The man in the sand and grey mud had been dead and buried for the last two hours. The mourners had cried a thousand tears, for a man they did not know and walked away after the job was done. The rain continued and the skies were darker than the darkest night.
The tombstones were grey, broken and some were so old that the inscriptions had been erased by the elements and over several decades that slipped into centuries. There were people buried in that old graveyard, that had descendants now living all over the world. While some were resting there in the dirt, being the last of their bloodlines.
John Drum was one of those men, who never married, after a line of affairs and women who wanted to marry him for his money. He was after all the richest man in the world, as he had found a cure for that most important enigma on earth. Men and women had been battling to find a solution for centuries.
John was well and truly dead, no muscle moved or nerve twitched in his body. There was no blood flow in or out of the ventricles of his heart. His brain was dead as well, there was not a sign of an electrical impulse in both hemispheres.
The mound of dirt that was freshly laid covering the empty pit that was filled with the large polished brown wood coffin was now silent. The mourners had all gone. The funeral preparations were done to the best possible standards. The wealthy and thorough John Drum had made all the arrangements long before his physical body decided to stop working.
John Drum was a good man, which was impossible in a world where there were so many evil men and women, so many of them who wore that haunted expression of deceit, envy, and hatred. John Drum was an honest, philanthropic man and although he always had an emotionless expression on his face, he did care about the future of the world.
This honest and good man was the last of his bloodline, there would never be another of his line to walk the earth. Although he knew that the deadly cancer would destroy his body, he did not want to fight his mortality. Being a very rich man he could have found alternative solutions to extend his mortal life. Yet, he knew he had played his part. He knew that there were three things he needed to do.
The three wishes of this good man, that he wrote in his last will, were that he would donate a large portion of his money to charity, the second was that everyone should have a family, even if they were employed, with his money, to be present for every single person in the world and the third wish that he had implemented was that his consciousness would be uploaded to the web so that he could life forever in cyberspace.
Centuries later, when the world no longer existed in space, after a Big Bang that destroyed the planet forever, the cyber-consciousness of the good man John Drum, was left to wander the realm of space, galaxies and planets, lost and lonely for eternity. This was the reward and the legacy of the good and honest man John Drum. He would have company, when he sat at the long table of the Creator, to witness the creation of a new humanity, a billion years into the future.