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An excerpt from my debut novella, Kill Your Heroes

I wanted to say goodbye to the cruel world, but I couldn’t do it, because I wasn’t ready, yet. Besides, I had to be the world’s worst wingman, for now. For Ken. And so, I said to myself, death comes later.

So, we walked down the road, across the boulevard, and then, across the Cemetery. A couple hours later, they would bring the dead guy here.And he’ll be as dead as everyone else. That’s all we can be, right?

Dead?

Ken asked me, with a poker face, “Do you believe in reincarnation?” To that, I replied tranquilly, “No. Once dead, always dead.”

I don’t believe in reincarnation, or life after death, but I do believe that when a dead person’s atoms break down, they roam around, and finally form molecules and ions, and they make up another person.

Our brains are hardware and our minds are software. When our bodies fail our minds do the same thing a program does when a computer shuts down. It’s gone. It no longer exists. Unless, if it’s backed up, of course.

This makes no sense, but it does, all too well.

If consciousness ceases at death, how then are we experiencing the present at all?

If you do not exist prior to birth, and you also do not exist after death, how is it possible to be experiencing the present?

Since time is actually not linear, it is merely a perception, the fact that consciousness exists at any point in time at all suggests that it cannot be destroyed, otherwise we would have no memory of it, including in the present.

akshat.connectin@gmail.com