"Don't take it too hard. You're joining the ranks of everyone here in that."

Another mystery within a mystery, within an ongoing chess game, where the game master had all but given up appearing, without taking the ants out of the farm or the farm off the table, or kept new ones from crawling in. "You're not dying." It takes a flash bright second of pause before he realizes how dour and steel still that had sounded. "Not that that's a bad thing."

Except it is. It very much is. Humans were not supposed to live past their deaths.

"Except that you should be. Your body is stuck in a very stable state of constant near total deterioration without deteriorating."

"You should be dead already," tastes too close to You died already. It didn't take this long then. "But it's keeping you in stasis."
Not the bed. The loop around all of the ship. Q's whatever he wanted to call it. A million words strung together on a child's toy.