Tears in the Rain

Another foundling, this time from 26th August 2000.

Like tears in the rain

I'm not bitter. I'm depressed, confused, scared and angry, but I'm not bitter.
Shit. I am bitter. Since I found out I've hardly slept. To sleep and lose consciousness would be too close for comfort. I don't know what to do. There is nothing to do. I can only wait.

I can only wait.

I've decided to get my thoughts on record. As far as I know, nooone else in the world is going to do what I'm going to do. Nobody has done it for over four hundred years. I'll be the first. Hopefully I'll be the only one. Or one of the very few.

I'm going to die.

That isn't so exciting these days. Nearly everyone dies sometime. Illness, accident, it still happens. But it's easy to recover, a week or so and they're back in the land of the living.

I'm going to die permanently.

My doctor told me a week ago. It's taken that long for it to sink in. I knew I had cancer - it showed up in my annual med-scan. I was't too worried about it. I decided not to get it treated. Well, why go through the difficulties of treatment when I could regenerate if it got bad enough to be a problem. My friends said I should deal with it; not to let it get out of hand. But I believed in the great miracle.

I believed.

And I think I wanted to know what it felt like to come close to death. I've always wondered if it would be different. Well, I'm going to find out now. Big time.

Eventually the pain started. I booked myself into a regen unit: in for a few days, then back to my life. All the standard checks, my brain scan recorded, DNA extracted, personality saved as a backup on the mainframe, everything as normal in the assumption? The hope? That I might have changed slightly in the last year.

And so I went into the unit.

Lowered into the tank. Naked and slightly cold. Green gel surrounding me, starting to fill my nostrils as it washed above my upturned chin. I panicked, tried to hold my breath as it invaded me.
"Relax and breathe normally. The gel is oxygen rich. You will be able to breathe perfectly well. Relax and breathe normally".
The slightly metallic voice with a slight edge of brogue washed across my brain.
"Relax and breathe normally".
I tried to relax, opened my mouth to swallow the gel. I choked as the jelly substance filled my lungs. Fought the panic reflex as the anaesthetic worked and I slowly lost consciousness. I'd like to know why they don't put you to sleep before you're immersed. Must be some reason. I made a mental note not to die too often as I went under.

I should be more careful what I wish for. I'll remember that in future. Ha bloody ha.

I woke up in a plain white room. Sterile. Gentle hum of machines monitoring my body functions. Lungs breathing in perfectly-balanced air. I slowly opened my eyes, letting flourescent lights flood my senses. I was alive and well. The cancer was gone. My existence ongoing.

A soft voice murmured my name.

Something wrong. Something trickling into my conscience. It didn't sound right. The voice again.
"Are you awake?"
Still something wrong. I thought I was dreaming. The same brogue as before, the same soft reassurance. But no metallic edge. I was listening to a human. What was a human doing in a hospital? I was in regen. I always thought that you didn't dream during the process. But I must be dreaming. I tried to ignore the voice but it was insistent. Getting louder. I turned my head away from the lights and there she was. A doctor. A human doctor.
"Mr Phillips".
She smiled slightly, the reassuring smile that the robots used when you visited hospital. I wondered briefly if she was just a better robot, but then that voice came again.
"There's no cause for alarm".
What an understatement. I'd never met a human doctor. I knew they existed. The last bastion of human control. They didn't often see patients themselves: they oversaw the robots, did research, sorted out problems.

It was the sort out problems bit that stood out in my mind.

I tried to force the words out of my mouth. They sounded like an unoiled cog in an old motor. Grinding and squeaky at the same time. She held a glass of water out to me and I took it, allowing the fluid to lubricate my throat before trying to talk again. Words gushed out in a torrent of questions that needed to be answered.
"Who are you? Why are you here? Where's the robodoctor?"

She did that smile again, smoothly, automatically, but just a little too lopsided at the edges to be believable.
"Relax. I'm your doctor. Doctor Price. I'll be dealing with your case from now on. There's been a"
She paused as if trying to find the correct word.
"A complication".
I closed my eyes and a series of images passed before them. Not nice images, but I didn't panic. With the medical expertise we have we could deal with everything. Even death. So at worst I would have to stay in hospital a little while longer before going back to normal. But that didn't explain why I suddenly had a human doctor.

So I wasn't worried when I asked the question. Just curious.

"What's wrong?"
I wasn't expecting the answer I got.
"We're not exactly sure. In simple terms, you're allergic to regel. Your body wasn't affected by the treatment."
A sense of dread started to creep through my body. Toe to head, just like the gel. Did this mean?
"The cancer? Was it removed?"
Her eyes broke contact with mine. Bad news when the doctor forgets to reassure you.
"No. The generation didn't deal with it. We considered the old-fashioned cures, but it's too advanced. If you'd had it treated earlier, we might have been able to help you."
Even her smile had faded. She looked terribly young. But I still didn't want to believe the truth.
"What's going to happen?"
Simply, plainly, a small helpless voice.
"You're going to die".

I laughed.

--------------------------------

And that was a week ago. Since when I've had my examinations re-examined, my body re-examined, my cells re-examined, the gel re-examined, my parents re-examined and still nobody understands the truth.

I'm going to die.

Permanently.

I can't swim. The silly, hopeless thought. I can't swim, I don't swim, I'm never going to learn to swim. I thought I had eternity, forever, an infinite lifetime of sometimes when I could do whatever I wanted to. And now I'm never going to learn to swim. Ever. Someone once said that man is huge compared to zero but tiny compared to infinity and now I'm going to learn what it is to be human. He's dead. And so, soon, am I.

Pascal. We learnt about him in school. Silly sod who believed in gods and spent time worrying about what happened if you did things for eternity. Started the Triangulars - no, was made honourary president of the Triangulars. Posthumously, of course.

The Triangulars. Strange bunch of people. Wierd sect that started in the Jupiter fields near Earth. Kept trying to kill themselves. Went on about how infinitely breeding people would eventually populate an infinite universe, or something like that. Called themselves after Pascal's triangle, but they couldn't even get that right: any mathematician could tell them it was a Fibonacci sequence they were talking about. They'd find some way to kill themselves, leave a big red triangle behind and then get pissed off when the councils regenned them. Stupid bastards don't have a clue about what death's really like. But I will.

I'm going to die permanently. I'm going to die.

It doesn't matter how many times I say it, it still doesn't make any sense. I'm going to die. But then what? I just stop existing? Hang around the databases until someone works out how to regen from my DNA and pops my personality back in? How do I know when I'm dead? Is it when someone stops trying to regen me? When they forget about me? If someone accidently deletes my records? I don't know what happens.

Maybe I should look up some dead people. Access the library. Hope that there's something amongst the geniuses in funny clothes to tell me about how to die. What to wear when I do it. What I ought to be doing. I wish I'd paid more attention to history class now. Hadn't scribbled notes to the girls while I was supposed to be listening to facts about fighting. And colonisation dates. And mining rights. And air-mixing systems. I don't even know if I get a choice about what to be doing. I'd listen harder in my re-school. Except I'm not going to live to be there. Or join the breeding program.

Ah well, one small chink of daylight in the darkness then.