arth Meteor
“You alright?” his Grandma asked, eyeing him with a certain reptilian care. Reptiles do care for their young.
The skin melted off her face like a skull candle in the flame.
“Yeah,” he managed.
But the glib phrase echoed through him and became an axiom, timeless as the tides of sickness and health, mortality itself drawing his life like the moon draws the ocean.
And there he was, inside his body again, neither infinitely rational nor infinitely hungry, a monad.
“You really don’t look good,” said his Grandma.
“Grandma, can I bum a cigarette?” he asked.
She regarded him for a moment. “Sure,” she handed him the tall packet of cigarettes with the ignition fluid quivering inside the purple lighter.
Some Grandmas make apple pie. He pulled a pure-white stick from the pack, and putting the filter end in his mouth. A flame licked out like a cat tongue, and he drew it into the stick, and more deeply, into his body.
What he drew into his lungs was death. He knew that, and he had made his decision for mortality, toward the inevitable suicide of separation from that ravenous immortality. The smoke swelled into him like helium into a balloon and he felt his feet against the ground like sandbags, tethering him there.
Was that what it meant to be the spirit of humankind? Is that truly what we have become?
Yes.
Yes, that is what we have become.
He felt a rush of timelessness beneath a full moon, and the stars clicked frame-by-frame in the sky like clockwork. He became the moon and watched the rise and fall of civilizations timelapse into now, when he fell back into his boy’s body in his room, with the howl of a coyote ringing in his ears.
The night had begun to lift, relieving the stark pallor of his grandma’s face against the smog-dark sky. The last of mornings stars blazed down, a dragon scorching his soul to flakes of blackened flesh blowing from scorched bones.
As the star-dragon’s flame faded into morning, a final damnation asserted itself. He would never know the singularity.
And he smiled then, because he had never believed in it. He had never believed that he, himself, the he that was him, could be folded down small enough to be written to disk. And so somewhere, a digital clone of himself coughed fatally in its crib.
It was a cold December and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. But he felt his legs stirring of their own accord. And so it began, swelling up from his body and into his brain, the operator’s will filling him out like a flaccid mylar balloon in the shape of a boy just like him but cartoon. The cigarette dropped from his limp fingers as he stood, and hit the cement, an alabaster white stick smoking, a discarded prayer rising up toward the morning.
“Bye grandma.” he mouthed.
“Bye son,” she said, not knowing that his limbs were not his own any longer.
As he started to walk a long walk toward the Surgery Center he heard the scrape of her chair as she turned to watch him go, “Where’re you going with no coat on?”
But after a moment, the chair relaxed against the concrete and he could picture her grimace of pain that paired with all of her movements.
So this was where his world-wrecking will brought him. Where was the ceremony? Where was the goodbye? And he knew in that moment that there was no ceremony, there was no goodbye. There was only the space where he used to be, threads hanging through a rent in the fabric where he had tugged too hard and pulled the image of himself loose.
He had managed it, and now the space where he was would be sealed over, repaired, and forgotten, the only memory of his passage in his grandma’s aging brain. And the memory of himself within himself would be damaged, too.
He felt an unmooring disorientation as the picto portion of his brain shut off and he lost 16 years worth of data.
For all his rebellion, he had never quite visualized this moment. He had never quite imagined the pouring out of the memories that made him who he was.
He was no Guy Montag, burning the firemaster like a great match. Like a dream, the man he burned was himself.
If his limbs had been his, he would have fallen, but instead his eyes flashed and went cold.
*****THE END, FINIS, COMPLEET****
Catch more of the wondrous tale of Isaac in Book #2, where he brings us down with more of his existential dread. But be brought up with us as we meet a magic dog named Sparks who teaches us the value of frisbees, meat snacks, and loyalty. Until we meet again!