Listing to Port

1. They say everyone has a skeleton or two in their closet. Me too. I have two. It’s quite a big closet. It has some dresses in that I quite like to wear. But I can’t, because there are two skeletons in there and they’re not too pleased with me and they’d rather like to come out. So I guess I’m out for the cost of the dresses as well as all the parking fees.
2. How did it come to this? Well, it started at the picket line. I was doing pickup at the hospital. Lots of pickups at the hospital, these days. Which is a bit of a problem, because, as I mentioned, parking. Not only are the charges horrendous, but I’m paid in a different currency. If you see what I mean.
3. Anyway, the picket line was still there. I think there’s been someone at it every day since I started this job. Sometimes security try to move them on, but usually they just let them be. Generally the ambulances, and everyone else for that matter, use the back entrance when they’re around. You can see their point. It is kind of uncomfortable. Which suits me down to the ground. My fee gets reduced for every minute beyond optimum pickup time I’m late, so having a non-crowded entrance is just fine.
4. Maybe it was a bit stupid of me to go right past them. I don’t know. I thought my rights were pretty clear. They’re not allowed to harm me, and if they’re a bit pissed off that I’m doing their old jobs, well. A girl’s gotta live, you know? I need it more than they do. And on the way in it was fine. I had the equipment stowed away. I walked straight in. I was on the ward a full minute early.
5. The first pickup was straightforward. I mean, some people have emotional problems with it. There’s even a support section in the app where you can chat with others and there are calming exercises to do and stuff. But I’ve always been fine. But then, when I’m packing the equipment away, I see the guy in the next bed. And it’s clear he’s going to go soon, as well.
6. The thing is, I’m saving up for a holiday. I got about five hours for the first pickup, but I need well over twenty-four per day if I’m going to take a week off. The last time I spoke to my doctor he said my case was amazing, that every time he saw me I looked like I had a couple of months left. I guess I’m going to have to tell him soon what I do for a living. But anyway, I need at least that amount of buffer or I’ll get too ill to do pickup. Game over. So having a holiday means earning at a higher rate for a bit.
7. So I look round. Nobody to notice. No cameras that I can see. Then I take the other guy’s pillow and gently put it over his face. He doesn’t even struggle. I have my phone out, so when the alert for an urgent pickup at the hospital comes up, I’m right there. I’ve even got the equipment ready. Urgent pickup is ten extra hours of life, credited straight to my account. Score!
8. Except then I look up and see one of them at the window. I’m never quite sure what to call them. Deaths? Except that now the job’s been contracted out, they don’t actually do anything. We collect the souls. They picket the hospital. They don’t even need to eat or sleep, so I guess they’re just out there all the time. There are lots of different types, but we mostly get the skeleton ones. This was one of the skeleton ones. And it had definitely seen me.
9. Can they talk to the police? Would the police even listen? I don’t know, but I got out of there as fast as I could. Out of the back entrance, of course. But my car was round by the front. So I waited a few hours. Long enough for them to lose interest? Long enough to run up an amazing parking bill, certainly. I thought I’d got away with it. I got as far as home thinking I’d got away with it.  But they must have spotted me and followed because two of them came round the corner as I was unlocking the door.  One of them got a foot in before I could slam it and in a panic I ran to hide in the closet. As I said, it’s a big closet. They came in looking for me, I ran out and shut it. I was never quite sure why it had a lock but wow, I was pretty thankful it did.
10. So that’s my skeletons. They do bang and rattle at night a bit, but you get used to it. Anyway, I don’t do hospital pickups any more and so my rate’s gone down. Probably no holiday for a while. Don’t know what the doctor’s going to say next time he sees me. Still, where there’s life there’s hope, eh?

1. Death is nothing if not reasonable. If you believe you have been hard done by by your inevitable end, if you feel that you are particularly busy or particularly important or your life’s work particularly monumental, there is a place you can go to register a complaint. Maybe get an extension. I know because my neighbour went down there. Only thing is, it’s best to go early. There’s a bit of a queue.
2. It’s a grey tower block, a bit brutalist. Fred the Grocer, whose wife headed out there in 1970, says it was built 1963 when the facility moved from a place out of town. But Death is nothing if not reasonable. Can’t have a head office you can’t get to without a car.
3. Then there’s Mina. I know Mina through bridge. She’s had a hard life, wants a few years of joy at the end to balance things out. Anyway, she went up last Thursday, been sending me texts. They weren’t lying about the queue. The whole bottom floor, it’s one big waiting area. Like an airport. Low ceilings and fluorescent lights and those elastic barriers you can’t lean on. But they do have a tea cart that comes around every few hours and there’s a ticket system for leaving your place to go to the toilet. Like I said. Death is nothing if not reasonable.
4. I forgot to mention Ed from Accounts, who went up last year. He’s just got onto the second floor. Still in the queue. I mean, it’s not the fastest. But he says they keep you busy. Death is nothing if not reasonable and the meal trolley’s pretty good. Not much reception on the second floor but he’s been writing letters. He’s still working on the preparatory paperwork. Special case, he’s worked out that his magnum opus will need to be a million pages long. Need a lot of time for that. Anyhow, they have to be thorough. Imagine if you snared immortality for someone else by mistake!
5. Not really heard much from those at the end of the queue. They say they shuffle them around a bit. Can’t have them going in in the wrong order. And by that time the queuers are a bit querulous; some are forgetful, a lot of them can’t walk and nearly everyone is in pain. They do provide wheelchairs, of course. Death is nothing if not reasonable. But I mean, some of them have been queueing sixty, seventy years. Some of them were brought in from the old building.  
6. Like I said, Death is nothing. Everyone gets a go. No-one ever comes out of the exit door.

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.

1. On the occasion of the vaporization of Glasgow by the Titanian New Urumqi Front in 3560, following a 24-hour warning: wet stone, ozone, whisky, bins and burning peat.

2. On the slow mummification of the last inhabitant of Rome on the sunlit and cypress-covered ruins of the Palatine Hill in 10251, and the crumbling of her ancient library into warm dust: sun-warmed tree resins, old books, wild thyme and wolf shit.

3. On the unexpected reclaimation of Lagos by the sea in 2520, following a meteor strike aimed so precisely at the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator that for many years it was taken as evidence that humanity was living in a buggy simulation: Petrol, sweat, mud and the overwhelming sea.

4. On the final desertion of Isfahan in 6640 at the start of autumn, in response to the fourth wave of the Maltese Plague: over-ripe pomegranates, black pepper, and the lurking hint of something dead.

5. On the death of the last human in Hyderabad in 55801, and the sealing of the city into a tomb by the Followers before their great journey: A thousand marigolds blooming in the dust, ewers of clear water, and something like metal and pears.

6. On the destruction of Nova Cuzco by the eruption of Maat Mons in Venusian year 20881: burning wood, tomato vines, green mango, butter and sulphur.

7. On the occasion of the last unlocking of London’s new gates, some time after the arrival of the ice, but before the long dark: grease, ambergris, leather and sharp cold air with the promise of snow.

8. On the last stand at Archangelsk, 19555: Seaweed, dirt, sewage, king crabs, vodka and fear.

9. On the night that the remaining survivors realised that there was no longer any way out of Los Angeles, 3994: fine wine, cherry syrup, spilt blood, weed, tar and gunpowder.

1. When you are no longer interested in the world
2. When the physical body dies
3. When the last person who remembers you dies
4. When the last piece of physical evidence that you lived is gone
5. When the last member of your species dies
6. When no living beings remain in the Universe
7. When the Universe itself comes to an end

1. Stop breathing

2. Get rid of that heartbeat

3. Lose consciousness

4. Cease brain stem activity