The End of All Things: The First Instalment by John Scalzi Read Free Book Online Page A

hypothesis: I was dead.
    Discarded because that seemed kind of stupid. If I were dead, then yes, I wouldn’t be feeling anything. But I also probably wouldn’t be aware that I wasn’t feeling anything. I just … wouldn’t be .
    Unless this was the afterlife. But I doubted it was. I’m not much of a religious person, but most afterlives that I’d heard of were something more than a blank nothingness. If God or gods existed, and this was all they put together for eternal life, I wasn’t very impressed with their user experience.
    So: probably alive.
    Which was a start!
    Second hypothesis: was in some sort of coma.
    This seemed more reasonable, although I didn’t really know anything about the medical facts of a coma. I didn’t know if people in comas could actually think about things while they were in them. From the outside they didn’t seem like they were doing much. Tabled this idea for later thought.
    Third hypothesis: not in a coma but for some reason trapped in my body without any sensation.
    This seemed like the most reasonable explanation on the surface, but two questions arose that I didn’t have answers for. One, how I got into this predicament in the first place. I was conscious and knew who I was, but otherwise my memory of recent events was shaky. I remembered falling out of my bunk and then going to the bridge, but anything after that was a blur.
    This suggested to me I had some sort of event; I knew people’s memories of accidents or injury were sometimes wiped out by the trauma of the event itself. That seemed likely here. Whatever it was, I was in a bad way.
    Well, that wasn’t news. I was a consciousness floating around in nothing. I had gotten the “you’re not doing so well” memo.
    But that was the second thing: Even if I were in terrible shape, which I assumed I was, I should be able to feel something, or to sense something other than my own thoughts. I couldn’t.
    Hell, I didn’t even have a headache anymore.
    “You’re awake.”
    A voice, perfectly audible, indeterminate in terms of any identifying quality, coming from everywhere. I was shocked into immobility, or would have been, if I had any way to be mobile.
    “Hello?” I said, or would have, if I had been able to speak, which I wasn’t, so nothing happened. I started to go into panic mode, because I was reminded so clearly that there was something wrong with me, and because I was desperate that the voice, whoever it was, would not leave me alone again in the nothing.
    “You’re trying to talk,” the voice said, again from everywhere. “Your brain is trying to send signals to your mouth and tongue. It’s not going to work. Think the words instead.”
    Like this, I thought.
    “Yes,” the voice said, and I almost cried with relief. A jumble of thoughts and emotions rose up in a panicky need to be expressed. I had to take a minute to calm down and focus on a single coherent thought.
    What happened to me? I asked. Why can’t I speak?
    “You can’t speak because you don’t have a mouth or tongue,” the voice said.
    Why?
    “Because we took them from you.”
    I don’t understand, I thought, after a long minute.
    “We took them from you,” the voice repeated.
    Did something happen to them? Was I in an accident?
    “No, they were perfectly fine, and no, you weren’t.”
    I don’t understand, I thought again.
    “We removed your brain from your body.”
    It’s hard, looking back, to accurately convey the amount of utter incomprehension I was experiencing at this moment. I tried very hard to express my level of confusion and incredulity at the statement I just heard. What came out was:
    What
    “We removed your brain from your body,” the voice repeated.
    Why would you do that?
    “You don’t need them for what we need you to do.”
    I was still not comprehending well, and absent anything else was numbly carrying on with the conversation, waiting for the whole thing to make the slightest bit of sense to me.
    What do