Your own death and how to cope with it
ONE
It was all very well receiving a five-page booklet entitled : Your Own Death and How To Cope With It. It was all very well attending counselling sessions with The Ship's Metaphysical-psychiatrist, and being told about The Nature of Being and Non-Being, and some other gunk about this guy who was in A Cave, but didn't know it was A Cave until he left. The thing was, Saunders was An Engineer, not A Philosopher - and the way he saw it, You were either Dead or You were Alive. And if you were Dead, you shouldn't be forced to fill in endless incomprehensible forms, and other related nonsensica.
You shouldn't have to return your birth certificate, to have it invalidated. You shouldn't have to send off your completed Death certificate, accompanied by a passport-size photograph of your corpse, signed on the back by your coroner.
When you're Dead, you should be Dead. The bastards should leave you alone.
If Saunders could have picked something up, he would have picked something up and hurled it across the grey metal room. But he couldn't.
Saunders was a hologram. He was just a computer generated simulation of his former self., he couldn't actually touch anything, except for his own hologramatic body. He was a phantom made of light. A software ghost.
Quite honestly, he'd had enough.
Saunders got up, walked silently across the metal-grilled floor of his sleeping quarters and stared out of the viewport window.
Far away to his right was the bright multi-coloured ball of Saturn, captured by its rainbow rings like a prize in a gigantic stellar hoop-la game. Twelve miles below him, under the plexiglass dome of the terraformed colony of Mimas, half the ship's crew were on planet leave.
No planet leave for Saunders.
No R & R for the dead.
He caressed his eyelids with the rough balls of his fingers, then glanced back at the pile: the mind-bogglingly complicated Hologramatic Status application form; accident claims; pension funds; bank transfers; house deeds. They all had to be completed so his wife, Carole - no, his widow, Carole - could start a new life without him.
When he'd first signed up, they both understood he would be away from Earth for months on end, and, obviously, things could happen; mining in space was dangerous. That was why the money was so good.
'If anything happens to me,' he'd always said, 'I don't want you to sit around, mourning.' Protests. 'I want you to meet someone else, someone terrific, and start a new life without me.
What a stupid, fat, dumb thing to say! The kind of stupid, fat, dumb thing only a living person would ever dream of saying.
Because that's what she was going to do now.
Start a new life - without him.
Fine, if he was dead dead. If he'd just taken delivery of his shiny new ephemeral body and was wafting around in the ether on the next plane of existence - fine.
Even if there was no life after death, and he totally ceased to be - then again, absolutely fine.
But this was different. He was dead, but he was still here. His personality had been stored on disc, and The Computer had reproduced him down to the tiniest detail; down to his innermost thoughts.
This wasn't The Deal. He wanted her to start a new life when he was gone, not while he was still here. But of course, that's what she'd do. That's what she had to do. You can't stay married to a dead man. So even though she loved him dearly, she would, eventually, have to start looking for someone else.
And ... she would sleep with him.
She would go to bed with him. And, hell, she would probably enjoy it.
Even though she still loved Saunders.
She would, wouldn't she? She would meet Mr Terrific and have a physical relationship.
Probably in his bed.
His bed. Their marital bed. His bed!
Probably using the three condoms he knew for a fact he had left in the bedside cabinet.
The ones he'd bought for a joke.
The flavoured ones.
His mind ran amok, picturing a line of lovers standing, strawberry-sheathed, outside his wife's bedroom.
No!' screamed Saunders, involuntarily. 'Noooooo!'
Hologramatic tears of rage and frustration welled up in Saunders' eyes and rolled hologramatically down his cheeks. He smashed his fist down onto the table.
The fist passed soundlessly through the grey metal desk top, and crashed with astonishing force into his testicles.
As he lay in a foetal position, squealing on the floor, he wished he were dead.
Then he remembered he already was.
Saunders didn't know it but, twelve miles below, on the Saturnian moon of Mimas, Flight Coordinator George McIntyre was about to solve all his problems.
