1.07 - The Science-Fiction Writer
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My name is Mal Fleming. I am here to assist in your passage. Can you remember your name and the circumstances of your death?
Josephine Johnson. The term is pulmonary embolism. You heard of it?
I don't believe so, no.
It's when a little blockage moves to your lungs, your lungs can't get any oxygen, and that's it. No warning. Out like a light switch. I was cooking dinner. I tried to turn the gas off, but pretty sure they found me before the building burned down. Took a while to figure out exactly what had happened. Had to hound some dead doctors, the recently deceased, mind you. The older ones love to diagnose hysteria. Originally, I thought it was a meteor strike or poison. Not that anyone would have wanted to poison me. It could happen to anyone.
Of course.
Dying with no warning at all. Dying while interviewing a ghost. A good premise in that, somewhere. Would need a little twist, though. It's the shrug of it all that's really terrifying, though. The lack of a good ending. That the person writing your story is a hack. No, not even a hack. A hack would have given the ending a little oomph, that your author just got bored and didn't even finish. Or maybe he's a modernist, trying to write a story that's just as meaningless as real life. I'm not a modernist, Mal.
You were also known as A.R. Baker, correct? Should I call you A.R.? Would you prefer that?
A.R. Baker was a pen name. I'm not faded enough that I don't know the difference. Call me Ms. Johnson. Did you research that yourself?
My predecessor left me a few notes, disorganized and incomplete as they may be. From what I could gather, not many of the magazines your work appeared in have been digitized.
I was too early. Or too late. No, too early. Okay.
Would it be helpful if you talked a bit more about your life?
No. It's a series of anthropological reports, right? Of alien civilizations, every one of them dead. The fur predators of Yagvel V all consumed in a mass ritual sacrifice, each ripping out the other's throats until there was only one left who died of old age decades later. The six-limbed amphibians of Greater Garlock, their worldsea poisoned with industrial runoff making breeding impossible. The tiny cat-like creatures of the barley asteroid belt, all killed with an engineered plague that made their organs dissolve out of their skin. You follow?
I believe so.
Each alien civilization is different, but every one of them died out from some sort of world-spanning conflict or alien-made catastrophe. As you read the anthropological reports, you get a sense of the culture that's writing the reports. It's cold, almost dismissive of them, as if they knew that there was no way the civilizations could succeed. The culture has difficulty with singular pronouns, refers to everything as they, even if it's a singular creature. A suspicion starts to form in the back of the reader's mind, and then the final anthropological report. Humans, of Sol System, wiped out from nuclear conflict, cast systems simultaneously clear yet ill-defined, no obvious mark of sentience. The dominant species on the planet, the cockroach, is promising.
Perhaps we can contact them in 400 years.
Was that one of your stories?
It was an idea for one. I'd written the ending for it. I like to write the endings first most of the time. Helps to know where you're going. Gives the story momentum. It still needed work. All the best twists are things that the reader already knows but can't quite put into words. It can't come out of nowhere. Are you a fan?
Of twists? Yes.
Science fiction. Horror. The fantastical genre, you could call it.
I have no objection to it. All right. I apologize. I've always been more interested in actual history and the story of people's real lives. I guess you could say I've found more than enough fantastical elements in them to keep me satisfied.
See, that's the thing with people's actual lives. I didn't spend most of my time living my actual life. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I'm not sure. The other spirits, the boring ones at least, they always want to know where you lived, where you worked, who you got married to.
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