"Satisfaction guaranteed, or your life back," said the technician, a slight young man with disinterest in his eyes.
"Can it, somehow, go wrong?" Lemrick asked worriedly.
Since the discovery of the after-life, and the device that can restore people from the cold grip of death, there had been a boom in people asking to entertain the experience. Lemrick, being a cautious latecomer, decided that he wanted a glimpse of it, as well.
"You mean, could you die?" The technician verified.
"I mean, do I come back... all right?" Lemrick explained.
This story would do well,
with a second part full of Futurama references.
"Yes, you do. Although," the technician gossiped intimately, "some people come back different. But, that is the whole purpose of the thing, eh?" He laughed, and passed over the bun to Lemrick.
The 'Bun of Death', or 'Bun of Doom', and even 'Roll of Call', was how previous customers had amiably chosen to refer to the edible gizmo that would remove them from the world of the living.
Lemrick sat down on a comfortable gel cushion, folded his legs, and took a bite. Then ensued the dream that is not a dream...
In the material recycling department of SciGen Incorporated, Cyril hid in a dumpster. The dumpster was very clean, other than the accumulating dust, and so the array of rejected pills seemed safe enough to eat.
There were pills of many colors and shapes, and Cyril enjoyed all of them. But, most of all, he enjoyed the small red and white pills that tasted like sugar, and were not chewy.
"Ferring soft pills," he murmured, and spat out an odd purple pill that was unfamiliar to him. "Ferring facilities and their inventions. Can't they just make more tasty pills?" He asked no one in particular.
"Who's there?" The voice of an older man echoed.
"Shit," Cyril whispered to himself, and tried to hide in a corner. The container opened from its' top lid, and the old hairless man stared directly at Cyril.
"What are you," the old man began, but Cyril was already jumping through the open container, and back to the dumpster hall. Without pause, he ran to the back door, from whence he came, and disappeared into the streets, where only the night, cats, and the occasional deployment vehicle roamed.
These were not real public streets, but the streets within the SciGen industrial compound. A vast maze of transportation routes, between warehouses and ever-rumbling factories. As he shifted from a jog to a regular walk, trusting the night to mask his presence, he heard a far away explosion, followed by shouts.
He could not make out the words, and the noises came from many places at once, but all from the same direction. The entrance, the front entrance, of the factory building he just escaped. He paused and tried to make sense of the scene. Some windows reflected strong lights, as if a fire was loose. Was it a machine accident?
Cyril decided to go back and check things out. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could learn something that SciGen did not want anybody else to know. Maybe, if he was lucky, he had something to gain, here.
Reaching the factory building, Cyril jumped in surprise, as a figure burst out of the top floor window, and crashed into the ground. Under the ambience of light projectors, Cyril could make out a dark haired man, in a white lab coat. He was not on fire, so why did he jump?
Cyril entered the building from the side door - another opening that he knew was unlocked, most nights. He heard noises. As if something was pounding against the walls, from the inside. As sirens began screaming, the boy knew that he had only a few minutes, before the entire platoon of guard patrol cars arrived. He was not planning on being caught by anyone. The consequences would be dire.
He approached further into the factory, and went to open another door, just as the safety mechanism kicked-in. The door locked, and heavy glass shielding began lowering, from the hollow above the door.
"What are you doing here, boy?" Cyril turned, and saw a man in uniform behind him, holding a pistol. "Come on, we have to get out of here, now! They are coming!"
Who is coming? Cyril wanted to ask, but the guard grabbed his arm, and pulled him away. Instead of going outside, as expected, the guard pulled him beyond another door. As it closed, it locked, and began lowering its' glass shielding. Cyril tensed, and felt himself sweating, with the realization that something terrible, quite more than he had imagined, was taking place.
"What is with all the explosions?" Cyril asked the guard.
"There was an accident with the test subjects. The pills killed them, and then turned them into something else," the guard hesitated. "Not human."
"Like, undead?" The boy asked.
"No," the guard stopped, and turned to look at Cyril. "Like monsters," he said, showing surprise on his face.
As they approached the other end of a storage chamber, the door behind them burst open. Through the locking mechanism and the glass shielding, which Cyril knew was much more than just simple glass. The guard started running, pulling on Cyril to speed up. Cyril had to look back, and see what it was that followed them.
It was a person in a white lab coat. Just a person. Cyril saw him jogging slowly towards them, as if nonchalantly escaping the terrors behind.
"That's odd," he said, and wondered how come bursting through the door seemed to draw no impact on the person's body. The face seemed calm, even emotionless, and there were no signs of torn clothing or blood.
"Over here," a woman guard shouted from above a short ladder. "Quickly, come up here," she said, gesturing them to hurry.
As they entered the upper chamber, the glass seal locked behind with a hiss of air pressure. Cyril looked back, and wondered what happened to that other person. He approached the seal, and looked through.
Somebody else was hurrying through a side door, into the storage chamber they had just escaped. He approached the strange lagger. Suddenly, the other jumped several meters into the air, landing on top of the newcomer, flattening him against the cement floor.
Cyril inched his eyes closer into the glassy seal, trying to make sense out of this bizarre scene. After a moment of lingering, the lab coated figure stood up, and turned to stare at the upper seal.
Cyril would have sworn, had anybody asked him, that the strange person now had a completely different face.
When Pae finally realized that she and her brother could not stay at the farm any longer, she asked Maghir, her elder brother, about their mother.
"Why can't we stay with mom? We can work the animals, ourselves," she complained. Maghir, a young boy, quite far from being a young man, did not have a good answer. Instead of giving her a bad answer, he decided that answering another question would be better.
"We're going to aunt Jen and uncle Madhu. They'll take care of us, and granny will take care of mom," he ended in a decisive tone. He was not really sure why their mother needed taking care of, but it was plain enough that she did not take their father's death well.
It is not that most children take death well. Not even a friend's death, much less family. Even the death of a farm animal could hurt. It is not even that their father was a bad man to be despised and glad over his demise. Not at all. Maghir and Pae simply did not feel as strongly as most others, when it came to death. Even they suspected that such a perspective was considered unusual in people.
"Spring" by Charles-Francois Daubigny, 1857
On the northern road, away from their home in Iranwin and towards those who would adopt them, at least for a time, Big Hor sang merrily. "Hoddy ho doddy do, little bird a whistle oh," he went and changed melodies and lyrics often, with little pause. Pae seemed aloof to the man's attempt at cheerfulness. Maghir felt slight disgust at the notion that they were too young to be allowed to be upset about their father's death.
Hor was a neighbor and an old friend. Each farm in their village, their further and further away village, stood a good walking distance away from the next farm. Even so, the locals felt close to each other, and treated each other well. Even between adults and children, games and conversations were commonplace. Hor was not then only a friend of the family, but an actual personal friend to both brother and sister.
As they walked under the mid-day sun, Maghir heard a noise from the east. Hor seemed to be too preoccupied to notice the sound, but Pae did turn to look at the same direction, as Maghir did. They exchanged curious glances. Could it be a wandering fox, Maghir wondered. When he turned back to look to the east again, he saw a tall woman covered with feathers from head to toe. She wore no clothing, except her feathers and a big toothy smile.
