For Théodore Ostrom, a physicist researching dark matter at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory, becoming posthuman both evokes terror and excites pleasure.

The terror is easy to understand. The days of the human may be numbered.

Following the return to his Beijing apartment during a global speciation event, Théodore Ostrom receives a call from an automated legal service, informing him that his family has died in a motor vehicle accident.

What about the pleasure? The exhilarating prospect of getting out of the old limits of human life, its uncertainty, its impermanence, and opening up new ways of being other-than-human.

In the hours leading up to his family's virtual funeral, Théodore Ostrom speculates over his complicated relationship with (0), who has already transcended without him. Having no choice but to decide whether to become posthuman or to remain human, he writes Metapatterning for Disconnection, a deracinated monologue that embraces extinction in an attempt to achieve a final, if not total, catharsis from the human condition.

BRANDON TEIGLAND is a Canadian speculative fiction writer largely concerned with pioneering the posthuman as a literary phenomenon, inviting the reader to construct significance out of ruptures, juxtapositions, and implied links.