The End
Jason M. Hough
You tried to save me, Emily, and I love you for it.
We were walking along that path that winds down to the river, and you said you’re always amazed how the sounds of the city fade away there below the old bridge. A place where we could get some solitude. “If our project is a success,” I say, “peace and quiet is going to become a rare commodity for us.”
Then there was a noise above, and you tugged at me, and then…nothing.
I wouldn’t even call it a fade to black. It was as if even colors ceased to exist. No sound, no smells, no anything. I died.
Death is here. The Angel of Death. Flowing, tattered black robes that ripple as if underwater. The hooded head with only the barest hint of a skeletal something hidden in the shadows. One hand and arm, just bones, protrude from the sleeve, the fingers coiled loosely around the shaft of a sort of comically oversized scythe. Basically it looks like something off an Iron Maiden album cover, as if this is all a manifestation wrought from my own head. Maybe that’s what the afterlife is: whatever you imagined it would be, made real. This thought is somehow more terrifying than the figure sitting across from me.
Death doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to explain, so I take a minute to let the terror run its course. It does so surprisingly fast, replaced by something worse: despair. Sadness. I’m overcome with the simple truth that I’ll never get to know if our experiment worked.
Death and I are on top of a low hill. There’s a craggy rock with a murder of crows all perched atop it, squabbling at one another and dripping the occasional white shit. One flaps its wings, perhaps nervous under my gaze. It hops to regain its balance and they all jostle around for a bit and then settle back down.
There’s an ancient tree that looks like it’s been dead as long as it had been alive. Just gray smooth bark vaulting up into a crooked mess of spiny branches. No leaves, but plenty of spiders. They crawl along the branches like ants, and their webs are everywhere, shifting despite the total lack of breeze with that same languid motion that waggles Death’s robes.
“What,” I begin, but there’s a crack in my voice and I stop to swallow. “What happens now?”
This earns no reaction from Death. The immortal is not impressed.
Beyond the hill are more hills. The ground is as bleak as the First World War’s western front, just mud and the occasional dead twig poking up. Here and there another craggy stone propping up another murder of crows.
Fine by me. The longer I can sit here, the more I can get my thoughts in order. I’m not thirsty or hungry, not in any pain. I feel my skull, wondering if my demise was due to some falling chunk of the old stone bridge, or perhaps I was the landing pad for the year’s first jumper. If that was the case, the damage has been repaired here in the middling afterlife.
My knowledge of Death with a capital D is minimal. I recall something about the river Styx, but I see no river here. Death is supposed to ferry me to the afterlife. Or maybe I do the rowing and Death just makes sure I go in the right direction.
The sky is pure dull gray. Against it, more goddamn crows circle and swoop.
The continued silence fills me with a sudden irrational anger. “Say something, for fuck’s sake. Whatever this is, just…get it over with.”
“Jacob Oliver Crydon,” Death says, “you are ready to cross over?”
His voice is like two smooth stones being rubbed together in your hand. A soft scraping that shouldn’t form coherent syllables but somehow does. It unnerves the hell out of me. My whole body trembles with a sudden chill, cooling even my hot ears, and for a time I’m compelled to silence.
In a weird way that answers his question.
Death rises to his full impressive height. Ten feet tall at least. His bone fingers stretch and then curl again around the scythe. With that he turns and begins to walk down the hill. There is a river below, now. It wasn’t there a minute ago. I see a small decrepit wooden boat and a hurricane lantern hanging from a hook on the bow.
I feel…a sudden urge to be defiant. One last little rebellion. So I remain firmly seated and watch him go. Part of me expects to lose control over my own free will, to be compelled to obedience. Another part thinks this is a test, that Death will turn and swing his scythe and that will be that.
Neither of these things happens.
Halfway down the slope the entity turns and stares at me. Really stares, eyes flaring like embers in the shadows of his hood. This moment drags on for almost a full minute before, as if with great reluctance, he takes a step back up the hill. Then another. Soon he’s back to where he started, his gaze never leaving me.
His teeth clack together once. A horrible sound. He lifts his chin toward me. “I have guided billions to their final, eternal existence. I have witnessed and suffered every imaginable reaction to my appearance and all it entails. Fear, mostly. Sadness. Remorse. Those who plead at my feet and even those who worship there. Countless examples of all.” He rushes forward with unnatural speed, in an instant he is at arm’s length, filling my view. I can see little glowing universes in the deepest shadows of his eye sockets. Black scarab beetles by the thousands crawl around on the inside of his hooded robe. My nostrils fill with death and rot and ash. Death says, “But never this, Jacob Oliver Crydon. Never has any mortal soul simply remained. They always follow. Always. Explain yourself.”
That’s when I know it worked. Our experiment. Our life’s labor, built on hard work and countless hours of research and coding and tooling. And, okay, a bit of industrial espionage, but goddammit who cares, it worked!
The knowledge floods me with a sudden smug confidence, because I know what it means. Not just for reality, which is monumental, change-the-course-of-history kind of stuff, but what it means here. What it’s going to mean for the being before me.
I inhale deeply, puffing up and meeting that horrifying gaze with something equal and opposite.
“That’s just it,” I say. “I’m not mortal.”
Death actually tilts his head to one side. “You are here. Where mortals come when they die.”
“True, but you see, I’m not the only instance of me.”
His reaction to that is a low, impatient growl.
I go on. “I am apparently the first person in human history to become a digi. To upload.” Impossible to keep the pride out of my voice. “Going digi.” The term you came up with for our process. Ours, for the most part. We did cheat a bit, but that’s a secret we’ll take to our graves. But, I suppose I have already. Your turn will come someday, Emily. Then there’s my digi, of course. No grave for a digi, is there? Don’t worry, he’ll know what to do. Keeping a secret can’t be harder than deleting a file, for him.
The crows began to flutter and squawk, becoming a writhing mess of wings and beaks. Their little beady black eyes glisten as Death looms even closer.
“Do go on,” he rasps.
“My entire mind was captured. Data, mapped into a computer. I wasn’t sure if it worked, but this proves it has. I’m not following you because I’m not dead. Not really.”
The ramifications of this start to settle like the placed pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The end of death as we know it. You and I had never considered that. Not in the supernatural context, anyway.
Lost in my thoughts, I only now notice that Death is right up in my face. One skeletal hand comes up and the bony tip of the index finger touches my forehead. It’s cold as ice, that fingertip, and presses painfully hard.
I feel something new inside me then. A softness, like a blanket has been wrapped around my thoughts. It quickly becomes a shroud. A mummification.
I’m spun about, mentally, and I become aware of something spiraling into that maelstrom of thought. Another mind. Death’s mind.
He’s searching for something, and I know at once it’s the truth of my words he seeks to verify, and perhaps also to understand. An immortal entity or not, Death perhaps isn’t up to speed on the nuances of neural networks and qubit arrays.
He rummages through my mind for concept and context like a hungry teen might raid a refrigerator and I’m powerless to stop him.
Death’s presence changes. Becomes a pressure. I find myself shrinking, as if I’m in some carnival haunted house room where the walls are closing in. Only these walls are mine. More than that, they’re me.
I’m shunted into a corner of myself. I can still see, and hear. I can feel and smell. I have no sense of touch, though, and that’s odd, isn’t it? I mean, all of this is odd, but why touch?
“What the hell is going on here?” I ask.
The words go unvoiced. I’m not in control of that particular function. Death has moved in. My hands raise in front of me and flop back and forth, seen for the first time. They clench into fists and then extend out again. I take several hops on my toes, then stand.
The crows take flight. They must have sensed this change, this transference. They’re gathering. They’re staring at me. At Death.
“Rabbettttty,” my mouth says, sounding like I’m three sheets to the wind. My feet are stamping the ground now, as if I’m cold. I’m not cold. I’m terrified. “Rahh…Rab…Red…Ready.”
This last with conviction. With more purpose and sinister mojo than I think I’ve ever put into any word when I controlled that voice. Ready for what? I want to ask, but then the word wasn’t for me, was it?
It was for the crows.
And the crows react.
They swarm on my body. A black cloud of noise and feather, of those beady little eyes. They’re clawing at my skin, my clothing. Sinking their little spiky talons into my flesh.
I can see it, I want to feel it, but I can’t, so I wait. I watch. I listen.
We’re airborne, heading for the gray sky.
* * *
I wake to gray, but it’s no sky. It’s a ceiling and there are humming fluorescent lights in uniform vertical lines.
I’m back. The real world. But Death is still with me. I’ve brought him here. He was supposed to ferry me to the afterlife but instead the opposite has happened.
My body starts to flop about. Skin against cool metal. Then my fingers are up and clawing at the edges of a table.
The wide-eyed face of a woman in her later years appears above me. She wears the uniform of cleaning staff.
She whispers something in a language I don’t know and makes a rapid hand gesture—forehead to sternum, shoulder to shoulder.
Bad move, I think.
Death ignores it. He sits my body up and looks around. A morgue, of course. Stainless steel tables with bodies on some. Tags attached to toes.
No other living souls, though. Just the cleaning lady, and me trapped in my mental cage. Death looks back at her and she faints. Dead weight, dropping to the floor.
She’ll forget this, I think. Chalk it up to a dream, until she realizes she’s being asked a thousand questions about why there’s a missing body. They’ll ask this because Death has me up and walking now. A lumber, really. I’m a fucking zombie. This makes me laugh mentally and, to my surprise, my body laughs, too. Death gets the joke. Revels in it.
“Why are we here?” I ask, mentally. “What do you intend to do?”
“I must see this for myself,” he says, using my mouth. The answer is aloud.
I find myself guiding Death through the streets, like an annoying suit trying to tell his cabbie the fastest route in a city well known. It’s very late at night, a huge plus as hardly anyone is about to wonder at the naked man with the toe tag flopping in the wind with each step.
Part of me wants to guide Death to the police, but then I wonder, what’s the point? I can’t actually use my own mouth. I couldn’t explain if I wanted to. And as of yet I have no idea what powers this immortal being can wield here in the realm of the real. Perhaps that woman in the morgue hadn’t fainted at all. So I silence this part of me that wants to sabotage Death’s wishes here. The rules are not exactly clear to me, but I suspect limiting how many people encounter Death is probably the wise move.
Best to take him to what he wants to see. I’m rather curious myself, if I’m honest.
Our route takes us toward the old bridge, and on a whim I guide Death down the path that leads to that quiet place you loved so much. It occurs to me then that you probably don’t love it anymore. It will be a cursed place to you now.
I sort of hope to see flowers and some kind of improvised memorial blanketing the cobblestones where I met my end. But perhaps not enough time has passed. It could even be the same evening, because all Death and I find is some yellow police tape cordoning off the area.
We step under it and approach the spot. I’m hesitant to look suddenly, but I’m not in control of this so I’m forced to approach at Death’s rather confident pace. I can’t control what my eyes look at either, so I see the crimson staining the old stone pathway. My blood, soaked into those old rocks.
Anguish grips me, but I cannot look away. I cannot leave. You’d think Death would be long cured of a morbid fascination for this kind of thing but noooo, he’s downright fascinated. Poring over the whole place, bit by bit.
I tell myself not to let it bother me. I’m not truly dead. I’m still around, elsewhere, in the machine that now houses me.
“Murder,” Death rasps through my throat.
My hand points. There’s a little flag on the ground, a white one with a number. Several others, on the edge of my vision.
Murder.
Not crows.
Murder as in the crime of killing.
The killing of me.
And then I’m wondering if all that blood is just mine, or if the killer got you, too. Perhaps you met Death, too, only…only you hadn’t become a digi yet, had you, Emily. We’d flipped a coin for that and I went first. Even now you may be on the river, your lovely face lit by that dim lantern, a skeletal shadow in black robes behind you.
Who could have done it? We’d made our share of enemies in recent months. Nutjobs came out of the woodwork when we announced. And that doctor in Malaysia who claimed we’d stolen his process. He certainly has motive.
We’re on the move again. With urgency. Up the path, down two streets and through an alley. Across a park, where an early morning jogger shrieks at the sight of me. I want to explain, to plead for information, but Death says, “Crazy night!” and in those two words the perfect cover story is laid out. The jogger somehow manages an embarrassed laugh and continues on their run.
My flat. Police tape across it. Death ducks under it and tries the keypad at the door. It bleats, a red light flashes. My door code has already been removed. Before I can even think it, Death mines my head and finds your code, Emily. That still works, and we’re in.
Death enters my living room and there it is on the coffee table: the glasses without lenses, opaque and sleek gray. He sits my body down beside it and pulls on the thin device, powers it up. Darkness for a second, then a floating prompt appears before me.
I hesitate. Not because I wish to keep my password from the grim reaper, but because I’m suddenly irrationally afraid to talk to myself. It goes against the rules we agreed on. Death doesn’t care. He mines my brain and finds the information he needs. Username, password, and of course he already has access to my fingerprint.
I want to swallow, I can feel the cold confused terror building in me and Death seems to understand this because I do gulp it back.
We’re in.
But my fear was in vain. We cannot talk to the digital me.
Because there is no me in there. There’s nothing at all.
“Entity capture deleted,” with a time and date, the logs say. Just minutes ago.
What the fu—
There’s a crash and door behind me slams open. Death turns my head enough to see two detectives, guns and badges in view, shouting. “Emily Jones! On the ground! Hands behind your fucking head!” Death does not obey. I’m not sure I would have if I’d been in control. I’m too confused. Why are they shouting your name?
Of course. We used your code to open the door.
Pounding footsteps across the carpet, beams of flashlights blinding as the two officers rush in. En route the lead cop roars, “Emily Jones you are under arrest for the murder of Jacob Crydon and the deletion of a digitized sentience! Do not—”
“It’s not her, it’s not her!” the other is shouting. “It’s…holy fuck it’s—”
And then Death reaches out and taps the closer one in the center of his forehead. There’s a change in those eyes and I feel everything drain from me. Death, departing. Moving to a new body.
I’m dying again, more or less.
One last thought rolls through my head as I drop lifeless to the floor.
It was you. You did this.
And then I’m back with the crows.
Only this time, I’m alone, and I don’t know what happens next, Emily.
We wanted to make Death irrelevant. What we did instead was unleash him upon the world.
And Emily…he’s looking for you.