# This is my entry to @calluna's [Tell A Story To Me Contest](https://steemit.com/tellastorytome/@calluna/tell-a-story-to-me-and-win-5-steem-writing-contest-10-when-you-die-and-winners-of-9) in which she challenges us to write a story or poem based on the prompt:   ***When you die, you wake...***


# I woke up...


I went to sleep one night and woke up 100,000 years later.

I had to string together some things to figure this out; the records of what happened to me were lost...as I was a few times myself.

Apparently, a plane fell on my house, or an earthquake flattened it, or maybe some prankster threw too much TP on the roof and it collapsed. My body was pretty much crushed. I remember very clearly, as a joke, signing up for some experiment that gave a medical company rights to my body in the case of catastrophe...what the hell, I made $5,000 bucks for a laugh.

In any case, these ghouls collected me after whatever happened and did some kind of surgery to save my spine and brain, and then stuck me in cryogenic suspension; I have no idea of which part of this was the experiment, as the only documentation they kept on me was a receipt for collecting my carcass that detailed the extant of my injuries, but nothing about what caused them.


That kind of poor record keeping is probably why they stuck me in a storeroom and forgot about me. At least they stuck the receipt on my icebox...

Three hundred years later somebody found me, and instead of unthawing me, what they did was to conduct another experiment on me. They stuck some kind of implant in my spine, designed to make me live longer ("forever", from the lab notes). At least these guys kept good records. For some ungodly reason, my body was in New York. I always hated being in New York, so I consider it was a good thing that I was in suspension at the time. Unfortunately, this was the last time anybody put a date I could recognize on my records.

The next part of this is very unclear to me, and is my best reconstruction from current records (which are prehistory for all practical purposes). But before I go on, I need to remind myself of a couple of medical advances that took place in the interim. The first is human cloning and the second was a spinal implant that became so common that it basically became a birth procedure.

Cloning had also become commonplace; replacement parts were kept on hand for emergencies, but if the docs could keep you alive...they could grow a whole new "you" in less than a year as long as you brain worked. Well, they could grow a whole new brain damaged "you" if your noggin got crushed, but that's a different story.

The spinal implant was amazing. It performed so many functions it is hard to explain fully, but I'll go over the main ones...
...it regulated emotional spikes
...it sent a signal for cells to repair themselves at a young adult rate...essentially, immorality as long as your roof didn't fall on your head
...it installed a computer with a direct interface to your conscious; complex calculations could be performed mentally, just for starters
...it allowed virtual realities to be felt directly in your own reality

This spinal implant allowed humanity to reach it's greatest heights, but it also put us into stagnation.

However, I am getting ahead of myself...

So the next batch of experiments performed on me did a few things for me. They grew me into a new body, young and fit; let's face it, I was a lazy fatass when I went to sleep. They pulled out the old spinal implant and put in the new sparkplug of man. They downloaded all of man's knowledge into the implant as a free bonus. And they made a softcopy of all the work that had been done on my chassis and downloaded that too.

What they didn't do was wake me up. The purpose of their experiment was anthropological, and they had been building me a nice little zoo cage when their experiment stopped. I guess their funds run out, or maybe a roof fell on someone's head. I did find a couple of surprises in these records. First, I had been asleep for around 1500 years, from what they estimated. Second, I was off Earth, and out of the Solar System. Where I don't know. The notes never stated that. Third, they had no idea of where they got me; they had purchased me in a medical surplus lot, that included amongst other things some alien mummies, zoological samples, germ war super-viruses, and old stethoscopes.

I just glad no one tripped over the power cord in that time.


Again, someone must have stuck me in the janitor's closet and forgot about me. I end up on the planet I live now because some traveling salesman bought me as a historical oddity and sold me in turn to one of the museums on this rock. Apparently, I had been a main attraction as a carnival sideshow. What gets me is how damn gullible people are; all folks could see would be the cryo tank...for all they knew, the barker could have been keeping a case of beer in there.

https://steemitimages.com/0x0/http://halofanforlife.com/wp-content/uploads/tumblr_mntum33KwZ1r5ajivo2_1280.jpg
[Image](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/http://halofanforlife.com/wp-content/uploads/tumblr_mntum33KwZ1r5ajivo2_1280.jpg)

So this I know for sure...the museum matched the OS of the implant and downloaded all their knowledge. Then they built a huge display case/maintenance facility and transferred me out of the metal can I was in. The they left me on display...for 20,000 years. In all that time, I had less than a thousand visitors. Well, I did say humanity had stagnated, right?

The only reason I'm awake at all is a lab technician turned me on by mistake.




Yup, the first thing I hear when I wake up is "ooooh shit". Of course, I was trying to figger out why I had a hangover when I hadn't drank in a week.

We looked at each other in less shock than you might expect (implant, remember) but each in a bit of confusion. I expect the tech had been switching back and forth into a virtual reality when he punched in the wrong sequence. I guess 20,000 years without an accident is a pretty good track record.

I wondered why I wasn't in my bedroom, where my fat had gone over night, why my head and stomach felt so bad, why there were cables poking into me, and why there was a very short Asian in a lab coat goggling at me.

He said, "This is a mistake, wait here" and then walked pretty quickly out one of the doors. I understood Qasaii (kway-say) because they kept me updated. Qasai, by the way, had no direct linguistic heritage to any earth language. I could run down the language history tree, but it would take longer to tell than the story I'm about now. I wondered for a moment what was going on, then the implant let me know.. I guess it had been in powerdown mode, too.

You'd think that waking up in the future would be cool, right? Nope. Most humans walked around in a VR all the time, the implant guiding them through their normal day. Robots did most of the manual work, but then again if an implant is guiding your every move, you're pretty much also a robot, from my point of view.

I undid the cables and went looking for coffee. Oh wait, no coffee on this planet. Not to worry, a VR overlay put a cup of coffee into my hand, and the implant sent all the signals of coffee smell into my cortex. I turned off that capability right away.

I knew I was in a museum, so I headed for the cafeteria. They had decided to display me sans clothes, so I was flopping around a bit, but since there was no one visiting the museum anyway, I didn't give a damn. Also, there was no one there that  would be likely to raise a fuss in the first place. I get to the cafeteria and oh, joy...gruel. People used their VR overlays to eat what they wanted. Crap, I turned the function back on. I chugged cold water that tasted and smelt like hot coffee and ate a steak or two.

At least my hangover went away. The lab tech and another couple of guys came in, but waited until I was done eating. Nice and polite. They were Asians, as was everybody else on the planet, but it wasn't a culturally Asian thing, it was a culturally implant thing.

One of them was the museum director, who offered me a job as a historical guide. I took it, though I didn't need to. Very few people worked, and out of those that did, very few left automation mode, enjoying the day in their own VR. Hardly anyone visited the museum to begin with.




Humanity had tuned itself in a collection of Eloi; thankfully, there were no Morlocks. I looked just to see, and there were a thousand and one ways to hack the implant process. I was surprised that no one had tried it before. Then again, if you could live life as an evil madman in your own mind, why bother putting in the risk and effort to do so in real life?

Of course, I'm not a sociopath either, so I realize that answer might nor work for everyone.

In any case, while the implant had allowed humanity to reach the stars, create perpetual bounty in food and energy, find inner joy...and turned most of us into oblivious fools. Like I said, thank God there were no Morlocks.

The average IQ dropped to what would have been in my time 65. 65? I'm surprised people can walk around without falling on their faces with an IQ of 65. The race didn't breed much; children were test tube scambles on demand from compatible parents; folks could have all the vanilla or kinky sex in their heads without having to deal with rug rats.

Frankly, it was boring as Hell. I saved enough to buy a spaceship and quit my job.

I went looking for a cup of REAL coffee, damn it!

# I hope you enjoyed this little story; please vote for me at the contest and read the stories of everyone else!





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# My Books
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MR35TE9/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li1&tag=gradschoolfoo-20&linkId=a3a0c9affdb816b7dc08e62d46ad160b&language=en_US" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B01MR35TE9&Format=_SL110_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=gradschoolfoo-20&language=en_US" ></a><img src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=gradschoolfoo-20&language=en_US&l=li1&o=1&a=B01MR35TE9" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />
[Home To Texas: Recollections of a Texas Badman](https://amzn.to/2M97JvT)

</div>


<div >

<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N5PRXWF/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li1&tag=gradschoolfoo-20&linkId=648ae3eb0ce89515628f3e3e260d58e2&language=en_US" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B01N5PRXWF&Format=_SL110_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=gradschoolfoo-20&language=en_US" ></a><img src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=gradschoolfoo-20&language=en_US&l=li1&o=1&a=B01N5PRXWF" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />

[The Effects Of Hoover's Bureaucratic Tactics On COINTELPRO Operations](https://amzn.to/2nkQ72c)


</div>

***

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