BeyondLife
by Reddit User u/BecauseISaidSoToo AKA Daniel Charles Wild
This one of the many wild tales included in his brand new short story collection, ‘Stories For Imaginary Friends’.
Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Daniel-
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/
Other TTTV stories by Daniel Charles Wild: https://talltaletv.com/?s=Daniel+Charles+wild
* Original Story Post – https://www.reddit.com/r/shortscifistories/comments/7sa1ia/beyondlife_well_kill_you_wholesale/
Are you worried about passing away peacefully in the night from natural causes and being gone for good? Worry no more! Purchase a BeyondLife™ Personal Plan guaranteeing your immortality. Don’t worry about signing anything, our patented SmartCopy™ has been tracking your eye movements and micro expressions and we have subtracted the credits from your account. Congratulations on your purchase! Ask us about our family plans today.
But wait! There’s more! Perhaps you are saddened by the loss of an ancestor, friend, or PreImmortal™ you admire; one whose consciousness was lost?
With the purchase of the BeyondLife™ Personal Plan you can include one PreImmortal™ as well. Just mouth their full name and the date of their death, and utilizing our patented BackCast™ technology, the message below will be sent back in time to alert the PreImmortal™ you selected.
Congratulations! You have been selected as part of a BeyondLife™ Personal Plan. You are probably wondering what that means and we’re excited to tell you! But first a brief history lesson about the discovery that made this gift, and our company, possible.
On March 17th, 2037 the world’s population, already at unsustainable levels, suddenly jumped exponentially. But, no one noticed, because the new arrivals weren’t new at all, and weren’t here in any conventional sense.
Physicists and computer scientists, attempting to digitize consciousness, discovered existing patterns in the electromagnetic signals and cosmic background radiation all around us. The software identified the patterns as conscious minds and researchers devised a way to communicate with the immaterial entities they had discovered.
They learned that if the conditions were right, self-aware patterns of information could be copied onto the very fabric of reality. Call it a spirit, a soul, or whatever you like, the dead lived on as conscious data packets in flux, embedded in the quantum foam all around us. The living were the minority and the dead had been here all along.
Contact had been made and humanity was suddenly faced with the astonishing fact that we are not alone. We’re minnows swimming on the surface of a sea of the dead and suburbanites living on the outskirts of a thriving Necropolis. In a metaphorical sense, the auditorium lights had came on and the living got a good look at the audience. It was huge and it wasn’t terribly interested in the living strutting and fretting their brief hour upon the stage.
While the dead took it in a stride, for the much smaller community of the living, the sociological consequences were far reaching. The first few years were understandably chaotic, government agencies and census bureaus had a lot of information to process, and judicial systems had to dramatically reevaluate the concept of murder. Additionally, society at large had to cope with a tragic mass exodus, as a large percentage of the population of the living, fascinated by this little understood discovery, self-terminated, and the vast majority of them were never heard from again. Because, sadly, it was immortality with conditions and not all who died remained.
It was the way you died that mattered. Only those traumatized by their passing, returned. Somehow, shock, pain, and horror, were the things that imprinted souls upon the material plane. Peaceful deaths? Those that died in the night? Those minds, at peace, fragmented and drifted away and their information was lost. This discovery, once identified, was verified in laboratories around the world. When the passing was peaceful, minds and memories broke apart like foam on a wave; nothing remained of the pattern. A peaceful death was a true death.
That’s where we come in and why we’re reaching out to you with this message. If you are reading this now, you originally died peacefully and your consciousness was lost. Thankfully, someone in the future wants to meet you and this is your notification that you have been chosen to be an unwilling participant in a BeyondLife™ Personal Plan. In the near future, you will be executed in a novel and creative way, one specifically tailored to maximize the amount of horror, agony and psychological trauma you will experience, thus guaranteeing your immortality. Utilizing our patented BackCast™ messaging technology we’ll send whispered commands back in time to a susceptible psychotic individual in your area who will soon be excited to make your acquaintance.
Also, while we are legally obligated to notify you that you have been selected as an unwilling participant, we encourage you to treat this as an enjoyable fiction and for you to go about your everyday routines as normal.
BeyondLife™ thanks you for your participation. We’ll see you soon.
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