2026 Monthly Story Challenge #6

Collective (Wordcount 9923)

By Jayde Holmes

cw: body horror, depression and severe hopelessness, characters try to prevent their own existence

____________________________________

He was six when his great-great-great-grandmother came to live with the family and he loved her. Her presence made him feel like he was in one of those happy families from the old movies. He’d liked Biggest Nana well enough as a human when he’d talked to her at the morgue, but he’d always wanted a puppy. He’d learnt early though that there weren’t enough resources for pets that didn’t used to be people these days, and he loved that Biggest Nana had found a way around that.

He was ten when Biggest Nana died, which was old enough to understand what was happening and be hopeful. For three days in a row, he went to the weed-filled park at the centre of their identical grey cube house neighbourhood, but he didn’t play with the other kids on the playground. Instead, he went to the small grassy area where he and Biggest Nana had played, and ran around, imagining her beside him as an animal spirit.

A month later Mum came home shaking and confirmed that Biggest Nana had been spotted in hell.

He cried and screamed and insisted it was unfair. Biggest-Nana had been a dog. She’d loved pats and walkies and had licked his face and her butt. There was no way she could have still had a human soul. His parents sat down on the plastic lounge of their standard-issue family living/dining room and nodded along as if he was an adult making reasonable points.

Considering the state of the world, his snot-chocked tantrum was as reasonable a reaction to the news as anything an adult could have said. He usually liked that his parents had stopped lying to him about how everything was going to be okay. He’d recently been included in these more adult conversations, and he’d liked the respect and honesty, but this conversation was different. As his parents nodded along with grave faces, he wished they’d baby him just this once. Knowing things were so terrible that a hug and a ‘there, there, it’ll be okay’ would be too much of a lie for them just made him cry more.

Eventually, Dad got up and join him on the floor. He got some tissues, wiped both of their faces, held him close in a half hug, and made an attempt to compose his own face.

“I’m sorry we lost her” Dad said. “We just have to hope a way out of hell gets found one day. But in the meantime, let’s try and look at the positives. She acted more doglike the longer she was in the vessel. Maybe more time would have changed her. If we work out what makes human souls different to animal souls, then when we’re done being humans we can be pets for a while, and then our souls will turn into spirits before getting absorbed back into the Earth. Biggest Nana got us so much closer to that.” 

“No-one will volunteer for an experiment like this again” Mum said. She sat with her arms crossed, still wearing her scout uniform and covered with the nervous sweat that broke out spasmodically for days after a trip to hell. She didn’t look at either of them as she spoke.

“There are a few other volunteers who are still pets” Dad said. “Maybe if they can exist like that longer than they were human –“

“Damnation, that’d be torture. You’ve seen how bad the morgues are for people who don’t understand, right?”

He nuzzled even closer to Dad as he tried to choke down his sobs. He felt glad that Biggest Nana wasn’t in the morgue anymore. He also knew that he shouldn’t be glad.

“Are you suggesting we don’t intubate them when their pet bodies fail?” Dad asked.

“Of course we will” Mum said. “I’m saying, we won’t get any more volunteers.”

“I know.”

“Can you get the information you need without more test subjects?”

“I don’t know.”

The three of them sat in silence. He bit his thumb harder, trying not to cry. After a while he scooted away from Dad, whose body was starting to shake.  As much as he wanted to be comforted, he’d already decided that he’d rather grow up strong like Mum. Being strong and distant seemed better than crying every day like Aunty Leanne or the Man Next Door.

“You’re gonna find a way to get everyone out of hell, right Mum?” He asked.

“I’m not going to stop searching” Mum said, staring at the ceiling as she spoke. “We’re not close though, so I doubt it’ll happen before we need the morgue. And the bodies are still a problem. You only have a spirit body in hell.” 

“The dog vessel lasted four years” Dad said. “And her soul stayed bound to it until the end. We proved re-bodiment is possible.”

“For everyone in hell?” Mum snapped.

“It could be used to get people out of the morgues.”

 “For even a fraction of the people in the morgues?”

“Maybe if we divert some power from the time machine it can be.”

“No” Mum said. “Love, I support your research, but after what happened to Biggest Nana, I’ll vote against anything that slows down The Collective’s plans.”

“You’d want that?” Dad asked. “What happened to not giving up? We’re getting closer.”

“Re-bodiment won’t help Biggest Nana” Mum said. “It won’t help any of the billions who’ve already died.

He noticed that it wasn’t just sweat on Mum’s face. Tears were streaking down her cheeks. Maybe it didn’t matter how strong you were, sometimes things were so bad that there just wasn’t any way of coping. You just had to cower down and cry and hope it passed.

Except, this wasn’t something that would pass. He wondered if once Mum started crying, what would happen if she never stopped? Biggest Nana was her great-great-grandmother, and had been able to withstand being off the morphine even more often when she’d been a child.

“Re-bodiment will help Biggest Nana once the scouts free their souls” Dad said. “We’ll have new bodies ready and waiting for them when that happens.”

Mum stayed silent, but Dad stood up and reached down to help him up.

“C’mon kiddo, I think we should sit with Mum now. We should all sit together for a bit.”

The two of them squeezed onto the couch, one on each side of Mum. She didn’t scream or bury her head or generate so much snot she could barely breath like how he’d seen other adults break down. Instead, she stared at the ceiling with silent tears running down her face. She held both their hands, and the three of them were silent for a while.

He didn’t have anything useful to say. He wasn’t going to say, “There there, it’ll be okay”, because even at ten, he knew that was a lie. But the silence felt wrong, so he blew his nose, got his breathing under control, and started talking.       

“Biggest Nana was always so nice to me” he said. “Both as a dog and as a great-great-great-grandmother. And, and everyone in the morgue room said they missed her. She doesn’t deserve to go to Hell.”

“No-one does” Mum said. “But everyone will if we don’t do anything about it.”

“Will I see Biggest Nana in hell?” he asked.

“No” Mum said. “We’ve tried holding reunions there. People cannot sense anyone they knew when alive. Biggest Nana –“ her voice cracked “- couldn’t see me.”

Even though he’d told himself he didn’t want to cry anymore, he buried his head in his free hand and cried. He cried so hard he covered his fingers in snot. Both of his parents were crying too. There was no-one else in the house, what would happen if none of them could stop crying? Would they get dehydrated and die and go to hell? He’d heard that happened a lot before the buddy system.

The three of them held each other, and he decided he had to stop crying for his parent’s sake at least. Maybe his parents had the same thought, because Mum recovered first and stared patting his and Dad’s backs.   

“The Collective will be complete before you have to go to the morgue” Mum said. He didn’t know if she was talking to him, or Dad, or both of them. She was still staring at the ceiling. “We’ll go out happy, and we’ll be able to go back through time and get Biggest Nana. It’ll be done before you go to the morgues. It’ll be done before then.”

_____________________________________

   He’d only been four when he first saw the Avatar of The Collective in person, though no-one had believed him. Why would a time-travelling avatar of the manifestation of the dying souls of every human to have ever lived be peeking into his window? Not that doing so would be a problem for Collective; it wasn’t bound by time, so if it had wanted to appear at a bunch of kid’s windows at the same time it could have. He didn’t develop that argument until many years later, but every time he saw Collective on TV, he would tell everyone around him that that was his friend who’d tried to play through the window.  

He couldn’t remember learning about Collective for the first time. Learning that there was a young male-looking person wearing a black blindfold with a body covered in tubes and wires who could appear anywhere at any time was a fact learnt along with the colour of the sky, the simplest words, and the fate of all human souls after death. 

But he could remember being seven when he was taught about The Collective Fate of Humankind. He didn’t see the video of the First Interview in school until he was eleven, but his parents had decided it was necessary for him to understand earlier, after his Close Call.

Every child had a Close Call. A moment where they did something reckless that theoretically could have killed them, and their parents or caregivers had broken down and given them the Hell Talk years before breaking such news was recommended. All he’d done was goof off near some power sockets, but his parents had both screamed at him, and his mother and held him so tight while she did it that he’d almost been crushed.

They sat him down and told him about hell. About how souls had been discovered long ago and scouts like Mum could follow them. Animals stayed on the Earth, living blissfully as spirits for a few years before being absorbed back into the planet’s soul. Humans though, slipped through a gap between dimensions and ended up in a place of eternal torment.

All human souls, they stressed to him, went to hell if the body died. And unlike animal souls, they didn’t get reabsorbed. Hell was forever.

“What’s it like in hell?” He’d asked.

They’d held back of course. He was still only seven.

“You don’t get to have any skin in hell” Dad had said. “And you can’t stop moving.”

“Even in a spacesuit it feels bad” Mum had explained. “Every way you can be uncomfortable; itchy, needing to sneeze, needing to pee, your spacesuit rubbing against your skin, you just feel wrong in every way. And sad, very, very sad. And that’s just as a visitor. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be there with no protection.”

He’d thought about that, then asked if it was really such a big deal.

“Hell is only until Collective helps us die right? He’ll take all our souls and slowly kill them, but it’ll feel nice right?”

“Son, you don’t want to go that way” Dad had said.

“That’s assuming Collective is even telling the truth” Mum had said.

They’d played the video of Collective introducing itself to Humanity, and tried to translate what was going on to something a seven-year-old could understand. 

Collective was introduced via an interview on a talk show, with comfy chairs, bright signs, sound effects and a well-groomed host wearing a suit better cut than any clothes he had ever seen in his life. All relics from a time when society had desires beyond avoiding hell.

The Collective wore a navy-blue suit from the time period, even though it didn’t need to wear clothes and certainly didn’t wear them now. It also had a red tie and had replaced its black blindfold with a red one to match. It seemed like the collective consciousness of every human to have ever existed had a weird sense of humour.

It talked with the host about the newly discovered souls and hell, and explained how it had come from a future where humanity had conquered hell by slipping every human soul into a place beyond time and blowing them up. Even though it was just boring talk about things he didn’t understand, he tried to pay attention, because he knew Collective from that time he’d been floating outside his window, and seeing that Collective was in olden days shows made it even cooler.  

“I exist in the death throes of the human race” Collective explained. “Once the collective will of humanity was for annihilation instead of defeating hell, we were able to gather every soul and bring them through the time machine. I have come back to ensure that the time machine gets built.”

More questions were asked about how time travel worked, and about the nature of souls. Even when he re-watched it at age eleven, and again at age fourteen, he didn’t understand most of what was being said. Collective used an analogy that appealed to the seven-year-old boy, where it described the universe as a picture, and time as the colouring-in process. A coloured pencil could go over the same spot in the picture many times, changing the colour slightly. Likewise, a time loop could run again and again, with small changes each time.

“Eventually though” Collective had said “Either that part of the drawing will become complete, and the resulting colour becomes permanent, or the paper will be ripped. With time travel, the timeline that leads to me will play out thousands and thousands of times, with tiny changes in each iteration affecting the others. But the time loop doesn’t recur indefinitely. There will be a settled history. Unfortunately, humanity gains time travel through a paradox, meaning there is always a time loop. It cannot be resolved. And the energy of all our souls exploding through that time loop is destructive. There is only one way it can end; we’ll never have existed.”

“What do you mean?” The host had asked.

“When history does settle; when the pencil does rip through the page, then the only way a self-regulating universe can repair the picture is to erase what caused the issue. Which is humanity. Once the time loop is destroyed, not only will all human life on Earth be gone, we’d never have even existed in the first place.”

“That’s insane” the host had said. “But, what makes you think the universe is self-correcting?”

“The speed of light” Collective had said.

He’d zoned out as the two people on the old TV show had discussed things about souls and time that even his parents hadn’t been able to explain. He did remember in the end though the Host asked Collective if anything could be done to change the future.

“Of course the future can be changed” Collective had said. “But… I am still sitting here, so in your future, you activate the time machine and I get sent back.”

“Right” the host said. “But also, we’re still sitting here, so humanity still exists.”

“It is very hard to grasp the true nature of time while you can only experience it linearly” Collective said. “But yes, we do still exist, for now. The paradox has not collapsed.”  

After watching the video, he’d been confused, but he’d agreed with his parents that humans were pretty great. He had fun playing with his friends, he’d loved Biggest Nana as both a great-great-great-grandmother and as a dog, the movies people had made in the past were amazing, and some of the old buildings and artworks he learnt about in school blew his mind. And of course, he loved his parents and they loved him. The universe would suck if none of that had ever existed, so he was glad that his parents were finding ways to save them from hell, and relieved that one day it would all be good and only the nice things about being alive would matter.  

When he turned eleven though, he got to go visit his relatives in the morgue in person for the first time. After that, he was glad that Collective was building the time machine, ready to destroy everything if his parents failed. 

  _____________________________________

The visit happened not long after Biggest Nana went to hell. A trip to the morgue wasn’t an unusual outing, except normally he wasn’t allowed onto the floor. He would stay in the telephone room and take turns talking to all the old people his parents passed the phone around to.

After losing Biggest Nana and then learning about Collective in school, he told Mum he was old enough to see the morgue, and she’d taken him at his word. Dad gave him a chance to back out after they donned the clean-suits, but he held firm and they walked through the white swinging doors into the morgue.

The sound hit him first. Moaning, crying, whimpering, all echoing in the massive, white-tiled chamber. The pathways were wide with polished white tiles that added footfalls from nursers and visiting family, as well as the squeaking of dozens of trollies and robots to the cacophony. They navigated the paths, which crisscrossed between massive black blocks of screens and tubes that had wires and pipes bursting out of their centres towards the fluorescent ceiling above, and dozens of bodies sleeved into capsules on their sides.

People were suspended up-right with their backs against the walls of the cubes, held into place with a gel sheath over their torsos, a padded neck brace, and hundreds of tubes and IV lines poking into them at random parts. Most needed masks to breath for them, or machines reaching into their chest to pump blood. They were aged beyond recognition, with no hair or teeth and skin thin and crinkled so bad there were few distinguishable faces left. Some were so ancient their skin was patched with gel, or their eyes were so caked with pus they were forced closed.

Some had privacy screens, but some didn’t need them because they didn’t have much left of their lower bodies anymore. He’d learnt that legs often got amputated and turned to food-paste before they had a chance to rot. Taking digestive organs or parts of the spine was riskier, but sometimes had to be done. Walking through the morgue halls, he could see skeletal people with bleeding bellies or leaking pipes who the overwhelmed nurses hadn’t been able to get to yet.

He saw an old woman who looked almost human wearing headphones and gazing into a screen mounted by her face. Minutes later, they passed a block of husk-like people sobbing pitifully as a technician on top of their block tried to fix a pipe. Most of the people they passed seemed oblivious to the world around them, Slack-jawed and vacant-eyed as the tubes pumped them full of nutrients and sedatives.

Dad placed a hand on his shoulder and asked if he was alright. He nodded but didn’t say anything. He was worried he’d throw up if he opened his mouth.

“Most people in the morgues are over a hundred-and-fifty years old” Dad said. “In this particular morgue, we have a lot of people born before hell was discovered, who are over two-hundred. Like Biggest-Nana was. It looks terrible but remember this; once we found out hell was real and for everyone, we did the best we could to make sure no-one else would ever have to go there. We dedicated everything we could make to keeping everyone alive. And I mean everyone. Before we found hell, everyone was divided into rich and poor or different races or separate countries, but once we realised how bad hell was, we all came together and made something that could protect everyone on the planet. I think that’s quite beautiful.”

 “People have died since we discovered hell” Mum said. “Sometimes in the morgues.”

That comment slipped by him in the moment, but when he was thirteen, he realised that his mother had converted to Collective’s cause after years of insisting that humanity’s achievements would be too big a loss for the universe, and it came back to him then. How long had the horrors she been grinding down her resolve? Or was there something else that broke her spirit?

They made it to the block where his extended family were stored. Mum’s extended family. He’d been five when Dad took him to the graveyard and explained how some people refused to accept the evidence and instead clung to their old beliefs about the afterlife. They did a lap around the block, and he was introduced to the ravaged bodies that matched the voices he’d been hearing since he was little. He also was shown sleeping relatives who he’d never spoken to before, because they couldn’t bear to be un-sedated long enough for proper introductions.

One of his great-something aunties asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He weighed up the pros and cons of all the professions he knew of – hellscout, nurse, doctor, scientist, and all the different types of technicians – and said he wanted to be a brave hellscout like Mum. He aunty sighed, and he couldn’t tell if it was directed at his dreams or just a response to the medication pumping into her veins.

“I can’t believe your Mummy became a hellscout” Aunty said. “She used to always tell me she wanted to be an artist.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen her draw whenever we get extra paper” he said. “She’s really good. Sorry, I thought you meant what I wanted to do for work when I grew up.”

“I did” Aunty said. “I thought your Mummy would grow up to be a great artist one day. She should have kept at it”

“But there are too many jobs that need doing Aunty Andrea” Mum said “Keeping you alive takes a whole team. No-one can do art as a job. And besides, we have plenty of art from the pre-hell days to enjoy in our free time.”

Mum and Aunty Andrea kept arguing, so Dad led him around the block to meet his great-great-grandparents. Great-great-grandpa slipped back into unconsciousness after only talking for a few minutes, but great-great-grandma was very chatty, despite needing an eye-tracking camera to operate a computer voice. She was quite sharp for someone who was just a head wrapped in a plastic mask and a torso splayed open to reveal an artificial heart and set of lungs. She asked how Biggest Nana was enjoying her dog life.

He told the comforting lie that they’d told the rest of the family; that Biggest Nana was still a happy dog.

“Really?” Great-Great-Grandma asked.

Dad looked around. Great-Great-Grandpa and the uncle next to him didn’t look like waking up anytime soon. On the other side of her was Biggest Poppy, who had headphones on and was bopping along to some music. He’d said hello at the start of the visit, but apparently, he spent most of his time tuned out. Next to him was a younger stranger who was crashing in Biggest-Nana’s old berth whilst waiting for a new morgue to be completed. Dad got as close as he could to Great-Great-Grandma and shook his head.

“She passed a few months ago. Sylvie saw her in hell.”

His jaw dropped, but Dad turned around and shook his head. Great-Great-Grandma thought for a second, then started moving her eyes.

“Good” she said.

Now Dad looked as shocked as he was. But he calmed his face and turned back to Great-great-grandma.

“I understand” Dad said. “And I forgive you.”

She cried after that, and he couldn’t decide if he felt bad for her or not. You didn’t wish hell on anyone; not even rapists or abusers or the evil people of the past who committed genocides or the monsters today who still committed murder. It was one of the earliest things he’d ever been taught; no-one deserved hell. 

After they went home, he looked up his family genealogy. He found great-great-grandma and clocked her birthyear. As he expected, she was born long before humanity had to be forced to reproduce.

But to his shock, he saw that she’d been born eleven years after the confirmation of Hell.

    _____________________________________

He was seventeen when he finally understood his great-great-grandma, and that understanding came unexpectedly.

A few months after his birthday, the Global Governing Body sent him and most of the kids in his class their first Reproductive Query Letter. They were handed out in class, and he read it determined not to be a coward like his parents had been. But at the end there was a checkbox with only two options: grant the GGB permission to use his stockpiled sperm now to add a child to the creche, or defer so he could parent a naturally conceived child once independent.

He ticked the latter box, even though he had never been in a relationship and hadn’t arranged for a platonic house partner yet, then he handed the form back to his teacher.

After three years of hating his parents for forcing him to exist, he’d chosen the same option they had.

He told himself it was different. That he’d keep deferring, that he’d keep delaying until he could find a way to have his sperm destroyed, and then he’d fight the doctors at every check-up so he’d never give a sample again.

    But as he was talking to his classmates, a lot of them admitted they’d opted for their gametes be used immediately, adding a boom to the creche. And he realised he felt relieved that so many were authorizing new people now. He hated the thought of causing another human soul to exist, but deep down, the thought of there not being enough young people to keep the morgues going was even less acceptable.

It was unacceptable because when he was fifteen, he’d gone on the mandatory excursion into hell. His whole class had suited up in what looked like spacesuits from the old movies and been led through a portal by a hellscout like Mum. They’d arrived in a painfully cold dark cavern, lit with just the barest red glow. Their helmets had lights, but they didn’t seem to work here. There were so many strange shadows that he kept thinking he was seeing figures waving in the corners of his vision.

The dead were everywhere. They were skinless and constantly moving on bleeding feet just as his parents had warned him, but he wasn’t prepared for how many toddlers made up their number. Their wails were stifled by their ripped vocal cords.

They found a few adults, who were happy to talk despite the pain. Desperate to talk to relieve the boredom. There were no remarkable differences between any parts of Hell, and if they developed even the slightest bond with another damned person, they’d become as imperceptible as the people they’d once loved on Earth.

He couldn’t help comparing their constant awareness (no eyelids even!) with the drugged out and dozing denizens of the morgues. There were so many other small tortures being inflicted on them, that his mind couldn’t process them all during the visit. He’d only really understood many of them later, as he compared notes with his classmates.

There was something worse than the physical torment the dead endured. Something people had tried to warn him about, but which had proved impossible to describe. There was a miasma in the caves with them. A black cloud in the air. He felt it press against him occasionally. It couldn’t penetrate his suit, but it was heavy, and he could hear muffled voices with an accusatory tone coming through his headphones.

The dead didn’t have any protection from the black clouds. The clouds perched on their shoulders, and they got their only distraction from the physical pain. They were surrounded by voices that made them cry, made them beg, and made them hate themselves so much that they would curse themselves out, slap themselves, smash their heads against the cavern walls if they were close enough. It would make them scream and raise fingers with peeling nails to their chests or faces and –

               -and when he got his helmet off in the changerooms after the excursion, the touch of air on his skin reminded him of black clouds smothering people’s faces, and he’d vomited. He was not the only one; it was such a common reaction to seeing hell that the changeroom had a spew trough in the centre of the room.

               He’d spent the following week despondent, all his desire to remain strong gone. His fate was to shuffle through those dark pits screaming in agony for the rest of eternity, and the only way to delay it was the indignity of the morgue. He’d be a legless, senseless living corpse hanging on a wall and that was the humane option? Now he knew why Aunty Leanne cried every day. Now he knew why the Man Next Door could barely get through his shifts in the morgue. He wanted to lock himself in his room and cry forever.

               He almost did it one day, but his parents came in and hugged him. He didn’t want to be comforted though. There didn’t seem to be any point to it. He’d known since he was little that things wouldn’t be okay, and now that he truly understood what was in store for him, the fact that there was nothing he could do to make things better broke him.

               His parents kept giving him tissues to blow his nose with. He filled a bin and still almost chocked on his own snot. They tried to get him to drink water, but he didn’t even want to lift up his head. He was sick of trying. There was no point to any of it, and he just wanted it all to end. But there wasn’t an end, not with hell waiting for him. He didn’t know what he could do, so he just kept crying, and crying, and thinking maybe it wouldn’t be too bad if they shoved him in the morgue racks right now and drugged him up, so he wouldn’t have to keep forcing himself to go on pushing through his doomed life.

               He sat on the floor crying until his legs cramped up and the pins and needles in his toes became too painful to bare. His parents helped him through it. He didn’t know how, since he kept his eyes on the floor most of the time, but they helped him reposition and massaged his legs. He looked up and took the cup of water.

               In the end, he had to get up and keep dragging himself forward, because he didn’t want to make it harder for them to cope with everything they’d been through.

               For the next three years, he continued to avoid making life harder for his parents, even though he hated them for forcing him to exist like this. A logical part of him insisted that he only hated them because blaming someone else for how terrified he was made it easier, but then he’d remember that they’d gone on the same excursion to hell that he did. Mum had seen even more of the place. They knew what they’d been signing him up for and did it anyway.

               Now that he was seventeen and had made the same choice they had, he understood them better. They were selfish enough to condemn another person to a doomed life so they could spend longer in the morgue, away from hell. And he was selfish is the same way. All humans were.

               Even Biggest Nana.

               After school, as he took the tram back to the neighbourhood, he wondered what the choice had been like for her. As he’d grown to resent his parents, he’d made excuses for Biggest Nana. He couldn’t really remember her, but he’d seen grandmas in the old movies, who were neither living corpses nor dogs, and she had become that in his mind. Every time he’d thought about Great-great-grandma’s callous response to Biggest Nana’s damnation, a part of him thought he’d understood her, but then the part of him that wanted a loving wise grandma would make excuses for Biggest Nana.

               She’d been from a different era and never seen hell first-hand, so many she thought giving life to children was still worthwhile. Maybe she’d gotten pregnant by accident and thought the foetus was damned anyway. It seemed weird, given that the extreme measures creche workers used to prevent parents from mercy killing newborns were well known, but while learning about the past, he’d discovered there were decades between the discovery of souls, and the discovery that it took a while for a soul to take on the ‘human’ quality that condemned it to hell.

               Now he realised the excuses didn’t matter. Great-great-grandma was rotting in a tube, and even if Biggest Nana had understood what fate awaited her daughter, she sill would have done it. Even though the morgues were experimental and the other plans, the mind uploading and the cryogenics, were proving failures. Even though Collective had said there was no escape besides non-existence, she would have still done it, and Great-great-grandma would have sill ended up in agony in the morgue.

Because Biggest Nana was selfish and wanted some vague hope of staying out of hell longer. Because Biggest Nana was human.    

               The tram arrived at the neighbourhood and most of the kids alighted. He got invited to hang out, he but declined. He didn’t want to hang out with other selfish humans. He walked to his house, which looked the same as the others, and decided he didn’t want to see his parents either. They’d been depressing to be around since the last graveyard visit.

               He kept walking. Past the park, past the streets, and past the fence that led to the Old City. He thought about just walking until he dropped dead. It would be easier than facing all the flawed people around him, and if Collective was lying, the morgues would fail eventually, so why not just go to hell now?

               He saw a sapling and stomped it into the ground until its fragile trunk disintegrated. He couldn’t see souls, but he knew there was now a baby tree spirit sanding by him, which would eventually become part of the Earth’s soul again.

               He kicked a larger tree so hard he hurt his foot. Then he kicked it again.

               Then he kept walking. Out of the forest, into a clearing of ancient street, full of buildings with functions not related to fending off hell or meeting as little of the living’s needs as possible. Shops from before the permanent rationing, daycares from the time where new children were cause for celebration, ad hoc medical or administrative buildings from when they had enough people and enough dreams to not have a streamlined central government.

It was dusk when he came to the ruins of a movie theatre and collapsed on a carpet of dry leaves in front of the ticket office. He tried to imagine what life would have been like for these ignorant people, who had clothes different enough that they cared about their appearances, and could gather items in the shops and go watch a movie with their friends, all without the crushing knowledge of hell weighing on their shoulders.

Maybe to them, the existence of humanity would have seemed worth preserving. Maybe their history and accomplishments had awed them, the way they’d awed a more naïve version of himself. But for him and the people of his time? With only morgues and hell to look forward to, and the knowledge that the collective selfishness of humankind was the reason they faced those horrors?

Let it all wink out of history in a temporal paradox. He couldn’t see anything in humanity that the universe wasn’t better without.

As soon as he accepted that, the leaves around him flew up and swirled around in a miniature tornado. The dust kicked up so hard he had to squeeze his eyes shut and cover his face as he endured a coughing fit.

Once he heard the rustle of leaves die down, he lowered his arm and opened his eyes, then blinked in disbelief.

Collective was standing before him.

_____________________________________

He was five the first time he visited the graveyard where Dad’s family were buried. Dad had taken him to the block of granite sitting amongst an overgrown yard behind an abandoned church and explained that some people couldn’t bring themselves to believe they’d go to hell. They laid a flower on the grave, but they didn’t pray.

“Aren’t you supposed to pray for religious people?” He asked Dad. “Isn’t that what they do in the movies?”

“You can if you want” Dad said. “I don’t pray though.”

“I don’t know how to pray” he said. “Why don’t you pray?”

“My family prayed because they thought that would keep them from hell. But I saw my dad there when I took my mandatory excursion. So instead of praying, I research ways to make us new bodies, so we can all keep living. That’s how I pray.”

After trying to sit solemnly with Dad for a minute, he got bored and went to find Mum. She was walking through the graveyard, pulling weeds away from stones and examining the engravings. Occasionally, she took photos of them.

“Who’s under those stones?” he asked.

“I’m not sure” Mum said. “But someone put photos of the dead person on the gravestone, so maybe I’ll be able to recognize them in Hell, and I can tell them about their grave. It’ll be something nice for them, to know their family cared.”

The last time he’d gone to the graveyard, he’d been seventeen and angry with his parents, but he’d still gone. They needed his support, and he loved them enough to provide it. 

He laid the flowers on the grave with Dad. Then Dad started preying.

“Why are you doing that now?” he asked. “I thought –“

“My research is getting discontinued” Dad said. “Takes too much energy and manpower from the morgues.”

“Oh. Shit, sorry Dad.”

“It’s okay. They say it’ll all be over soon anyway. Until then, I guess all I can do for my parents is pray now. Want me to show you how?”

He wasn’t interested in religions that led people to forsake the morgues and go to hell, but he liked the idea of there being something he could do, so he learnt to pray. Afterwards, he joined Mum as she walked through the graves. She didn’t take any photos.

“I’ve never found a single person from this graveyard” she said after he asked her about the change.

“I guess it would be hard, with them not having skin and it being so dark” he said. “But I think if you ever did find someone, they’d like to hear about their grave.”

“I know. But I don’ think it’ll happen kiddo. Besides, it seems pointless now. They say the time machine is complete on our end. We’re just waiting for Collective to sort things out on their end then poof, none of this would have ever even happened.”

She said it like a joke, but then she leant against a nearby crypt and stared crying. He stood frozen at first, then he went and hugged her, and they tried to be strong together.

That visit was when he knew his parents had both given up. He couldn’t tell when it had happened, but looking back, he saw the signs. For a while his sympathy almost smothered the rage that he’d grown for them, until he started asking why the fuck they’d even had him if they wanted to erase him from exitance.

Despite everything, existing wasn’t too bad. He liked the old books and movies, his classmates and his shrivelled family hanging up in the morgue. He’d once gotten to throw a ball for a dog in the park, and he’d gotten to discover how the world worked. How dare they try to take that away?

Except now, in the present, (whatever ‘the present’ meant for someone living in a time loop), as Collective held out a hand that looked identical to his own, he thought about just how insignificant his pathetic little life was. He’d forgotten what it had felt like, to want to help his family as they struggled through their doomed lives. He’d forgotten how much they all cared for each other every day and didn’t even think to weigh that against the human selfishness he’d uncovered. 

“Do you appear before everyone who gives up?” he asked Collective.

“I suppose I could” Collective said in a bored drawl. “But that isn’t how I want to spend my last seven or so minutes before my whole existence ends.”

“Aren’t you in some pocket dimension with every human soul where you have endless time?”

“Yes, but it is exhausting, holding every human to have ever lived together, and feeling oblivion at my back ready to end it all. And while it is forever, it is also only seven minutes. I don’t do this normally.”

“Then why now?”

“Because you won the jackpot” Collective said in a voice much dryer than the one he’d used in that ancient interview. “You’re our millionth nihilist. Congratulations.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet? Oh, why am I surprised? I remember this conversation from your point of view. You seem a bit more up-tight than I was though.” 

He looked at Collective’s hand again. He looked at his hair, that was cut the exact same way as his own. He tried to make out details of Collective’s face beneath the blindfold and the wire collar, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit what he was seeing.

“Yes, I am you” Collective said. “Don’t stress if you see any visual differences. I suspect in this loop, a different sperm may have reached the egg. We have the same soul though. Take my hand. It’s time to wipe humanity out of existence.”

Different genes but the same soul? Dad had been researching the way souls and bodies interacted his whole life and never mentioned that possibility.

“Did you ever share that information with the past?” he asked. “Did you ever use what you’d learnt from playing with every soul to have ever existed to help us find a way to figure out what made human souls go to hell?”

Collective pulled back the hand and laughed. It wasn’t his laugh. In fact, it sounded like a laugh made up of multiple voices.

“Oh, you’ll see how cute that sounds soon” Collective said. “Okay, I made a mistake explaining our relationship. It was one I told myself not to make this time, but it just slipped out. Anyway, I said I am you. That’s true in a way. But also, I’m not you. Once you take my hand, I’ll take you to the time machine. You’ll be integrated into it and shipped off to a pocket dimension beyond space and time. Then every human soul that matured enough to linger will home in on you and follow you into that dimension. After that you won’t be you anymore. You’ll be Everyone. Unfortunately, Everyone wants humans to have never happened. Our collective desire is oblivion. Which is what I assume happens to me and everything around us once you go into the time machine. Poof, no more trace of humanity. No bones, no buildings, no art, no nothing. Except this little echo in the timeline that undoes all our work. But even that is about to fade away.”

“How can every human being to have ever existed want oblivion?” he asked. “Most humans to have ever existed were babies. Even with the grace period, I saw how many toddlers were in Hell. And even if all they want is not to hurt anymore, the living toddlers don’t think about that shit.”

“The Collective will of humanity is not a consensus” Collective said. “It is a majority vote case with emotions, and with you, our will reaches a threshold that allows us to act to achieve non-existence. And the collective will of all the people is so strong, that whatever we all want happens.”

“So, if I change my mind –“

“You haven’t made a conscious choice” Collective said, holding out His hand again. “You just feel the way you do. And if it wasn’t you, someone else would tip humanity over that threshold any second now. Which oh wow, that’s an interesting thought. What if I put a different person’s soul in the time machine? It would still work, but I suppose it would be slightly less paradoxical. Maybe it has happened before. Maybe that’s why the echo in the timeline won’t fade; it could be getting patched up that way. We didn’t have this tangent in the conversation last time. Isn’t that fascinating?”

It was fascinating. He wanted to become a researcher on the time machine and figure out just what a human soul was and how he could free it.

But Collective was right; someone would tip us over that threshold soon. I may as well be him.

“Are you actually going to change your mind?” Collective asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

Without hesitation, he got up, reached out, and took Collective’s hand.

____________________________________

After taking Collective’s hand, It took seven minutes for all signs of human existence to poof out of existence.

Yet once he left his own linear timeline, that didn’t matter. Time didn’t flow the same, and every part of his life, or any time before was equally present. He didn’t have unlimited time, but he had enough time.

As Collective had foretold, every other human soul in existence followed him through the time machine. Over a hundred and fifteen billion souls followed him. The souls poured into him and he grew. He knew all that had happened to everyone, and felt the pain, sorrow, joy and hope of the entire human race.  

He transcended the limits of his own human perception, going from him to Him. Capitalised in all minds due to the power he wielded, and masculinized due not to the gender of who he was before, but due to the collective bias of humanity.

The first time He left this pocket dimension, it was to float outside the bedroom the person he used to be lived, to look at Himself as an innocent child. The overwhelming majority of souls within Him believed children like that should get to grow up safe and happy, and that they should be loved. Even those who were twisted enough to want to see others suffer, or who were simply two young or developmentally disabled to think about other people growing up at least desired to be happy, safe and loved themselves, and most were able to extend that hope to others.

The collective will of humanity was for a safe, happy paradise for everyone, where everyone could be loved and there was no more of the pain and sorrow that had touched them on Earth. And so, He made it like that in this pocket dimension. A perfect world was sculpted with human longing, and the people grew spirit bodies with the power of their desire. Not skinless, traitorous bodies like in hell, nor even the faulty Earthly bodies they were accustomed to. They got the indestructible, ideal bodies that the entire race had always longed for.

With these bodies, the souls that now made up Him interacted with each other. He saw Dad reunited with his dead family members. They all hugged, and cried, and Dad was introduced to great grandparents that death had prevented him from knowing. Mum and her family had a picnic out in the sun, marvelling at their new bodies and the ability to walk around or roll in the grass once more. Biggest Nana walked amongst them, radiant as she got to introduce her parents and little sister to her descendants.

He saw every such celebration as every soul – as every part of him – got to have their reunions. He saw toddlers who’d been lost in hell held and cooed at, either by their family members or by caring adults who just wanted to make sure everyone felt loved.

He oversaw the fulfillment of humanity’s first collective desire. The power of the collective willpower of humanity was shocking. Speculation began on if a collective desire for dominion or knowledge over the universe was what had bought a time machine and its accursed paradox to Earth in the first place.  

 He also saw the cracks in this paradise. Caused by human desires being as contradictory as they were powerful.

He saw Great-great-grandma remain standoffish with Biggest Nana after their hug. He saw his paternal Grandfather chide Dad for not going through the op-out process for the morgues, insisting that their current state proved he’d been right about Heaven. He saw millions upon millions of victims look to their attackers with rage, and he saw souls uncountable seethe as they saw that people they had deemed inferior or sinful in life being rewarded here at the end.

Biggest Nana knew of Great-great-grandma’s pain. Of the pain of all her descendants, including the person He once was. All humanity was one collective being now, made up of billions of individuals, she couldn’t not know. She fell to her knees and begged forgiveness. She explained that besides her own fear of hell, she’d had children with the hope that her parents and little sister, who’d died in a car crash before the discovery, could one day be freed.

Mum and Dad appeared to the person he once was, also expressing their remorse that they’d brough him into such a bleak world. He saw that whilst they did have that fear-driven selfishness that had broken him from his desire to see humanity continue, they had genuinely thought having one child they could raise when they were ready was better than three in the creche system. They had tried to make the kindest choices they could.

His grandparents on both sides made similar apologies. As did countless world leaders who’d made the call to keep humanity going so the morgues could be maintained. So many flawed people who’d done their best, but had ultimately been too weak to fix the world he’d be born into.

And it wasn’t enough. After a lifetime of wanting to be strong, He was too weak to forgive even normal human follies. He couldn’t forgive anyone for the hopelessness he’d felt.

He was not the only one. Everyone had been hurt, and it was the collective will of humankind that those who had done wrong, whether in reality or just in someone else’s perspective, whether purposely or not, that they be punished for their part in making the human experience so miserable. Even most children, who had died before developing a theory of morality, had an innate desire to see people who did bad get punished.

And so He went back to before the first sapiens crossed that threshold of self-awareness needed for their souls to shine, and opened another pocket dimension.

The evillest amongst the human souls in the collective dreamt up horrors to fill this other dimension. These monsters numbered in the billions, but they were not enough to guide the collective will of humanity. The collective was however so eager to make someone pay for the horrors they’d experienced, that the visions of the monsters came to exist in that pocket dimension, and hell was born.

He knew it was illogical. He knew it was cruel. But the power of a hundred and fifteen billion human souls was limitless. The collective desire of all humans was both for peace, and for the punishment of their collective sins. The person He once was finally let go of his rage at the world. It felt wrong to blame the people who came before him now that he knew his own hands had created hell. The human collective though was unmoved. Many whose despair had been caused by hell relented, but many of the most ancient people now knew that their aeons of torment had been caused by the lust for vengeance of those who’d suffered so much less than them in life or death.

Besides, so much misery had nothing to do with hell or the quest to avoid it. So much human misery had been caused by other people, or even nature, so despite the person He once was regretting his desire to end human exitance, the Collective still longed for oblivion.

With His purpose secure, Collective went back in time again. He gave that introductory interview, and piece by piece, He took the time machine back to the past. He weaved through time, building the annihilation humanity wanted. As he did, other individual souls slipped through the rift between dimensions, desperate to change the past and find another fate for humankind.

They were not infused with the time machine like him, so they only had their spiritual bodies in the past and could not directly interact with the world like He could. Still, they tried.

His Dad and some of his colleagues met up with the greatest minds in history and researched souls in paradise. Then they went back to their past selves with their findings, whispering their ideas in their minds and praying that this time, they’d make a breakthrough that would provide more hope than the time machine.

Mum and her colleagues learnt all they could about hell from the monsters who had dreamt it up. They confirmed that there was no escape yet, except with the power of the collective human race pulling through the time machine, but Mum and her people had slightly more presence in hell than on Earth, and they used it to provide what solace they could. Mum found all the people she’d photographed in the graveyard, and told them about the beautiful graves their loved ones had erected, as well as the paradise that awaited them.

Billions upon billions left the safety of paradise, to be invisible ghosts in the miserable world futilely trying to change their pasts selves. His focus was on getting the time machine built, but he noticed all the desperate attempts to change the past. He could see the way reality was being worn down around the rifts, and despite no-one in the Collective truly understanding how time loops worked, He had a feeling that more people were going back this loop than ever before.

Hundreds of millions now realised that their ideologies had caused pain, and instead of deciding it had all worked out well enough, went back to beg their past selves to change. Thousands of millions now saw their earthly tormentors as scared, confused people and went back to try to diffuse the rage of their past selves. Sometimes, their voices got through, and he could see that their past selves would act differently going forward. That they’d come into the collective as different people. 

Biggest Poppy just went back to convince the him in the morgue to share his music with the children. Collective watched as he got through, and the Biggest Poppy of the past offered the person He once was the headphones the first time they met in person.                             

There were plenty like Biggest Poppy, who weren’t consciously aware they were deciding humanity was worthy of preservation. Biggest Nana, after urging herself to do whatever she could to make life tolerable for her descendants, spent most of her afterlife in the morgues, touching her family with her spectral hands, telling them that they were loved, and that she wished for so much better for them. As He helped design the wires that would encase Him, He saw her hugging Great-Great-Grandma as her stomach rotted away, even though Great-Great-Grandma was restored in paradise now.

Countless other people from throughout history went back to try to influence their past selves, or to walk besides those who’d suffered so much. People saw children happy in paradise who had never been happy on Earth and went back in time to watch over them and try to convey a bit of warmth.

Sometimes they went back just to see the wonders of Earth, both natural and human made, despite the happiness paradise had to offer. He watched a young girl who had lived and died alone in a decrepit orphanage travel the world to see cities her past self had heard whispers of, then sit with her past self and recount all that she’d seen, as if trying to inspire a friend.       

They went back to spread kindness and hope, because they believed that even though everyone was in paradise now, the earthly existence of humanity mattered, and they should try to make it better.

They were not enough to turn the collective will of humankind towards preservation, or to make it forsake its desire for hell.

But they almost were.

With every person who was able to influence their past self, with everyone who was lifted out of despair by their unseen companions, with every new hope-bringing idea for dealing with hell that got implanted in the past, they got even closer to crossing the threshold.

He completed the time machine and saw just how damaged their reality was. He didn’t think this time loop could keep echoing much longer. He didn’t think they had enough do-overs to change the collective mind of humanity.

The person He once was sought out his parents just before their seven minutes ran out. He found them in hell, along with forty billion other hopefuls, using their hands to fan the dark clouds away from the shambling dead.

It was futile, but he joined them for a while. A few dead people were spared the torment of the clouds for a few minutes.

Then at the end, as Collective, He made one last jump into the past. He appeared in a tornado of dead leaves before the ruins of a theatre. His past self was leaning against the building, wallowing in hopelessness.

The conversation between them was identical, except he didn’t comment about His speculation on what would happen if He took a different soul through the time machine being different, since it wasn’t new his time.

He stepped forward for the final time and held out His hand to the past self, who looked more unsure than He remembered feeling.

“Are you actually going to change your mind?” Collective asked, genuinely surprised.

His past self looked at His hand, and hesitated.

THE END

< Back to My Stories