Dime Novels From Oblivion

"It doesn't matter to people that things are fine. Just that they're normal"

The impact a revolutionary technology has had on society can only be thoroughly examined in retrospect. Regardless of what changes for better or worse peoples lives will be altered by what it brings to bare. This is the third story I have written about the consequences of a scientific breakthrough that allows light to reanimate.
The first was titled "The 3D Dead" the account of how the discovery was made and "Right to Die" an anecdote about how a dead man found himself tormented by his new station in the world as a ghost and his family's inability to let him go. The following is another story about what happens when our cherished civic institutions finally had to decide how society would face a new world where the dead are never really gone.....

The studio was a carnival of human misery where anonymous spectators filled the seats to entertain themselves with the worse aspects of the human condition. The producers fished out the most depraved and shattered souls…

The artifice of the holidays was distilled into an even more synthetic version via virtual reality. Families having long since physically disintegrating could now meet remotely in a digitally rendered scene. Physically Kelly was in her apartment in New York, but her neural synapses were processing the sights, sounds, and smells of Thanksgiving in her parent's house in the suburbs Chicago. The software rendered her as flesh to her parents. The embedded code manipulating their neural faculties simulated every detail down to the warmth of a hug which it was able to estimate to within less than a tenth of a degree.
Kelly and her parents sat across from each other in an uneasy silence. Her father ate looking down at his plate, and her mother nervously pecked at her food while watching her heavy eyelids flutter while her chin, resting in her palm slowly sank further and further down toward the table.
“Kelly are you alright?” Her mother finally asked with a tone of concern.
“Huh? Oh yeah…

Kinnin's cell was part of a multilayered concrete labyrinth that houses thousands of captives inside its sunless confines. The inmates denied the sky lived according to the dictates of the electric lamps that buzzed overhead. Faint sounds of humanity carried through the iron door. Diminutive echoes penetrated the cell before dissipating into the thick silence. Kinnin was in his late 20's. He was energetic with a congenial and outgoing personality that made the isolation of prison all the more punishing. He was ceaseless in his drive to mitigate the torment. He immersed himself in literature, even occasionally reading sports statistics so he could find common ground with the guards that patrolled the corridors of caged humans.
Kinnin became friends with a guard named Beck. They would have daily discussions that weren't always terribly interesting to him but given this was Kinnin's only human contact would have to suffice.
All their chats were conducted through a slot w…

Some day soon....

#sexbotsrising! 

The cold rain falling from the washed out autumn sky inundated the ground and turned the earth into a soft spongy surface. The churning mud regurgitated the body left in a shallow grave between the trees just yards from a paved gravel trail.

Her fingers curling out from beneath the liquid soil was the first thing the woman walking her dog noticed. She reported the corpse to the police who quickly descended on the scene. When the layers of decaying organic matter were shoveled out, a female body was found in the shallow pit.

Frayed wiring sprung from her broken joints; her perfectly apportioned limbs were twisted and smashed, she was covered with jagged lacerations. There wasn't a drop of blood and her synthetic flesh hadn't been touched by any of the scavengers living in the dirt that feast on decay. The detectives and medical personnel dispatched to the scene pulled open the gaping wounds and found a polymer skeleton covered in a silicone mol…