Bodies In The Barn

A cult suicide was nothing ground breaking these days, it happened often. But this one specifically had a gut-wrenching horror stitched to it the second Beth walked in to do her job. Calling it a “suicide” was still heavily politically debated on, but to Beth, a bunch of lifeless teenagers on the ground of this abandoned barn she had just walked into, had said enough.

“Hope they’re having a blast!”, her partner, Slim, said as he brushed passed her and was taking a closer look. “Just a bunch of teenagers. What the hell..”

Beth stood gripping the cross around her neck, tight enough to puncture skin if it had been sharpened at its sides.

“Yeah… I guess.” She thought back to the kids she had at home, an impressionable teenage boy, and an even more, impressionable little girl. Without a father in their lives, she feared the worst would happen if they ever decided to take the next step from the depression she knew they both had felt.

Suicide and even death today were things of the past, with the use of a new technology that was deeming people “deceased - with brain activity” on morgue charts. If you just simply naturally died, you guaranteed a questionable void, or a higher power if you had a faith. Technology once again, had even phased out that nature in people.

OrgaTech had developed the most innovative technology known to man, ‘a direct plug into the mind’, was their campaign slogan - but Beth saw it simply as the devil saying, “Here’s a ticket, and you should already know the kind of show I run.” They targeted those that struggled with understanding and fixing themselves - who needed easy ways out. Or, those that just wanted to feel young again, forever. Shit, it was even used on whole families as a means of a permanent vacation. And this was because these half-deaths were offering life beyond the physical world through tech without being called “murder”.

At first glance it seemed simple enough to comprehend, one would get a surgery that could receive the tech straight into the brain, and one would place it in once ready to leave this world. The OrgaTech cleaners would retrieve the bodies. OrgaTech had designed a piece of technology (and a new permanent ‘trend’) that mixed organic stem cell life, that paired, synced, and stole the brain as its power outlet.

She noticed spray painted writings on the walls of the barn. “THE ONLY TECH THAT WAS WILLING TO SAVE US FROM THIS HELL”, “GOODBYE HELL.” Everyone, including these kids, had learned to grow and abandon the tech companies that were just simply polluting the Earth and making quick bucks off people’s lives by exploiting them for the sheep they had been trained to be. OrgaTech was the only solution for most, a tech company that actually cared. Beth knew how truly awful the way each generation had become addicted to technology, and lost their humanity in that process, but the only hope to her would have been asking for forgiveness and trying harder tomorrow. Because a life where all you had to do was lay back, plug something in, and let OrgaTech cleaners like Slim and Beth pick up your body - so their brains could be cut out and returned back to OrgaTech with their property - was no longer a life at all. They’d maintain people’s brains in jars filled with appropriate nutrients and the regulation needed to keep the organ and their tech “alive”. Beth didn’t know much more about it, she wasn’t any good at the science, just saw the morality behind it.

Slim walked around the bodies, avoiding stepping on any of the children they once were. “Can’t believe your husband followed suite on what a bunch of damned teenage kids ended up doing.” Slim was her long time friend, and shit, could have even been a new father to her kids if he wasn’t already dating someone. He was attractive and mature enough for her - but what he had he lacked in a filter. Saying most definitely what he felt and that was best showcased with that statement there.

She walked in with him, started dragging the bodies to a corner. She was lost in his statement, but beyond it, more lost in the memories that had kicked in because of it. She remembered the day he came home with wrappings on his head and the conversations they had had prior to that day where she had put her foot down yelling, “NO!’, to his reasonings.

“What if I am too old to get the surgeries later on in life, and it's something I want to do? Why can’t I just make these choices for mysel-“, his reasonings we’re faded all in a blur. More than less it was to her about their marriage rather than any logical reason. And there she thought, was another reason, something OrgaTech could add to their slogans. ‘To get out of a failing relationship’.

Her kids found him one day, just in the car with the seat back, completely plugged in - out of their world. All she had expected of him, was to live with her, die a natural death alongside her, just as God intended for them and that their vows had committed.

Every time her phone rang, she would always fear the worst would happen. And just like that as she was lost in thought, as though it was on cue, it was call from her house phone. What would the devil take next.