LIFE BEFORE DEATH

Jeremy Russell flipped the memory stick between his thumb and forefinger. For several hours it had sat untouched on his desk, filling up the place with whispering danger. He’d decided over dinner to plug it in that evening, or destroy it for good.

The letter arrived not long after the funeral, when Jeremy learned for the first time that his wife had signed up to a company specialising in what it called the ‘digital legacy’, a service which promised to ensure your story lived on when you could not. That she’d kept it secret was not surprising, neither was how she found the money to pay the fee, which he’d since learned was extortionate. Until her death, he’d been totally ignorant of their finances; she had handled everything, and he provided a signature here and there. But why she would want this, the woman who over thirty years of marriage had not kept so much as a diary, who never held with nonsense even for a second, he just could not fathom. Jeremy worried that the whole thing was a test.

To begin with, he ignored the letter, stuffing it into a shoe box overflowing with bank statements and electricity bills. In recent months, his study had become a convenient place to lose things he didn’t want to deal with. It was a room set aside entirely for his things, his hobbies, his clutter as she called it. Her rooms, the rest of the house, were stylish, minimalist; not bare but clean. Everything still smelled new. Jeremy preferred the smell of old books, yellowing newspapers scattered across his desk and escaping from drawers, spine-cracked biographies piled on bending shelves, a wooden chest, which he’d laboured over for the past five weekends, sitting half-finished in the corner. The room was getting steadily harder to move around in, but a little mess was inevitable with the time he spent keeping the rest of the house exactly as his wife left it.

After some weeks, a representative from the digital legacy company called him at home. Jeremy was invited to a warehouse with cathedral ceilings and rows of impossibly small telephones and laptop computers which looked to him like shiny insects. Except for a few young, mournful types who walked the aisles in respectful silence, the place was empty. Feeling their