“When there’s no more room in hell, then the dead will walk the earth”
Sage advice, a warning to live proper lives, or face the wrath of hell and the undead. So one’s soul does not return to the land of the living to feast upon them. However, what happens, and the time will come soon, when there’s no more room on earth?
People are overpopulating the planet; plausible sustainability is becoming a larger issue every day as more humans are being born than are dying. That is simply viewed as progress, though. Population growth means that humanity isn’t dying off, we’re thriving.
In this possible world, however, capacity has been reached and surpassed. The core of the story though, begins where we end, with death. It all started logically, you create ashes of your loved ones; spread them where they may have enjoyed in life, perhaps a lovely spot on the mantle, no burial plot. Then, diamonds: wear your loved ones in small pieces of jewelry. Even in your world, this is possible; the cremated carbon remains of your loved ones are subjected to great pressure and heat, and the entire process, from cremation to finished stone takes up to nine months. In this other possible world, as in all things, given enough time, an extrapolated logic set in. The bodies of people who died were no longer venerated, they simply became no longer practical or cost efficient, taking up too much valued real-estate; the dead outnumbered the living.
It began with the evisceration of graves en masse, destroying all those who died, creating new homes for those still alive. Eventually, death was barely even taken seriously anymore, and life was enjoyed much more, death became an afterthought to the joys that life could bring: what happened, happened because of fate, out of our hands, impossible to control. Live fast, die young. Eventually, people began to celebrate death. Feasts and celebrations of the dead took on new meaning. We became our own comestible, a rare delicacy served only on special occasions. Some took great pride in living gluttonous lives to be a delectable feast, to be able to have large celebrations, able to feed large amounts of the friends that they had accumulated and acquired in life in one final dinner in their honor.
There were no true repercussions, and for those of you wondering, there were no dead to walk the earth for revenge. The only time the dead rose was when the living over indulged upon their corpse, or had indigestion. Don’t you see what this world has become, when the living feast off the dead? When there’s no more room on earth, then the living will walk in hell, and the dead won’t have a prayer, because it’s the logic of the living.
