Something Bad And Irreversible

It was generally agreed, without anyone needing to say it, that the citizens of Brighthaven Orbital were, by and large, absolutely fine. That is to say: they were safe, wealthy, well-fed, sexed, simmed, and surround-sound-streamed into oblivion.

Which is precisely why Jared McKee wanted someone, anyone, to be exploded.

He stomped down the Bonsai District, his coat flared out behind him in the universal language of male dissatisfaction. His hands were in his pockets, but only so he wouldn’t punch a serenity sculpture. His face had the expression of someone trying to hold in a scream and a smirk at the same time.

“I wish,” he muttered, then louder, “I wish someone would just die.”

Jared kept walking.

He had no job, no prescribed role, no major traumas. He had been raised in a well-supported creche, received an expansive arts education, and been offered dozens of meaningful vocations. He declined all of them. He wasn’t depressed. He simply wanted something to happen. Something bad and irreversible.

He spent most days walking the Orbital’s older sectors, places less frequently updated, where the lighting had a nostalgic flicker and the architecture still retained corners. It was easier to imagine a crime happening in places with corners.

But today, Jared decided to visit a museum he liked. Officially, it was called The Brighthaven Orbital Mortality Archive and Experiential Hall, but everyone just called it “the death museum.” It had been built during the brief wave of mortality nostalgia that swept through society right after immortality drives went mainstream.

The most notable display was tucked away in its own quiet alcove. A single sleep pod. Standard-issue beige. It looked like it should be in a storage closet, not a museum.

The plaque read: 

KARL J. NORTON, Age 207 

Last person to die not by choice. 

Died mid-update.

Jared walked past the rest of the exhibits, then the gift shop. He bought two urn-shaped shot glasses and a plush bacteriophage named “Morty.” He already had one, but they were cute.

He felt it then — not an idea exactly, more like a permission unlocking in the back of his mind.

You can just do things, he spoke in his head. That was something his creche instructor used to say to him. He repeated it again: You can just do things.

A low growl cut through his reverie.

Someone had parked an anti-grav racer in a zone explicitly designated for quiet contemplation on the grounds of the museum. The engine was still running. Loudly.

This wasn’t standard-issue. It wasn’t even legal. The surface was coated in reflective polymers banned by all known surveillance algorithms. The emissions signature suggested it had never passed a regulation check and wouldn't start now.

A woman slid off the saddle with the casual grace of someone who could ignore gravity if she felt like it. Her boots hit the ground like a challenge. She wore a big, bright red fur coat and athletic joggers. There was zero irony in her posture.

She stared at Jared. “You look like a man who wants to do something irreversible,” she said.

Jared blinked. “I was going to murder someone.”

“Murder me?” she said, eyes wide.

A long pause.

“I mean,” Jared said, “if you're offering.”

“God yes,” she replied. “I’ve been bored for six months!”

Jared stared. “You’re serious?”

“Deadly.”

Jared squinted at her like she might be joking.

“So, how do you want to go?” he asked. “Pushed off something tall? Slipped something toxic in a cocktail? Classic drowning in the public baths?”

She gave him a look of practiced disdain. “Please. I want to die with at least a little dignity.”

“You mean like... slow?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I mean spectacular. If there’s not at least one minor interplanetary scandal afterward, it’s not worth the bother.”

Jared considered this, then tried again. “Shot into the sun?”

“Too symbolic.”

“Crushed by a rogue satellite?”

“Too random.”

“Died mid-catwalk when her smart heels decided the quickest route to ‘elegant exit’ was straight through an industrial fan?”

She paused. “Oh god, that would be embarrassing.”

“Something erotic, maybe?”

“Erotic-adjacent,” she clarified. “But tasteful. Like a tasteful explosion. The kind they screen in art galleries with a long pause after.”

“I see,” Jared said gravely. “You’re not easy to please.”

“I come from money.”

“You don’t say.”

She offered her hand with the air of someone bestowing a minor knighthood.

“Erika Anderson. Civil disobedient."

He took it and bowed. “Jared McKee. Extremely unemployed.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Come on.”

Jared followed.

…

Inside her residence, the temperature adjusted three degrees without being told. The walls rippled to show a curated starlight display.

Jared stood there, not touching anything.

“Is your father an admiral?” he asked.

She threw her coat straight onto the floor, where it quickly disappeared.

“He founded the algorithm that profiles everyone’s optimal retirement fantasy. Built it while he was drunk. Still collects royalties.”

Jared raised an eyebrow. “What’s yours?”

“I don’t have one,” she said cheerfully. “I failed the compatibility scan. They said I was fundamentally incompatible with peace.”

She gestured for him to sit. The couch was so soft it gave him vertigo. It recalibrated around his posture like a therapy animal.

“So,” she said, grabbing a stylus, “we have to design a death that is memorable, slightly pornographic but not crass, and definitively unreplicable.”

“Right,” Jared nodded. “A sort of haute couture death.”

“Exactly!” she beamed. “And fortunately, we’re under no obligation to get it right on the first try.”

She gestured toward a seamless black panel on the wall. “That’s the media room. Neural-adaptive. Variable-entropy simulations. We can prototype anything. Emotional escalation included.”

Jared raised an eyebrow. “You run death sims in your spare time?”

“I log them under ‘creative praxis,’” she said. “My productivity tracker gets confused and starts sending me congratulations. Wait—have you ever died in sim?” Erika asked.

He paused. “No,” he admitted, embarrassed. “I guess I’ve only ever imagined other people dying.”

She gave him a shrug. “We’ll do a rehearsal run after dinner. Double suicide by firearm. Low stakes. Just enough to get in the mood.”

…

Erika had a rule: no death scenario could be repeated more than once. If you had to recycle a gruesome demise, you weren’t thinking hard enough.

So they didn’t.

They ran simulations daily—sometimes twice a day when the ideas got really good (or really stupid).

Erika died in a luxury elevator explosion that turned her body into a Jackson Pollock on the crystal walls. She died falling through the atmosphere wearing a translucent wingsuit and a pearl thong. She died mid-orgasm, killed by a virus in her stolen mech that overstimulated her to death as she crashed through a cathedral.

Jared played the assassin, the lover, the betrayed ally. Sometimes all three.

They tweaked the settings obsessively. Tension curves. Lubrication coefficients. Witness reactions. At one point, Erika brought in a historical linguist to write her final words in a dead dialect of pre-Fall Earth Aramaic.

After a while, Jared stopped keeping track of how many times he’d killed her.

Because the truth was: he didn’t want to anymore.

She talked a lot between runs. Usually while topless, often while eating something unspeakably expensive with her fingers. Her mind moved like it was skipping between timelines, tracing tangents he hadn’t caught up to yet.

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” she said once, licking saffron cream from her knuckle, “to stage an assassination in a museum where every sculpture is a jealous surveillance AI in love with the target?”

“That’s… oddly specific.”

“I saw it in a dream. Or an ad. Hard to tell.”

She spoke like someone always performing for a crowd that didn’t exist yet. He found it exhausting. And fascinating. And increasingly irresistible.

The change came slowly. A longer pause before confirming the death protocol. A softness in his voice when he asked how she wanted to die next.

The first time they kissed, it wasn’t even during a sim. They were on the balcony. “Real” sky projected above them. She was laughing at something he said about a failed drowning attempt, and then suddenly she was on his lap, and he was grabbing her like he meant it.

The next morning, she asked if he wanted to try a death that involved mutual detonation via simultaneous orgasm.

“Hypothetically,” Jared said, “what if we didn’t detonate?”

Erika stared at him.

“Wait… why would you say that?”

Jared shifted in his seat. “I just don’t think everything has to be a dramatic death all the time.”

There was a silence. 

“You don’t get it,” she said, blinking like she was trying to clear a fog that had been him. “I thought you did, but you don’t.”

“I’m not—”

“No,” she cut in. “You’re actually happy with this life. With all of this.” She gestured around the room like it was covered in filth. “You’re fine being fine. What the fuck, Jared.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You think this is life?” she asked, pacing. “This curated, padded, happiness-maxxed prison? Every single thing I feel has been anticipated. Optimized. If I start crying, a soft voice offers a playlist. If I get horny, the lighting shifts and my social feed coughs up three algorithmically compatible lovers. I can’t even feel bad without the system trying to fix me.”

Jared leaned against the wall. “You seem to be doing a fine job feeling bad now…”

She stopped pacing. Turned.

“Don’t,” she said, eyes narrowing. “Don’t make this cute.”

He held up his hands, mock-surrender, but she was already shouting.

“You ever scream into a sound-dampened room, Jared? You ever try to break something and realize there’s nothing breakable left? Everything’s been idiot-proofed. Bubble-wrapped. Made safe for infinite pleasure. No sharp corners. No real stakes. No room to want anything that matters.”

She looked at him like he might finally understand. Like maybe he’d say something that would change everything.

He didn’t.

So she turned away, muttering to herself, and that’s when it hit him. Not all at once. Not cleanly. Just… a drop. Then a flood.

He wasn’t like her. He was compatible with peace, as long as it took some work. And in that terrible, silent realization, Jared smiled.

He’d done it.

Something bad and irreversible had happened.

He’d caught feelings.

And she was—fundamentally, gloriously—insane.She wanted to die. Over and over again. For fun. For art. For the sheer choreography of it.

And he?

He didn’t.

Oh god, it was awful!

He liked her. He couldn’t have her. It would never work. And he’d have to live with that.

He left. Walked fast. Didn’t look back.

By the time he reached the Bonsai District, he was nearly skipping.

The mist hung low in the air, cool and fragrant, curling around the stone paths like it had nowhere better to be. The serenity sculptures stood among the bonsai trees, lit up all soft and wise like they knew something.

Jared was so stupidly happy he could’ve kissed one. Like, full-on grabbed its smug little stone face and made out with it in the name of being alive.

He was alive. Painfully. Inconveniently. Stupidly. Alive.

He had to get over her. He would get over her.

It was impossible, and hopeless, and deeply uncomfortable.

Perfect.

There would be tension now. Days that hurt. Thoughts that circled. He would lose sleep. He would mess up. He would grow.

He passed a reflective pool and waved at his dumb, smiling face.

“Something bad has happened,” he whispered, almost gleeful. “And the trouble is only beginning.”

Then he threw his arms out to the synthetic sky, and kept walking.

Like a man with a future.