Your body lurches like it’s been plunged into boiling water and for the first time in your life you understand death as a biological state, an organism ceasing to function. But the sentimental gesture of kissing her forehead makes you recoil because the moment your lips touch her skin you realize just how cold and just how still she is, just how permanent that coldness and that stillness feel. You watch, winded and reeling, as the medical technicians neutralize the stasis field and power down the synthetic organ metabolizer.

That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel obvious-it feels shocking. “When someone dies they get very cold and very still. Because the dominant storytelling medium of my world involved the seamless integration of an individual's subconscious wiring into the narrative, evoking deep personal wonder and terror, familiarity and delight, yearning and fury, and a triggering catharsis so spellbinding and essential that the idea of sitting down to page through a novel that's not even intended to be about the secret box inside your mind- why would anyone want to do that for, like, fun? Unless, of course, you were constitutionally inclined to sublimate yourself to a stronger personality, in which case reading a book where every word is fixed in place by the deliberate choices of a controlling vision, surrendering agency over your own imagination to a stranger you'll likely never meet, is some sort of masochistic pleasure.” That quasi- telepathic pact between author and reader held little interest for a general audience. But regular people don't read books there.

“Where I come from, nobody reads novels unless they're like my mother- fetishizing the artistic media of a bygone era, probably because it was the last time she was happy.

All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai