Till Death Do Us Partition, Layer 1.

Part one of three.

This is part one of a three-part serial, and is free to read. The following two parts will be paywalled (upgrade here to read them and to access all twenty-one stories in the paid archive). I appreciate you, thank you for your patronage.

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 layer 1

  Can’t talk to you about this, honey, as that requires a premium subscription. In this make-shift garden, atop an empty parking garage where my emergency contact is a former coworker and my CofFree taste burnt—the sunrise is dried Pepto-Bismol. Cold steel bench on my ass doing more to wake me than this fake coffee swill, and the phone dead ends:

  I’m sorry, this voicemail is full. Please try again later. Goodbye.

  A murder of crows hesitates above. I redial, look down to the crushed Pepsi can beneath a vine of dying cherry tomatoes. This garden is seven parking spaces wide by four rows, and it is the only thing occupying space in this nine-story parking garage.

  ...this voicemail is full. Please try...

  The ‘premium’ roast of CofFree smell does nothing to mask the compost rot behind me. The city is silent save for the caw of crows before the phone tone clicks and—
  “Goodness, D, it’s six in the morning!”
  “Sorry, Beth, listen—”
  “This couldn’t wait ‘till a rational person is awake?”
  “I wanted you to know, before they let you know,” I’m twisting the top of my CofFree cup, take a deep breath.
  CAW-CAW!
  I shift my weight, finding no comfort from the steel on my ass.
  “You still there, Beth?”
  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Quiet, slow. It’s what they taught us to do in 9-1-1 operator training to calm and control the caller. It forces them to pay more attention, which slow themselves down, and keeps them from panicking or doing something they’d later regret.
It’s that obvious, I guess.
  CAAW. CAAW. CAAW!
  “Couldn’t sleep because of the nerves, you know? And it felt rude not to call you—”
  “Spit it out, champ.”
  “I’ve got an appointment with OmegaPoint today.”
  “Where are you?”
  “I’m safe, Beth, Jesus, I just didn’t want you to worry when—”
  “They pronounce you dead?”
  My grip tightens on my half-empty cup. A crow lands between me and the tomatoes, cocks its head, and blinks.
  “They only do that for legal purposes.”
  “Because you’ll be dead, Dante.”
  That’s not what the brochure says. Rendered faster than perception, OmegaPoint is life without bounds, and I can see their smokestack, half the height of the Space Needle, from here. Come business hours, those crematoriums will barf black clouds and bruise the sky purple. I can’t eat pork anymore ‘cause the smell is the same, but at least there is less highway traffic every day.
  The crow pecks at the crushed Pepsi can, then looks at me with sideways corvid blinks and a low caw. Cola sludge is probably safer for him than city water. I wonder if he wants my CofFree.
  “Where are you?”
  The scrape and jingle of car keys, the creak of her front door.
  “You ever see those old memes comparing the size of Minecraft to our actual planet? OmegaPoint is bigger than that, Beth.”
  “I won’t call Fire.”
  9-1-1 speak for ‘Fire Department’, which includes EMTs. SPD—Seattle Police Department, they’ll meet me at the hospital, if Beth has her way. She’s treating this like I’m a suicide caller.

  OmegaPoint is not a digital afterlife—it’s a digital foreverlife!

  “You’re my emergency contact, I didn’t want you to panic.”
  “Lotta good that’s doing.”

  Leave your worries in the meatspace. With OmegaPoint, the unattainable is yours—and delivered fast as thought!

  Bench is cold enough my ass is numb, and even the crow would rather peel aluminum open than risk the cherry tomatoes raised on the poisonous Seattle rains. I tell myself that choosing a virtual world was not selfish. I tell myself that you were allowed your own secrets.
  “This call is better than finding a brochure, trust me,” I tell on myself.
  CAWCAWCAW!
  “There was no note, Beth. Did I tell you that?”
  Instead of your handwriting, practiced with lines like ‘I’m sorry I am a burden’, the first page of the brochure reads:

  A single adult consumes fifty-eight gallons of water per year and consumes 547,500 calories. A square foot of wheat consumes sixty gallons of water per year, and provides ninety calories for human or animal consumption. A single cow, able to provide 780,000 calories, when slain, consumes 12,775 gallons of water in a year and consumes 912,500 calories herself. An OmegaPoint server slab is able to hold four digitized adult minds, and consumes only a single person’s worth of water a year¹. You won’t only be entering a better world when you join—you’ll be giving life in meatspace another chance!

  Instead of ink pressed hard onto paper in anger, page stained by an errant tear with spiteful words like ‘Till death do us part, motherfucker!’ the brochure in its place says:

  Server and upkeep costs can be covered through multiple payment plans, including making OmegaPoint the sole beneficiary of your life insurance.

  I’ll admit I fucked up, honey. But a suicide note would have been less dramatic. Instead, I got a four-page advertisement detailing the reasons why digitizing a mind to transfer it into a virtual, endless playground is a permanent process. I can tell you, from memory, how the brain will be vivisected and sliced into micrometer-thin meat sheets and scanned down to its electrons because the mind cannot run without emulating the exact hardware of the brain from which it came, but I can’t tell anyone why my late wife decided to have that done. Not for certain. I mean, guess who I’m on the phone with now?
  Like, I know. But not in your words.
Feels silly to hold a funeral when half of your family won’t show up because they can, theoretically, talk to you with a good enough internet connection and a premium subscription. Feels silly when you don’t know yourself, on a philosophical level, if you are widowed or divorced, because questions about the soul and the nature of consciousness are maybe a little too heady when your bed is half-empty, and no one at work will look you in the eye. Feels too still in that failed nest of ours, and I’m the fool who ruined it.
  Can’t sleep long because I drink too much and have to get up to pee, and what sleep I do get is on the couch because the bed feels like a fucking mausoleum. Credit card maxed out with the handle of cheap tequila, which tastes like pine for some goddamn reason, but it means I can’t afford the down payment to talk to you. A laptop is a medium to the digitized dead, and like all charlatans, it costs money to do so.
  The crow looks at me and says nothing. I hear Beth’s car door open, the seat belt warning going bongbongbong...
  “Where are you?”
  “What’s the difference, Beth?” I peel the plastic lid off my CofFree and pour a little bit of the sludge into it, then set it down near the crow.
  “All of my contacts are former coworkers. Not exactly like I’m living. At least at OmegaPoint...”
  CAAAAAW low, guttural, a second crow lands, head out as it bows. Both of them eye the CofFree.
  Beth says ‘what’ and it’s not a question.
  “She’s my wife, Beth. I deserve to know.“
  “You’re a selfish ass.”
  The first crow hops backwards as the second pushes towards the offering.
  “Fuck the philosophical shit, D. The soul, all of that, legally you’re dead, and this is a one-way ticket.”
  I shrink in my seat. Look up to the flying crows dotting the pepto-pink clouds like shredded black boba tapioca balls. Probably tastes better than this fake-ass coffee from a soda fountain. No such thing as light pollution in OmegaPoint; you can live in a sprawling, clean city and see the stars at night. Smelling wetdust and compost rot, I wonder if a telescope would show you the stars’ pixels.
  “If you’re concerned about me, you can meet me at OmegaPoint.” And the first crow jumps forward with wings open and sips from the lid.
  No shifting gears. No car engine.
  “What if she doesn’t want to talk to you, D? What are you going to do when they vaporize your brain and you wake up in a fake world, and she wants nothing to do with you? What then?”
  Crushed Pepsi® can ahead of me, steel bench beneath. Crows fighting for something that might give them arrhythmia. Fact is, the brochure was everything you needed to say to me.
  One hell over another, I’d prefer the one where you say it to my face.
  Can’t even afford to talk to my dead wife.

  At OmegaPoint, the sky is limitless!

  “Ten o’clock. Their main facility.” I close my eyes. “I loved you,” and hang up.
If she calls back, she’ll get I’m sorry, this voicemail is full.
  The tomatoes, untouched by my winged friends, you can see they are rotting at the base. Could be the soil, the poisoned rain? Could be that every day there is one less car on the street and what’s left behind is neglected. If God is alive, then He certainly must live in the machine; otherwise, how could He bear not to flood this creation?
  All of that 9-1-1 training amounted to nothing—I couldn’t save the one person I vowed to nurture.

  In OmegaPoint, anything is possible.

  I stand up, brush pollen off of my frozen ass, and the two crows give out one last CAAAW before flying away.
  All I want to do is tell you I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone, promise, let you have your eternity in OmegaPoint’s digital playground. But I can’t do that here. No job and a day away from being homeless, with our last dollar spent on something that is definitely not coffee.
  The question is: will you allow me to say it after I cross, or will you even deny seeing me?
  Hell in this world, hell in the next. In the distance, the giant crematorium smokestack spews a black pillar of the dead into the sky.

  And I have an appointment to get to.

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M.P. Fitzgerald writes darkly humorous sci-fi for dream criminals. To unlock part two of this serial when it is published, upgrade to paid. Money will not prevent me from writing, but what you give will allow me space to publish it.

1. OmegaPoint is not beholden to exact numbers; for recent estimations, please refer to…