Imagine a Procession

Imagine a procession that begins at an imposing gateway built to resist a bomb, or simply a ghost of a gate built that dramatically. Either way, the entry will be absolute secured by physical form and security personnel, designated by the government serving its role as protector. To lift the experience from forbidden to sacred, the gateway will have a giant harp whose strings are softly strummed by the wind. The gate sways but never opens in one place, to aid laying out the rest of the sequence, without introducing too many variables. Like a Lego Model, modules will present choices to make by clients well ahead of their death. In signed contracts with succinct specifications, each decision clients make will serve to direct the entire procession. Upon entry into the environment encompassed by Yucca Mountain as a secured site, a promenade will greet visitors, who of course, will not be IN the landscape physically, but in the experience being simulated and delivered by all current broadband, high-speed transmission technologies,
Eyes will be drawn ahead from the entry to a large labyrinth sculpted into the landscape with very shallow shovel scoops done by remote controlled robots, directed by local artists to be hired as project partners, in serial internships that lead to apprenticeships that are led by talent artists, able to also teach, so each generation will be ready to sustain the site’s on-going artistry. In the center of the shallow maze for surface water retention and recharge of the subterranean aquifer (no matter how minimal), will be a funeral pyre. Magnificent enough to light up the desert, an eternal torch (simulation that may eventually be realized when the site is detoxified in the centuries ahead) will signify the spirit that animates flesh, and exits the dead.
A choir can come up from silence to hover over the entire procession, if chosen. Soundtracks can be added as wanted, such as Imagine Dragon’s “Radioactive” song, ACDC’s “Highway To Hell” and Don McLean’s “American Pie” as backing tracks to personalized narratives, pre-recorded by the client, or taken as a service to be provided by a friend, family members, or esteemed colleague. I might pick Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Wished I Was In Heaven Sitting Down.” Many may prefer Samuel Barber’s “Adagio For Strings” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” will likely be a popular choice, inexpensive to store and edit into personalized soundtracks, designed as surrogates to orthodox funeral services, in which preachers too often talk in generalizations about people they barely knew, with noses down to keep track of scripted praises. Messages can be wafted, recorded, and sent worldwide by skywriters scripting phrases voiced in personalized services, as final testaments that will fade into the ether. Pre-recorded memoirs can be aired like motion picture soundtracks in sync with each segment of the procession.
Ahead, framed by a shimmering candlelit path, will be the entry to THE TUNNEL. Stark as death itself, and every bit as eerie, the blankness of the slot in the Earth will stand in contrast to any sort of storybook ceremony. THE PORTAL TO THE TUNNEL will hint at a BLACK HOLE in THE EARTH. The remains that wind up on this site won’t be inside this hollow. It must remain pure to its first purpose — the safe storage of nuclear bomb test waste. This tunnel isn’t a womb for a monster or a tomb for a hero. It is an enigma, forever beyond comprehension. It takes on more meaning by being seen as kin to the Empty Cave where Christ was kept for three days. (Matthew 38) Human remains will remain on the living landscape, as it aches will manmade ills and cries out to us to heal its wounds. But from inside the mysterious hollow, the deepest low note imaginable will come from the Earth itself, as a simulation or actual recording of the vibrations from deep inside the roiling planet’s burning innards. The ground around the focal ceremonial site, in the physical, metaphysical, and virtual realms, will be the vast plain for human remains to rest in peace. Thus, what has given Christian religion its edge over others — the empty tomb — will here have its symbolic reference, making emptiness a priceless design element. With that concept, the huge investment in tunnel engineering already done, with much more in abeyance awaiting final decisions about site use, gain a reprieve by being repurposed from radioactive waste containment, to religious symbolism, which in the course of human history has been proven to be a far more important investment. With the real estate flip, previous infrastructure investments will be a bargain, in the long run.
Protected from stray winds and rogue tornadoes by banks of bamboos, pliable trees, and anything that can grow vertically on the environment’s perimeter, the ashes should be left to dissolve back into the neighboring minerals. Cryogenic options will not likely be available, unless a particularly picky client assigns some of their body parts to be frozen and others to be incinerated. We don’t know enough about “shelf life” to predict how this complicated option might mix with relatively simpler incineration options. To share experiences of favorite fragrances, clients can include scented items to be delivered completely separately to invitees, kept separate from on-site installations or simulations.
Every sequence of the entire procession will be open to client’s choices to co-design their own funeral. From the first stage when their remains are retrieved, decisions will be offered for inclusion or exclusion from the whole experience co-designed by customers, to be given to their loved ones and the curious to experience in their absence. Remains can be picked up at the local coroner, or a legal alternative, such as a home, hospice, elder care complex, etc. Handlers can be dressed in any religious accoutrements chosen or simple attire, from black Ninja outfits to angelic robes. Vehicles for transport can range from luxury limos to classic hearses to Winnebagos or anything else that clients choose to finance with us.
Costs for each purchase can be spread amongst groups who choose to operate similarly to micro-loan circles, with repayments covered by insurance programs that can also be custom tailored into the spectrum of services. Middle men will be minimized while options are maximized and costs are spread by those who choose to. Angel investors can even fund specific heroes or groups of people they choose to endorse by providing funding specifically designated, rather than pooled and then potentially diffused. Focused investments will be a feature of the co-designed funeral experience.
Drones and dirigibles will be available, by outsourced partnerships, arranged into the service. As transportation of remains gets near the site entry, which will be strictly guarded for public safety, another sequence of experiences can be specific by each client, applying options akin to a buffet menu in a large casino cafeteria “like the good old days” feasts for families, friends, and lovers. Companies like Google and Meta may choose to enter partnerships for finding anything from one person’s procession to a whole company, in serial burials, even a region where they stake their sense of identities, if they so choose. Government taxes can be expected to trickle down and thus be augmented by private sector and philanthropic non-profit foundations in order to create a beautiful passage experience, as diverse competing and contrary political demands on finite funds will only increase in the decades ahead for all the services that the public sector provides.
To liberate design options, the government’s role in the life of the whole project should probably be focused on land ownership as its contribution, plus routine protective services ranging from minimal policing to certified testing of safe public uses to the physical site. Augmenting the tangible landscape will be a whole array of virtual experiences designed to hover in cyberspace and be produced as requested through data banks, similar to artificial intelligence, serving as “institutional memory” to draw from in each case. Thus, virtualized site ceremonies can be staged for internet delivery to anywhere outside the immediate environment. Simulated segments can be strung together like storyboard elements are in movie making studios. Clients will get to direct their own final stories to be left as their representatives amongst the living left behind.
If a person prefers Buddhism, their remains can be picked up by monks in robes and transported to the site by a small caravan of donkey wagons or a single wagon can be transported by any classic car a client might chose to represent them, symbolically, perhaps in reference to the dream cars of their youth. Following the theme of a Buddhist experience, clients might choose to have demon encounters simulated in their wake, to give a glimpse of life is too short to not be gratefully embraced. Christians, Hindus, Shoshones, and all humans infused with animating intelligence will probably feel the same way, in the end.
This site is one of many and whatever we do here can influence the other 440 nuclear power plants located in 30 countries that generate over a tenth of the world’s electrical energy, with more predicted, in spite of the dangers inherent in nuclear waste. Radioactive debris needs to be stored in deep subterranean geological repositories to decay over time that spans tens of thousands of years, assuming that salt, rock or clay create a barrier that perpetually insulates the waste. However, leakage is likely if waste is not properly packaged or stored, allowing hidden contamination of nearby water sources, wildlife, and people in the vicinity, as hapless victims never given an opportunity to voice consent or dissent. Earthquakes can break geological insulation to release nightmarish consequences of natural tectonics. Foreign enemy missile strikes on storage sites could amplify atomic bombing to new heights in future wars. Internal cells of malevolent agents also have ample targets to strike in the event of a well constructed insurrection. Danger is never over.