Undeath: A Manual — Part 1 of 5 — Questions of Optimal Undead Existence; Religious Afterlives to be Avoided; Death and Undeath: Definitions
Everyone wants to think that there is some eternal and incorruptible part of themselves that survives beyond death, at least under ideal circumstances, but...
Everyone wants to think that there is some eternal and incorruptible part of themselves that survives beyond death, at least under ideal circumstances, but, in general, people really seem to have little tolerance for those who exercise any of the numerous options to ensure that death, or at least bodily death, is not the end. It’s more than a bit hypocritical.
“It’s unnatural,” they’ll exclaim as they hunker down in their boxes formed of refined metals and ceramics and foamed plastics and spun glass fibers and boiled tar and chemically treated tree-corpses cut and cast in shapes never found in nature and cook their food before they eat it and look at their world through artificial lenses of plastic and glass and wash off all of their self-exuded oils and slather on those distilled from the substances and life-forces of other organisms, their attention permanently embedded in a world presented to them via the action of tamed lightning on purified toxic minerals microscopically arranged in arcane patterns to serve their whims. These people have never had an entire day of natural in their lives and would beg fervently never to experience one if someone were to threaten them with making them endure one.
It’s not that I blame them for not wanting any kind of natural existence. I personally enjoy reading after sundown and would find it hard to give up. It’s just that the “unnatural” claim is disingenuous. They know it’s factually incorrect and ludicrously inconsistent as a complaint. The most natural thing in the world is a corpse, and the second most natural thing in the world is a corpse that doesn’t want to lie down. It’s just that typically humanity destroys the body or hides it away somewhere in nailed-shut boxes underground or in stone or concrete vaults to keep them from getting back up on the off-chance they figure out how.
…because, as it turns out, what humanity most wants from their dead is their silence and their stuff and their, you know, absence. They might be a bit torn on that third thing, depending on how the dead person treated them while alive, but they typically talk themselves into accepting it because of the first two things. For older relatives, at least.
If the deceased is younger you can also miss their dependence on you and your vanished opportunity to order them around for the rest of their lives. But humanity also tends not to talk about the relief for no longer being responsible for their errors or for potentially being blamed for how they might have turned out. There’s a taboo. We don’t think we should ever feel relieved when someone close to us dies, so we don’t often talk about that.
This is what people mean when they misuse the word “natural” in the circumstances of your death and subsequent apparent lack of undeath. They feel that it it is some kind of divinely ordained and ordered happenstance that they should be forever free of you were you to die, and also that they should be free to choose what they would like to own from your stuff. Or at least free to squabble over choice morsels with the other theoretically bereaved.
If you don’t feel like taking that lying down, I understand.
Questions of Optimal Undead Existence
These are questions that you must ask yourself before you start trying to find a way to extend your years. I guarantee that you will be sorry if you pursue an undead existence before giving these topics due consideration.
What do you imagine an optimal day of unlife to be like? Why would that be possible only after you’ve had your normal lifespan?
How much more time do you think you might want? A few decades? A hundred years? A thousand? More than that?
Where would you like to spend those years? If it is among people, how do you hope to be able to fit in?
How do you expect to be able to support yourself?
What are you prepared to do to sustain your existence? What are you prepared to do to maintain your postmortem physiology?
What are you prepared to endure in order to make the transition? Do you hope to find help? If you were to find other to help, how would you assure yourself of their trustworthiness?
What do you know of current undead society and various factions? Will they welcome you? What is your grasp of undead politics? Are you hoping to avoid all that?
What kinds of afterlife are you inclined to actively avoid?
Write down your answers. I’m serious. After you get more information on what various kinds of extended life can be like, you’ll want to use your answers to help you choose the best path forward.
Speaking of afterlives to avoid…
Religious Afterlives to be Avoided
The first time I heard the legend, I was one of those who made the mistake of wondering to what purpose a postulated Tooth Fairy would put all of the collected teeth of children. At first I wondered if it was a kind of recycling program, where collected teeth were made available for toothless babies who needed teeth of their own to start growing in. That was gross enough and I should have stopped there. Instead, I went on to picture arts and crafts mosaics, tiled bathrooms and kitchen backsplashes, then buildings and villages and entire cities made of teeth and ground-up teeth reconstituted into concrete. I pictured these cities populated by monsters grown from teeth like Cadmus’s seeds. Was it from the labor of these creatures the Tooth Fairy earned the money to buy more teeth? From the selling of Toothcrete® or products made from it?
The same lines of reasoning are just as disturbing when you start thinking about who would collect the immortal souls of dead people and the uses to which those souls might be put. Are they consumed? Burned as fuel? Taken to pieces and recycled? Are they put to work or incorporated into machines? What kind of labor would they perform? Is there any choice at all? Is it rewarding? Is the compensation fair? Is it a cooperative or is there at least some kind of profit-sharing? Is there an indenture period or a retirement plan? How are souls sorted for acceptance or rejection and/or task assignment?
It was worrying that goodness seemed to be equated with generosity and self-sacrifice for the religions that were the most easy to research, because that implies willingness to beavering away without a fuss. And then the light dawned that that was what human religious authorities desired from the living followers of their religions for the purposes of politics, of soldiering and crusading, of keeping up the flow of donations.
The more I was able to research things in a more direct and hands-on fashion, the more I was forced to assume that any significantly powerful spiritual entity would find little value in a collected soul beyond consumption, entertainment, or enslavement, and that any entity on the scale of a potentially all-powerful being would have no use for them at all. There is nothing that the entire population of sentient life from the beginning of the universe to the end of time could provide for any hypothetical Almighty that He could not provide for Himself. The implication of this line of thought is that whoever might need a soul other than their own is unlikely to be all-powerful or all-anything to speak of, and thus also unlikely to have that soul’s best interests at heart.
I’m saying they’d probably eat it. Like a marshmallow.
Remember that most of Earth’s current dominant religions descend from the ancestors of goatherders. So obviously the only way to think of the spirits of the deceased is as livestock, to be selected and sorted with respect to some ideal for value for breeding or trading or toothsomeness. It’s probably not out of the question to think of the god of such a people as being some undead remote ancestor (or a conglomeration thereof) in spiritual form bloated like a swollen tick on thousands and thousands of years of the spirits of their dead.
Perhaps not all religions would work along those lines. Buddhism, for instance, prepares one for nearly inevitable serial incarnation with a long-shot option for blissful oblivion. Many of the pantheonic religions are likely to sort their dead by caste and affiliation for conscription or consumption. The most idyllic religions seem to offer one a place in some model implementation of a natural existence, and I must admit I might find that tempting, at least as a short-term vacation. But in all, I don’t see how these are better options at all than those most people get while they’re alive. All things considered, even if one starts at the absolute bottom of the food chain, it may be preferable for one to try to forge one’s own afterlife—or, perhaps, for one to avoid dying in the first place—if the alternative is being chattel. Livestock. Fodder.
Death and Undeath: Definitions
At some point in every project like this, the authors stop the flow of information of actual interest to take a boring and half-hearted swat at defining terms and generally insulting the intelligence of the reader. I don’t want to indulge in that, but I feel I must. I’ll try to keep if brief and breezy, though.
In popular terms, where people think of themselves as indivisible units, death is said to have occurred when one loses consciousness and doesn’t get back up again—and, within a day or two, it becomes evident that the process of rot has taken over. This diagnosis can be accelerated in cases of consumption by predators or flames or a pretty thorough smashing or dismembering, but it’s not uncommon for the diagnosis to take a few days. Keep in mind, however, that it is always a “said to have occurred” kind of process. We leave room to be wrong just in case the presumed corpse gets back up again. In that case death is “said not to have occurred,” and the episode is retroactively declared to have been merely a period of unconsciousness.
Meanwhile, over in actuality, we all know that even medical professionals are occasionally stumped when attempting to diagnose bodily death. We all know that biological death is a process that begins at birth, or even a little before, except we tend not to notice it until it is no longer overwhelmed by the ongoing processes of growth and development and renewal. We get further confused by the fact that humans are an organism, an organization of (generally) cooperating parts that number in the trillions, some of which have formed boisterous committees, the contributing voices of which can individually and in groups rebel, grow tired, fall silent, and unincorporate. Death, in these terms, is a majority vote to disband of a very large organization where not all votes are equal, where some groups take action before the vote has been processed and acted upon by everybody. Some groups even change their minds. Several times. It is democratic chaos, or, if you prefer, anarchy. In these most literal terms, death has no meaning at all. Any process can be restarted or replaced by a process of similar function at any point. As long as some significant portion of the personality can be restarted or re-anchored, life endures.
Everybody knows this, and yet everybody, by convention, acts like the popular definition is somehow still relevant. It’s infuriating.
In the terms that would be dictated by actuality as detailed above, undeath isn’t even a thing. It’s a non-thing. Any entity that anyone would popularly call undead is simply alive. Still alive. Atypically alive, perhaps. Unexpectedly alive, even. But alive.
Undead is what people popularly label an entity that is alive at least at an animal level in a way that they do not expect—whether that individual is simply prolonged in a body for a duration substantially longer than some sort of arbitrary mathematical average subject to change from year to year as standards of living and access to current medical technology tends to improve on a regional or global basis, or continues to exist by way of using a body that operates on principles that one does not understand at all, or somehow manages to operate without a body at all.
As there is no definition for undead beyond the popular one, that is the definition I will reluctantly be using.
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Undeath isn’t for everyone. In fact, it’s downright inconvenient for someone who was hoping for oblivion. Many who end up not at all happy with their undead existence would like to find their way to oblivion instead and find that undeadness causes certain complications and delays. And while there are many ways of potentially meeting your objectives for a satisfying unlife, there are a huge number of ways of screwing it up to the point where you wish you had never bothered trying to remain.
The noncorporeal form typically available to humanity has an anatomy that is just as complicated as any living body, and it is embedded in a nonphysical ecosystem that is every bit as complicated as any of those of the living world. How else would it be able to store and support and maintain and provide for the further growth and development of an entire complex human personality?
Keep in mind that a physical body is a dynamic configuration of a set of self-renewing components, not a static object. It (famously) endures a constant loss of mass and substance while taking on new material to process for replacing lost cells and tissues. Its various parts must remain in flux in order to provide for motion and growth and proper response to and anticipation of environmental events. For this process of living to function sustainably, you must be embedded in a viable ecosystem. Or at least a cleverly engineered terrarium. To continue to exist disembodied, you will require no less. Healthy noncorporeal existence is quite analogous to physical existence in that respect.
In fact, the most comfortable and least problematic way to endure indefinitely is to stay physically anchored and maintain (or periodically replace) your living body. And, of course, also ensure that your body of choice experiences a threat-and-disease-free environment for the (extended) duration.
I suggest you try it. If you announce out loud that you are attempting to live forever, people will encourage you and offer you all kinds of unsolicited and enthusiastic advice. Show any evidence of succeeding, however, for more than a socially acceptable decade or two of extension, and people will start to complain. And probably even attack.
…because at some point they will realize that they will want your silence, and your stuff, and your absence. And they can’t have any of that if you don’t get into your Forever Box, lie down, and let them weld the lid closed. They will complain that global resources are limited and that it’s bad form to set the precedent of not getting out of the way so that future generations can have their fair run. By which they mean themselves. Present generations, but just younger.
Screw those guys.
All things considered, however, oblivion may be your best option after all the risks and costs and agonies yet to be endured have been weighed. And if you’ll take my advice, you’ll leave yourself a path to explore other avenues of undeadness—and oblivion as well—if your first choice doesn’t work out.
Stay tuned for the four upcoming episodes that complete this series:
Part 2 — General Categories of Undeadness to Consider
Part 3 — How Things Go Wrong; Reality-Adjacent Real Estate; Planning Your Retirement