Field note. The tribe assembles to look at one who has stopped.
The subject lies horizontal in a padded box, a resting posture the living never adopt, and the box is expensive, though the occupant can no longer register expense. This is the first anomaly. Resources are spent lavishly at the exact moment they cannot be perceived by their recipient.
The living arrive in dark coverings. They lower their voices, though the subject is beyond hearing. They line up to approach the box and speak to it. The box does not answer. They appear to know the box will not answer. They speak anyway, some at length, and fluid leaks from their optical organs while they do so. Preliminary hypothesis: acute hydraulic malfunction, contagious, spreading through the room in waves.
I observed a smaller human patting the shoulder of a larger one, repeatedly, to no functional effect. I observed food being carried in afterward, and consumed near the box, as though refueling. I observed one human laugh, then cover the mouth, embarrassed, as if laughter were a leak of the wrong kind.
Data does not resolve. The subject cannot be helped. The gathering changes nothing about the subject's condition. And yet they came from great distances, took leave from their labor-warehouses, pressed their bodies close together in a room to stand near a thing that will never know they stood there.
Revised hypothesis. The ceremony was never addressed to the one in the box.
They are practicing. Each of them is rehearsing the day they, too, become horizontal, and confirming, by the crowded room, that when their own optical fluid runs, someone will arrive to leak beside them. It is not for the dead. It is a promise the living make to each other, in the only language that survives them.