Encounter-a-Day

What would you do if one morning you woke up… dead? No one’s quite sure how the Lazarus Plague started, but now that question is on everyone’s minds, because it’s a very real possibility.

How the Lazarus Plague works is a mystery. It somehow puts a cease to all the biological activities in your body, but doesn’t really kill you in the sense we’re accustomed of thinking. In every clinical sense you’re dead; no heart beat, no need to breathe (though those afflicted by it still tend to out of habit), not even any signs of electrical activity in your brain.

In essence, you’re coasting, like a car on a hill with a broken engine. But just like that hill flattens out and you lose your inertia and stop moving, the Lazarus Plague doesn’t keep you going forever. You can still move your muscles, but just like when you’re alive they’ll tear when you stress them. Now, though, there’s no process to rebuild them. Your eyes dry out, wounds never heal, it’s a pretty terrible way to go, actually.

And here’s the worst part… Once all your muscles are atrophied and you can’t even move your tongue or your eyes… It’s still very much possible that you might be conscious in there. Among some of the first cases, scientists studying them said that the people remained cognizant and responded to stimuli up to the point where they literally couldn’t move anymore.

It’s a pretty scary thought, your body would essentially become your tomb. Most who contract the disease set their affairs in order and then elect to be cremated… Of course, there’s no evidence that that would work either. Victims have been beheaded and both their bodies and heads were kept under their control. Brains have been destroyed as have hearts, but it doesn’t seem that either of those are necessary for this “unlife.”

That raises the question, then; if burning you may not kill you, what happens to your consciousness when there’s no body left?