“Pardon me miss. Does this picture appeal to you?”
She turned hesitantly, the male voice pleasant, but the words filling her with dread. Bus stops always seemed to attract the weirdos hopeful for a captive audience. Looking up, she saw a pair of people, dressed in white formal clothes, smiling. A man and a woman, pushing all the gender norms for each in terms of facial hair, makeup, and general style. The woman was holding out a magazine, the back cover showing.
She glanced down in trepidation, then back up to the pair, in confusion. Then back down to the image, a colorful smattering of whorls and curves, segmented by dark lines forming misshapen hexagons.
“I… I wouldn’t say APPEAL. Might look nice framed on a wall.”
The two spoke in unison. “This is immortality.”
She took a step back. “Oooookay.” A small rolling cart stood on the sidewalk behind the pair, showing more magazines and pamphlets, with a small placard bearing the name Collected Hopeful Revelations of Immortal Soul Theory.
“Is this a religion thing?”
The man smiled patiently. “It is a belief, yes, but not a religion. These images come from the experiences of people during near death experiences, or on mental enhancements that simulate the same conditions.”
The woman took up the obviously rehearsed speech. “Our founders believe that this is what the universe truly looks like, and that when our fleshy prisons release our immortal souls, this is what we will find.”
Finding herself oddly interested despite earlier reservations, she leaned forward. “Okay, that's… interesting. But.. what’s the point of, you know, all this?” She waved her free hand at their cart of literature.
“The point is to offer a glimpse at immortality, the world beyond. A non religious reason to hope for life after death. We study the art and practice seeing, so that when we reach the afterlife, we’re ready. Don’t you hope to be immortal?”
Shifting the shovel that was propped over her shoulder to her other hand, she held out the newly free hand and waffled it back and forth. “Enh. Not really. The brain can only hold so much, and I bet I’ll be quite ready to just stop when I get old enough. This is my idea of immortality right here.”
She tapped the handle of her own small personal cart, and the pair bent over, looking down onto swaying green.
“Soil, seeds, and seedlings. See, I keep a garden. Growing things that will last when I’m gone. And teaching others as well, I have a viewtube channel where I teach people how to grow things. My feeling is that if I help people start traditions of planting and growing that they pass down to their kids, that’s immortality right there.”
The woman frowned and started to speak, but was cut off by the sudden excitement of the man with her. “Wait, OH MY ME! I knew you looked familiar. You’re the DIGGER!”
He turned to the woman with him, tapping her shoulder with the back of his hand. “Jenn, it's Mathilde, the Digger!”
He turned back, “I’m a huge fan!” He stopped short, frowning slightly, looking down at the ground, confirming that they were standing on the same slab of sidewalk. “Wow, you’re… shorter than I expected.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I get that a lot.”
“Wait, you’re… are you really going to take the bus with a shovel and a heavy rolling basket?”
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She looked a little sheepish. “I know, its a bit much, but that’s why I’m doing this in the early afternoon, the bus is empty.”
Jenn shook her head, magazine forgotten, dangling limply at her side. “That’s not what I meant. That looks really heavy and.”
The woman pointed over Mathilde’s head, shouting wordlessly. There was a crunch sound in the distance, honking, and the world seemed to slow as Mathilde watched both of the immortality evangelists start to throw themselves backwards, faces contorting in horror. The sound of a truck horn seemed to doppler, lowering in pitch as if moving away, even though she knew it was creeping ever closer. Her last thought was to lower the shovel off her shoulder, thinking to herself that it would be a shame if it pierced through the windshield and hurt the driver of the truck that she had, in the slow eternity of the last few seconds of life, had resigned herself to being killed by.
Darkness. Light. Shapes, resolving into spinning whorls of color, broken into hexagonal tiles that seemed to swell and shrink independently, while the colors danced along as if the borders of their lines didn’t exist.
“Hunh. They were right.”
Her voice came from nothing, and went nowhere. She watched the dancing patterns for what seemed like moments, days, hours, years.
“If this is actually immortality, I’m going to be mad. This is boring.”
After a time, she felt like some of the whorls were collecting around … not her body. She didn’t have one. But a region of space that she had begun to think of as herself. And her sense of self grew larger.
“Am I… Am I a plant?” She reached out with her mind and could feel something like roots, and something like leaves, a part of her mind, her soul. The roots seemed to gather along the lines, and the leaves collected the whorls of color, and she grew.
Slowly, suddenly, all at once for an eternity, the eternal pattern grew brighter. And she felt, heard, tasted, smelled, and perceived through senses which have no name, as they don’t exist in any form which beings who think in our form of language can possess, voices.
“WELL. LOOKIE HERE %$^^&$. THERE’S A VOLUNTEER GROWING IN THE COMPOST BIN.”
“@@$*&&, THAT ISN’T A VOLUNTEER. LOOK AT THOSE ROOTS GROWING OUT OF A CLEAN CUT. THAT’S NO SPROUTED SEED, IT’S A DEAD SOUL, ROTTING WITH THE REST OF THEM, THAT JUST REFUSES TO STAY DEAD. CHOP IT UP AND BURY IT. WHO KNOWS WHAT KIND OF INVASIVE WEED IT MIGHT BE.”
“I WILL NOT. LOOK AT THOSE COLORS. THAT’S A CARETAKER SOUL IF EVER I SAW ONE. LET ME JUST, CAREFUL NOW.”
If she still had a stomach, it would be nauseous, as her sense of direction, limited though it was, spun in directions she didn’t know existed. Pain spiked along the edges of her, as she could feel some of her ‘leaves’ being crushed, and several of her ‘roots’ being cut away. The brightness faded, and she smelled motion, a citrus sharpness that was moving up, and a tang of old pool chlorine that suggested to her that she was moving away from a wall of some kind, into the open.
“@@$*&&, DON’T YOU DARE PLANT THAT THING IN MY VEGGIES.”
“DON’T GET YOUR %^%^ IN A TANGLE, %$^^&$. THIS LITTLE THING WILL BE PERFECT OVER IN THE PLANTER BY THE PASTURE. HERE YOU GO LITTLE ONE. THIS IS MORE THE SOIL YOU’RE USED TO.”
She felt herself being covered with something, something heavy, as the whorls of color faded into darkness, and darkness faded into light. Her eyes, something she had forgotten she once possessed, opened.