Microstory 2050: Minnesota

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Now, some of you may say that my papa never made it to all fifty states. He died in Oklahoma before he ever got the chance to see Minnesota. But my family and I don’t feel the same way that you do. After he died, we had a funeral service for him in Florida. My grandma has a hard time moving around. She doesn’t have ALS, but she’s old, and that’s just what happens. My aunt, uncle, and cousins all flew down to be there too. All of papa’s friends from college, the Navy, and his co-workers from the submarine company were there. Papa met a lot of people as he was going to every state. I didn’t talk a whole lot about that, but he didn’t just step over the borders, and take photos. He became involved in people’s lives, and they remembered him later. People heard of his accomplishment, and because of my dad’s work with the news, it made it into national news. Everyone knew that he had died, and they knew when the funeral was. They even had to move the service to a bigger room, because there wasn’t enough space in the one we had booked. When it was all over, we took papa’s cremains up to Minnesota. When you die, you might be buried in the ground, but they also may turn your body into ashes. It may be scary, but a lot of people want this to happen to them, and that’s what my papa wanted. We spread his ashes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Papa loved forests, so we thought that it was a good place to do it. Don’t worry, we asked for permission first. Some of the ashes are still in a little urn on our mantel. We had the special map framed, and it’s hanging on the wall right above it. The rest of the ashes will stay in Minnesota forever. I think that’s fitting. My papa went to all fifty states in the United States of America. I think that’s pretty amazing. Thank you for watching and listening to my presentation about my papa.

Microstory 1764: Phoenix Industry

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I’ve had a monopoly in my industry for the last two years. I had to hire a team of lawyers to protect me, so the government couldn’t come in and confiscate my property. Back when I was just a crematorium operator, I gave my administrator the task of finding me a new furnace. When the machine came in, I assumed she had bought something without going through me first, but it wasn’t long before I learned that she had had nothing to do with it. She’s trustworthy, but as lazy as I am, so she hadn’t even gotten around to starting her research. We never did figure out where the new furnace came from, and that’s kind of a big deal. Not only is it weird—and worrisome that someone had the ability to charge my company credit card without authorization—but it also appears to be unique. They call it the Phornax, which after I used it, I realized was a combination of the Latin word for furnace, fornax and phoenix. You see, it brings people back to life. It doesn’t matter if they’ve already been cremated, or if they’ve been dead for a long time. Any dead person I place in here will come out brand new in a few hours. There doesn’t even appear to be any side effects, like an insatiable hunger for human brains, or neurological issues. In fact, they usually return healthier than they were when they died. It cures them of all maladies and other medical conditions. The only caveat is that I do need all of the remains. I’ve tried to bring back someone with only a portion of their ashes, because part of it was spread into the ocean. It did not turn out right. I’ve seen a lot of disgusting things in this business, but I retched the most I ever had the day I opened that door, and found a horrific pile of boney goo of a man with incomplete cremains. Since then, I’ve been adamant about doing my due diligence.

I do charge for my services, but even though no one else can do what I do, I think I keep my prices fair, and I base them off of tax brackets. The rich pay handsomely, and that supplements the loss of income from my discounted rates, and my pro bono work. I work hard at this, and it’s not easy. I only take Saturdays off to rest. I shouldn’t even be in the office right now, but my administrator is on vacation, and there are a few records I have to verify. As I’m standing at her desk, trying to figure out her filing system, a man walks in. The door was supposed to be locked, so I’m not sure what happened there. Somehow I know that this is him. This is the man responsible for my furnace gift. I don’t know if he just works for a secret cabal, or if he’s straight up the devil, but I can tell that he’s involved. He confirms as much when he recites the full serial number of the Phornax, which he wouldn’t have known if he was just some rando off the street. I ask him why he did this, and he claims that this was all a test run. He and his people needed a way to assess whether my species was ready for the privilege of immortality. This was a great way to do that, because the process is irreproducible, so I’ve not been able to get around to helping all of the over hundred billion people who have died in history. He tells me he doesn’t like the results, and that he’s taking the furnace back. I beg him not to, that we deserve a second chance, but he refuses. I’m not a violent man, but I feel compelled to try to stop him physically. In the struggle, I somehow end up inside the Phornax. “Fine,” he says, before switching it on. I scream in pain as the fire overwhelms me. I break myself out hours later. I had always wondered what would happen if you put a living organism in here. It appears to give people superstrength. What else, though?

Microstory 1737: Phornax

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I received my new furnace yesterday. No, this is not the furnace you keep in your house. I own a crematorium. It’s our job to make sure that your loved ones rest in peace, according to their wishes. I have a little bit of help with the administrative stuff, and customer-facing responsibilities, but I pretty much run this myself. I come in when I please, and work at my own pace. It takes some time for people to schedule funerals and memorials services, because friends and family have to come from out of town, so it’s not like I’m ever on a time crunch. I got into this industry because I knew I could do it. More to the point, I knew I could stomach it. I’m not a sociopath, but death has never bothered me. It’s an important and inevitable fact of life, and I’m happy to do whatever I can to help ease people’s pain. Better I deal with all the dead bodies and cremains so someone who hates it doesn’t have to. All that’s been missing up until now is some decent equipment, which it looks like that is what has come in. I had my receptionist look into the newest and most affordable models, but I didn’t actually ask her to order anything for me yet. Anyway, I trust her, so I’m sure this one will be fine. It certainly looks nice. I’ve already seen the line item on the expense sheet, so she apparently took that affordability mandate seriously. It’s called the Phornax, which I imagine is just a stylization of the word fornax, meaning furnace. I read the instructions, and most of it seems standard. I won’t have to learn anything new. I will say that it’s rated to take about twice as long as my last furnace, but that shouldn’t be a problem. I imagine that’s where the affordability comes in. It must be designed for energy efficiency, not speed.

Once I have it installed, I decide to test it on my next subject. Here we have a Mrs. Pollyanna Bartolotti. Forty-two years old, widow, used to work as a dental hygienist. She died of complications from something called takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Her husband, a tractor dealer died recently, so that was probably her ultimate cause of death. It’s also known as broken-heart syndrome. I place her in the furnace, turn it on, and leave to binge seven episodes of this show from fifteen years ago that I just discovered. When I stop to take a pee break in the middle of the last one, I hear a banging downstairs. Great, it’s a horror movie, and I’m about to die. I creep back down to the basement, and open the furnace, where I find a perfectly healthy and alive Pollyanna Bartolotti. She’s freaking out and confused. Now I know why they call it the Phornax. It’s a pun. I’ve seen this movie before, though. They don’t come back right. If I’m not careful, I could spend the next eighty minutes running for my life from evil zombies—except we don’t call them zombies. She definitely doesn’t act like one. She’s coherent, and everything. I explain to her what little I know, just hoping she doesn’t suddenly jump up and try to eat my face. She eventually starts begging me to do the same thing for her husband. But he’s been cremated already, I remember, so I don’t know if it’s possible. Still, it can’t hurt to try. She gives me a key to her apartment, so I can steal the urn, and come back to give it a shot. I’m surprised to find it works. It actually works. The damn thing must indeed cremate the body first, and then spend the rest of the time reconstituting the cremains. He’s just as pleasant and grateful as she was. I wait for them to turn evil over the next six months, but they never do. So now I’m no longer in the death business. I’m in the phoenix business. Come on in. Let’s see what we can do for your late grandmother.

Microstory 1724: Columbarium

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I am the only survivor of a crashed scout ship on an alien planet. My communications array was destroyed, not that there would be anyone to reach out to this deep in the black. If Earth doesn’t hear back from us, they will assume the worst, and make no attempt to mount a rescue mission. They cannot waste time looking for me when every ship is needed to search for a new home. Here is where I will live for the rest of my days, which will probably be long. The forward section of the ship is intact. It has good ventilation, solar power, ample medical supplies, and comfortable quarters. I must still go out in search of food, however, as our reserves all burned up. I’ll only last a year on the emergency rations that we had the good sense to store separate from the rest. I leave the protection of the vessel, and venture out into the wild. I won’t have to walk, fortunately, as a single occupancy helicopter did manage to survive the devastation. I’ll be able to hunt for resources from above, and it will go much faster. I immediately find a source of freshwater. It appears to come from a spring, and cuts through an oasis. I’m not sure if any of the plant life is edible yet, so I’m going to have to run some tests. I keep traveling over the lands, and keep finding these isolated oases, but the majority of the planet appears to be rather barren. It will be fine for me, but it would have been a poor choice to migrate our entire population. Life here would have been hard for people, so hopefully they will find something better elsewhere. I don’t see any land-dwelling animal life at all. I see some birds in the distance, but they are quite repelled by me. I don’t think I’ll be able to catch any of them for food. They appear to be too skittish.

I return to the ship knowing that I’ll have to become a vegetarian once the rations are gone, but also relieved that I’m probably going to be okay. I’m a decent engineer, there don’t seem to be any predators, and the weather array suggests a mild climate all year-round. So what am I going to do with all my time? My life is meaningless now, and I was raised in a world where meaninglessness meant uselessness, and uselessness meant a drain on resources which could be going to someone who contributes to the survival of the species. I have to find my new purpose. I first cremate the remains of my crew, and temporarily store them in bags. Bodies take up too much precious land, so we stopped burying our dead decades ago. I find some nice clay just outside the ship, so I use that to fashion a personalized urn for each and every one of my 55 fallen friends. I don’t stop there, though. Once the cremains are in the urns, they need a place to rest, so I begin building an entire structure for them, called a columbarium. It takes me a very long time to set the stones by hand, by myself, with clay and sand as my mortar, but I literally have all the time in the world now. I no longer have to worry about radiation pockets, or smog, or rioting. It’s important that these heroes be honored and respected. They deserve to be on display, not just for future travelers who might happen upon us millennia from now, but for me. It’s twice as big as it needs to be, because they deserve the wide open space too. Once it’s complete, I begin setting the urns in their niches. I stand there and admire my work, proud that I did this for them, and didn’t just focus on my own needs. As I’m making sure all of the urns are faced correctly, one of those white birds flies in, and perches in one of the empty niches. Another follows, and does the same. Then more come in. Perhaps I won’t have to become a vegetarian after all.