remake/remodel

dead souls

Last night I dreamt a terrible dream of a future in which human cloning worked exactly as in science fiction and the popular imagination, meaning that the creation of fully realized adult duplicates of the dead was practical, almost even commonplace. In one popular application of this technology, replicas of dead celebrities were grown to maturity in frothy coffin-shaped vats, then revived and forced to spend a month absorbing entertainment magazines and cable television before spending the rest of their unnatural lives performing as bonded entertainers.

In the dream, I looked forward to a Joy Division summer U.S. tour every year — refined to a science, marketing of the future had left high schools and shopping malls lousy with black, oversized Joy Division and Nirvana t-shirts — but the tour would always be cancelled at the last moment. This of course had quickly reached the point of yearly ritual, and every May, the same mock-anguished teens lit candles in mourning before hanging themselves. I thought about trying it, but I had never quite adjusted to the future, and anyway, suicide was still expensive.