Soul Survivors: a tryptich of SF Horror Drabbles

By Geoffrey Hart

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2022. Soul Survivors: a tryptich of SF Horror Drabbles. Flash in a Flash No. 234. 18 November 2022.

The Mind–Body Problem

Consciousness, the neurologists tell us, is embedded in the human brain’s hardware (“wetware”, if you prefer). Thus, they believe that matter transmission, in the form of the Star Trek transporters we designed, is perfectly safe. They have strong evidence from rat and monkey studies that support their belief. Unfortunately, as medical researchers like to point out, humans are not rats or monkeys. We have souls, though we don’t know how to quantify them. Nor how to teleport them, it turns out. Those of us who volunteered for the first human trials learned this the hard way. Soon, you will too.

Only mostly dead

We scientists can’t measure souls, but we can measure the brain’s electrical impulses. A zombie’s brain pulses with life, even when the brain’s been shotgun-splattered across a wall. From what we know of the brain, this means the original person’s consciousness, trapped in those electrical currents, sits and watches while the corpse runs about noshing on brains. So when you kill a zombie, you’d think that’s it, that’s all, they’re gone. But zombies, being undead, never really die. They go on living while bacteria and fungi slowly gnaw at their decomposing flesh until, finally, the last electrical trace is gone.

It’s All in the Execution

Black holes draw in matter and energy, and their tides stretch infalling matter to absurd lengths in a process known as “spaghettification”. Nothing escapes their gravity, except perhaps, residues of information. Not even souls can escape. What you won’t read in any densely written peer-reviewed journal is just how excruciatingly this hurts. The physicists tell us that this process, at least if we believe the mathematics, takes an infinitely long time, and that despite the coolness factor, there is no practical use for this phenomenon. They lied. We in the prison system found a very good use for the phenomenon.

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