I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
1. The dead are turned into diamonds; or at least, their carbon is, the other elements falling away as steam or ash, apart from those that are saved to form a small and individual flaw. There is a great dark vault under the city and in it a warren of dark rooms. This is an old society. Each dark room is something like a family tomb, decked with the diamonds of hundreds of generations past. You may enter one at a time, with a candle, to spend time with the glittering dead.
2. Each year after coming of age, on their birthday, they write a little more of the stories of their lives on their skin. The yearly tattoos can be anywhere and may be of any length, though the wise and old leave space for many years to come, because this is a country just growing into a confident medical maturity. When they die, their skin is their biography. Usually, the grieving family adhere to the request of the deceased: burn it, or save it. In the older families, inclusion in the family book or books is held to be of great importance; their libraries have rooms for the dead.
3. They are at ease with the presence of the dead. It is customary to bury in gardens, deep beneath the vegetable patch. Though there is little ceremony, the consumption of the first crop of vegetables after the burial is as close to a wake as they come.
4. All bodies are scanned and digitised as soon as possible after death. It is an intensive process which does not leave much by way of physical remains. Instead, the relatives take home information: composition, measurements, networks, probabilities of the dead. They do this not because there is a chance that they could be reconstructed, but because data is sacred. Information is power and by consuming the information of others one becomes more powerful.
5. There is a legend that the dead will rise up as an army to save their people in a time of peril. But the people are in a time of peril already, and have been for some centuries. The dead seem not to be taking the hint. Now there are great ships that take their dead to the coldest parts of the world. Their funeral garb is body armour and the coins on their eyes night-vision goggles. They stand, at ease, frozen in great ready ranks, waiting for the call of the dead’s new generals.
6. Death is a matter for great public shame. The official line is that the forward march of medicine has conquered it. If only humans would be careful with their fragile bodies, if only they would eat and sleep and fuck as they were told, if only they would avoid all risks, if only they would not be the sort of people who have bad luck. The official line is that the dead have squandered their lives. It is often very hard to find out if someone has died, because the mark of utmost respect is to hush up a death. There is a service to discreetly take away bodies. One may hire actors to portray occasional reappearances, or write letters from distant lands. The censuses of the age are filled with fictitious centenarians. But I believe the average lifespan of that time is not much more than in our own.
7. They take the dead into space. Some choose, from this point, to be a shooting star and burn up in the atmosphere. There are set nights for these artificial meteor showers and the population of the world comes out to watch. Others choose the other way: to be taken out to deep space and launched on a trajectory that will, some millions of millions of years hence, touch down gently over the event horizon of a black hole.
