The n-Body Problem

At first, we were terrified of them. We thought they would kill us. I don’t know why. We thought that the only reason the dead aren’t dead is because they wanted to kill us. So, we waged war on them. Shooting them and setting them on fire. We ran from them. We quarantined people in stadiums. We believed that terrible violent things were happening. It was often repeated on the news—the dead were eating us. In time their numbers grew. The dead were forming enormous masses. Twitching masses. All across the world. In time, economies began to collapse. Wars ended quietly. Leaders slipped away. We didn’t totally cave in. Some took hold of the structures, the culture, the daily life and they looked past, believing this was a solvable problem. They noticed, and soon we all did, that the dead were not hurting us. They were harmless.

It took a long time for this fact to spread into the population. Some never bought it and committed horrible acts of hate on the dead. Some destroyed the dead for sport. Some kept parts in collections. Some wore moving fingers on chains. Still do. There’s a complicated, deviant culture pretty much everywhere these days.

When some calm returned, when a majority was finally convinced that the dead meant no harm—in fact, meant nothing—then solutions became possible. This was a waste disposal problem. The dead numbered in the many hundreds of millions. And they made up mountains of bodies. Like water droplets running into each other to create flowing water. They didn’t mean to hurt us, but they threatened life in other ways. They became immovable. We didn’t know it at first but their biggest threat was invisible: we were now, all of us, thinking about them and thinking about them all the time.

Governments, or at least what was left of them, turned to the private sector for tenders. Dispose of these things in an efficient and reasonable way. Keep costs down. Make it sustainable. Many proposals became popular. At one time, enormous cremating ovens were erected in Africa. They had incredible capacity. They recorded over a hundred thousand cremations a day. It was impressive. Iron ovens the size of cruise liners. Clean white smoke woven in the clouds. Still, weightless ash flowing on the wind into desert lands.

It was the pictures that killed it though. Bulldozed bodies piled in the ovens. The filthy heat and fire. It was, to many, a ghost. The holocaust. The iron cross and the metal letters. There were others who saw the bodies burn and believed we were constructing hell. We were Satan’s architects and builders. Others, sentimental ones, just couldn’t bear the thought of an uncle or sister twitching in the dark centres of these body balls, then being burned.

The African ovens were abandoned. There was a flood of proposals. Weight them down at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. This one failed in trials. The bodies simply found ways to surface. A clip of a trawler cutting through a sea of moving flesh and faces as far as the eye could see was too much. Landfill projects were tried, but with similar results. Thousands of moving beings beneath a landscape will find a way to break the surface. They poured down from hills and parks. Science tried to still them. To make them stop. But even this was too offensive once we saw their work. Vivisection and freezing and hammering and encasing and draining and filling with hard glues. Nothing stopped our nightmares. We were starting to feel this new creature was lying within us.

The answer that we finally accepted went like this. Waste Management Corp. (WasteCorp) constructed space shuttles with immense crates on their backs. These ships headed into our upper atmosphere and released the millions, setting them into orbit around the earth. WasteCorp, having learned a few things, knew it had to calm us, had to provide new rituals, had to give us the right pictures. Sunbaked loved ones. Star-dappled children. Not gathering in mounds like mad insects, but rather distributed evenly in infinite space. Great care was taken with both word and image. In fact, it was pitched as a vast improvement over being eaten by worms in the cold, indifferent earth. This was a room with a view. This was not death, but like what it was, a final place to slow down and be surrounded by wonder.

And so we sent them. By the millions. The only images we saw were beautiful. People leaving the ship easily, then drifting like a soft astral landscape. There was no question: it was the perfect place to rest. WasteCorp said that the dead were gently refusing the grave, and waiting for us to move them to the sky. If you could afford it you could even have a trackable loved one. You couldn’t see them with the naked eye, but a chart was issued to you and you could know roughly what part of the sky they moved. Every day and night.

Then the light changed.

blind.