by Hugh Howey
As far as the early 21st century went, I knew I was lucky. I had a nationality (American), a career (accountancy, corporate), insurance (work based, surprisingly comprehensive), savings (some), property (house), a wife (short, enthusiastic, liked tropical fish, 1990s sitcoms, me), children (Child One who liked me, Child Two who hated me, Child Three who liked me. I felt that was pretty good going), etc. Unfortunately, I was born inside a human body whose faults include serious lower back pain, mysterious wax build-up in my left ear, and being a human body.
I remember seeing quizzes like, “What do you hate about your body?” and blinking when people answered things like, “My nose” or, “My wrists”. The only answer which made any sense was, “A tendency to start to degrade from the late teens, slowly lose function and stop working entirely within one hundred years tops.”
I just didn’t understand. I didn’t understand when my first pet died (cat, ginger, angry). I didn’t understand when my first friend died (teenage car-crash, no drinking, deeply unfair). I didn’t understand when my parents died (mercifully late, relatively painless). I didn’t understand when I saw famines on the news or shootings in the streets (constantly). I just didn’t understand. And I always thought two things simultaneously …
This shouldn’t happen.
This shouldn’t happen to me.
In short, my mid-life crisis started early, and kept on going. I had many weaknesses as a human, but you can’t say I didn’t commit. Eventually my perpetual mid-life crisis actually met my lucky mid-life, which meant I had some money to throw at the problem in hope it would just go away.
I sidestepped most of the well-worn, traditional methods. I didn’t buy the latest model of car or try to date a young model or experiment with plastic surgery. I didn’t leave my wife. I didn’t go on a ludicrous health kick, though I continued to eat more kale than I’d have strictly speaking liked (a fact which I would come to regret).
I already had a gym membership. I decided to join another club, with a similar aim. Both promised a longer life. Their methodology varied. My gym believed that the aim would be achieved by having a twenty-something shout at me to lift metal objects up and down, while my other club leaned toward decapitating my head and lobbing it in a vat of liquid nitrogen.
It takes all sorts.
I’d read the literature. Scientific opinion was distinctly mixed. Some argued that revival would only work if the decapitation happened before you died, which would require euthanasia to be legal, which it wasn’t where I came from. It was likely a waste of time, and people thought this was a lot of money to spend just to end up as a minty-fresh head-sicle. I didn’t really care. A chance was all I was looking for.
Religious people don’t really know if their afterlife of choice exists. Just the possibility makes the likelihood of absolute eternal non-existence a little more palatable. In the same way, the idea that I had a vat of liquid nitrogen of my very own was a comfort. It didn’t matter if it likely wouldn’t work. It might, and that hope was all I needed. Anyway: I was only still relatively young, life-expectancies were rising and who knew what new technologies would arise in the decades of happy life I had ahead of me?
“Look out for that car!”
“What car?”
Dead.
THIS IS WHAT resurrection is like.
One second you’re not there. The next, you’re there and you have this stream of sensory data which you desperately try to make sense of. From then on, it’s a case of everything slowly coming into focus, shapes becoming objects, objects getting their nouns attached. The blur of light became a white flat surface became a pristine featureless wall. Between me and it, the small white blur became a flat horizontal surface supported by four thin columns, became a chair.
Wherever I was had both walls and chairs. I’d read about future shock, so was relieved that the fantastical future world I found myself in featured both walls and chairs, two things I was quite familiar with.
I tried to turn my head. I tried to breathe deeply, and failed. I screamed. An electronic voice emerged from a box beneath my throat. It was only slightly better than the text-to-voice on my twenty-first century computer. I would have guessed we’d have finally made progress in vaguely convincing computer voices by the time that we’d mastered resurrecting the dead, but I was a simple layperson. It was likely a good thing. If they’d prioritized reanimating the dead over not making computers sound like they’re about to demand Earth surrenders to its cyborg legions, I could hardly complain. Also, if there was a position from which to complain, I couldn’t get there, as I was a decapitated head.
If returning to life was less interesting than you’d hope, being a living head more than made up for it. I’d read about guillotine victims’ heads blinking, or Mary Queen of Scots still mouthing the words of her prayers when her Catholic head was sliced from her Catholic body. I always thought that must be a uniquely strange experience, which my own experience swiftly confirmed.
Firstly, you’re uniquely breathless. Literally, without breath. I could move my mouth and tongue, but the soft, constant ebb and flow of air is just gone. I hadn’t realized how soothing the simple act of breathing was. It was as if I had my hair stroked my whole life, and suddenly it had stopped. I felt abandoned, betrayed by my body. I thought it would never leave me, yet here we are.
I’d read about phantom limbs. I had a phantom body. I could feel my whole self but a glance to the right showed I was mistaken—I was attached to a tall pillar, with no room for limbs, torso, or any of my usual fleshy accoutrements. It was like an awful, total sleep paralysis. I also had a headache. There’s only one part of me left, and it ached. This felt most unfair of all.
In short: I would not recommend.
I was only briefly alone. A seam opened in the far wall, and through it stepped a tall person wearing black, which was slimming. When the person was already as tall and thin as they were, the effect was profound, as if a sentient traffic pole had walked in, their head a solemn sign whose specific meaning proved unreadable.
“John Garth?” they said.
I’m using “they” as I eventually better understood their dialect, that it’s the best way to translate their preferred language into old English. It’s not that their preferred pronoun is “they.” It’s that all pronouns are “they,” with more specific pronouns used when more detail is required. You may think that this understanding suggests a happy ending, that everything turns out okay as me and future-humans become best friends. I would not make that assumption. Assume makes an ass out of you and me, and I had no ass, as I am a living head. Show some sensitivity.
In fact, their pronoun tree system seemed to make a lot of sense, and much more than my high-school French where I could never remember if a chair was male or female, or even understand why you’d need to know if a chair was male or female.
I was meeting my first ever future human and my first ever future human was looking at me in a way which implied I was far from the first past-human they’d ever met.
“Yes, I’m John Garth,” I said, in a buzz of syllables. “Where is this? I thought they’d clone my body and—”
I stopped, realizing there was another question.
“What year is this?” I said.
They sat down on the chair, whose gender (not being a French chair) can remain a matter of speculation.
“Let’s keep it to ‘The future,’” they sighed.
“Tell me,” I said, “Don’t worry. I won’t freak out. I can take it.”
“Yes, you probably can,” they said, “but I’m not telling you because I’m worried about you. I’m just not particularly interested in filling in the gaps for you.”
This was the exact moment when I realized this future would not be all I had hoped for.
I ASKED ABOUT my family. They were dead. I was upset.
They were all good kids. Well, not all good-good, but I loved them. Now they were good and dead. Like my good, dead wife. You can assume
a lot of distress happened, because it did.
The person was hard, but not unkind. They left me alone to weep, with me only able to imagine my now-gone body bent double in torture. Instead, my face wracked in spasms as I cried. After some time, the machine I was attached to started gurgling. I eventually realized it was replacing fluids in my body. The gurgle was neither a dramatic or sympathetic noise. In fact, it sounded like it was mocking me, a situation which only made me weep harder. After some time, I started feeling better, if somewhat disconnected. To make a disembodied head feel disconnected says a lot.
Eventually, the tall figure made their way back into the room, peeking their head around the door.
“Sorry that I had to hit with you with some sedatives, but I’ve got to see a lot of people,” they said, “But you should know—your level of distress will definitely be in the plus column. It shows that you have sensitivity for people other than yourself. People like that. Some people will root for you.”
I took a second to add this to my growing collection of things that were not entirely comforting.
“Who are you?” I said. “Are you a doctor?”
“Yes, but not in a relevant way. I’m a Doctor of Philosophy and Law,” they said. “My name is Bobb. I’m your lawyer.”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong?”
They smiled in a way which made me suspect that while Bobb may be my lawyer, my lawyer was not entirely on my side.
“This is perhaps best made clear by a thought experiment,” they said. “How do you feel about Hitler?”
“Not a fan,” I said.
“I’m glad you agree,” they said, flicking their eyes to the right. I only later realized this was them making notes in an internal UI. At the moment, I thought they had a twitch. You live, you learn, and then you die, and it turns out you learn some more. They leaned forward, as if speaking to a child. I was already feeling like one. It turns out that being a living head is deeply emasculating.
“Assume Hitler won and his Reich dominated world politics for his whole life. He’s in his eighties, and eventually a cancer nasty enough to trump 1970s medicine turns up. They decide to try and preserve his body for future generations of Nazi scientists to have a crack at getting him back on his feet. Let’s assume they find a way which leaves something that far future science can actually reanimate. And then one day, they bring back Hitler.”
They paused. I resisted the urge to make a joke about Zombie Hitler. I assumed it would not be appreciated.
“Except since Hitler died, the world’s changed. The democratic powers found a way to out-produce the fascists, and are now top dogs. A society that at least pays lip service to multiculturalism has got the man responsible for the deaths of millions of beings. What do you think happens?”
“They have a trial?” I say.
“Exactly,” they said, “and they’re glad that Hitler was dumb enough to deliver themselves into their hands.”
They paused meaningfully, gesturing at me and my present predicament with great formality. They held the pose until I got what they meant.
“But I’m not Hitler!” I said.
“That remains to be seen,” they said, sighing.
They performed another series of eye-twitches, the future equivalent of flicking through the tabs on your browser.
“That’s the weird thing about you people,” they said. “You all acted the way you did, voted for what you did, fucked up the planet, were complicit in the abuse of billions of lives and then expect the people who inherited the world you made to welcome you with open arms. It’s like the drunk uncle who set fire to the house at Thanksgiving, turning up at Christmas and expecting to have a seat at the table.”
“You still have Thanksgiving?” I asked, jumping on the clue.
“No, we don’t,” they said, “I’m just trained in your idioms and cultural signifiers.”
Bobb got out a pen, and clicked it in and out. They held it above a paper, and made no note. The whole show was just to make me more comfortable. It really didn’t work.
“Let’s get this over with,” they said.
IT TOOK A while. I started to do what any good 21st century American human would do in a similar situation. I complained, with every single tactic I could muster. Whining. Anger. Bargaining. More anger. A lot more whining. Indignant huffing. Asking to see the boss. Asking to leave. Asking to see the boss’s boss. Nothing worked. Apparently this behavior is entirely normal. Later Bobb told me they were playing a Reanimation-Defense-Lawyer version of Bingo, ticking off my tactics as they came up.
“I have rights!” I said.
“You don’t have rights,” they said. “You died. You are legally dead.”
“How can I be accused of crimes if I’m dead?”
“You’re clearly a person, and a person with a history.”
“Don’t I have rights as a citizen?”
“You’re not a citizen of this state,” they said. “Even if you once were, now you are dead. You have no citizen rights. You are essentially a new being looking to join our society. We’ll keep you in a cage until we work out what to do with you.”
“You can’t just keep me trapped for that,” I said, before realizing exactly what I’d said.
A shamed silence.
“I was against that,” I eventually managed.
“Good,” said Bobb. “Did you do anything about that?”
“I wanted to call my representative,” I said.
“Right,” they said.
“And I retweeted a bunch of scathing jokes,” I said.
“Right,” they said.
“And I made disapproving noises when my wife’s father went on a tear on Mexicans that Thanksgiving,” I said.
“You’d get more credit for having an actual row rather than passive aggression, but it’s better than just staring at your turkey and blueberry,” they said.
“It’s cranberry,” I said.
“The records say blueberry,” I said.
“The records are wrong,” I said.
“You probably have minor brain damage. It’s natural after such a long freeze,” they said.
“You’re messing with me now, right?”
“A little,” they said. “Come on. I can trick you into answering the questions, but play along and it’ll be much easier and it’ll come across better. Let’s start with some basic ones. No lies.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“That wasn’t to you. That was to the machines. You can only answer truthfully now.”
I’d noticed a series of other lights had activated. I felt a tingle between the base of my spine and the nape of my neck, a distance considerably shorter than I had become used to in my whole-body years. An electronically stimulated truth-telling state. Now we’re doing future science.
They took a deep breath, and I tried to do one and failed. We began.
“Did you recycle?”
“Yes.”
“Did you pay your taxes?”
“Yes.”
“Did you give to charity?”
“Yes.”
“Was it—say—10% of your income?”
“Hell, no.”
“How much did you minimize your tax exposure in legal ways which you actually consider unethical.”
“Some.”
“How often did you spread information from a new source you had any doubts about whatsoever as it mirrored your pre-existing beliefs.”
“Wow, that’s specific. How am I to know?”
“You know. Just answer.”
“All the time. Who has time to check?”
“Right. How complicit were you with rape culture?”
“I never did anything to anyone.”
“How often did you stop your friends making jokes that treated women as a punchline.”
“Not enough.”
“So … once again, how complicit were you with rape culture?”
“I was passively complicit.”
“How did you vote?”
“I voted Democrat whenever I voted.”
“How often did you vote?”
There was a pause.
“Is this question difficult or unclear?”
“I voted in the majority of elections,” I said. “Sometimes I didn’t see the point. The candidates all seemed the same and the polls seemed sure.”
Bobb closed their eyes and breathed.
“Do you know what happened to the world after you died?”
“No. I was dead.”
“And you’re not going to get to know. But you just should know that that alone is enough to make you guilty. You have no idea how angry your descendants are at you.”
“I’m really not as bad as Hitler,” I said. I realized that as far as arguments go, this is both undeniable and weak.
“Yeah, you’re not,” Bobb sighed. “We do grade on a curve. But say … let’s say we dropped a 19th century slave owner in your society’s lap. Let’s make it easier—a slave owner who actively beat, abused and murdered his slaves. What would happen?”
“A trial like this?” I said.
“It wouldn’t,” they said. “You’d have half the country saying it was okay because it was legal then and who are we to judge?”
I tried to deny it and found I couldn’t. I didn’t agree with the argument. I couldn’t say it. The computer had stopped me. I may have not been able to say it anyway. I got the point. Bobb sighed, and carried on.
“Did you eat kale?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did you eat kale?”
“Yes, of course. All the time.”
Bobb froze, mortified.
“What?” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“If I took you outside and showed you the kale-derived gene-modded superforest that’s filled the entire Pacific basin, torn down the east coast and is only kept even vaguely under control by an army of flamethrower-toting techno-barbarian special forces, you’d understand why kale-eaters aren’t too popular nowadays,” they said.