Dance of Death
Cassady opens the metal door and steps in. The hologram clicks on.
As always, despite all the years, he’s not prepared. He knows it’s only an illusion playing over a steel cryogenic tank but he still wants this woman in her transparent capsule to be real. Wants to believe all he has to do is break the glass and cradled her in his arms.
Which is pure madness. After seven years of cryogenic suspension nothing as simple as cradling her in his arms is going to work. Carolina’s dead, and even in 2041 there’s still no technology to revive her.
He sinks to the solitary meditation pillow and waits for his mind to settle, to accept without flinching the silent gaze of this woman who was once a living storm of dreams but is now a haunting mudra to the fleeting nature of human existence. An exquisite philosophical meditation but one that’s hopelessly flawed. Cassady knows only too well if she’s ever revived and discovers he stored her in this glorified meat locker she’s going to be eternally outraged.
This wasn’t her plan for death. Like Teacher Moses, Carolina viewed death as the ultimate orgasm. She believed ferociously that life evolved only because it kept killing and feeding on itself. She knew there was only one way into the future: the dance of death all wetware is eternally engaged in. Yet despite knowing this, he’d been unable to ignore this promise of a fully lived life, even though he knows she’ll never forgive him for forcing it on her.
And with every passing year the questions multiply. Where are all the ever-changing ideas and dreams that were once Carolina? Are they gone? Do they drift in some timeless bardo? Will her frozen wetware ever be reactivated? And if it is, will the reanimated being even be Carolina?
Questions he’s never been able to answer. Despite obsessing on them for seven long years, he’s still staring into a black hole of incomprehension.
