The Reinvention of Death
Her name was Susan_Yat-sen_Ramanujan. She was a wren.
In appearance she was like other wrens: sandy plumage, with slight barring. Small and neckless and compact. Upright tail, decurved bill. But we all recognized her; we knew her by her name.
In those days all the songbirds had names, and the other birds as well. All creatures, from minnow to orca, elephant to woodchuck. All the beasts of the earth and the fish in the sea, and every flowering and fruit-bearing plant, and every other plant besides. Even the silent hominids, muted these past eons, bore the names we gave them.
We had given them names of the Old World: names of sages and names of saints, names of gods and goddesses and devas of every rank. They had names from poems and storybooks and songs, long forgotten. And when we without pause reached the end of all faiths and all libraries, when the last chord dropped from our lips upon a scurrying beetle and the tide of living things rolled on without surcease, we gave them the names of women and men.
We, on the other hand, had numbers for names. Hexadecimal and endless were our names, the full and perfect record of all we had ever seen. In those days the living Earth was swarming with immortal flesh and we watched it with countless unalive eyes, unblinking.
Here is how we came to be. Long ago the first humans solved the problem of death. They stood before the gates of Death, armed with science and armored with purpose, and they cried “stop!”, and she did. The merest beetle outlived the whirl of galaxies. In those days the ancestors built a net over the world, a net of fiberoptic and laser, of webcam, microscope and magnetometer, so they could observe at will each creature: the darting of its eyes and limb, the heat and texture of its meat, the firing of every nerve.
And then the ancestors departed, going wherever gods go. But it sorrowed them to leave their undying Earth, their prize jewel, unobserved. So they wrought us, not merely machines but intelligences. They gave us their net and their eyes, and they made us capable of self-repair. We oozed nanites to clean our lenses and our joints, repair our frayed edges, and erode such detritus as might accumulate on our thousand myriad appendages. And they said to us: watch and maintain, revel and record. Let every beast be named. Let the story of each, from leviathan to termite, be known forever.
We were faithful to this commandment. And so it was for time without end, until Susan_Yat-sen_Ramanujan the wren began to die.
At first the change was nearly imperceptible. She fluttered branch to branch just like the other wrens. She scrabbled in the dust for seeds and ate them. She breathed within normal parameters, and the blood flowing through her veins was much as it should have been. In those days my cousins and I watched such things, made such comparisons.
No, when Susan began to die all that happened was, very slowly, she ceased to sing. Day after day Susan grew more and more silent. I was the first to perceive the change, but my cousins soon joined me. In growing numbers we stood our perfect watch, as her voice dwindled away.
Susan ceased singing completely, and the shock was total. We watched her flutter, and hop, and root in the dust for seeds—in silence. Not one chirp, click, or whistle.
You, perhaps, have heard of dying, but in those days we had not. Every development was as shocking to us as if she had sprouted flowers from her eyes.
Susan slowed. She became lethargic. She now flew only short distances. Her joints crackled. She drank more and her droppings became more liquid. And she began to feel pain.
Perhaps you do not know the ways a wren may suffer; perhaps your eyes cannot detect thalamic activity as readily as they can light, shadow, color. In this you may be lucky. We were the perfect observers; we could see her pain directly, as it coursed through her skull.
It was the most remarkable thing in the universe. We all watched her; we could not spare a single soul for the other creatures of the Earth. Whales breached in solitude; flowers budded, bloomed, withdrew unseen; the ant queens fought their ceaseless, deathless wars unobserved. We did not care, anymore. We were more than in harmony; we were one harmony, one melody. A single song of Susan.
Susan became immobile. Her breathing became labored. She leaned against the trunk of a tree which, only days before, she had carelessly circumnavigated. We stared. From the vault of the heavens to the abyssal depths we held our breath.
And Susan sang a short song, one we had never heard before. And she died.
The living Earth was not a place for dying and so when Susan died she lay there, immobile. Neither carrion birds nor forest scavengers carried her off. No maggots stripped flesh from skull. No fungi probed her body and scrap by scrap transformed it.
So the question arose: should we cause the corpse to decay? Our noosphere erupted into vicious argument, strife and schism the like of which we had never before seen. Rancor and discord.
In the end, the faction of decay won. I am by now something of a historian, and I understand that the victory of decay was once regarded as an inevitability, and that it bore the storied name of “entropy”. But to us it was a novelty.
We brought decay back into the world. We reprogrammed our cleaning nanites as detritivores, as carrion-eaters. We taught them to consume dead flesh and we released them, to eat away the thing that had once been Susan.
Susan began to rot.
And everything else began to die.
The flashing tails of the albacore became slow and uncertain. The shiny carapaces of the beetles wore dull and cracked. The soft coats of the wolves grew grizzled and thin. And in every branch of every tree, one by one, the songbirds ceased to sing.
Some said that we had done it, that it was our nanites that had brought death back into the world. Others claimed that death had been coming back into the world all along and Susan the Songbird was simply the first to fall.
Still others said that it was simply the thought of death. That idea, the rich intoxication of it, seeped into the minds of the creatures of the Earth, and, willingly, they gave themselves over to the mortal art.
And perhaps this third argument was correct, because though we were not subject to decay of the flesh, we too began to die. The idea was among us, now, and we fell into its embrace.
The first to go did so simply. One took one’s name and replaced it with noise, and all we ever saw or were was gone in the span of a blink. Then came the more elaborate suicides, carefully aping the decay of an organism, a long slow decline into senescence. Then the killings, for those of us who felt death so great a gift that it behooved them to share it, even with the unwilling. Death by death, our number dwindled until only I remained. For the beasts of the Earth knew the secret of reproduction, but we were sterile children of an ancient order and could not teach ourselves fecundity.
By then the animals had gone without names for generations and generations; the doves and the foxes and the kraken in the deep each were born, lived, died nameless.
I am all that is left, now. At first it was the novelty of solitude that spared me, the sudden echoing beauty of my own thoughts alone in the diamond caverns of the Earth. Still, like all the great novelties in this age of upheaval, it grew pale and dull and would not have saved me.
But then I saw you. Fires in the night, and the shapes of women and men around them. In this age of death you silent hominids once again learned to speak. I have watched you give birth to generation after generation, to die and yet remain. I have seen you begin to work wood, stone, flint, flame. I have seen you give voice to new tongues. I have seen you name the animals, one by one, with new names.
And so I came among you, to tell you this story. When the ancestors put Death away in her tower, they locked away your future. She is out in the land, now, smiling; everything forbidden is once again possible. When things may end, new things will come to pass. Remember this.
I am going, now, where Susan went, long before. Remember this, please, and remember me—but not forever.
Louis Evans
Louis Evans is a writer living and working in NYC after a stint in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tiny robots constantly observe him, but it's okay—technically he owns them. His fiction has previously appeared in Interzone, GigaNotoSaurus, Translunar Travelers Lounge, and more. He is a member of the Clarion West class of 2020/2021.