This Is the End

by Eric Pollarine

“I’ve decided to freeze myself,” I say, and a very literal hush falls over the crowd, even the protestors have shut up at this point.

  Someone starts laughing. I don’t know who it is exactly or else I would have called them out on it personally, so I look out at the crowd and smile.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t find any of this funny. This isn’t a joke; I’m going to freeze myself until they find a cure.” People stop laughing. Instantly fingers move across touchscreens. I can feel the zoom lenses coming in on my face like planes on King Kong, but I’m the emperor, I have the last laugh.

  “You can’t be serious?” asks one of the microbloggers, who I absolutely know for a fact wasn’t shit until my app’s advertising feature catapulted them into the big time.

  “No, I’m very serious about all of this. I’m going to freeze myself until they find a cure, and then, when you’re either all too old or all too dead to report on it, I’m going to wake up and live out the rest of my filthy rich life.”

  I look right into the microblogger’s face and smile. I want him to know he may have a couple million, but I have nearly half a trillion in capital, liquid-fucking-capital, to do whatever I want with.

  “What about your company?” asks one of the manicured plastic surgery beauties from Fox News.

  “Look, everything will continue on. We have more than enough money to continue to destroy your brains with our apps for years to come,” I say. People chuckle.

  Then I start hitting them with big fucking atom bombs of truth. This was the plan all along. Okay, not all along, but at least since I found out I have cancer. I let the cigarette drop and grind it into the composite concrete steps that run under the small platform the podium is set up on.

  “In fact, we’re working with both the DHS and NSA on a project right now that will totally compromise the intelligence of generations to come.”

  I smile again and then let my face go serious. They smile back, but then start to get it. I’m not joking. I’m not having a laugh with them; I’m laughing at them.

  “Are you being serious?” asks someone else from the megacorporations. I look right over to the Prison Planet.com guys.

  “Yes, Alex Jones and his staff had it mostly right. I couldn’t be more serious. Though, to tell you the truth, Alex works for the CIA as well. I mean, hasn’t anyone wondered why he’s still on the air if he’s exposing real secrets?”

  The crowd across the street goes wild with venomous joy, some of them even applaud. The journalists representing Prison Planet.com aren’t having fun anymore.

  Everyone else begins to yell. It’s a feeding frenzy of questions. My security guys become restless. A cop puts another frail-looking student, this one appears to be a man or boy or whatever, that was attempting to reach our side of the road into the pavement.

  “He was right about my corporation working with the two agencies; he was half-right about the facial recognition and biometric scanning software that allows you to tag your ‘friends,’ and almost right about my whole company being propped up by the government.”

  Fingers are moving at speeds that are probably not supposed to be possible for jointed appendages. Someone yells my name and I look over and point.

  “Why should we believe any of this?” they ask.

  I let that one sit for a minute. And then, when I’m ready, I smile and flash the five thousand buck beauties at them and say, “Because…I’m fucking dying.”

  * * *

  The news conference lasts another hour and fifteen minutes. It’s physically exhausting, but I let it all out. I answer questions about why I’m freezing myself: “Because I can.”

  Why am I coming out now about everything? “Why the fuck not; what are they going to do to me? I’m already dying.”

  What do they think caused it? I hold up the next cigarette in my seemingly never-ending supply and then say, “Next.”

  Finally, after all the stupid questions, the silly, unimportant issues like what about my investors—“I bought them out and will be the sole owner of the company, even in suspended animation”—someone asks about my wife.

  I look out into the faces of the crowd and say, “I haven’t figured that one out yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to either kill her or divorce her.”

  The protestors across the street have all been let out of the free speech zone; the crowd has nearly tripled. Even the cops have slack jaws and are listening to me go on and on about the truth. The way the world really works. The way business is run: the back room deals, the underhanded way that everything is pushing us towards a total takeover of our lives by megacorporations, about how individuality is a lie, how being unique is really a way to market products to sub-niche groups. The revolution wasn’t televised, it was advertised, branded, bought and sold, to you, for you, by you. And you just eat it up.

  After I’ve said my piece, after I answer the last few questions, I’ve had enough of their glass-eyed looks and yapping maws to end it, plus I have things to do and money to spend before I freeze myself.

  So I wave, shoot the bird out to everyone and say, “Thanks, folks. Fuck you.”

  I turn to leave. My security guards make a tight circle around me. Big dudes who have more technology, testosterone and weaponry than should legally be allowed fold in around me like a wall of meat and we move back into the lobby of the hospital. The sun is low in sky and my chariot awaits; I’m flying out to my office on a private helicopter.

  We make our way into the elevator and up to the landing pad on top of the hospital that’s normally reserved for life flight choppers. My black bird is there waiting for me. The blades are spinning enough for me to bend over slightly. As we pull away I look down at the front of the hospital. The crowd is still there, standing like those Terracotta Warriors in China, silent and fragile, endless and broken.

  3.

  I check my email on the tablet while the chopper makes its decent towards the roof of my building. I want to see what the world is saying about my little truth sit-in. All the usual suspects have spun it to make it sound as if I’ve lost my fucking mind. The market has dipped a bit, especially in the tech sector, but the underlying news that I have more apps coming out has hedged any sort of short sells that might have happened due to my chat with the public. Alex Jones is adamantly denying that he works for the CIA. I look away and down towards the landing pad.

  I see two figures standing on top of the roof. One of whom is my lawyer, who I am happy to see—go figure. The other is my soon-to-be ex-wife, who I am obviously not so happy to see.

  By now the video of the press conference has had enough time to go around the world three or four thousand times, but I knew this moment was coming. I’m not going to lie to you though; I was sort of hoping that I wouldn’t have to deal with it until right before I freeze myself. It’s a character trait I’ve always had, and it goes like this: as much as I like to make a shit, I don’t actually like having to deal with the smell of it.

  I need a cup of coffee and another cigarette. I also need to finalize a couple of things that shouldn’t take me more than a day or so. But seeing her standing there on the landing pad—her hair cut and colored the wrong way for her ugly, frown-lined face but the right way for whatever passes as fashionable—tells me that this is going to seriously suck big balls.

  I recognize the fact that announcing my intent to get a divorce publicly is a shitty thing to do. I get it, I know, blah-blah-blah. But in the spirit of being honest, I did only marry her for her dad’s money. Yes, I am a terrible person, one who probably deserves cancer. However she has never had to work in her life, never had to make decisions and sacrifices, never wanted for anything. Ever. So I think the half-billion dollar payout that’s sitting in her bank account, right about now, is enough to completely compensate her for the emotional damages I may have caused. Believe me; she’ll forgive me when she sees that. Also, I really fucking hate her.

  I lean back in my seat a little and hold my breath as we set down on the r
oof. The most dangerous times during a flight are at takeoffs and landings, and helicopters are pretty fucking scary things to do both of those in. I tell the lead security guy—James, I think his name is; I don’t really know because they rotate out so frequently, and also given the fact that I don’t care—that he should wait for my signal to escort her out of the building.

  He nods and whispers something into his watch that isn’t really a watch, and the rest of the security guards nod in unison. I’m not sure, but I think we built those watches, too.

  She’s waiting, trying to hold her whatever-the-fuck haircut in place. My lawyer stands off a little further from the landing pad; he looks like a robot, still and unwavering. Not even a single hair is misplaced by the downdraft from the chopper as it lands. He has a tablet like mine, they are both synched to each other and I update him with real time. Not fake real time, mind you, not three-, or five-, or even half-second delayed “real time.” I mean as-I-see-the-world-through-my-eyes, nanosecond real time. Let me put it to you this way: by the time I’ve typed it, he’s already read it. It usually makes dealing with issues such as this much easier.

  As the rotors die down I can almost hear her screaming at me and telling me to get out. The windows are completely blacked out so that you can’t see in, but she’s flown in the chopper before and knows exactly where I sit, exactly where to look me in the eye. I sigh and pull out my pack of smokes, check my count and realize that I have to grab another pack before I head out again. My hand moves towards the latch on the door, and I pull it down and then slide it open.

  She starts, “You’re divorcing me?”

  “No, I just said that because I thought it would be a lark, a laugh, something to do,” I sigh and then add, “Yes,” without looking at her. I’ve never threatened to hit anyone before, especially a woman, but if I look at her right now, I might have to break that streak.

  “Jesus Christ, Jeff, you just announced that you were going to divorce me at a press conference. What the hell were you thinking?”

  I continue to walk past her. I don’t have to look at her; our contract has been fulfilled and we’re through. I pull out the tablet and continue to walk towards my lawyer. She insists on following me. I look over at my lead security guy. He does the curt sort of nod thing and then motions for two of his men to take her by both arms.

  “What are you doing, Jeff?” she asks. Then she realizes what’s going on and begins to yell at the silverbacks in suits that follow me around. “Get your goddamn hands off me! Do you throwbacks even know who I am?”

  Neither of the two men says a word. They continue to usher her past me and my lawyer, towards the door.

  She starts kicking and screaming at me. “Fuck you, Jeff. I want a divorce so I can take this stupid company, that app and everything you own away from you.” She says all of this and more as the shaved apes parade her through the access door and into the stairwell.

  I wait until after she’s gone and then look up at my lawyer, Phil Goldstein, the only man I trust more than myself.

  Again, go figure.

  He’s still standing like a statue; every bit of him is composed. There’s not a single speck of dust, dirt, hair or residue from the rooftop on his black suit. His chin looks chiseled out of stone; his hair is cropped and pulled back into a tight and conservative pencil-straight side part. Seriously, if I didn’t know better I would have my doubts that he was human.

  “Phil, how are you?” I ask as we begin to walk towards the door. The sun is setting and there’s a chill running through the wind.

  I want to get a hot cup of coffee and I still have some business to attend to, final drafts and some minor coding to get to tonight.

  “Good, Jeff. I just finished depositing the settlement into Janet’s account, notified her lawyers and they have agreed to accept the terms of the divorce,” he says back as we move through the door and down a flight of steps that leads towards my office.

  My security detail moves in front of us through the door. Many of them are going home; the second shift will be clocking in and waiting for me outside my office when we get there. I don’t really like the security. I only keep them around because I feel bad that they’ll soon be out of work.

  I won’t need the entire detail when I’m frozen, maybe just one or two a day and one or two of them at night. So I figure that I can, at the very least, give them all the overtime they want until I go to sleep.

  Phil walks me through the door that leads to the hallway that leads to the only place I really feel at home, my office. God, I love my office. I will probably miss my office more than I miss anything else after I’ve been frozen. Okay, maybe not cigarettes, but it’ll be a very close second. I have even left explicit instructions that there’s to be absolutely no major changes in the layout of my office—just minor upgrades, mostly tech-based—while I’m asleep.

  I bought this building with the first hundred million I made, gutted it and had the top floor of the old factory and manufacturing space turned into my own private office. There’s close to 12,000 square feet of space in it. I love it; it’s tacky and ultra-modern and cold and devoid of any real color. It’s clean and simple, mine and mine alone. I have a secretary, but she’s just here from the traditional nine-to-five. I basically live here. There’s a fully functioning bathroom and kitchen, two loft bedrooms that you could conservatively fit three king-sized beds in and still have enough room to hold a dinner party for twelve, and, of course, spiral staircases—two huge, ugly, wrought iron spiral staircases that I rescued from a building that they were ripping down across town.

  The doors are completely bulletproof—not resistant, but bulletproof. The windows are floor-to-ceiling length and covered with a new solar membrane that helps power the array of computers, personal servers and appliances that are in the space. We manufacture the polymers and membranes, as well. They don’t make as much money as the apps do, but I get healthy research and development grants from the Pentagon for the designs so I really can’t complain.

  The doors to my office run biometric finger scan security protocols, so Phil and I stop discussing the weather long enough for me to scan in and get inside. After I hear the magnetic click of the locks, I stop in the doorway and take stock of the simplistic, awesome beauty. I take in the smell of coffee and old cigarettes and the thin white noise of electronics as they hum hundreds of thousands of processes per second.

  Okay, I admit it, I’m gonna miss my office more than my smokes. There’s a huge semi-circular desk that sits in the middle of the “official” business section of the space and I move to sit in the perfectly sized and expertly molded, ergonomically designed specifically for me executive chair sitting in the middle of the opening.

  I touch the screens that are mounted into the desk and my coffee maker in the kitchen begins to brew a fresh pot of coffee. I ask Phil if he wants a cup and he shakes his head no.

  “Down to business, then?” I ask him. He begins tapping his tablet and I watch as the other screens mounted around the desk console come to life and start scrolling pictures of the nearly completed cryogenic chamber that I’m going to be freezing myself in. I watch as men in white, freeze-dried space suits assemble the last few pieces.

  Tubes jut at angry angles from every side; there are huge tanks that I presume hold the stuff that they are going to use to freeze my body strapped to the wall next to the large glass coffin-like structure where my actual physical body will be placed. I won’t be in there just rotting from the inside either; I’ll be under going chemotherapy in there as well as some of the latest organic and chemical treatments that my money can buy. There’s also a failsafe, a just-in-case, built in to the life support systems. I mean, you can’t be too careful when you’re undergoing one of the first long-term freezes of the twenty-first century.

  I hear the coffee as it finishes brewing and move to get a cup. It’s one of the last cups of coffee I’ll have in a long, long time. It’s delicious.

  4.


  Phil and I discuss the status of my “Freeze chamber.” I opted for that description being used as “Cryotank” sounds a bit too Goth for my tastes, but really you could call it a high-tech meat freezer for all I care. As long as it works the way it’s supposed to and I come out alive in the end, I don’t give a shit. We talk about the company’s holdings, the future, the apps and developments that I want the company to focus on, and a couple of last minute changes to my “Living will”—all digital and pre-recorded versions.

  Then we move to some of the black ops, skunkworks stuff that we’ve been working on: hybrid stealth holographic projection membranes for tanks and planes, railgun technology for the Navy and, of course, a couple of chemical and neurological weapons. I don’t like the way I have to do business, but you’re fooling yourself if you think that you can take money from the government and not owe them something for it.

  I told most of the truth today at the press conference, or at least the amount of truth that I can really tell when it comes to the company’s involvement with the government. But I’ve also come to realize, all intended Star Wars references aside, that the truth, the real truth, really just means “a certain point of view.”

  Phil continues to try and explain how we’re developing a crowd control aerosol dispersant with some name that I can’t pronounce even if I have it phonetically spelled out for me. I’m really good at computers—coding and scripting languages, data management, HTML and CSS 6—meaningless, fake and intrinsically ethereal things like that. Hardcore scientific shit like this on the other hand, has and will always be a mystery to me.

  It’s nearly midnight after we call the day officially done. I’ve almost finished off a second pot of coffee and Phil looks less like a statue and more like the tired and graying high-powered lawyer that he is. I smile at him and tell him to call it an early night.

  He gets up and we shake hands. I put my finger on the console and the magnetic locks click open, allowing the doors to swivel open slightly. The second shift security guys glance into the room and then hold open the big, heavy doors for Phil as he exits. They release and the doors automatically close. I’ve got a few things to do before I can get to bed, but I pass out at the desk somewhere around one thirty, maybe later.