation a normal functioning human being that no longer wanted to slash and stab other human being. He was now a cured and productive member of society.

The Hand:

Two seconds later and the apple was gone, the large horse teeth smiled back at me. Those chompers had eaten tons of my childhood toys, my father rumored that the horse was probably half goat. Today however, I was happy to feed my old friend a delicious treat. Granny was an ancient horse, 34 years old and still as sassy as ever. Granny used to be called Gran or Gran-Poo-Ba when I saw younger, but age had become her defining badge of honor. Granny neighed and nickered and then rested her head on my shoulder affectionately.

I knew Granny was going to die most likely in the next 5 years, I would probably find her in the stall breathless and stiff. I tried not to think about it too often but sometimes her hips showed her age as she struggled to get up and down. Granny also had moderate development of senile cataracts, her cloudy eyes could still see apples when I held them in front of her face. I felt bad for her and tried my best to keep her clean and happy. Her nickering became a soft spot for me. Above all else regarding Granny, I didn’t want her to suffer, she was a good horse on her last legs.

I only saw her on the weekends, my father took care of her otherwise. Most of the animals my father kept were old animals, he stopped refreshing his livestock about 6 years ago. He was getting old too and there was no way I was taking over as steward of the old animals. Maybe for Granny but not for the remaining dogs and chickens and cows. Those were firmly his responsibility and hopefully they would all die before my father did.

My childhood was rank with farm chores, shoveling chicken poop, cleaning, moving, watering, and feeding. For my father, he received a huge stipend of satisfaction, a nearly endless supply of gratification from the husbandry of animals. He wished that I would see the value in hard work, but the smells never disappeared. I hated the smells of everything, the feed, the barn smell, the smell of death when an animal died and rotted behind some piece of antique farm equipment. The satisfaction never rubbed off on me, the biological didn’t interest me in the slightest.

Granny interested me though. Perhaps from growing up together. Each weekend she beamed out those large and imposing teeth whenever I got close enough for her to recognize me. I always greeted her with an apple and told her all about my week at work. She was a metronome for me. I watched her closely looking for signs of aging and death, doing whatever healthy thing I could for her when I was around. It didn’t help.

Granny started to show troubling signs of deterioration last week, her hips prevented her from standing longer than an hour. She greeted me from the ground, looking up at me with the same enthusiasm as ever, her body was simply falling apart. However, her teeth looked different, they looked less square, perhaps some bone degradation. She had trouble eating the apple, and didn’t nicker at all, the apple seemed like a chore. Next week I will bring her a pear or a softer apple and see if she likes it.

Week 2: Granny is upright less and eating less, my father tells me she won’t eat much of anything and that her time is near. I think she just needs the right food. I brought some soft fruits and cooked carrots.

Granny’s teeth are looking worse, it is surprising how much they have decayed and changed. A couple of them look like they are pointed. She ravenously ate the pears and carrots. She didn’t nicker at all, she ate the food I brought and then went to sleep. She snored a little and her ribs gently rose and fell peacefully. My father is worried about her, she won’t eat anything he gives her, even the same cooked carrots or tender pears. He thinks it is time for the gun, that she is past her days and only misery and a slow death remain. I told him to wait until next week, let me try and feed her by hand a little maybe she can bounce back. I am not ready to give up on Granny.

Week 3: I have come every day since last week. Each day I feed her by hand, she only eats and sleeps now. Her teeth are rotting, or breaking or something like that, they look rounded, thin and slightly blackened. She seems fine when she is sleeping, but when she is awake she seems more irritated, hungry and unable to stand. I can sense the frustration in her. I told my father that she is eating regularly from me, he doesn’t seem convinced. He thinks that I am prolonging her misery. “Why is quantity of life more important than quality of life?”, I don’t have an answer for him, but I think Granny can still bounce back.

Week 4: She is dying. She doesn’t even try to get up anymore. She stopped eating the soft vegetables, the horse doctor said he could give her a painless injection to end her pain. I am going to see her one more time and say goodbye.

Granny was sleeping in the stable, her ribs barely rising with each breath. The hand stroked her shaggy mane, patting her neck and shoulders. A soft weeping could be heard, little drops of salty water fell to the ground in a wordless farewell.  

The horse woke for a moment, straining to open its eyes a moment. The horse looked up and nickered a little, revealing mangled rows of spiny teeth. The hunger within Granny rose up in her one last time, one last pull of a rusted lever in the equine brain, compelling her eat. Granny snapped out and snipped the hand, a fleshy finger separated under the rotten teeth. The hand recoiled and screamed, Granny snapped awake in confusion, the strange taste of blood and flesh in her mouth.

Thinking only that another dream had rolled over her, Granny returned to sleep unware or unable to see the owner of the hand. The hand was wrapped, stitched and tended. Granny was injected with death later than day and never woke up.

Airplane Crash:

Carl Sanders was putting his shoes back on, he had just passed security. The new scanners were tiny, and you probably didn’t need to take your shoes off, but they still required it. Carl was eager to get to the plane, to get the whole traveling leg of his trip out of the way. He was on his way to a beautiful and tiny tropical island that would take less than an hour to drive around the entire island.

The trip was supposed to be calming, relaxing, a little dip into a carefree mindset. Carl was a very nervous person, he had an itchy brain, at least that’s how he thought of it. He felt like something terrible was about to happen, a heavy sense of anticipation for nothing. Nothing ever happened, he just felt like dread hung on him like a moldy blanket, a social antiseptic with a sweaty collar.

He had managed to get by most of his life by pretending that something unbelievably horrific wasn’t about to happen, something certainly wasn’t around the corner, ready to rip everyone to shreds. He got calloused to most people by the time he finished high school. He didn’t care if people couldn’t see his unseen dread, like an invisible rash, once explained it developed into recoil and avoidance.

He pretended that everything was fine, smiled when he had to and faked his way past lower management. He pretended his way to a solid middle manager position, requiring almost nothing of him. He spent most of his time in the office listening to calming music on his device, ocean noises and bird calls. Relaxing was a hobby that he failed at most of the time. It took very little to justify his sense of dread.

In his younger years Carl had attributed every life change to this sensation of impending doom. Whether it was a first time at something, a death in the family or a job interview, the anxiety crushed any sense of tranquility. As Carl grew older, the dread hung on him even when things didn’t change, instead of worry, it twisted into suffocating claustrophobia. He would lie awake wondering what sort of rotten thing he was becoming by staying at his job, what sort of dead end was he about to discover. The idea of discovering that his life had been wasted by staying in the same place too long terrified him. Doom itself kept a heavy finger on his fast-beating heart.

Now on the plane Carl tried his best to pretend to be a tired human being, hoping that sleep would dissolve the time between places. He adjusted his seat, watched out the window with eyes that he tried to convince himself were heavy. His attempt at self-hypnosis proved a frustrating and twitchy ordeal. The seat wouldn’t recline back enough, a child was crying and there was light turbulence. Carl shifted in his seat for the better part of an hour.

Then the lights flickered, the cabin shook, and Carl’s stomach slapped him to attention. The plane was descending. The plane jerked, and little pieces of plastic fell from overhead. The child screamed, and the lights failed. Everyone around the cabin did something different. Some put their hands over their eyes, squinting and rocking in their seat. A couple held each other, burying their faces in a desperate embrace.

The plane was going down, the first couple of seconds of realization was marked with short and shallow gasps. Everyone’s stomach was in their throats, and a few let them out in screams and shrieks. The certainty of the situation was coming into a bright focus, unable to turn away from the quickly approaching abyss. That didn’t stop people from trying harder, and the following seconds were filled with an unearthly variety of emotions.

The screaming, praying and crying rolled over the cabin like a wave. Everyone trying to drown out the realization that the ground was going to smash everyone, but only those with windows could see the ground coming up. Carl didn’t flinch.

Carl had spent his whole life with the bottled-up pressure that was now filling the airplane. Everyone was cloaked in the same dread he had felt his whole life. He was glacial, he looked around at the contorted faces and wet eyes, he surveyed the flailing congregation of people. They all had the same look in their faces, the same look he saw when he looked in the mirror, that something terrible was right about to happen. The difference was that he had a window seat and had seen the ground coming up the whole time, he wasn’t surprised or unnerved, he was relieved that the nauseating anticipation of his life was coming to an end.

The grim satisfaction was that Carl finally felt like he was in the right place, with the right people. He felt like this was a moment he didn’t have to explain, or hide, or suppress any part of himself, he was feeling expressive.

He joined the frantic choir of the soon-to-be-dead airplane passengers and let out a song. He belted the song out at the top of his voice, he sung Africa by Toto, with the crackle and skill of a drunk karaoke singer. He didn’t care, today, right now was the moment he had truly come alive. The dread was real, and the anticipation felt like he was heading right into the center of the universe, ready for the smash.  

The smash happened with a blink, like a rollercoaster, it jerked their little water-balloon bodies with enough kinetic force to dissolve any recognizable definition of a human body, the fire burned the rest. Luckily most people had their seatbelts on and could be identified later by the locations of the charred piles. Carl’s remains weren’t any different.

Jessica One:

Jessica was the first of her line, a top-end socially augmented human being. Her first words were predicted, her early childhood development was carefully influenced. Any neurosis or mental deformity was pruned from her life and repaired with the best nurturing that corporate money could buy. Jessica was groomed for her destiny. Her fate was heavily invested in, planned, orchestrated with the intention of producing the most psychologically stable human being.

The resulting product was a serene and graceful creature. Jessica was carved in marble, a statue of mental fortitude. She could endure; she would not crumble from loss, shatter from trauma, wrinkle with idleness, or slump at despair. She would bounce back within days, regenerating her attitude with elegant ease.  Nothing kept her down, no test or situation she was put in, her perspective never faltered.

Jessica had just turned 50, it was clear she would be able to endure anything. The reason for this Olympian effort to develop such durability came from a practical consideration. Jessica was going to be extracted into a complete digital creature. All of her life had been monitored, recorded and analyzed. The last step was a complete neuron map of her brain. This mapping process had lethal consequences, it was a one-way trip. 

Jessica wanted to do it, she wanted nothing less than to fulfill her destiny and enshrine her durable perspective. To her, this was immortality, and it placed a tremendous value on her life, regardless that it had to end with the brain mapping procedure. Besides, life had grown a little dull the last couple of years, she was growing impassive. She figured that it may be better to die at your peak then decay into faults and mutations. The idea of her flawless mind fading had a terror that reflected in her eagerness to complete the brain mapping. She didn’t have anything called anxiety or doubt, that terminology had been sterilized from her thinking.

The brain mapping device was in its 4^th version, the imagining hardware was able to map connections down to 10-to the negative power of 28. This advancement was largely due to breakthroughs in gravity wave detection. None of this concerned Jessica, this was her one chance to break the virtual barrier for humanity. No stable human to virtualization brain had survived longer than 3 days. The psychological torrent had proved lethal and painful. Jessica had no doubts, if she did, she had no mental language to think about them.

Jessica was as serene and tranquil in life as she was facing death. She smiled, she thanked the doctors and engineers for their work. Her life’s work and their life’s work had come together to create something never before created. There was a ceremonial tension in the event. Jessica laid motionless on the table as the machine began to circle around her head. A wide camera was lowered, the domed black glass looked like a large eye. The camera was going to record the positions of atomic structures down to everything except the positions of electrons. The black glass glowed briefly a dull indigo blue.

The overhead scanners and the rending lasers started their activities. A couple of 3-fingered machines held Jessica’s head still as the outer and inner skull casings were removed. The scanning and recording from wide camera took an hour. They scanned all the way down the spinal cord for physical reflex calibration. All information was backed up, redundantly stored, and placed in fault tolerant facilities. Jessica’s remains were frozen.

Then the creation started. The scan information was loaded into the bio-fabrication machine. The machine was ready and capable of 36,000 identical constructions. While the information loaded, the machine started the creation of 36,000 clones. All tests showed that Jessica would be able to handle a 100k biological reflection, but 36,000 was the Nash Equilibrium of outcomes.  There would be plenty of opportunity for additional construction. The time required for precise atomic recreation was 1 year. The recalibrations and remeasurements were tedious.

After the long year, 36,000 clones woke up. They were allowed to meet each other in carefully planned amounts. The first couple of introductions resulted in groups of 5-6. As soon as the realization of multitude flattened out, the groups could handle more. Groups of 150-200 formed on day 2. They simplified priorities within hours and developed a larger sense of self. There was no sign of mental decay, or self dissolvement, the durability seemed to be holding up.

Jessica survived the 3^rd day without any issues, she formed groups of 4-5 thousand with ease. There was no hierarchal dissonance, no jealousy, no confusion, and most importantly no murders. In the past the hivemind had turned violent. Stricter fail safes had to be included before further replication. Jessica’s grace had proved peaceful and effortless, she suffered no discomfort from magnified existential turbulence. 

On the 4^th day it was clear that Jessica had the durability for further production. The bio-construction machines started creating the next batch of Jessica.

Fictional Obituaries of Forgotten People:

Holi Bava:

Little machines are easy to move, their little gears and wires require little strength. Large machines create waste and pollution yet compared to an equal work force of human beings they excel at efficacy, making little waste. Each large machine has allowed for seemingly endless human beings to exist, their needs being met. Soon we will make enough large machines to feed everyone. This leads to population growth, inching up to the edge of what the large machines can produce, and if more machines are needed, more machines are made and with them more people are born.  At least this is the general vision of progress, accompanied by glossy ideas like quality of life, liberty, freedom and other abstractions.

Without the machines we would be reduced to hunger, freedom and liberty meaning nothing without food, our consciousness shrinking in direct proportion to our communal blood sugar.  

Some people don’t value food at all. Even when hungry, they have no use for the machines that make food. They value something altogether different. Food is a requirement passed down by a biological urge, something to be slated only when absolutely overpowering. After a lifetime of practice, the threshold of being overpowered by hunger is pushed back into the realm of starvation.

One such lanky veteran was called Holi, and she ate as little as possible. She hated society’s obsession with food.  Holi’s obsession was with small machines, their little wires, and their screens provided everything she wanted. Holi loved looking into her small machine, it showed her endless ideas, a rainbow of terrible variety. Each one a marvel and curiosity, a time sink of amazing and wonderful distraction.

Holi thought that dying while gazing at the beautiful spectrum of ideas was the best way to die. Of course, her biological urges took over when she became too weak to hold this idea in her head, it would fade away and glass over like a still pond. When the idea returned, it was too late, her body had managed to stuff some nutrients back into itself. Thwarted, she would start the march back into hunger again, each time more resolute to finish the job.

Holi wasn’t stronger than her biological urge for food, but the idea of ending the struggle, the idea of relief still haunted her. Her fantasies becoming more elaborate: walking into a forest or desert, locking herself in a room without food, or perhaps handcuffing herself to her bed. She never followed through with any of them, the biological boss in her head always took over with a last-minute grab of the proverbial steering wheel.

The human beings around Holi constantly told her how much she meant to them, each one of them telling her to listen to her biological boss and eat more food. They piled concern unto Holi in heavy handfuls, until she gave up the practice of starvation. They called her cured, reformed, and welcomed her eagerly back into the fold of the world of human progress. However, Holi simply changed her strategy, she would wait until her friends and family died and then she could finally disappear without the heavy weight of concern. She spent her time in the fantasy of suicide.

She would imagine herself getting hit by passing trains, run over by traffic. When walking under construction, she would hope that a neglected hammer would fall straight down unto her head, hopefully traumatizing nearby people. She would watch the road workers repair the concrete roads with jack hammers and thick tar, lost in a whirlpool of possibilities, she would smile and continue her day.

Year after year she patiently waited for those who were concerned to die of their own means. Bidding her time with the fleshy variety of life, she encircled suicide patiently, pecking at its possibility. She had considered taking a trip and having an accident of some kind, perhaps swept away on some far away cliffs into a cold sea. There was also the idea of disappearing, but the anxiety and worry it would cause her friends and family would haunt her and the romance of death-by-imagination would be darkened by guilt.

 Holi waited until she was 84, and everyone that loved her, everyone that cared if she lived or died had met their end. They had all died boring deaths of organ failure in comfortable ease. She attended the funeral even she tried her best to avoid people, the last thing she wanted was to meet new folks that would begin to care about her.

Now that everyone was dead, and no one was around to consider if her being around was a bad or good thing she worked quickly to set up her own demise.

She loved her little machines, they gave her a terrible variety and they did not fail. She was ready for the final battle with the biological boss in her head. It was a simple and old idea, she would lock her door and throw the key out the window. She lived on the 13th floor so and retrieval would be impossible other than flying out the window. She would be too frail to climb down any fire escapes.

Holi plugged all her little machines in and hooked them all up directly into her spinal implant. She sat on her couch and dipped into the carrion of her imagination. She feasted and as she did it fed the beast of variety inside her, slating the creature in high magnitude ideas. She dove into everything, every taboo, every boundary, every concept that was shamed, blamed or evil.

Holi died in her apartment on a Saturday night deep into her little machines. She died finally victorious over the biological boss in her head, and without any guilt. Pain and hunger were just a background voice in the whirling chaos of a brightly illuminated enlightenment.