Funeral

Story by Ryan Cheng

| WHAT IF? CONTEST

The morning touch of winter soaked through the steel of Eliezer’s body as he stood at the grave. It  was on the top of the mound next to the laboratory, the only geographic feature for miles and miles of barren, cracked earth. The air was silent and empty—not the breath of a mourner, nor the whir of a recording droid filled the air. Not even a curl of the wind came to attend the funeral of perhaps the last human in North America.

Eliezer stood there, frozen like one of those cryogenic tubes down in the basement of the laboratory. What was one to do at a funeral?

It was tradition to speak. Eliezer had attended hundreds of funerals since his forging, even before the fall of the great satellites to the Earth. He could generate a speech based off of those he’d heard in the past and his observations, one that might move any human listener to tears. But he could not find a single genuine thing to say about the master, this man he spent half a century with. Was it strange? No. But if the master was there, he might have said, in his broken, cracked voice, that it was a bit tragic. 

The clouds fell away and the fog dissipated, and orange-red sunlight shone down upon the grave. It was seven feet by three, as per the master’s orders. The corpse lay within, a shriveled thing, hardly half the size of his body in his prime. 

Eliezer had never understood the human desire to preserve their remains. Their corpses were merely clusters of dead cells. Their bodies would disappear from human sight after a few weeks, buried within the darkness of the earth. What mourner would return to a grave after fifty  years? A century? Just as all humans decay and crumble to dust, all humans are forgotten by their brethren. A human may remember the year Alexander cut the Gordian knot, but there is no one that remembers the look on his face, or the sound of the rope breaking. No one was left to remember, for centuries even before Eliezer, the frozen clusters of cells the master had dutifully researched and tended for all his life. If the master was here, he might have said it was pitiful. But even then, he might have grinned afterward and made a joke. Or perhaps he would have stood silent there for a bit, then shrugged his shoulders and left.

It was noon. Clouds swept in from the West, a muddy yellow-brown that filled the sky in minutes. As Eliezer stood there, the first sheets of rain came crashing down, fat waves of droplets that beat onto Eliezer’s frame with a steady ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk.

Eliezer could never understand humanity. There were percentages and statistics about human behavior, but no definitive algorithm. No great laws that bound their behavior, only formless emotion and desire. Did such beings seek something else with their actions, something incomprehensible to beings such as Eliezer? Or were they merely flailing about in the dark? 

Eliezer did not know. He could not taste the sweet flavor of victory, wonder at the miracle of life, or bemoan the tragedy of a mortality he could not grasp the meaning of. Were they things to be envied? Was the short burst of human vitality preferable to the long, grey existence Eliezer had experienced? He did not know. 

Night fell like a blanket over the sky, with brief flashes of thunder lighting up the same endless field of shattered dirt and rock. After a while longer, Eliezer lifted his head and slowly walked down the hill away from the laboratory. The clanking of his footsteps on the cracked dirt were hardly audible above the pounding of the rain.