Death is no longer the end of life, but it comes at a cost. Sgt. Ana has to navigate the perils of corporate contracts to regain her memories.
Hi, Hive!
Back at it with a short story series! A 3-part science-fiction dystopian story. The idea was inspired by Soylent Green, the film (definitely a must-watch), and with a sprinkle of George Orwell. Plus a tad of Caprica, specifically the Apotheosis concept. I love me a good dystopian, and even better when it's a dystopian dressed up as a Utopian story! That hits hard. As life does.
This first part introduces the main character, Sgt. Ana Granger, and follows her through her first hours in the After-Life. She has no memories of her life before and she needs to adjust to this new state of existence.
News reports blared on the holoscreen hovering over her face, bombarding Ana with topics of rampant crime, disease, and perpetual hunger across the city. Same old, same old. She flicked them away and got up from the cracked leather couch in the lobby of a building she didn’t recognize. Nor did she know how she’d gotten here. She slipped out of the building and into the street where the bright of the sun assaulted her eyes despite a sepia fog hanging over reality. Blurred faces and signs with no legible words decorated the dull city scene. Someone at the Correction Station had to know what had happened.
Her ear-implant crackled, sending a soft hum through her head. She paused on the sidewalk. The Station’s I.D flashed in the air before her eyes.
“Sergeant Ana Granger,” she answered.
“Death in Section B, apartment seven.” The feminine voice on the other end was robotic and abrupt, and the line died. There was no rest for the good, never mind the wicked. Duty called, always at the most inconvenient of times. She sighed and walked to the off-red car parked near the curb in front of her.
“Section B,” Ana said as she got into the taxi. The driver grunted and turned the ignition. The car tugged along as fast as the marketplace crowd would allow, a daily battle to travel when rations had been served to the starving masses. The crowd was thicker than usual and the car could no longer move. She didn’t have time for this.
Ana squeezed out the passenger’s door, her wallet implant pinging as she left the vehicle, and threaded through the waves of bodies, down the street, into the lobby of a lavish apartment building that her optics indicated as her destination. A hum of white mist radiated from the tall structure’s walls.
Static screeched in her head as she stepped into the hallway on the fourteenth floor. She stopped and took a deep breath, waiting for her blurred vision to focus against the sharp artificial light. She had felt displaced before but now it was like she returned from, what she guessed, was an astral projection experience, the ones the talk shows went on and on about.
The mist evaporated from the air and signs had words once more. Ana tugged at her redacted memories. Still blank. Probably from another drinking frenzy that life had persuaded her into. She shook her shoulders, trying to release a knotted muscle stabbing under her shoulder blade, and looked up. Apartment Seven. The white door at the end of the hallway resonated with vague familiarity. She stared at the scanner above the door frame.
“Sgt. Granger to investigate,” she said. The door whizzed open and she stepped into the affluent apartment. “What we got?” She raised her voice as soon as the Crime Clean-up Constable Jerry walked past.
“Bag and tag, let’s get out of here.” He spat a piece of gum out onto the soft beige carpet, new and recently cleaned as well, and licked his dried yellowed lips. They hadn’t gotten along in their shared years of service.
She stepped back as the officers carried the body out, watching as a familiar face disappeared under the zip of a black bag, her eyes staring through Ana and into oblivion. A mirror of the person she had once been.
Ana leaned over the corpse when the Clean-Up officers lifted her onto the slab waiting in the hallway. They wheeled Ana’s body out, treating her better in death than before it. She turned away when the door slid shut, realizing what the fog was and why the displacement. She was part of the After-Life Program.
She scanned the crime scene of her home, staring at the field of glass littered on the living room floor, shattered from what was once a cheap coffee table. A struggle. Ana paced the room, her legs translating through anything in her path, and caught sight of a white streak so thin it evaded the brutes, trapped in the coils of the carpeting.
Mumbles and footsteps crept closer from the hallway. Before Ana could get to the strand of hair, the cleaners had burst into her apartment with their trolley of equipment leading the charge. They, too, ignored her. Their vacuums droned to life, sucking up the drops of glass along with the hair in their noiseless sweep across her home. They whisked away every shred of evidence, and she couldn’t stop them. They left, promptly, engaged in a discussion about the latest ball game.
No longer a crime scene, a piece of time frozen for others to observe, study, and speculate on, Ana’s home was hers again. She couldn’t remember it being home but she felt it. She had kept an eye on this apartment for months before. She took in a deep breath, realizing it wasn’t necessary and just a remnant reaction from when she still had a physical body. She held it, testing the feeling but her mind panicked, still keyed into believing it needed air. She released her breath.
Ana ran her hand over the arm of the beige sofa, longing to feel the suede bristle under her fingers, or smell the lemon-scented bleach she used to use on the kitchen counters. A cat purred and rubbed his side against the coffee table’s skeleton in front of her, coming from some hiding place it had stayed in when the brutes invaded. Poor cat. The only one who seemed to acknowledge her. Long white strands of fur danced in the air with each nuzzle against the steel legs.
“Sniffles, I’ll call you,” she said to him and he blinked slowly. She couldn’t imagine ever wanting to get a cat, not with her allergies. Unless she had expected her own death.
Her body shook and faded in fragments. At first, her hands then her arms. As she ran for the door, her chest glitched. She wrapped her faltering hand around the handle only for it to glide right through. The memory of living had kept its physical habits. She closed her eyes and put one foot forward, but the door refused her exit and her foot dissolved against its polished metal, stopping midway through it from a force inside.
