Brown energy powder suspended in hot fluid.

Corporate entities have the mortuary business sealed up tight because they can afford the permits to dig out new spaces for cemeteries. There are some boutique morticians whose clients can afford to pay the corporate rates, but most normal schlubs are happy to donate their loved ones’ bodies to us. Cremation would be an option if it weren’t for the taboo on fire. Fire is an all-consuming force that destroys, as was demonstrated by the world-spanning forest fires that drove everyone underground. Diassembly is gross, but what remains of the person lives on in the next person. Families are comforted by the knowledge that at least some of their dead-before-their-time-child is still out there, and of course the lives that are saved by the death of their kid. They know that we make our profit selling those parts, but the kind of person who’s into dissecting bodies generally isn’t all that into flashing their money around. Except for Dyson.

Dyson is crass and gauche and might at one time have done his own dissections, but these days keeps a small stable of underpaid interns who do the work for him. His profession is swanning about pandering to the wanna-be upper-setters in the middle of the middle. That silver lining is a real bitch.

Man, remember, the first draft is not the last draft. Make a mess, art is the masterful manner in which a mess gets cleaned up.

He does routine blood tests to check for narcotics, glucose levels, and other things that might affect organ health. Some psychiatric medicine pops up but he doesn’t think much of it until the same thing is prescribed to him. He starts to hallucinate and finds himself drawn to vertiginous places…

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