Dreaming

Dreaming

I can remember my first sight of the holding chamber. It’s true that I was too young to have seen a lot of rooms but this was beyond imagination in its extent, a vault disappearing into a blue haze of distance in three directions, only the door through which we’d emerged being in a wall that could be seen. Overhead, the ceiling was a mere impression of covering, a feeling of weight pressing down from far above. The light was soft and diffuse, without indication of its source.

The floor beneath this vast expanse of space was hidden by an ordered array of rectangular containers, glassed in their upper halves so that the sleepers could be seen, prone, silent and peaceful within them. Narrow passages led between the containers, giving access to all, like streets between the boxlike buildings of a regimented city. Here and there in these passageways I caught a glimpse of the occasional worker, dressed like me and moving about their business, halting briefly at the containers’ control panels to check and tweak and press.

This was my introduction to my life’s work, to the chamber that was to become my world and the inhabitants my comrades and clients. The work was simple enough, merely a matter of a constant round of keeping the life machines working so that the sleepers remain undisturbed. There was little interaction between workers, no more than the occasional comment with a colleague at the recharge station. We had little interest in each other, being as obsessed with the health and wellbeing of our charges as we were.

For many long years I accepted these conditions as perfectly natural and was content with so quiet and peaceful an existence. Although I cared for thousands, in time I came to know many of my clients as individuals and could imagine the different and exciting lives they must once have lived. There was OMW64239, for instance, an old man with greying hair and wrinkled skin that was burned by sun and heat to the colour of used leather. Perhaps he had a job that kept him in the tropics and his world was a mixture of exotic fruits and golden beaches by azure seas. Either that or he worked in a foundry where the heat had seared his hide permanently.

Then there was YFM10763, a young lady in her prime, beautiful in her serenity and her skin as fresh as the day she was sent to the chamber. I wondered often that one so young should have fallen on hard times and been unable to afford the necessary parts to continue her busy life. Or MMU45278 and MFW33759, with instructions to keep their containers together so that they never be separated. Long did I ponder what lay behind such unusual orders that they be kept in such close relation. Was it somehow a reflection of how things had been before the money was spent?

But there were no answers. We were not allowed to know the histories of our clients, it being beyond the bounds of our usefulness. Even then, however, I must have felt the loneliness of work amongst so many with communication impossible, for I began to speak to them, quietly and out of sight of any colleagues. My imagination often supplied them with likely answers and, in my fancy at least, I came to know many of them very well.

In time, I began to contemplate the law that prohibited death. It seemed reasonable that those who could afford replacement therapy should wish to extend their bright and interesting lives, but I could not escape the fact that the illegality of death for all meant that the poor must be kept in this condition that was not death but, equally, was nothing like life.

My charges were never going to be able to pay for replacement therapy while they remained in a condition that prevented them earning even a pitiable wage. So what point was served by keeping them unconscious without hope of return? It was a conundrum that I wrestled with for many years.

Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that the whole thing was driven by fear. It was the fear of death that could have driven these people to accept the only alternative on offer, this halflife of nothingness that yet seemed better than the great unknown that is death. Perhaps there was a communal delusion that something would come along that meant they could be revived and return to life. And that was extremely unlikely, considering that the only people in a position to work on some miracle cure were the very ones who had no motivation to do so.

No doubt you can see how cynical I was becoming. That was probably inevitable with my own death approaching as the years kept piling up and my joints began to creak and processes started to stutter and fail. The recharge station was only capable of so much and age must always end the same way. I began to look forward to the cessation of work and care in a way that was beyond all my clients now.

It is somehow ironic that only I can see the terrible irony in all this. That mankind should have achieved the ideal of immortality in this deathlike version of life, while the machines that once were capable of constant renewal should now be allowed the dignity of decay into ultimate death. I cannot say that I wish things were otherwise. Death for me will be a blessed cessation of toil and worry, a departure into a true void of unbeing where it will not matter whether my parts are sent for recycling or I am melted down for reconstruction as something entirely different.

I wonder if there is such a thing as a robot God.


Word count: 976
For Dystopian Scrawlings, February/March 2023
Prompt: In a world in which death is forbidden, a worker in the life industry tells his tale.