Dead. Very definitely dead. She had been injected with enough phenobarbital to have wiped out the dinosaurs, so Christa Pike was clearly dead. Yet now she had woken in a hell in which Donald Trump has allied with Vladimir Putin against Ukraine, Elon Musk was backing them, the US Secretary of War Peter Hegseth was going to televise an execution live, possibly getting a bigger audience than the final episode of Friends, while China launched a hypersonic air-launched antishipping missile that could destroy the most powerful carriers in the US Navy, and in little old Ireland the Irish Army has effectively banned soldiers from using the term “illegal immigrant”.
Except this is not hell but the post-execution reality to which Pike woke from her non-fatal fatal coma, with presumably far worse to come. True, since then, Trump has emerged from his own pre-death coma to announce that there will be no publicly-viewed execution of the Texan Islamist (in itself, a concept as bizarre as a lesbian stallion.) But maybe there will still be a pay-to-view, and possibly an auction to join the firing squad: the best of all possible worlds!