How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

He’s seen the funerary industry take over our banking system, the footage of people paying for food at the grocery store with mortuary cryptocurrencies tied to ad-ridden phone apps.

sharing the details about the renovations on his house in Vegas, where Mom had been living the past couple of years, and some science project of his having to do with black holes that seemed wholly superfluous considering the world was being sucked up into its own asshole.

My engineer father once told me that marriage and who you fall in love with are largely a matter of chance, chemicals, and how far you’re willing to drive. He said who your kids turn out to be is even more of a crapshoot.

He wonders what proportion of happy moments to sad ones is necessary for a person to sincerely want to keep living and hopes he and Yoshiko can get there together.

A neighborhood friend of your mother’s, Dan Paul, volunteered to help coordinate the event, leading people to their seats, handing out programs, talking to the local television station that plans to share the launch on the internet as part of a web series on how the plague has reinvented the way we die.

He’d ask me about other species, why the spaces between civilizations were so great. And I’d tell him that most worlds can’t handle the company. They’d destroy each other out of fear or ignorance. So, the spaces are a deterrent, but they are also a challenge, for the worlds to rise above the odds, to thrive together, and perhaps even find us—what is left of us.