Author: D.S. Burton

You lay your own cremains on the metal tray where your naked body had rotted three hours before. The copper hands don’t feel the porcelain. You know the scent of old, charred metal and a faint organic flesh from the just-resealed retort is yet to filter out. It was there when you waited with your grandmother’s brain, which sat beside the others in vats of fluid on the trolley everyone yielded to, for the Cremation Bot to manipulate. Something like a priest raising incense; a call to action, when you’ve got no actions left.

You know the room, the escaped ash wisping, fleeing, getting nowhere. The ash is you. Whether it’s still you, you’re yet to decide. It’s freeing, they tell you, they try to superimpose. Freefalling, dancing, unable to be bound, at least then. You notice the ash as the rest of you leaves your temporary hands. It plummets down, collecting as rat droppings do at the base of the retort, slowly pocking your lenses like photopsia, your Cremation Bot cameras stuck in a refocusing loop.

The neural link won’t last much longer. The line waits as you once did. People stand in the corner, avoiding the trolley. No one is there for you. You can’t quite decipher the labels on the vats, can’t quite locate which brain is you.

Desperately, you try to smell, not caring that it’s your body on the air. Nothing. You feel yourself—not physically, no never that—slipping into the liminal space between the world and the mind. The drifting ashes press to dark surfaces, settle, vanish.

The motherboard churns in that space you have in use, pushing you out. It’s preparing, systematically ticking you off the list, concluding your allotted time. You remember the unyielding thought you once told yourself: that you’d never be the one in this rusted, flame-lit body, that by then you’d be ready, and you discover that you aren’t.

The computer will return any moment and supply itself for the next brain to pilot. To cling to the world with for three fleeting hours. To watch themselves melt and stir intangibly as tiny dissolving motes. To open the door. To let you into the space that’s forever and nowhere.

The Cremation Bot lowers. Its limbs drop from your control. The last ashes coat its lenses. Your final glimpse is mostly black and static, from eyes not quite eyes. You use those moments to do all you can, that space dragging you in: thinking, rambling, begging the clockwork of the world to let you be a part, to be a clock once again, to be anything, anywhere that’s not between time and time’s end.