The Circle of Death

An Encryptor documents the multidimensional ending of a person’s death. The love, horror, sadness, grotesquery of any solitary moment. Once crafted, that single moment is dropped into an ethereal sea of millions of other moments, overlapped, forgotten, and dissolved until used again. These moments of death are the only thing left of a person’s existence. Nothing to recall who the person was or what the person did or did not do, but only the singular moment of a person’s death felt by those around them can be molded into their droplet.

The Encryptor’s job is to recount all sides of one’s death no matter how minute or singular the feeling. It may shock you to find that there is no scythe wielding Grim Reaper to whisk you away to an afterlife. There are no angels pulling you up to a type of heaven or demons ripping you down through the ground to hell. No Charon to deliver you across the River Styx. At death, there are only Encryptors, and they are everywhere. Their long hooded figures glide through the space between people watching, listening, feeling the multifacets of the human condition. Feeding their way through the rippling waves of humanity only to watch all lives end abruptly and without meaning. Then, they encrypt.

Your death starts as a love story. And if that’s all it was, a story, that’s all it would be about: love. But your moment in time which will define who you were, are, and ever would be is tinged with horror and spotted in tragedy because nothing real is ever a single thing. A square is only a square when looked straight on but from the side or down below there are shadows that reveal its cubic structure, its multiple dimensions and sides, its hard corners and blank spaces. So while the newspapers will call this moment a tragedy and the witnesses will recount the horrors of the seconds that stretched to minutes, one person will remember the side of the story that housed love. And that love will become encrypted into your death.

However, you ran across the street to get away from the man who just confessed his love for you. Too soon. Too aggressively. You ran because he tried to grab your arm. Tried to relay details he loved so passionately about you. Details you never told him on the two dates you deigned this easy match. But those details don’t matter. What matters is that he loved you and that love will forever stain your existence. You ran through the busy throng of people, not noticing that the crowd was stationary with reason. The large red hand signalling to STOP blinked through your vision as the last thing you remember when you raced into oncoming traffic.

This moment--your moment--will be forever known as a tragedy to seventeen of the bystanders who watched your body get torn apart by the unlucky sixteen-wheeler marred with having to navigate the busy city on a weekend. The moment will be the horror that forever changed the course of three of the lives in the crowd; particularly that of a six-year-old girl who had the misfortune of catching part of your fractured jaw in her bicycle basket, blood staining the purple frills dangling off its edges. This moment will be known as a repulsive unfortunate accident of a girl who took her chances, played and lost chicken with the traffic to ten more witnesses in the group. It will be a mystery to twelve more who weren’t looking when the accident happened. A regret to four others. A lesson to a handful. And a love story to one. To the man who followed you everywhere you went including out to the street that fateless day. He held your torso with its barely clinging limbs and crushed skull and cried for you and him and what could have been if you’d only seen it the way he did. Your moment, the moment that defines your existence, will forever be blighted by the man who forced his love upon your death because your death is not about you. Your death is about those around and affected by your demise. And to one individual that was love.

The Encryptors gliding through your moment will feed on and regurgitate the emotions that swirled in the air. They will breathe in the stench of death from the surrounding living and spill it back out into a neat droplet that will make up the only thing your life means post mortem. Never to be anything whole again. Your moment will dissolve into the sea of deathful moments that will make up future persons. These moments are what reincarnate future generations because on the other side of the Encryptors are the Encoders who scoop out fractions of miscellaneous death moments to mold into new beings.

With your moment of death encrypted and dropped into the sea of endless souls, Encoders will take factions of that moment swirling with thousands of other people’s last moments to create a new life. A life that will be part of the horror, passion, nausea, peace of those that died before you creating a new being for better or worse.

So know that the love in your story does not die with you. It lives on in not only the man who professed it to you and the countless others he’s loved, but in the people who will come after you, be made from you in your final moment. Such is the way, is humanity, is the circle of life and death.

And such will be the downfall of human kind. As the species continues to die, the final moments of woe will continue to outweigh the moments of peace. Encoders will create increasingly fiendish individuals from people’s final moments filled with loathing, fear, and malaise. Humans will fall by their own hand as genocides and greed overwhelm the world and the death that befalls all. And when the final human succumbs, Encryptors will shift to a new apex species to continue dropping final moments into the sea of souls while Encoders begin creating a new sentience from those moments until there is a species better fitted to one another. A species that creates more honor and peace in their final moments than they do atrocities.

So, dear one, know that in your final moment of death, your love story will be a minor cog contributing to the fall of the human race. And all because one man loved a girl, and she did not love him back.