Author: Alexandra Peel

The future’s bright, they said. The future’s now!

When the Church of Eternity claimed its wise men had seen the light from future days, we bowed to their superior knowledge and respected their ages-long claim on, if not our mortal bodies, then our souls. Now we had the opportunity to transform ourselves into beings of light and wonder – they said. They sold us a lie.

When Priddy got ill, she returned from visiting her Curate in a state of bewilderment. Always kind during the time I’d known her, most decorous in her behaviour; I had never heard her say a bad word about anyone. She cried for hours after, wouldn’t tell me what she had revealed during her final confession, said she was damned. Nothing I said could ease her mind.

Priddy didn’t want to die slowly, wasting away one muscle at a time, one memory a day. So I killed her. I would not call it murder. She asked me, no, she begged me to. I couldn’t stand by and watch her shrink and shrivel in pain. She said that it would be beneficial, beneficial to whom? I cried. The population is out of control, she whispered, one less won’t make a difference. So I held her hand to steady the pills, and as she slept, I smothered her with a pillow soaked in my tears.

Her Curate’s cyborg came for the body two days later, told me to accompany the Church of Eternity Constable, who waited silently as the remains of Priddy were vacuum-packed and hauled away. The Constable remained mute all the way to the Doctrine Ministry; he didn’t have to speak, I knew why I was being taken.

Now I know what they mean by perdition. You can forget your archaic wandering in a barren landscape alone scenario, or an underworld of fire-pits and pitchfork demons. This is the future, this is now! Can the soul be clad in something other than flesh and bone? I had wondered. The future might be bright for some, but for others, like me, it’s a new state of eternal damnation – I need only look in a mirror to see.

I seem to recall, maybe I am wrong, but didn’t I used to have brown eyes?