Tomorrow Death Died Out

By Sima B. Moussavian

David and his wife are living in 2024: a post-pandemic time, marked by radical change and insecurities regarding the future. As a rational, well-read person who is distrustful towards authorities, he finds a highly encrypted USB-device in a case, the documents on which give a dark outlook on the future. The narrator claims to live in 2120: an apocalyptic time when people can no longer die. He describes himself as the leader of a group, known as refugees from life, who have spent a century looking for an antidote against the impossible to bear immortality that a vaccine brought over them in 2034. Having read the documents, David needs to decide whether or not to trust their authenticity and do what the narrator asks him for: destroy humanity before they can become immortal, which would mean a complete destruction of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sima B. Moussavian
• Release date: Mar 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005601997

Sima B. Moussavian

Born with a defect that is breathing words, Sima B. Moussavian has been a German ghostwriter and novelist since 2010. Her short stories were published in several German magazines. Since 2021 she has been publishing her work simultaneously in German and (as she would put it, not exactly perfect) English. She maintains a deeply passionate love hate relationship to Ireland, where she has been living part time since 2016. Although her writing has mostly been inspired by the beauty of the uncanny in modern works of authors like Charles Bukowski and Charles Bronson, her heart is black and beating for dark romanticism. Oh, and for Friedrich Nietzsche, of course. Whose in all the world isn't?

Book preview

Prologue

In 2031, the polar bear became extinct. A year later, so did the tiger. Humanity will be next, we thought at the time. How I wish we had been right!

It is 2120, and mankind hasn't yet died out. The opposite, in fact: what became extinct, instead, was death. We used to live like kings until we stopped, and merely survived. However, what is living worth, if survivors cease to feel alive?

The clocks stopped ticking. For decades, they haven’t moved their hands, and years don’t even matter any more: they only really would if we kept on counting. Shortly before the turn of the millennium, we stopped. Faced with eternity, aside from life, what could be meaning less than time?

Nobody needs to measure it, when their own on earth has broken from its grip. Nevertheless, some of us continue: people like me. Without meaning and purpose, we keep on counting the years, in the silent hope that it will help them pass faster. It makes no difference, though, as nothing will ever pass in the space of the eternal.

Since 2034, the years haven’t been going by, but writhing: suffering, like an injured animal by the side of the road, and no one can redeem them, no matter how hard they try.

When I was growing up, time still mattered. Every single minute of it used to have a worth. I am one of the last generations with an understanding for ticking seconds, passing years, the inexorably emptying hourglass that used to be a life. They say, for people like me, the existence we are doomed to lead today is hardest. Because we remember: a time when life barely had time, and wanted to be lived, given it didn't last forever. Nowadays hardly anyone still knows what it feels like to live for only limited days. That is: barely anyone still knows what it feels like to be alive. Never did we, who remember, expect the life we’ve known to get out-dated like horse-drawn carriages, telephone boxes, relationships, cars. Nevertheless, we had to watch it happen.

Convinced that time wasn’t timely any more, most applauded those who redeemed us from it. They worshipped them like Gods, but where there is a God, the Devil must be close. Some said, without time we won’t ever again have to repent, have to fear, have to desire. Without ticking seconds, they assured, we would be spared the dark sides of existing, and, perhaps, they were right, but what we have been spared, as well, is life.

Explosions woke me up this morning. In the past, it used to be the voices of roosters at dawn. Today: milliseconds of incomprehensible energy, shadowing the eternal, when it breaks upon the temporal. Alongside bodies, geysirs of earth and concrete were shooting towards the sky. The dark horizon: scorched by orange flames, and below: screaming and roaring on a ground that was trembling more violently than in a century quake.

Two hours have passed since I last looked out the tarnished windows. A veil of dust and smoke over shattered towns, and on earth: craters as deep as a giant’s mouth. As if they belonged to ghosts, arms stretched out of the ruins to plead, suffering, for a death that might never come. How many is it this time, was my first thought today. How many might be buried alive under tons of rubble this time, doomed to wait perhaps forever until someone finds a heart to redeem them?

The quakes are approaching. All neighbourhoods have long been destroyed. Soon, the one where I am sitting and writing this will crumble to ashes, as well. However, I won't stay. I am a nomad who moves from place to place, town to town, one ruin to the next. Fugitives from life, they call us, although it has never been life that we’ve been fleeing from. We are looking for its remnants. For decades, we have been doing so, and are determined to continue for the rest of forever. Unless somewhere along the way, we’ll find the death that was violently torn from our hands.

They extinguished it just like the polar bear, just like the tiger, when I was still a child. In 2020, what was to happen to us became first foreseeable. It was a century pandemic that sealed our gruesome fate. And a number: 250 million.

Numerics are funny: complicated and simple all the same. They say, numbers are the easiest way to express the world and everything in it. However, once they exceed a certain realm, no one can picture what they really mean.

How much is 250 million? Can anyone picture 250 million lives? Unlikely: most do hard enough to picture one of their own. Nevertheless, about 200 million people are born each year and around 60 million die. It was more than that when I was 23 years and 234 days old.

250 million died, on March, the 6th, 2034: a single monday. Back to work again. Another week that feels the same. No one really likes mondays. I’d rather sleep in, keep my eyes closed, stop moving for another while. Typical monday morning thoughts. That monday morning, however, was to forever change their meaning.

250 million people decided to keep their eyes closed, stop moving, give up breathing that day: forever, so they thought. Up to now, I can see them in front of me. Clearly: not like a movie or picture. It is more as if it were happening at this very moment right before my eyes.

Bodies. They were dangling from tree tops, dropping off bridges, jumping off cliffs, colliding with trains, trucks, trams. All of them: male, aged 20 to 40. Millions over millions who tried to die through their own hands on a murderous monday morning. I saw it accidentally. On the TV-news, a steaming coffee in my hand, and the cup trembled in my cramping grip.

When a single person dies, you relate to them. Yet again: numerics are funny, and once the number of those who die exceeds a certain realm, you’re hardly relating. That’s why the thought of a single death would get to you. That of 250 million, however, would barely touch you, as it exceeds what you can conceive.

Back then, at my age, I couldn't conceive much at all. Nevertheless, one out of 250 million burnt his mark into my brain. A policeman, maybe 30 years old. He’d shot himself in the head. There wasn’t much of him left. Half his face: dispersed, and the brain: scattered across his dark blue uniform. Yet the other half of him, covered in gunshot residue, pierced me with that look. Upon the remnants of a dead man’s face, I saw the look of freedom.

I wasn’t prepared for it. I guess, no one really was. What I had been so far: a child of what they called the abandoned generation. We’ve never had a chance. Childhood was withheld from us, as if it were a knife, doomed to do only harm to ourselves and others. Our lives got sterilised until we were isolated and lacking every experience that we would have needed to grow up, so growing up, we never became adults.

It was meant to teach us respect for life, but what we learned, instead, was fear of death. It would threaten us and everyone we loved, if we ever began to live. Day after day, hour by hour, this was what we were told. By teachers who, all at once, refused to teach us, radio voices who, all at once, talked down to us, and leaders who led us down the road of misery.

No one recalls much from times when they could not speak. What I, however, do remember about the first years of my life is how lucky I was. Barely anyone knew I existed. Undocumented and raised in the clouds: somewhere up there, high above. In the mountains.

My mother gave birth to me on a rocky ledge, groundhogs around her. Eagles and fragrant pine trees above her head. She’d planned it exactly this way. 17 hours it took her to bring me to life, and 17 years it took me to fully understand the favour she’s done me. If she'd gone to the hospital, told anyone of the child she was carrying, been amongst people at all, I would have been registered. I would have had an identity, traceable and trackable: undeniable. It was without it that I got a chance to have a life.

Everything she has ever done was for me, which is why I have no choice, but to make it up to her. She killed herself before death died out. Perhaps she felt it coming and chose to go as long as she could. I might be a child of the abandoned generation, but she would never have abandoned me. Instead, she tried to take me with her.

She used to love nature: all the elements, and, dying, she was going to cuddle up to them. I think I was crying when she took me out of my cradle that morning. She did her hair and put her makeup on, opened her wardrobe, slipped on her shiniest dress, and went to get the galvanised rope that my parents used to tie up our horses. She didn’t tie up horses that day. Instead, she tied a rock to her feet, me between her arms, had, smiling, one last look around, and pushed the rock off the landing stage into the mountain lake behind our house.

I remember the splashes it caused when it hit the icy water. The sounds we caused, dragged after it, I remember just as well. It was peaceful, once we’d left the surface. The sounds slipped away and, eventually, our consciousness did just the same.

That was on February, the 5th, 2014 - around twenty years before 250 million people tried to take their lives. Out of 250 million, barely anyone succeeded. At first, they did: they were dead, for a little while. Yet they didn’t get to stay this way. Their cells regenerated and brought them back to life. No matter what condition they were in: eventually, they rose again.

On March 30, 2034 it was loud in the cemeteries, loud in the morgues, in the crematoria, and churches. They pounded against their coffins from the inside. Buried dead, yet now alive again, they tried to attract attention. Those who were not yet underground rose from their deathbed, incredulous. They looked confused and disappointed that they were still amongst the living, and it didn’t just happen in our region, but all over the world. At first, hardly anyone understood how. Now we know what happened then, and ever since I realized, why 250 million suicides did not permanently die, I’ve been grateful that my mother got to leave the world early enough. Thank God, she met death that February! I’m relieved that she is dead! Nevertheless, she would never have left if she had known I would survive.

By chance, my heart kept on beating that day. I should have drowned with her, fragrant lake water in my lungs. It did, however, not succeed to wash them clean from the last breath: the last bit of life. If my father had not been sitting in his hideaway that day - if he had not seen my mother and hadn’t jumped off the landing stage to dive down for us - I could have joined her.

Would I have wanted to, knowing everything I know today? I’m not quite sure. What I’m sure of, is only that, if I had met death with her, I wouldn’t have had to witness how 250 million males, aged 20 to 40, resurrected from the dead, a decade thereafter. I wouldn’t have had to spend my life hidden away on trees and rooftops, wouldn’t have had to move around in the shadows above town, and wouldn’t have to do what I will do in a few days, as soon as the sun will rise and weave the earth into its brittle net of gentle rays.

Eleven trillion. Can anyone picture even one? I cannot, and still it will be eleven who will see the sun rise for the last time in around seven days. We think we’ve found a way. We have to end it, once and for all, in the hope that the end will give way to new beginnings.

Everything that’s happened is in this case. All the things that have brought us here: bottled up notes of a century, and while I am writing this, I’m trying to picture who you are: the person who will find this message in a bottle in hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of years. I’m trying to picture how you are living, and wonder if you feel alive. If you will ever die and what scares you more: death or being alive. To tell you the truth, I hope you will die. In that case, our plan is working.

Good luck to you, whoever you might be and let me ask one thing of you: let me beg you to take these notes seriously, and when you meet death, don’t fight it, hug it gently, instead, and tell it from me: You are welcome!

Chapter 1 : The message

Where did you even find this? In the toilets? she shakes her head. This cannot be real, David, don’t be stupid!

She is still beautiful. Even now that she wrinkles her nose and looks at him as if he were a madman.

I found it right here. Over there at the river bend, where we first… well, you know…

A madman he is not, but too embarrassed to finish his sentence, and she is embarrassed for him, as she has never pictured herself with anyone this uptight. Her eyes turn and slip over him, like a summer breeze just vividly enough to wake him up.

What if it is real, though? he asks, turning the print fresh piece of paper in his hand. And what if what is happening out there right now is this, all over again?

One too many ‘what if’s. She cannot take him seriously, and, to be honest, she never has taken him that. He used to always be too caught up in his own world for her to still want to understand him, so the twists and turns of his mind don’t make any sense to her.

So what are you saying? she asks half-heartedly, remembering the last ‘what if’ he has thrown at her.

What if the rumours are true, and you are sleeping with Daniel? Well, she was, but innocent until proven guilty, and, back then, his what if eventually worked in her favour.

Do you seriously want me to believe this is a message from the future?

She nudges him and watches his face turn red, because her touch never fails to light him on fire. Unfortunately, not even biting flames can now distract him from the thought that starts eating through his brain.

Not the future, he shakes his head, the opposite, actually. The birch tree high above him throws autumn leaves on top of him, as if it is trying to bury him alive.

I read about this a few years back, he adds, about the possibility that this world is way older than we think. Not sure, but wasn’t it the Mayan who assumed society hit uncountable breaking points throughout billions and trillions of years, and got completely wiped out thousands of times just to reemerge from bacteria?

Normally, when he would get this way, she’d shut him up with a kiss, bite his still moving lips until they’d turn numb, and run her fingers down his neck, so he’d surrender. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked for quite a while. To be accurate, it hasn’t since the crisis: out there, and of their own.

You get that there’s way too many lunatics out there who are trying to instrumentalise stupid theories like this in order to convince the crowds of their fanatic point of view, right?

Jesus, what is she thinking to engage in this sort of conversation?

All of a sudden, she misses Dan, who couldn’t have been any less interested in talking. A quiet place to flee to, whenever the world around and her own husband would get too loud for her. That’s what Dan has always been to her. She should have rather hung on to him, than let him go and save her marriage to a guy, who’d clearly lost his mind.

I haven’t lost my mind, alright? he gets defensive now, and on their way down, even the birch leaves avoid him. Of course I know that there is a whole lot of misinformation in circulation out there at the moment, but that doesn’t mean this message can’t be genuine. I mean, making me believe this stuff wouldn't help anyone.

She is the person whom it will certainly help least of all, but, tongue-tied, she only bites her lips, and decides to let it go. To be fair, at this very moment she thinks about letting him go, as well, and, sooner or later, she actually will - three months pregnant - which will be how her story will start and end. She doesn’t know about it yet and even if she knew: it wouldn’t change the shape of things to come. She looks down her nose, as if she could foresee it, although, in reality, she cannot see a thing, and what moves her features, is only the stench that mists her with the next gust of wind.

Just wondering why this is where we would come every day. Aren't there nicer places out there than the public toilets? This smell!

If she saw anything at all, she would notice what he does: a field of flowers: delicate, but blossoming, and, for some reason, the grass is greener here, fuller, sturdier than anywhere else. His mouth opens, as if he wants to say it, if it weren’t for the silence: so cosy and warm that, eventually, he says nothing at all.

Gritting his teeth, he starts cuddling up to missing words, and wonders if he will ever be happy with her who never sees a thing. What he is overlooking is the future, which, from where they are sitting, cannot be seen at all. At least one of them will have none, and the question of whether they could ever be happy will, therefore, resolve itself.

What if we were going to go away? she murmurs, thinking the same thoughts that he is thinking. To a place no one can find us in.

Right, what place would that be?

He’s painfully aware that even on the moon, they could be found. Once you are registered, they track you. All the time, without you even noticing. Maybe that is why he doesn’t bother to give her more than public toilets, and perhaps this is why they will never work: the public toilets and the world and the others, since it is always easier to blame the circumstances for everything that is doomed to fail.

She knows that what they have won’t last, was never supposed to last, was never meant to be, and he knows that the same goes for humanity. Nevertheless, it is hard to confess that things, which used to be and are presently, are not going to have a future.

What are you going to do with this now? The message, I mean? she wants to know, but really doesn’t, because as soon as you know, you won’t ever get to unknow it.

When David is going to find out what he will discover, he will wish to unknow everything he has ever learned, but what he will never get to forget for the rest of his life is that everything he has ever known was an illusion.

He doesn't know anything about it yet and could actually consider himself lucky. Instead, he looks at her disapprovingly and shrugs, a sigh on his lips.

Don't know. This isn't even everything, though: there was more.

He swallows down the rest of the words, as if they were a stale gone chewing gum, which would feel like a stone in his stomach, later on. Could she even take any more? According to her frowning forehead, she cannot, and even if she could: you cannot tell people about things you don’t quite yet know anything about yourself. To be honest, he is not sure what he is supposed to make of everything he found. An USB-device with a whole lot of data, encrypted and, according to the guy he gave it to, impossible to decrypt.

With our technical methods, they told David, we will not get into it in a hundred years!

Wait for it: pretty much in exactly 100 years, the technical methods will allow it, but that would only be anticipating things.

If she knew about the encrypted device, she would probably only think of one thing: Dan, the only IT-person she has ever known. After all, he has a degree: summa cum laude, from Washington State University, one of the most prestigious places for information technology. He even acquired a professorship on computer security and has, for some time, worked as a cryptographer for the authorities.

Far ahead of his time, they used to call him during his college years. How far exactly, nobody has ever wondered, since it wouldn't matter much for as long as nobody knows what the future holds. Only now that the message in the bottle claims to know exactly what’s going to come, it starts to matter. For David personally, knowing about it could matter more than anything else ever has. In order to find out about it, however, he will first have to discover what he currently doesn't know: that his wife used to cheat on him with Dan. He doesn't even know him, after those rumours absolutely doesn't want to get to know him, and would probably never meet him if she weren't going to leave him for the guy, sooner or later. Actually, sooner rather than later: in a few more days, to be precise.

David is sitting at the kitchen table as it happens. The coffee is still steaming, a knock at the door, and there he is standing: to him a stranger and to his wife a quiet place to flee to. Which is what she does as soon as she sees him. She rushes down the stairs, suitcases in her hands, and flees into his arms - afterwards, into his car, the engine starts, and when David stumbles back towards the kitchen, the coffee steam is gone and so is she. For the next while, at least.

He doesn’t see her, doesn’t hear from her, doesn’t think of her for a couple of heavenly quiet weeks. The next time her name crosses his mind it rolls off the pinched lips a police officer faces him with, on the threshold of his half open door.

Her partner reported her missing 48 hours ago, he says. Any idea where she could be?

No, thank God, David hasn’t. For all he knows, she could be in someone else’s bed, gone to jail for robbery, or gone away to torture the innocent. She has never been a good person. The opposite, in fact, and he should have never been good to her. A grim realisation, after all those years: useless, too, it really doesn't help a thing.

If he had only seen it earlier !

If only he had been able to foresee the future! What would it have changed? Everything, perhaps, or nothing.

In what way does the future change as soon as someone knows what it will bring and who is ever going to answer this question? At this very moment, David isn’t trying to answer it. What he is trying to do, instead, still on the threshold, is getting rid of the police, so he can finally return to his peaceful world, where a message in the bottle is still waiting to be figured out.

Why are you even asking me about her? he grows impatient. Just ask Daniel, or whatever his name is. I haven't seen her in weeks. Ever since she ditched me for him.

The response to this statement couldn't be more depressing: I asked him where she likes to go when she panics, but he said you would know better.

When she panics? We have been married for five years but I’ve never seen her panic. What would she even panic about?

Certainly something stupid. The size of her dress, a new wrinkle on her face or the latest numbers on the scale.

It is quite an intimate thing, the officer replies, but since you are her husband… Apparently, her partner found a pregnancy test in the bin. Positive.

Shock reaction is an awkward thing. It hits you out of nowhere and what you would do thereafter, depends on who you are deep inside. David has been a thinker for all his life. He has never been the one for overly emotional reactions and when a shock reaction would hit him, he would flee into the twists and turns of his winding mind. Just like he is doing it right now.

She never wanted children!

That’s all he can think of, and neither did he. However, his reasons why differed tremendously from hers. Overpopulation, pollution, dying planet.

What a horrendous future for a child and what disaster for the world if he burdened it with yet another polluter.

Compared to his, her reasons were pretty simple: no interest in taking responsibility, the constant need for self-fulfilment, and everything else to do with herself.

I think I know where she is, he suddenly whispers. She’s gone to get an abortion.

Would he want her to get one if it were his child? Oh, Jesus: could it be his?

He doesn’t ask the officer any of this, but secretly tries to answer it himself: for the next few minutes, hours, days, but on his walk through the twists and turns of his mind he doesn’t seem to find a thing. Three days later, his initial state of shock subsides and he feels safe enough to crawl out of his head again, but has not yet decided where to go, thereafter.

The rattling bell decides it for him: nowhere. Apparently, his presence is required here. He opens the door and behind it, he finds the same face that took away his wife.

Is this supposed to be a fucking joke?

No, unfortunately, it is not. It really is Daniel. A bit of an awkward situation, if he weren’t the one and only who holds the answers to David’s most pressing questions.

Sorry for dropping by like this, he says, but I think we need to talk.

He has no idea how right he is and David doesn’t, either. For a while, he thinks about punching him in the face, closing the door into his face, or turning his own face away. Why would he have to face a man who has caused him nothing but trouble?

I didn’t stop by to cause any trouble, he hears him say, but we need to talk about the pregnancy.

David didn’t expect to have to ever hear this sentence. Especially not coming from a nearly 50 year old man.

Alright, he nods regardless and although conversations like this aren’t threshold conversations, he decides to handle the matter here and now.

It can't really be mine, though. I mean, lately we haven't really often been... well, you know.

No, Dan doesn’t really seem to know,