Tomorrow death died out (dystopy)

2 Sima B. Moussavian TOMORROW DEATH DIED OUT What if the future were past?

3 Imprint Bibliographic information of the German National Library: The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. For questions and suggestions: [email protected] 1st edition, all rights to the work belong to the author © 2021 by Sima Moussavian All rights reserved, in particular the right of reproduction and distribution as well as translation. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form (by photocopy, microfilm or other process) or stored, processed, duplicated or distributed using electronic systems without the written permission of the author. Cover design and typesetting: Sima Moussavian Cover illustrations: Sima Moussavian Editing, proofreading: SBM Ghostwriting Publisher: SBM Ghostwriting ISBN: 9798417395390

4 One truth, one hope, one lie. Over the steaming fire I cooked them, my friends, and ate them up to the last inch of skin. In four weeks when I will save the world, I’m going to be the only human on earth.

5 PROLOGUE In 2031, the polar bear became extinct. A year later, so did the tiger. Humanity will be next, they said at the time. If only they had been right... It is 2120 and humans haven't yet died out. The opposite, in fact: what became extinct, instead, was death. We used to live like kings until we stopped and merely survived. However, what is survival worth if, surviving, you lose the core of life? The clocks stopped ticking. For decades they haven’t moved their hands and years don’t even matter any more; they only would if we kept on counting. Shortly before the turn of the millennium we stopped. Faced with eternity, aside from life, what could be meaning less than time? No one needs to measure it, once the own on earth has broken from its grip. Nevertheless, some of us continue. Without meaning and purpose, we keep on counting the years, in the silent hope that it will help them pass faster. Even though it makes no difference and nothing will ever pass in the space of the eternal. Since 2034 the years haven’t been going by but writhing: suffering like an injured animal by the side of the road and no one can redeem them, no matter how hard they try. When I was growing up, time still mattered. Every minute of it had a worth. I am one of the last generations with an understanding for ticking seconds, passing years, the inexorably emptying hourglass that used to be a life. They say for people like me the existence we are doomed to lead today is hardest. Because we remember: a time when

6 life barely had time and wanted to be lived, given it didn't last forever. Nowadays very few people know what it feels like to live only for limited days. That is: very few know what it feels like to be alive at all. Never did we who remember expect the life we knew to get out-dated like horse-drawn carriages, telephone boxes, relationships, cars. We watched it happen, regardless. Convinced that time wasn’t timely any more, many of us applauded those who redeemed us from it and worshipped them like gods, but where there is a god the devil must be close. Some said without time we won’t ever again have to repent, have to fear, have to desire. Without ticking seconds, they thought, we would be spared the dark sides of life. Perhaps they were right, but what we were spared as well was the essence of being alive. Explosions woke me up this morning. In the past, it used to be the voices of roosters at dawn. Today: milliseconds of incomprehensible energy, shadowing the eternal, when it breaks upon the temporal. Alongside bodies, geysirs of earth and concrete shot towards the sky. The dark horizon: scorched by orange flames and below it: only roaring on a ground that was trembling more violently than in century quakes. Two hours have passed since I last looked out the tarnished windows. A veil of dust and smoke over shattered towns and on earth: craters as deep as a giant’s mouth. As if belonging to ghosts, arms stretched out of the ruins so as to plead, suffering, for a death that might never come. How many is it this time, was my first thought today. How many might be buried alive under tons of rubble, doomed to

7 wait perhaps for centuries until someone finds the heart to redeem them? The quakes are approaching. All neighbourhoods have long been destroyed. Soon the one where I am sitting to write this will crumble to ashes as well. However, I won't stay. I am a nomad who moves from place to place, town to town, one ruin to the next. Fugitives from life, they call us, even though it has never been life what we have been fleeing from. Instead, we are looking for its remnants. For decades we have been doing so, determined to continue for the rest of forever. Unless somewhere along the way we will find the death that was violently torn from our hands. They extinguished it just like the polar bear, just like the tiger when I was still a child. In 2020, what was to happen to us became first foreseeable. It was a century pandemic that sealed our gruesome fate. And a number: 250 million. Numerics are funny: complicated and simple all the same. They say, numbers are the easiest way to express the world and everything in it. Even though, once they exceed a certain realm no one can picture what they really mean. How much is 250 million? Can anyone picture 250 million lives? Unlikely: most do hard enough to picture a life of their own. However, about 200 million people are born each year and around 60 million die. It was more than that when I was 13 years and 234 days old. 250 million died on March, the 6th 2034: a single monday. Back to work again. Another week that feels the same. No one really likes mondays. I’d rather sleep in, keep my eyes closed, stop moving for another while. Typical monday

8 morning thoughts. That monday morning, however, was to forever change their meaning. 250 million people decided to keep their eyes closed, stop moving, give up breathing that day - forever. At least, so they thought. Up to now I see them in front of me. Clearly: not like a movie or picture. It is more as if it were happening at this very moment right in front of my eyes. Bodies. They were dangling from tree tops, dropping off bridges, jumping off cliffs, colliding with trains, trucks, trams. All of them: male, aged 20 to 40. Millions over millions who tried to die through their own hands that murderous monday morning. I saw it accidentally. On the TV-news, a steaming coffee in my hand and the cup was trembling in my constantly tightening grip. When a single person dies, you relate to them. Yet again numerics are funny and once the number of those who die exceeds a certain realm, you are hardly relating. That’s why the thought of a single death would get to you. That of 250 million, however, would barely even touch you, as it exceeds what you can conceive. Back then at my age, I couldn't conceive much at all. Nevertheless, one out of 250 million burnt his mark into my brain. A policeman, maybe 30 years old. He had shot himself in the head. There wasn’t much of him left. Half his face: dispersed and the brain: scattered across his dark blue uniform. Yet the other half of him, covered in gunpowder, pierced me with that look. Upon the remnants of a dead man’s face I saw the look of freedom. I wasn’t prepared for it. I guess no one really was. All I had been so far: a child of what they called the abandoned generation. They have never had a chance. Childhood:

9 withheld from them as if it were a knife, doomed to do harm to them and others, once in children's hands. Their lives got sterilised until they were isolated and lacking every experience they would have needed in order to grow up. So growing up, they never became adults. It was meant to teach them respect for life, but what they learned, instead, was fear of death. It would threaten them and everyone they loved if they ever began to live. Day after day, hour by hour, that was what they were being told. By teachers who all at once refused to teach them, radio voices who all at once talked down to them and leaders who led them down the road of misery. No one recalls much from times when they could not yet speak. However, what I do remember about the first years of my life is how lucky I was. Barely anyone knew that I existed. Undocumented and raised in the clouds: somewhere up there, high above in the mountains. My mother gave birth to me on a rocky ledge. Groundhogs around her, eagles and fragrant pine trees above her head. Exactly the way she had planned it. 17 hours it took her to bring me to life and 17 years it took me to fully understand the favour she has done me. Had she gone to the hospital, told anyone of the child she was carrying, been amongst people at all, I would have been registered. I would have had an identity, traceable and trackable, undeniable. It was without it that I got a chance to have a life. Everything she has ever done she did for me and in this knowledge I have no choice, but make it up to her. She killed herself before death died out. I reckon she felt it coming and

10 chose to go, when she still could. I might be a child of the abandoned generation, but she would never have abandoned me. Instead, she tried to take me with her. She used to love nature: its elements and, dying, she was going to cuddle up to them. I think I was crying when she took me out of my cradle that morning. She did her hair and put her makeup on, opened her wardrobe, slipped on her shiniest dress, and went to get the galvanized rope that my parents used to tie up our horses with. She didn’t tie up horses that day. Instead, she tied a rock to her feet, me between her arms, had, smiling, one last look around, and pushed the rock off the landing stage into the mountain lake behind our old house. I remember the splashing sound it caused, when it hit the crystal clear water. The sounds we caused, dragged after it, I remember too. It was peaceful, once we had left the surface. Sounds slipped away and our consciousness did just as well. That was on February, the 5th 2014 - around twenty years before 250 million people were to try taking their lives on a monday morning. Out of 250 million, barely anyone succeeded. At first, they did: were dead for a little while. But in the end they didn’t get to stay this way. Their cells regenerated, so as to bring them back to life and no matter what condition they were in: eventually, they rose again. On March 30, 2034 it was loud in the cemeteries, loud in the morgues, in the crematoria, and churches. They pounded against their wooden coffins from the inside. Buried dead, yet now alive again, they tried to attract attention. Those who were not yet underground rose from their deathbed, incredulous. Confused and disappointed that they were still

11 amongst the living. Not just in our region: it happened all over the world. At first, hardly anyone understood how. Now we know what happened then and ever since I realized why 250 million suicides did not permanently die I have been grateful that my mother got to leave the world early enough. Thank God, she met death that February! I’m really glad that she is dead! Nevertheless, she would never have left if she had known I would survive. It was purely accidental that my heart kept on beating that day. I should have drowned with her, with fragrant lake water in my lungs. It didn’t, however, succeed to wash them clean from the last breath of life. Had my father not been sitting in his hideaway that day, had he not seen my mother, had he not jumped off the landing stage to dive down for us, I could have joined her. Would I have wanted to, knowing everything I know now? That’s what I am wondering, but don’t know how to answer. Sure, however, is that if I had met death with her, ten years later I wouldn’t have had to witness how 250 million males, aged 20 to 40, resurrected from the dead. I wouldn’t have had to spend my life hidden away on trees and rooftops, moving around in the shadows above the towns and I wouldn’t have to do what I will do in a few weeks, as soon as the sun will rise to weave the earth into a brittle net of gentle rays. Eleven trillion. Can anyone picture even one? I can’t and still it will be eleven who will see the sun rise for the last time in around 30 days. We think we’ve found a way. We have to

12 end it, once and for all, in the hope that the end will give way to a new beginning. Everything that has happened is in this case. All the things that have brought us here: bottled up notes of a century and writing this, I am trying to picture who you are: the person who will find this message in a bottle in hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of years. I am trying to picture how you live and I wonder if you feel alive. Wonder, if you will ever die and what scares you more: death or keeping alive. To tell you the truth, I hope you will die. Because in that case our plan is working. Good luck to you, whoever you might be and let me ask one thing of you. Let me beg you to take these notes seriously and when you meet death: don’t fight it. Hug it gently, instead, and tell it from me: “You are welcome!”

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