tell them the great god Pan is dead | Glowfic Constellation

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Tetratopia, all in all, is a pretty good place to live. The median Tetratopian would probably disagree with the claim that it's perfect, but they would, reluctantly, agree that it's at least better than the ancestral environment. They have a global supply chain network, free public services, and professional healthcare services. Tetratopians care about each other, after all. Tetratopians don't want each other to die.

But there are some health issues that are both too rare and too expensive (both in terms of finances, and in terms of personal inconvenience) to monitor and prevent. Every solar-rotation, about 6 in every 100,000 Tetratopians have a ruptured brain aneurysm. Of these, about 80% will survive (although they will probably suffer some degree of permanent brain damage). Even if you don't, Modernity will find and cryopreserve you.

But if, for example, you happen to live alone, and you don't wear one of the standard non-intrusive heartbeat monitors meant to prevent exactly this kind of situation, and either don't have friends who would worry if you suddenly vanished from the textnets inexplicably, or you signal a strong disendorsement of your friends acting on such a worry, and one day, while you were sleeping, a brain aneurysm that had gradually developed, unnoticed, over the past few years, ruptured, well.

You might not be found until it's too late.

But of course, that's very unlikely to happen. Convenience is great and a 0.7/100,000 chance of death is so little.

(and 288 heartbeats later, his soul was lost).

Pezef liked the wilderness. Very far way from any city, there was a total quietude and the stars were beautiful; here, in the middle of the night when he'd switched all his lights off, he could just about see the arc of the denser part of the local galaxy stretching across the sky and the bright points of the satellite constellations speeding across the sky. He thought that a lot of other people would like the wilderness, too, but being too far from the agglomeration of cities was a cost that rarely made it worth it for any nontrivial amount of time for the kind of person who does want to generalised check textnet daily.

As such, Pezef's previous subjective experience was that of falling asleep somewhere hot and dry and far from Modernity after stargazing for a while and setting up his tent. It wouldn't be surprising at all if he was incommunicado for this.