“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.” -- Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
0. Tabula Mortem 2600
As everybody knows, in 2037, US military engineers created a way to grid death over a geographical space, successfully ending war. The process was dubbed necrotabularum (or, simply, necrotabbing). An NDSA (National Death Security Admin) operator feeds some coordinates into the machine, which is the notorious Tabula Mortem 2600 - say, for example, calculations indicating the borders of and everything within port city Visakhapatnam. The machinist then depresses a button and, after some security checks are appeased, voila: every organic thing in that industrial center in Andhra Pradesh instantly dies. The necrocode can be accelerated or decreased, gridding fresh death or generating instantaneous moldering skeletons.
Necrotabbing - depending on the imposed degree of intensity - is capable of killing people, animals, trees, plants, bacteria… anything organic. It is said that a blinding flash of white light like incandescent magnesium strafes the landscape - a momentary fluorescing - when necrotabbing is initiated. After the flash, nothing lives. Everybody knows this.
What fewer know is how the American military cooked up this conflict-halting necrotech. It’s an unlikely tale, and even though we’re all just trying to survive now, it’s worth documenting, I guess, unless of course posterity goes defunct along with everything else.
1. Terminal Elias
In the winter of 2032, Elias Cavanaugh, aged 86, checked into St. Agatha’s Hospice in Tacoma, Washington. He knew he’d never check out.
The milky walls, like an achromatic void, provided no comfort. This didn’t bother Elias, however. He’d spent his entire life spurning comfort, seeking instead the serrated, unkind edges of existence. Now, his body honeycombed with prismatic cancer cells, crumpled under the sedulous bombardment of metastasized blight, Elias faced the outermost edge: death.
Elias wasn’t afraid though; he was fascinated. He viewed death not as a phenomenon to escape from, but as a process to be optimized. Elias’s lifelong obsession with systems and organization, once applied to fiscal machinations and later to extreme sports (BASE jumping and cave diving), had found its final distilled focus. He was not searching for peace or acceptance. He wanted only to experience dying in its most acute configuration. Elias didn’t want to miss a second of it; he wanted to savor each waning moment.
“Keep those fucking pain pills away from me,” Elias would spit at the nurses.
His doctor, a fatigued, considerate woman named Amalia Hakobyan routinely tried to reason with him. “Elias, we want to manage your pain. Your state… your blatant suffering… is disturbing to the other patients. Hospice is about quality of life.”
Elias grinned. Amalia could discern the smirking skeleton beneath his thinning skin. Sickly pale, bald, chemo-plagued and gaunt, Elias Cavanaugh didn’t have much time left.
“Quality?” Elias said, amused. “Doctor, I’m interested in the quantity of death. The stages. The anomalous sensations. I want to map the cadaverous terrain before I become it.”
***
Elias began documenting death in a journal, meticulously logging the particulars of dying, rendering them as eldritch cryptograms. Elias’s notes contained very few words. Instead of text, the journal radiated black diagrams and sepulchral schematics. His increasing weakness was depicted as Cartesian coordinates. The fluctuating pain levels were presented as bastardized Schläfli graphs. Hallucinations of corruption and defilement came in the form of sketched sinusoidal waveforms. It was more Ouija board than analytical register. The patients and nurses found Elias’s notebook unsettling, as though as an object it emitted dark delirium that could inimically affect those in its radius.
In addition to the weird transcriptions, Elias dissected in real time the emotional landscape of the slow death. He called up estranged family members and urged them to visit - not for reconciliation, but to observe and absorb their reactions to his wasting state. He tried to gauge the pungency of their grief, weigh the emptiness of their awkward goodbyes. He prodded nieces and nephews with disagreeable questions: “Are you sad for me? Or are you picturing your own demise right now? Am I a mirror? An augury? You’re still young, but not for long.” He would pause for effect. “Very soon, we’ll all know the answer to the riddle that makes the skulls grin.”
Elias’s doctor would find him in acute pain, having sold his analgesics to other patients in exchange for ink pens and markers, sheets of paper.
“You’re torturing yourself,” Amalia would say. “Mr. Cavanaugh, what you’re doing is not science. It’s monstrous.”
“Monstrously fascinating,” Elias corrected, his voice a diminished rasp. He continued speaking while sketching a data model of putrefaction. “You see, don’t you, Doctor? Humans have been dying for millennia. Yet we still approach it with nothing but fear or cloying sentimentality.”
Elias poked his journal with a pen-tip. “I’m stripping it of its mysteries. Revealing its esoteric functions. I’m making it… knowable.”
After more than a few of these conversations, Doctor Hakobyan gave up and left Elias to his agony and annotation.
***
When Elias wasn’t suffering and scrawling, he jerked off to images and stories from the obsolete Necrobabes.org site and read necrophile fan fiction culled from various janky dark-fetish internet-crevices. He would meditate in the dark to WAV files of performance artist John Duncan’s Blind Date, included in the cassette-book PLEASURE-ESCAPE, in which Duncan recorded the audio of himself fucking a cadaver in a Mexican border town’s mortuary. He studied texts on necromancy, gravekeeper autobiographies, and even consulted entirely fantastical RPG game manuals relating to black wizardry and reanimating the interred. He made collages of photos of autopsies and crime scene photographs. It was all done to conjure a vibe, a headspace where death-in-31-flavors informed everything.
Delineating in the dark, sketching and calculating furiously, Elias would play the Atrax Morgue song “Something Bad” incessantly:
SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED. SOMETHING BAD. ASK THE PSYCHIATRIST ABOUT YOUR MENTAL CONDITION
SOMETHING BAD HAS HAPPENED
SOMETHING BAD HAS HAPPENED
SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED. SOMETHING BAD. ASK THE PSYCHIATRIST ABOUT YOUR MENTAL CONDITION
***
An excerpt from Elias’s ineffable notebook: “In my model, I suppose Nature as a whole to be the outward manifestation of pure identity (A = A), which is absolute activity / productivity; every organism, insofar as it is individual, may be seen as a freakish contradiction, appropriating the energy of the Absolute, contaminating the world as a lusus naturae, a deviation which can only be eradicated by annulling its original, nonmaterial actants.”
“God is Death and Death is God,” Elias would often remark. “It’s as simple as that.”
2. Eureka
Grant Trotter was a 39-year-old theoretical scientist. A polymath and innovator, Trotter was enlisted by the United States military as a researcher immediately after graduating from Stanford. Although bright and promising, Trotter was low on the departmental totem pole. He was actively, avidly looking for a way to elevate himself within the NDSA.
So when his 98-year-old mother, stricken with blood cancer, phoned him from St. Agatha’s one evening and proceeded to describe a strange death-obsessed patient who kept a frightening journal, Trotter’s antennae kindled.
Trotter visited his dying mother in August of 2033. It wasn’t so much a visit as reconnaissance.
As Trotter’s withered mother prattled on about mundanities and sipped her mug of lukewarm green tea, Grant’s attention was laser-focused on Elias, who sat by himself in a corner of the dining hall, hunched over his journal, scribbling manically.
“It’s been nice. I mean, the weather’s been sort of schizophrenic but -”
“Is that him?”
“What, honey?”
“The man in the corner. Is that the one you told me about?”
Mrs. Trotter, mouth agape in a portrait of senility, glanced around. “Oh. Yes. Elias Cavanaugh is his name. He’s not very friendly though.”
“No family visits?”
“Not in a long time, no.”
“Perfect.”
“What?”
Trotter shifted his attention from Elias to his mother. He forced a smile and patted her hand. “Mom, I’d like to talk to the staff here about him. Who’s in charge of this place?”
3. Swan Song
There is no record of how Elias orchestrated his final experiment or performance: how he persuaded someone to bring him the needed equipment or how he managed to set it all up without the hospice nurses or anyone else noticing beforehand.
Though his bony fingers must’ve trembled, he rigged portable speakers and a laptop to blast sounds of escalating harshness: the maddening growls of predator animals, the yelps and helpless cries of prey being torn asunder, the shuddering screech of car metal colliding and shredding during fatal crashes, the abyssal screams and choked protestations of gurgling murder victims whose violent ends had been taped and uploaded to gore sites.
On the day before his death, Elias cached the audio setup in a vent above his institutional bed.
He’d become intimate with death and knew he had mere hours remaining. That last night, Elias dimmed the lights, alone in his sterilized room, and activated the noise barrage, punching up the volume to max before replacing the vent’s gate.
He lay down, assailed by a maelstrom of horrific noise.
He was dying, and he essayed to heighten the endorphin surge. He closed his eyes as the soundscape intensified. His heartbeat thumped his breastbone, a staccato drum before the firing squad. Fear refined itself to something blacker and more pure and sluiced through his venous network, augmenting his contaminated spirit that was ripping itself away from his wilted body and hoisting it thrillingly to the heights where malformed banshees shriek and funereal angels pirouette in freezing dark winds.
His soul, like a napkin in a hurricane, freed from its flesh-cage and swept up into the Howling Void that is unseen.
Lethargic night-shift nurses speedwalked to Elias’s room, alarmed and jumpstarted into action by the cacophony of roars and explosions baying acoustically from down the hall.
Elias felt one last piercing pain at the base of his skull - a kind of cerebral lightning strike. His vision blurred and skittered violently, and he died. It was even more ecstatic than he’d hoped, those final seconds stretched out into a quarter of an eternity.
As the terror-sounds blared and merged into incomprehension, as Elias’s soul departed its corporeal shell, a nurse burst through the door with two more behind her. It took them a couple minutes to locate the laptop and speakers, unscrew the vent’s gate, and disable the whole unholy show.
The hospice fell into dense silence then.
***
Elias Cavanaugh’s time of death was recorded as 0027.
4. The Birth of Death
It’s late, the witching hour, and the NDSA facility in Arlington that houses the Tabula Mortem 2600 is manned by just three machinists and a casual security detail armed with discounted HK416 A5s. The machinists are coming down from a rather vicious corpse-wine bender.
(In a storage room for spare electronics adjacent to the Tabula Mortem’s centralized chamber, the machinists operate a funerary still: a large vat connected to a sarcophagus - the crushed corpse-liquid boiled and then cooled to condensed, drinkable vapor. Per usual, the morbid sonics of Cannibal Corpse’s 1991 album Butchered at Birth saturate the so-called Death Dome of the facility.)
The Tabula Mortem looks like a Sportsmans Series 1000-Watt 2-Cycle Portable Generator. Its high-carbon steel exterior is matte black with a barely discernible silver tint. A cartoonish white skull emblem is its sole ornamentation. The chamber itself is designed like a high-tech version of an 18th-century medical amphitheater.
When Elias Cavanaugh expired, Trotter and a cadre of CSS (Central Security Service) brokers took possession of the body and Elias’s journal and began their diabolical work. It took them approximately five years to manufacture the TM2600. The process began with the decoding of organic life systems. Necrotabbing is not a strictly physical force, but more allied with a logical operation, whereby the system and structure of life is undone or negated, returning the organism / target to its primal simplicity - the pure intensity / pure activity around which the material of life has been organized. The white blinding flash of tabbing nec is a mere byproduct, the radiant equivalent of a sonic boom.
Elias, through his morbid investigations, discovered the secret to undoing life at its true source. Viewing life as an abstract system enabled him to solve for the unknown variable that sustains it; namely, the simple actants that precede matter, individuating and organizing matter, imparting its determinate qualities.
Thus, Elias did indeed make death knowable. Usable.
Ultimately weaponized.
The heart / engine / motor of the machine is Elias’s death-drenched brain, suspended in a webbing of cybernetics and insulated by cemetery moss. The brain is punctured at various points by arcane tubing that circulates graveyard serum, a mystical substance a team of scientists, overseen by Trotter, invented by extracting certain bleak truths and macabre formulae from Elias’s notes. Elias’s brain, conscious of its own rotting material and actively pursuing destruction, possessed a unique neural signature that could not be simulated by AI or any other program - there is but one engine, unreproducible.
(In late 2037, a weirdo cult of terminally online nihilists sprung up, deifying the TM2600. They called themselves Children of the Black Mechanism [or CBM]. They worshipped the machine via Tumblr screeds and memes, believing the “death happenings” of the TM2600 to be sacrificial, divinely endowed. The sect spread prophecies all over the internet about Total Death and an imminent, welcome Apocalypse. Though an unhinged bunch, their prophesies proved terribly accurate.)
If the machinists had not been regularly drunk on corpse wine and thrashing to “Meat Hook Sodomy”, perhaps they would’ve spotted the change in the TM2600 and saved us all a lot of trouble.
The machine had begun leaking a black oil - blacker than petroleum - from hairline cracks in its housing. Elias’s rigged and reified death-brain had been corroding the interior of the TM2600 for weeks. Inside the steel shell, the brain of Elias had slowly metamorphosed into an otherworldly black egg. And, inside that egg, a somber embryo differentiated into a Dark Angel.
It all happens swiftly. The three hungover machinists witness it without really understanding what is occurring before their bombed eyes.
A large fissure in the steel housing of the TM2600 cracks into a gaping maw that spews black filth. Electrical shortages spit blue sparks that fizzle feebly in the eldritch oil that is now flooding the titanium floor of the Death Dome.
“Fuck! Fuck FUUCKK! Turn the goddamn music OFF!” one of the machinist’s shouts.
Cracks in the machine, cracks in the egg, cracks in reality. The facility’s lights go out and something newly born commandeers psychically the entirety of the building’s control systems. Lights extinguish; doors are locked; alarms are trivialized.
In the corridor outside the chamber, the lax security detail is overwhelmed by a swirling black magic that ramps up their death drives exponentially. In short order, each of the five soldiers eats the barrel of their respective assault rifles, blowing the backs of their heads out and Pollock-ing with scattered brain tissue the nearby walls.
It’s too dark in the Death Dome for the machinists to see what emerges from the cracked machine-cum-incubator: a black mist glittering with silver pinpoints of light billows out of the broken steel. This gloomy eddy coils and spirals, coalescing into a nine-feet-tall hooded black cloak whose fabric glows with scrolling neon-blue code. Framing the hood of the cloak is a hologram skull - it appears to grin. In its skeletal left hand, the emanation grips a souped-up cyberpunk rendition of a scythe, the weapon blinking with points luminous and featuring intricate latches and slides for myriad blade configurations.
It is bizarre or perhaps not that the personification of Death looks almost exactly how pop culture has illustrated it for centuries.
Death waves its scythe and casts an unnamed hex that instantly kills all three of the machinists.
5. The End
After all the life in the Arlington NDSA facility was snuffed out, Death (né Elias Cavanaugh) floated out of the government building and, over time, made a wasteland of the world.
And that is that. I do not know how many of us remain. Mere hundreds, worldwide, surely. It is only a matter of time before the roving scythe finds our necks.
Pray for us.
-- Wolfgang Carnifex is a multimedia artist from Detroit. His third book, an experimental sci-fi novel called st1mulus z3r0: gnawing bicosmic angst, will be published early 2027.