Religion & Death in Rosella Tolfree’s World

day of the dead costume, by Pexels, Source pixabay, (Processed through Adobe Spark)

Death Equals Meat

Only The Emotional Bury The Dead

Rumors Say The Rich Are Eating Corpse Meat

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On March 29, 2021, Gallup reported that church membership in 2020 fell below 50% for U.S. adults.

By the Second Age of Humanity, this decline continued until it hovered around 15 to 20%. This was despite years of attempts to lure generations back into the pews.

With the changes in the 501(c)3 laws allowing religions to actively participate in the political process in the U.S., we see the decline in religious membership stabilize to it's 15 to 20% level.

The View on Death

Those following religious beliefs were given a sense of immortality rooted in an afterlife. Usually, the religion or belief attached the outcome of this afterlife to a set of morals.

For Rosella, she professes no religious belief. She sees the universe, like many, in the light of the standard scientific model of the time, and socially accepted ethics.

In Rosella’s line of work, she’s seen death. Her world view gives her a concept of death that when you die nothing happens except the body decays as a piece of meat.

Burial of the Dead

Each religious community had its own form of burial ritual common to their faith. This even includes those faith groups who see the androids as living, with some burying the “dead” androids in coffins in cemeteries. It would not be uncommon for Pattyroller agents, working for the leasing groups, to be seen late at night digging up these “dead” androids to recover the leased property.

Rosella loved her father so much that she wanted to give him a burial. She wasn’t able due circumstances of her being in the Ranger Marshals, and the speed at which the medical examiner processed her father’s body. This desire for a burial happens with individuals who are strongly attached to their loved ones.

Even with cemeteries present, there are many who don’t even bother and walk away from their loved ones. Leaving them for the state to dispose of their body. This may seem incomprehensible, but a cultural belief of the dead body has no meaning and is no longer your loved one has become a norm. The view held is your loved one is only your loved one while alive. But if dead, they are no longer who they were. They’ve become meat.

This view of death being nothing more than bodies becoming decaying meat has resulted in people pursuing ways to avoid this end. This has translated into pushing genetics into causing humans to living longer, curing diseases, or building technologies to avoid certain environmental issues.

In the parts of society where death is more of a daily reality, these people still hold the general view that death results in a person is only a piece of meat. As mentioned with Rosella, if a person has an emotional attachment to the individual, only then will they try to seek a burial ritual.

Cannibalism of the Dead

Since the Great Melt and losing large meat animal husbandry, fresh meat supplies have dwindled. On outlier Social Media Net shows there are stories that the rich have used fresh corpses as sources of meat. These stories are nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors and hearsay. The reality is closer to the fact the rich can afford 3-D printed steaks, and other similar cuts of meat. From sources grown in orbital stations dedicated to supplying food to Mars.

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Note To The Readers- The term Pattyroller is not to glorify this job. Or make it akin to Decker in PKD’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep“. And my use of it is not equal to that of the horrible brutalities inflicted upon those who these “bounty hunters” retrieved in the past (see below). It is to bring to light a historical word in a similar context to allow the reader to explore the true meaning. Androids are nothing more than property in Rosella’s world. Property that has emotions and can think, but is not alive by human standards. Androids are not even a close analog to a human slave, except in the sense of being property. Like a car or a house. Androids are the essence of how people saw those known as slaves. Not fully human, despite whatever legal document said of them. Something to ponder as we move forward technologically.

Pattyrollers- In the early days of android leasing, there were no Pattyrollers. Only your standard repo-men working for leasing agents. It wasn’t until androids had Emo-Ware installed did the Pattyroller come into existence. The problem was androids with Emo-Ware had a tendency to walk away from their work. The phrase Pattyroller resurfaced in the American lexicon during the Second Age of Humanity because of the level of cruelty these men used (and they were mostly men, typically unfit for mining on Mars). The word’s ​origin comes from a black slave descendent term used for the slave patrols, groups of licensed men who brutally hunted down escaped slaves. The name stuck despite its original meaning and became incorporated in many legal documents. Many states granting these men a host of rights, such as the ability to kill any person standing in their way to recover a bounty. Socially, many considered Pattyrollers scum and maladjusted.