Head

Eyes open.

Phil, who's head was frozen in a cryogenic test tube of some sort, has now awakened to a large man wearing a custodial uniform looking straight at him. This is an unsettling sight to go along with the terrifying realization that there is no body below his head. Phil begins to panic and wants to vomit in fear, but nothing comes up. His eyes look down, up, all around, then rest back on the large man who says, "WELCOME TO HELL MY FRIEND!"

A blip. A nightmare. This can't be reality. Of all the things this could be this CANNOT be reality.

But it is.

The last thing before this horrible sight that Phil could recall was his family by his bed where he was in the middle of dying. Years of success and renown in some currently inconsequential field of scientific study had afford him the option of having his head cryogenically frozen. The allure of the future was such a burning desire of his that he jumped at the chance. He knew, lying there on the cusp of eternity, that he would awake one day to find a fantastic new world.

Now, he was staring at a large man laughing and rocking his head back in forth in a carefree motion. It was inconceivably frightening. If he still had a heart it would have exploded by now.

"You're the only one that made it!" the large man said. "I thought it would be important for someone to see this with me." He was drunk, and wearing a uniform.

Phil tried to speak but could not. Reality had turned out to be a roaring hell beast who had begun to pull him down into an unimaginable hell. Phil, unable to communicate in any other way, desperately started blinking in morse code in the off chance that the large man would understand him.

The large man didn't.

"It won't be long now, friend. The bombers are on their way. The fleet has left us and the other poor souls on the surface of this… dead fucking planet… it's getting scrapped." The large man sat down with Phil's head jar tucked under his arm. Phil tried to scream. "I can't believe it came to this. Just this morning everything was fine. It was my day off, I got to sleep in. I didn't even need to come to work but I left my giga-tray here and fuck me if I can ever go a day without cyber cheese. Can you believe they made this shit alcoholic? Well, tricks your brain into thinkin it's drunk, still a world class app that cyber cheese."

Phil shut his eyes so hard he hoped they would burst in his head and he would bleed to death. But then, where was the blood coming from now? Damn this miracle of technology that was keeping his head alive, damn it to a hell worse than the one he is cemented into.

"Hell if we would've put as much effort into the important shit as we did into that cyber cheese and downloadable mental states and the goddamn sex ray… maybe we wouldn't be 5 minutes away from being carpet bombed by a fleet of planet nuking space destroyers."

Phil attempted to bite off his own tongue.