The professionals who tend this place are known as caretakers, and one named Maxwell met me near the entrance. I knew his clothing was ceremonial, but you would never know it, dear guest, if you had not been told in advance. He wore no ornamentation, nothing that communicated pomp or importance. Just loose-fitting garments made of undyed fabric, cinched around his forearms and ankles to prevent dragging in the dirt. The outfit was a reminder that my visit that day was on a strict schedule. Maxwell was to conduct a burial – a ‘laying-in’, they call it – and though I was welcome to see the preparation, I would not be permitted to attend the ceremony itself. It was a ‘family matter’, he said, and studying the events from the sidelines would not be well received. Exodans tend to express strong emotions quite freely – brashly, even – but I have observed a general (though not universal) dislike of doing so around strangers. I struggle with this idea, but I respect it all the same.

‘So,’ my host said, gesturing to the chamber before us. ‘This is the main event.’

The space we occupied was as tall as the exterior suggested. Stretching up before us was an enormous cylinder, unchanged since the days of the Earthen builders. A ramp spiralled around the cylinder, all the way to the top, wide enough for several Humans to walk side-by-side. At the base were several well-sealed hatches, from which the final product could be retrieved. Another caretaker was engaged in this very activity, filling metal canisters with what could easily be mistaken for nothing more extraordinary than dark soil. I was immediately filled with questions, but Maxwell had other ideas. ‘We’ll come back to this,’ he said. ‘We can’t go out of order.’ He paused, studying me. ‘Are you comfortable seeing bodies?’

I answered honestly. ‘I don’t know. I have never seen one.’

He blinked – a response that indicates surprise. ‘Never? Not one of your own kind?’

I gestured in the negative before I realised he wouldn’t understand. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not in a medical profession, and am lucky enough to have never witnessed serious violence. I have lost connections, and have grieved them with others in a ceremonial sense. But we do not grieve with a corpse present. We do not see the body that remains as the person we have lost.’

Maxwell looked fascinated, as one could rightly expect from one of his profession. ‘What do you do with them, then?’

‘They’re cleanly disposed of. Some still practise the old way of leaving them just beyond the shoreline, where the waves cannot reach them. Mostly, though, corpses are dissolved and flushed away.’

‘Just . . . with wastewater?’

‘Yes.’

Maxwell visibly wrestled with that. ‘Right. That sounds . . . efficient.’ He gestured for me to follow him. ‘Well, if you do feel uncomfortable, just let me know, and we’ll leave.’

I followed him through a staff door and down a corridor until we reached his preparation room. The difference between this place and the main chamber could not have been starker. My tentacles reflexively curled with chill, and the air was irritatingly dry.

It is difficult for me to distill all I felt as we entered the room. If I were to describe the moment with pure objectivity, I stood at a table looking at a dead alien. She was old, her body withered. I related to nothing of her anatomy, laid bare and unshrouded. I realised my declaration to Maxwell that I had never seen a dead body was untrue. I have seen dead animals. I have eaten them. I have walked past them in food markets. I have fished expired laceworms out of my beloved swimming tank at home. In some ways, observing the Human corpse on the table was no different than that. Please understand, dear guest, I do not mean that I believe Humans are equivalent to lesser species. What I mean is that what lay before me was a species other than myself, and so any connection to my own mortality, my own eventual fate, was at first safely distant.

But then I began to think of the dead animals I have seen and disposed of and consumed, the ended lives I did not grieve for because I did not understand them fully. I did not see myself in them, and therefore it did not matter. I looked to this former Human – this former sapient, with a family and loves and fears. Those things I could understand, even though the body was something I could not. Nothing in the room was moving, nothing was happening, and yet within me, I felt profound change. I grieved for the alien, this person I had never known. I grieved for my pet laceworms. I grieved for myself. Yet it was a quiet grief, an everyday grief, a heaviness and a lightness all at once. I was overwhelmed, yet there was no way to express that beyond silence.

I do not feel I am explaining this experience well, dear guest, but perhaps that is appropriate. Perhaps none of us can truly explain death. Perhaps none of us should.

*

Tessa

Tessa stood in the doorway to her workroom, lunch box in one hand, the other hanging at her side. She’d had a bad feeling since the moment she’d discovered that the staff door opened for her despite the lock being offline. In the workroom, poor Sahil lay with his head on the desk, snoring and drooling without a care in the world. She looked out to the endless shelves. Everything appeared just as it had when she’d left the day before. She knew it wasn’t. Somewhere, something was missing. Probably a lot of things were missing.

She did not need this today. She really, really did not.

She crouched down beside her colleague. ‘Sahil?’ she said, giving his shoulder a shake. ‘Sahil? Dammit.’ She gave him a once-over, just to make sure nothing was bloodied or broken, then turned to the vox. ‘Help,’ she called.