by Michael Bray
It seemed my botched suicide made me a perfect candidate for the latest VIRSOFT product. Rather than blow my brains all over the come stained bed sheets and yellowed wallpaper as I'd intended, the bullet had somehow clipped off my spinal column (Destroying my teeth and jaw in the process) and then down into my chest cavity, damaging my heart and embedding in my lung. Benedict told me it was a one in a million shot. I might still have died if housekeeping hadn’t been in the room next door and heard the shot. I was whisked off to hospital barely clinging on to life. Benedict had grinned at this point in the story and told me my survival was a minor miracle.
I tried to ask him what they had done to fix me, but the words didn’t come. Either way, he seemed to know what I was asking.
“It’s called the Neurointel respiratory system.” He had said, proud as punch.
I wanted to tell him to shut up and leave me alone, and to remind him that for all his posturing, he had actually screwed things up by saving me as far as I was concerned. Of course, I didn’t get a chance to speak, as he was going on, and was now showing me charts and documents of what they’d done to me. I’ll save you the long version that I had, and for the sake of pacing, I’ll give you the condensed rundown of what they did.
According to Benedict, the bullet had ravaged my insides pretty good. It had damaged by spinal column and a lower portion of my skull before changing trajectory. It had destroyed by windpipe, then nicked the aorta in my heart, then the right atrium before coming to rest in my right lung and collapsing it. Essentially, it screwed me up pretty badly.
Even so, it wasn’t anything VIRSOFT couldn’t fix. By then their research was so advanced they were just waiting for someone with the right injuries to come along so they could test their products. As you know, the consent free right to operate act of 2020 means I didn’t get a say in what happened to me. I was essentially just a mostly dead slab of meat for them to experiment on as they saw fit. I can’t complain too much, though. Despite everything that has happened since they did a pretty good job of fixing me. They had repaired my jaw and teeth with a super tough synthetic plastic called Persaflex. They had also installed a new throat and vocal chords for me so I can speak (not that there’s anyone to talk to anymore). The biggest things they did was the replacement heart, lungs, and nerve network. Benedict explained how the new synthetic heart would never clog or fail like the human hearts of old. To ensure this, it was regulated and controlled by a small chip connected to the base of my skull just above the spine. A fusion of technology and biology, the chip was fused to the nerve endings of the spine. Benedict said it was to ensure the heart was regulated correctly and kept in working order. Then again, he had to say that. He could hardly say I was now controlled by a computer, could he? Either way, that’s how it was. The chip was the thing that would keep me ticking over.
As impressed as I was with the advances in science which had given me a new lease of life (wanted or not) I couldn’t help but think about getting out of the hospital so that I could finish the job I started, but do it properly this time. Only that’s not how it worked out.
Instead, at the same time as I was recovering in hospital, something happened. The actual details are hazy because it all went down so damn fast it caught the world with its pants down. Some said it was the Koreans. Others blamed the Arabs or the Russians. Some even said the U.S were responsible and it was a botched plan to give them more political leverage. Either way, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that someone released a virus. A deadly, highly contagious virus. One which was resistant to temperature, and also was able to travel by air as well as blood and saliva. Worse was that it had a lengthy incubation period, so by the time people started to die, three quarters of the world’s population was infected. Even so, there was hope, for a while at least until the mighty VIRSOFT said it was beyond their ability to stop. That’s when the panic started. For those who remember when films used to be made with actual people instead of entirely CGI cast members, you might be thinking some kind of Zombie apocalypse was on the cards. (By the way, if you do read this, try as best you can to track down some of the old George Romero stuff. It’s pretty fucking amazing) It didn’t go down like that, though. Real life was much crueler and savage. People died and stayed dead. The virus was deadly. Within hours of the incubation period breaking, respiratory functions would cease, severe flu would onset the victim, who would, in turn, cough more of the virus into the atmosphere.
For all the technology, for all the weapons and scientific advances, the world didn’t stand a chance. People were carrying the virus and were already dead before the first symptoms presented themselves.
Three months.
That’s all it took to wipe out everyone on the planet. Everyone except me of course.
Thanks to that prick Benedict and the stuff they did to me, the virus didn’t affect me. With no organic heart or lungs to damage, the worse I suffered was a little sickness and vomiting whilst all those around me died in their thousands. I was the only one, you see. The only one who fitted with this artificial system which has forced me to live in a world full of death.
I paused in writing this to look out of the window at the overgrown, grey world outside, a relic to a species made extinct. A world in which nature was finally recovering from the destruction we’ve caused since our species began.
And I see her.
The girl on the lawn. The one who haunts me.
I didn’t start to see her until after that first year. By then I’d gotten used to the smell of the dead, and had existed in a kind of limbo, wondering from place to place, trying to figure out exactly what the hell I as supposed to do. For a while I looked for others who may have survived, but the more I looked all I found was death. My travels had taken me all over America, traveling by car when I could, on foot when I had to, all in the hope of finding something. By the time I reached San Francisco, my mind was made up. I was going to finish the job I started. I walked across the golden gate bridge, past rusty, dust covered cars which lined the bridge like skeletons. I wondered about the people who owned them, what kind of life they might have had before it was taken from them. Rather than sad, it made me jealous.
I looked down over the edge of the bridge, 200 feet of fresh air between me and the water and the bliss of death which I craved. I climbed over the edge, shaking with fear despite my determination, knowing that I was literally one step away from peace.
That was the first time I saw her. The girl with the black hair.
She was on the rail next to me watching me. Pale skin, wide blue eyes, raven hair. She was wearing a one piece white dress which fluttered in the breeze. I was so shocked to see another human being that for a few seconds I forgot to breathe. I asked her if she was real, or at least I think I did. I might have just thought it. She just smiled at me.
I don’t know how long I stood there. All I know is my knees were trembling and it wasn’t from fear of the fall beneath my feet. I looked away from her at the oblivion below be.
“You can’t do this.”
I flicked my head back towards her. She hadn’t moved and was still watching me with that curious look on her face. I imagined I could see a half smile. I was less sure she had even spoken at all.
“Me?” I croaked.
She didn’t respond, and just stared at me, as if she were waiting for something. It crossed my mind that she was an illusion, a vision created by a brain devoid of stimulus for such a long time. I turned back to look at the water below, wondering if it would hurt, wondering if I would die straight away. It was time. My mind was made up. I took a deep breath and put a foot out in front of me.
She grabbed my arm.
I hadn’t heard her move, but somehow she had closed the distance to me and was gripping my upper arm. Her fingers were cold and vice like, and I could smell her. Soap and coconut, the first non-death smell I could remember experiencing since the world died. She still didn’t speak, and she didn’t have to. I looked into her
eyes, lost in the sheer depth and knowledge which shined inside them. I tried to pull free, but couldn’t move.
No.
It wasn’t spoken, but it came from her all the same, somehow delivered straight into my brain.
Not this way.
Something happened then. I still don’t know what it was, I just know I couldn’t look into those eyes anymore. I turned away and squeezed my own eyes closed, then the next thing I remember I was back on the bridge, sitting on the ground and leaning against one of those skeletal shells, hot tears stinging my eyes.
Of the girl, there was no sign.
Scrambling to my feet, I ran back to the edge, looking for her. Somehow, I knew she hadn’t jumped, so I set out to look for her, scared and excited in equal measure. For three days I looked, shouting for her to respond to me, all without success.
What cruelty. To give me a glimpse of companionship then snatch it away from me. It made the solitude worse than ever and increased my determination to end my pitiful existence. Finding a gun wasn’t too hard. They littered the street. I took one from a police officer I found, his corpse dry and withered, slumped over in his patrol car. I had left San Francisco by this time and was in Layfette. I found a nice place out in the Reliez valley with beautiful views of the trees and open country. It was a beautiful place to die. Remembering my earlier failure, I was determined to do it right this time. Gun in the roof of the mouth pointing up towards the brain. Make sure it’s done right. I flicked off the safety and took one last look at the view.
The girl was there, not ten feet away from me. She was wearing the same clothes and had the same wide eyed expression on her face. Fear, like a hot physical thing, knotted my stomach. Good god, those eyes. I was scared to look but powerless not to. I fumbled and dropped the gun in the dirt at my feet. I bent and picked it up, and when I looked back the girl was gone.
It may sound stupid to you if you ever read this, but the fear instantly morphed to sadness that she had teased her presence and then left me again. I turned the gun towards my face, looking into the black depths of the barrel, knowing that just a few pounds of pressure on the trigger was all that stood between me and peace. The wind ruffled my hair and brought with it the smell of soap and coconut which told me she was back.
I turned to my left, and there she was, sitting on the rock beside me, knees tucked up under her chin, delicate bare feet on the stone. She wasn’t looking at me, but straight ahead out over the valley, her porcelain doll like face framed beautifully in the sunlight.
No.
I knew it was her, even though she hadn’t spoken.
“Why not?” I whispered.
She looked at me then, eyes full of sadness.
I can’t let you.
“Why, who are you?” I asked, my words snatched away on the breeze.
She didn’t answer me, and I didn’t want to wait any longer. I knew if she looked at me, I would be denied. I adjusted my grip on the gun and turned it towards my face.
She grabbed my wrist, her grip just as vice like as on the bridge. I tried to struggle free, yet she seemed more than capable of restraining me with little effort.
“Let me go, I want to die,” I hissed at her.
She did look at me then, and all the fight went out of me. Words, her words came into my mind, and with them, I knew who she was, and why she was here.
I can’t let you break the bond.
Of course she couldn’t why would she? It made perfect sense. VIRSOFT had spent a small fortune fitting me with new innards. With a second attempt at suicide a very real option, it stood to reason they would build in a failsafe, something to stop me from destroying their prototype.
“You look so real,” I whispered.
She didn’t reply. Instead, she gave a half smile and looked out over the rolling valley.
I knew what she was, of course. She was a character, something created by the chip at the base of my skull, and yet for as much as I knew it, she was right there. I could see her, I could smell her. She was in every way right there in the world with me. I could see the light dusting of freckles on her cheeks, the stray hairs dislodged by the breeze clinging to her cheek, even the slight moistness of her lips. I tried an experiment then. Rather than speak my question to her, I thought it instead. Immediately, she responded, again without speaking.
No, I can’t do that. It’s my job to stop you.
I nodded. She was a failsafe, a program designed to stop me whenever the urge to end my life came, a self-preservation piece of code designed in a dead society which was now my curse.
“I don’t want this,” I said, then repeated my earlier question. “Please, just let me die.”
I watched her and waited. For a while she said nothing, then just as I was about to repeat the question she spoke- actually spoke words for the first time rather than in my head.
“You should be grateful,” she said, her words soothing, “You have been given a great gift.”
“What kind of gift?” I asked, tossing the useless gun into the dirt.
“The gift of life.”
“I don’t want life. Just look at the world for Christ’s sake,” I screamed, frustration finally boiling over.
Of course, it was software, a computer program, it had no idea what had happened to the world. All it had been programmed to do was keep me alive until it was told otherwise by its creator who was long dead. Instead, the girl reeled off the rest of its stock answer, and its words brought home the reality of the situation.
“You will live forever,” the girl said, turning those penetrating eyes on me. “My systems are designed to work indefinitely.”
“But I’ll age, the rest of me will age.” I pleaded, knowing that as advanced as it was, the software didn’t understand. “What happens when I get old?”
“When the suicide risk reaches acceptable levels, my creator will change my programming.”
“He’s dead!” I yelled, my voice echoing around the valley. “Everyone is dead.”
She smiled and turned back to the view. I saw my future then, a withered, crippled old thing, brittle bones broken, muscles wasted away to nothing, but still alive, still breathing, all thanks to the computer in my head.
“I’ll find a way, I’ll find a way to end it,” I mumbled.
No. I won’t ever let that happen.
It was then that I began to weep. I don’t know how long I sat there sobbing like a baby. All I know is that when I finished, the girl had gone and I was alone again. As much as I know it was fruitless, sometimes I would attempt to kill myself just so I could see her again. Always without fail she would appear and stop me, always with that look in her eye, always smelling like soap and coconut. On those occasions when I would try to end it, I would try to engage her in conversation, if only to break up the monotony of my existence. She never stays any longer than she needs to. As soon as the threat is gone, she goes with it until she is needed.
I look up form this notepad and out of the window and she’s still there, standing on the lawn, watching me, waiting. She knows I’ve set up the noose and will attempt to hang myself just as soon as I’ve finished writing this. Of course, in my heart of hearts (what heart? Ha!) I know it won’t work. I know that when they time comes, I’ll smell her intoxicating scent, and feel that icy grip on me. Even so, I have to try. God help me I have to try.
In closing, If when you find this note, there is a corpse in the hall hanging from the staircase railing, then know I died happy and successfully. If not, then once again I have been foiled and am destined to walk the earth in limbo until either my body or this computer in my head breaks down.
Pray for me.
BURGER VAN
Trent looked at the meat and then turned his attention back to the scrawny, rat of a man called Gable at the other side of the table. “I’ll give you an even hundred.”
Gable shifted and flicked his eyes to his colleague who was lingering in the shadows. “Nah, man. Two hundred. That was the
deal. We had an agreement.”
“You promised me sixty pounds worth. There’s only forty here.”
Gable again glanced to his friend and scratched his cheek. “We had uh, distribution problems.”
“Not my fault,” Trent said, holding firm and folding his arms.
“Come on man, you’re killing me here,” Gable said, staring at the vacuum packed tray of pink mincemeat on the table.
Trent feigned disinterest, throwing in an exaggerated sigh for good measure. “Maybe we should just forget it if we can’t agree on a price.”
Gable squirmed. They both knew he was a distressed seller, and as his one and only buyer, Trent was determined to use it to his advantage.
“Look,” Trent said, leaning on the table, flexing his thick forearms. “We both know I’m your only customer for this. Based on where you had me come out to meet you, you’re keen to keep this under the radar. You also know that if it’s good quality, I’ll buy more from you. You can get more, right?”
“Yeah, I can get more,” Gable said, cheek twitching as her continued to look for something to focus his eyes on.
“Alright, then you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Give me this for a hundred, and as long as it’s good, I’ll buy the next batches off you going forward for one fifty per sixty pounds. Not forty. Not fifty. Sixty, or no deal. Got it?”
Another glance at his shadowy friend and Gable nodded his head. “Yeah, alright man, you got yourself a deal.”
Trent handed over the cash and picked up the tray. “Two weeks today. Sixty pounds of meat for a hundred and a half.” He turned and disappeared into the shadows of the warehouse before the Gable or his friend could say or do anything else.
THREE MONTHS LATER
