Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  “I can’t believe you were right,” Kathleen said finally, flexing her right hand and studying it. Her left hand had a death grip on one of the hallway’s many handholds. “Your crazy head-freezing scheme actually worked.”

  The frozen head remained still, silent. Its expression was something between a smile and a smirk. There was something very Shelby about that look.

  “My teeth feel weird,” she went on. “It’s the little things, right? They chew fine, but I can tell they’re not mine. I wonder if I’ll get used to them, like you do after having your wisdom teeth out, or if they’ll always feel wrong, a constant reminder of what you did to me…”

  The head, of course, refused to answer.

  Kathleen sighed, digging in a zippered pocket for the holo-cube the cybians had given her, after explaining where—and when—she was, and putting her through a series of tests to make sure her brain was sound and had accepted the body.

  “Run program ‘space squirrel,’” she told it, and a life-sized hologram appeared in the hallway, floating next to Kathleen: a monster squirrel sitting in what looked like the inside of a high-end RV. It spoke:

  Hey sis, it said. It wasn’t Shelby’s voice, not at all, but something in the tone was familiar. I assume the cybians explained everything to you. Hopefully by now you’ve accepted that it’s not a dream or a dying hallucination.

  The squirrel-Shelby hologram paused, ears twitching. Kathleen wasn’t sure how to read the hologram’s body language, but the squirrel seemed to know her well—she was only moderately convinced this was really happening, and only because she’d experienced linear time for longer typical in a dream.

  I know it’s a lot to take in, and maybe you won’t ever believe during your human life that there will be a next one. But as long as my head stays on ice, for you there will be next lives. Use as many as you want; I’ll wait. She—was it a she? how could you tell?—gave a strange giggle, like nerves, or maybe hysteria.

  I’ve paid the cybians to store me for a little over three millennia while you live your lives. If you don’t forgive me by then, I deserve… The squirrel absently grabbed its bushy gray tail in both hands, looking over Kathleen’s shoulder. The hologram was pre-recorded, but Kathleen found it hard to shake the feeling that it was staring right at its own frozen head.

  Anyway, it went on with a twitch. I’ve left you my accounts, and my ship in the docking bay, all yours and user-friendly; you shouldn’t have much trouble figuring it out. I’ve asked my old friend Astrill to come show you the ropes anyway. Don’t let zir try to collect on a case of snapps ze thinks I owe, ’cause I already… that’s not important.

  Another pause, this one longer. Kathleen might have thought the program had frozen if the squirrel’s oddly human hands hadn’t been in constant motion.

  I can’t change what I did to you. Heck, I can hardly even believe I did it! But I can give you the chance to enjoy what I did and see a little of the universe. As you once told me, I want you to live a full, long life. For both of us.

  I hope you remember me in your next lives. Not just as Shelby, the short-sighted human sister who betrayed you, and not even as the “space squirrel” I now seem to be, but as a part of you. Someday, if you choose it, we can become one again.

  I leave it up to you.

  Maybe Kathleen was projecting, but she thought the squirrel was crying.

  I love you, Kat. Whatever choice you make, you’ll always be my soulmate.

  The hologram blinked out like an old tube television. Kathleen’s vision was blurry and when she brought one hand to her eyes she discovered tears. From sadness or love or anger, she couldn’t quite say. A swipe of her hand dislodged them, and she watched in awe as the droplets spun off into the hall, coalescing into perfect little spheres in this zero-g part of the space station.

  Everything here was so alien.

  Pulling against the handhold, Kathleen swiveled to face the furry alien her sister had become.

  “Oh, Shel,” she said, placing one hand gently against the viewing port. “What in the great wide galaxy am I supposed to do now?”

  The frozen head just kept on smiling. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but Kathleen thought it looked peaceful.

  ***unpublished

  Story notes:

  This story was sparked by a brunch conversation in which one person insisted that the slim chance at prolonging her life through cryogenics was worth the risk, weighed against the certainty of death, while the rest of us threw every pragmatic argument in this story—and probably many more—at her.

  We did not talk about potential afterlives, but afterward I jotted down the story idea as “frozen head v. reincarnation.”

  The idea of reincarnation has only ever made sense to me if it stretches beyond our little planet, where the number of souls that would be required continues to increase. After that, I just had way too much fun creating aliens and other lives.

  10 Things to do in Los Angeles After You Die

  1) Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills

  Breaking out of your grave will be the hardest part. Remember not to panic; you’re already dead. Once you punch and kick and claw your way to the surface, enjoy the serenity of Forest Lawn’s rolling hills. Don’t bother looking for her; she wouldn’t visit your grave if she could. Do check in on your famous neighbors like Lucille Ball, Liberace, and Buster Keaton. They’ll be home. Only some newly dead celebrities shamble over the hills to feast on the brains of star-struck tourists. Though small, these brains are highly prized by Los Angeles area living dead.

  2) Hollywood Sign

  You took her to this iconic spot for your first date, but you weren’t looking at the fifty-foot letters then. You’re not looking at them now; you’re remembering how, even years before the change, she loved to bite. Gaze down at Los Angeles spread before you. A carpet of lights twinkles through smog and thin columns of smoke. For now.

  3) Grauman’s Chinese Theatre

  If you still have shoes, see how they compare to Steven Spielberg’s prints in the forecourt. Imagine your life as one of his films: would you be happily ever after, or spattered with unnecessarily red blood? Be careful comparing hand prints; if your fingers get stuck in too-small spaces, they’re likely to fall off. While in Hollywood, enjoy a fine foreign meal. Even a shambler can catch the sight-seers gawking at costumed cretins in front of the dramatic theatre. They’ll see you coming, but they’ll only be amazed by your costume, posing for a picture with you while you gnaw on their ears.

  4) Venice Beach

  She used to perform here. You used to watch her, you and the other men, as she twirled and danced in her short shorts and tall skates. You used to taste her skin down on the hot sand, feel her teeth tickling yours. Go there now, moaning and shuffling along the concrete paths. With so many garish street performers, body builders, and ragged homeless, no one will notice the grave dirt and blood that streak your face. Wander the canals where feral alligators choke on the occasional floating body, and realize how far from the real Venice you are. You will never go there now, and neither will she. You will never have a tenth anniversary.

  5) Disneyland

  If you need a pick-me-up, try the Happiest Place on Earth. Zombies get in free; simply chew your way past ticket-takers with pith helmets and fake-looking elephant guns. Try to hit weekends and school breaks, when the park is mobbed with children and their smug, fat parents. Kids make excellent snacks, and it’s fun to watch Disney security in cartoonish riot gear scramble bodies off-site even while parents wail and rend their clothes, becoming a kind of zombie themselves. There is no death here, or so the guards say. Stand under the Matterhorn (you will never see the real Matterhorn) and remember the feel of that ring in your fingers as you held it up to her. Remember how her yes sounded like a maybe.

  6) Watts Towers

  In life, you were afraid to go there, though she loved the place. The neighborhood is too rough, you said. Look up now at Simon Rodia’s bizarre ma
sterpiece, see the spires like antennas broadcasting to an absent god. Walk among arches and touch the bits of tile and broken glass and garbage so lovingly arranged. But be attentive: the neighborhood is rougher now than ever before, fortified against your kind with sawed-off shotguns and machetes. If you are spotted, run. If you lose a rotting limb in your flight, leave it where it falls. As you run, imagine what a lovely wedding site it would have been.

  7) The Queen Mary

  Some love it for its history, some for its grandeur. Some are drawn to this stately ocean liner by rumors of hauntings. You thought it would be the perfect place to wed, but now you’d like to torpedo the whole thing, sink it finally beneath the placid harbor. Go ahead and rampage; bite and tear. Knock drinks from elegant hands and swab the decks with blood.

  8) Farmers Market

  Fresh, organic food is the name of this game. Ironic that the rotting scourge caught her here, among the snobs and foodies. She wasn’t one of them when you met, nor when you married. He was the one who got her interested in cooking. He was the one who dragged her here. And the biting—well, you can’t say that was entirely his fault. She always did have an inviting mouth, a generous, promiscuous, wandering mouth.

  9) Union Station

  This Art Deco classic was the last place you saw her, leaving you. The zombie rage was starting to take her over, but your rage was entirely human. To leave you? With him? On a train? Their laughter had more than a hint of the groaning sickness, but still it echoed lightly in the great hall. You confronted. They attacked. And the next thing you knew you woke up in a grave.

  10) LaBrea Tar Pits

  Or was there one more chapter between the train tracks and the graveyard? Recall the last of her yellow hair as it sank into oily mud beside plastic mammoths tethered to the shore. Remember the blood on your hands. Your wounds were deep, but you thought you’d survive. You were wrong. Watch now as bubbles of gas blub up from the stinking, shimmering pit. If you stumble into it, no one will question your motives. After all, zombies do not think. Driven by demonic hunger and rage, they are clumsy beasts.

  Think on this as you fall.

  ***published in Every Day Fiction, October 30, 2012

  Story notes:

  You know all those clickbaity travel articles with headlines like “28 Places to See Before You Die”? Doesn’t the “Before You Die” part seem kind of redundant?

  I set out to write a short, funny piece about posthumous tourism, but it turned sadder than I meant it to. Oh well.

  This piece also needs a thank you to singer-songwriter-accordionist Jason Webley. The phrase “between the train tracks and the graveyard” was lifted from his song “Goodbye Forever Once Again.” He also likes to introduce a different song of his by saying, “This is the happiest song I know… about death.”

  Only the Messenger

  Dozens of lives I’ve lived now, as all manner of things that swim, run, slither, and fly, and it’s the same damn story every time. You may think you’ve found love of a profound and timeless nature, but that love will still swim away from you when the current is right. If you’re very, very lucky, it won’t happen until you die and get reincarnated on opposite sides of the galaxy.

  I’d give three tentacles to be that lucky, just once.

  Zaraell is the closest thing I’ve ever found to a soulmate, and the last holo message from Roptrango-A makes it clear that that’s over. Holo messages are slow. She recorded that one almost a full Trango year ago, which means that the ranch-style coral home we sang into shape together has already been dismantled, the seeds divided among our offspring. I can barely think about what must remain, my portion left sick and sinking into the shifting sand leeward of West Volcano Spaceport.

  Better to think of happier times: our first launch together; the day our first clutch of offspring hatched and the pride we felt in the survivor of the post-natal melee; the last time we mated, Zaraell’s sinuous tentacles twined in mine until neither of us knew where ours ended and the other’s began— Actually, thinking of happier times isn’t helping either. My third stomach churns with sick bile. I can’t live with your choices anymore, Zaraell’s holo image had said, grainy image of zir head softly shuddering. Or is it that I can’t live without them?

  I can’t live without zir.

  So what am I doing on this heap of an interstellar trader speeding faster-than-light away from my truest love? I’ve been thinking about that a lot since I watched Zaraell’s latest message, and I still don’t know. All I know are three true things:

  1) Illegal cargo is lucrative cargo. We’re going to make a cloaca-load on this trade, bringing lab-grown meat to the Tro’o, if we can steer clear of the Intra-Stellar Trade Organization (ISTO).

  2) The universe is stupidly, laughably big. Even with the hummingest star drive, it would take lifetimes to get from one end to the other (assuming there are ends—I have a vague memory of an edge, a starless pool of nothingness I may once have seen, many lives ago, but you can’t really trust memories from toddler lives, so who knows?)

  3) There is no such thing as a soulmate.

  And yet...

  The InstaComm pings, reminding me that I’m lost in the space of my own head. Words scroll out on the console’s screen—a return message from the Tro’o, acknowledging our new ETA and providing new coordinates for the exchange. A moment later, a fresh sphere rolls out of the chute.

  A shiny, rubbery sphere where a second ago there was nothing.

  This new InstaCom unit has me baffled, and I’m the best engineer in this arm of the galaxy, if I do say so myself. To instantly—and I mean instantly, not at light speed or even faster-than-light, but right exactly now—send a message anywhere in the universe, you just type up a message, pop in a sphere, the machine does its thing, and the flattened disc that was the sphere comes out for disposal. When a message comes back, the machine spits out the message along with a fresh sphere to “fuel” your reply. It’s not any kind of matter transfer I ever learned in school, and I’m itching to take the thing apart and uncover its secrets. But there is a very serious warning label on the sucker, and if even half the rumors about InstaComm are true, it’s no idle threat.

  Besides, these things are expensive. I’ve only been on two ships could afford one, and the captain’d have my beak if I broke this one poking about. So I shove off toward the stasis chamber to get the fresh sphere tucked away until we need it. You won’t believe what the rumor mill says could happen to us if I don’t.

  #

  Living on a little trading jumper like this one is tough for us Roptralians. I can hear everything that happens, whether I want to or not, vibrating through the hull and inner bulkheads and even the air.

  So I know that Captain KrunZo, gruff and scaly in person, sings Kranellian arias in his grooming pod. I know that our pilot, Jorusz, wakes regularly from nightmares about his last life, in which he was an indentured guard for his species’ royal family, a great humorless flying thing who was kept chained at night and eventually fed to a clutch of royal fledgelings. All through his sleep cycles his shoulderblades twitch, phantom escape attempts from muscles where in this life wings do not attach. I try to make allowances for his recent trauma when he (frequently) lashes out. I know that Quonka’s calm and cheerful façade isn’t phony—that she dances to the happy tunes in her head anytime gravity allows, humming along with them even while performing surgery and scrubbing out infected wounds.

  But the same overly sensitive tentacles that make crewmate overshares a certainty also make Roptralians great stardrive mechanics, so what are you going to do? I tune out what I can and I ignore the rest. When gravity allows, I spend as much time as I can floating in a ball; not touching anything really helps reduce the noise.

  But it leaves me alone with my thoughts, which are presently mired in contemplation of the size of the galaxy versus the size of this growing unease in my hearts.

  From our present location, if we turned around and burned hard, our little
ship could make it “home” to the Trango System in about 1.3 Trango years. Not that KrunZo would do such a thing with a payday on the line. If I really want to get back, my best bet would be to jump ship at the Tro’o rendezvous. Who knows? Maybe I could get hired on by something faster, make it back home in less than a year.

  Home. Is it still home if you don’t live there, and your partner has left you, your house un-sung and surrendered to the seas?

  How did I let it get this far?

  One cargo at a time, that’s how. One better payday than the last; one more puzzle to solve, carrying me a little farther along, then a little farther, then a little farther still.

  I feel so small, a speck in the vast uncaring universe, going the wrong direction.

  And then I hear a knock at the door.

  It’s a testament to my preoccupation that I barely register the oddity of a knock on my hatch—the crew knows to leave me alone when I’m in my bunk—before I realize the knock isn’t at my hatch. I uncoil one tentacle, uncovering one eye, which happens to have a perfect view out my porthole.

  I gasp involuntarily, tentacles splaying, air bladders inflating. There is a face peering in the window. A cute little mammal face, with white fur and whiskers not even frozen by the vacuum of space. So I’m hallucinating. But then the knock comes yet again, and then an adorable fluffy paw waves at me, pointing one digit toward starboard. Toward the nearest airlock.

  This is how those scary holos always begin, I think. But I swivel toward the hatch anyway.

  In case we are about to be murdered by the Thing From Outside, I swing past the captain on the way to the airlock. KrunZo is a FranKoporp, another species you’d think would want to avoid the spacefaring life at all costs. Mostly round, covered in thick scales with stubby limbs and a thick, thick head, KrunZo maneuvers in low-g like a bowling ball propelled by anger. Planet-like gravity makes the ship even worse for him, turning it into a mountain of ladders too big for those poor little limbs to climb easily. KrunZo stays on the bridge most of the time, or in his quarters, and uses Captain’s Prerogative to make the rest of us do his running about for him.