Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)
Prompt:
you die at the age of ninety-five years. Having been dead for two months, you wake up in your coffin and see a screen saying: “Your free trial version has ended. Would you like to purchase the full version and unlock additional functionality ?”
Response:
The only tangible thing that pierced through my confusion was that the rot had set it. A lot of it. I had to make a decision before the dissolution of my brain’s synapses was complete–if it was indeed my brain doing the thinking at all.
In fact, based on what I was seeing before me, that emergent and materialist view of consciousness seemed somewhat unlikely.
There were two simple buttons on the screen below the message: Yes and No.
I lifted my left arm experimentally–terribly heavy. As I watched my hand float upward in the screen’s soft blue glow, there was a wet, sucking snap, and my forearm fell off the liquifying remnants of my elbow, thudding damply to the bottom of the casket.
I inhaled a shallow, whistling breath into my corrupted lungs, realizing that I wasn’t even sure which option I’d take.
Had the free trial really sold it for me? Would paying the price of continued existence in this world be worth it for some added features?
It’s not like I hadn’t gotten to the end, at least. No one sees the cancer coming, but at 95 years of age it was going to be either that or something else in the near future. It took me so fast. It shut me down.
I hadn’t had much to live for anyway, admittedly–not for decades before learning of the tumors. Not only was my body pretty much out of commission, but because I’d been alone for 64 years.
I was one of those people that marries their high school sweetheart. Young people in the throes of love often think it’ll last forever, but we all know it usually doesn’t. For me it was different, and that’s why I’ve always kind of wondered about reincarnation–our spirit reborn into another body in another time. When I first saw Amber, first looked into her eyes, first spoke with her, during each of those moments I felt that I had known her before, somehow. I felt so strongly that we had loved and fought and laughed and explored the mysteries of existence together. I felt that we were halves of the same soul.
We married at 22, as soon as we were out of college. We didn’t have real jobs yet, and were poor and in debt, but goddamnit did we love each other. We curled up together at night, knowing without speaking that we could take on the world.
She wasn’t drinking at all the night of the crash, nine years later. She was a careful driver. The cops said it was quick, that she died at the scene. They had to put her together again before they’d let me see the body. The drunk died too, flung through his windshield. There’s no justice in life. He’s probably enjoying additional functionality somewhere.
I never remarried. I dated, yes. I drifted around the country, from job to job. I travelled the world. I experimented with psychoactive drugs, but never in the wandering of my consciousness did I find the love that would be at my side when I returned to the grind of Earth. I never found another that I loved like I loved Amber. And I couldn’t bear to marry someone only to dispel my loneliness. My body aged. People stopped paying attention to me. I became invisible.
If I hit No, I thought, then that’d probably be it. I’d lay in the coffin until I disintegrated completely and became soil. Game over, perhaps for all eternity. The universe is full of mysteries, but those mysteries are empty without the love of the other half. My spirit was chipped away at long before the disease did its work on my organs.
I lifted my right arm next, but the forearm didn’t even rise from it’s resting place. Another sucking snap, and the meat above my elbow was levered disgustingly into the air through the tenacity of some lingering ligaments.
Slowly, I bent at the waste, forcing my upper body–my face–toward the screen. My nose did the trick.
I hit Yes, and the screen melted away, replaced by what seemed to be the side of a great and complex wheel, revolving slowly before me, even through me. Within it saw scenes from my life–not of myself, but images of all I had seen through my own eyes, like mental snapshots. The understanding came to me immediately, with the same surety with which foreknowledge comes to us in dreams, that I was meant to choose any place to jump back in.
I waited as the images scrolled with the turning of the great wheel, until at last I saw Amber, as clear as life itself, for the first time outside of photographs in all those 64 empty years of my existence.
The wheel turned, back, back, back through time, to that day when we were 17. So simple. The school hallway. She was two lockers down. I was a gangly teenager with acne, and shouldn’t have been worth looking at, I thought–but then she turned to me, and I met her eyes, and I knew.
How often do the two halves of a soul end up in the same time period, let alone two lockers apart in high school?
I wondered if that additional functionality would allow me to save her, on the worst night of my life, and the final one of hers, years later. Or would I have to stand by helplessly as she was taken from me again?
I imagined myself diving, and then I was actually doing it–diving toward that moment at the lockers: My God, to be able to start again . . .
Everything froze, and the image dimmed slightly. A message lit up across it in orange.
CHECKING…
A spinning wheel appeared.
Checking what??
It spun. And spun.
CHECKING IS TAKING LONGER THAN USUAL…
All the cosmos, it seemed, held their breath along with me.
Suddenly a bright green checkmark appeared within the circle, and text of the same color bloomed on the screen.
SUCCESS! AMBER HAS SELECTED THE SAME ORIGIN POINT! HURRY, SHE’S BEEN WAITING TO EXPLORE THE FULL VERSION WITH YOU!
