From the short story “Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes,” appearing this month at Lightspeed.
{Negelein is at his workstation working on the Lafferty file when the cannibal’s bone spear arcs over the sea of cubicles and strikes just above his right ear, penetrating his skull with a wet crunch. Oblivion is not quite instantaneous; his neurons all fire at the moment his brain goes soggy with blood, giving him in his last instant an overwhelming taste of peppermint. He is prevented from doing a face-plant on the keyboard by the spear, which arrested in its flight comes to rest with its ends hung up on his opposing cubicle walls, making it a clothing rod of sorts from which his corpse hangs like a tailored suit. He sighs. And dies.}
*
“…something like every hour and ten minutes.’
“Seventy minutes, then.”
“Yes, that would follow. Christ, why was I even referred to you? Couldn’t you come up with something a little more helpful?”
“Now, now. I was briefed by your regular doctor, but it’s an unusual condition, I can be forgiven for taking a few seconds to absorb what you’re saying. This is once every seventy minutes, correct? Not just in times of stress; not just when you’re exposed to certain high-pressure environments. Every seventy minutes.”
“Yes. I — ”
*
{He is driving on a narrow and twisty road, high in the mountains, the jagged rock face to his right, the bottomless drop to oblivion to his left. It is raining and the pavement is a cascade of water, flowing down from higher elevations; there is no bloody reason for him to be driving here under these conditions, no place worth the suicidal idiocy of braving this weather, but the vision’s logic cannot be argued with, and so he maintains a steady pace, ten over the posted speed limit and twenty over what he should be maintaining, with the rain lashing so hard that he can barely make out anything beyond the hood. Then the vague silvery blur in front of him goes dark, eclipsed by an improbably spherical stone, the mass of a respectable bus, that has come loose of the dirt higher up and landed on the road, just ahead; a rock that rests as if dazed for all of ten seconds before starting to roll toward him. There is no room to evade it, not unless he wants to steer his car into a drop of a thousand feet, and so he does the only inadequate thing he can and brakes, putting off the moment when he is crushed or knocked off the side of the road for the few precious heartbeats he can. He lives just long enough to hear his body go squoosh.}
*
“…as it happens, sir, not every seventy minutes, but a little over every seventy-two. Over the course of our day of monitoring, we have logged several thousand intervals of neurological disruption, marked by these spikes here, here, and here; each time lasting for less than a tenth of a second.”
“They seem to last so much longer.”
“That’s not surprising. Your accounts reflect so much in the way of incidental detail that they’re less dreams than experiences, which your brain seems intent on generating out of whole cloth. Subjectively, as in your more elaborate deaths, they may afterward seem to have lasted more than an hour. I can assure you, however, that they’re all instantaneous, as is your transition back to the everyday world. It is why you can still function. They’re over in an eye blink…”
*
(The story is already available at LIGHTSPEED if you buy the issue, but will be public shortly.)
Leave a Reply