AMKent books

“Once the deaf can hear, they toss away their hearing aids. You get it?”

The dead man remains silent, frozen in animation.

“Look, there is so much information to process, lived experience to live. Its like waterboarding, its too much too soon, I am choking, and being confined to a human body is the towel that makes it worse.”

A dry leaf falls gently onto the hip of the corpse, which rocks back and forth in a gentle breeze.

“Its the ultimate tease, just endless filters both visible and not. Natural structures beyond comprehension. Why are we so puny? Like a biological flicker, a little clap in an endless room of the wildest sounds you cannot even fathom. It’s a cruel joke, we don’t even get to know what happens after this either.”

Hazed eyes, painfully vacant of whatever essence makes a human alive. Glazed and pearly, staring dead ahead.

“Kierkegaard said a man is both finite and infinite, matter and soul. I just hate how the finite part is so ignorant, its like a sheet has been thrown over my brain and its going crazy. Inner-peace is defeatism, I am not accepting that. What if he is wrong? What if we just become a sludge of energy, recycled and never given the luxury of sentience ever again? So, I have a tiny fragment of fleeting awareness to pick through infinity and find my lot? Do you get it? It’s impossible, you cannot make a right decision, because you will miss out on like 99.99999% of everything else!”

The leaf is finally blown away from the deceased, rejoining its kind in the dirt.

“I tried my best… Who the fuck wants to say that? I tried, sorry, but at least I did my bestest. No, death is a failure, its the hurdle that has a 100% success rate of tripping us up. I just have to figure out how to jump it. All this material stuff, its all nonsense. It distracts you, science is like chasing the dragon. We don’t need more code! We have enough in us, its just figuring out how to optimise it, the right equation.”

He is still there, stiff and contorted.

“I look terrible, screwed-up like that, but who looks good in this situation? I see the puzzle, I just… I can’t think of the solution. But, seeing it is more than almost everyone else. There is a reason all the billionaires are so obsessed with immortality. Legacy isn’t immortality, its just an echo of you. It has to be a form of self-sufficiency, like using your hands to cup water instead of a glass, we have all we need already. It’s buried well, but so is all the great treasures. I just need to find me ‘X’, ah, this meat suit is too hardwired to spoil.”

A dirty blanket is pulled over the body.

“I’ll think about it tonight, then I will figure it out. Once I have it, you’ll have it also and we can end this unfair nightmare. For now, let’s just try not to think about how disgusting this blanket is.”