DistanceSpring 2021

Today at the end of a long hallway, an old man forced his way to his bedroom closet, opened a box, and swallowed a pill.

The old man had raised himself for what felt like the first time in a century, maybe ever. He itched and burned and ached. Tattered at the arms and frayed at the skirts, the chair he lived in screeched metal on metal as springs extended and disagreed with the restraint of their fasteners. An audible exertion announced his intention to slump his weak limbs across those ancient pinewood floors.

He found a hard-won standing balance.

His skin, dry and cracked. Dead white flakes thickened to make grout in curving valleys of the face he wore every day. Bone-in sausages dragged across one eyebrow and then the other. Each finger feeling the strands of hair moving back into place. Once and once again to be sure. The few things the bastard robots didn't touch.

His fingertips hurt with the same dull ache, the same warm soreness he could feel in every joint in his body. Every waking minute. He was up against the slow atrophy of muscle. Against himself. Against the certain decay of every cell in his body. The sickness of his aging. His voice and ears worked well enough to ask for things to be brought to him. One of the house robots would carry, print, assemble, or answer. Their lidar eyes followed his movement even when their bodies sat motionless.

One shuffling foot now in front of the other.

The sofa he passed was empty of everything but pillows and filth. Rot accumulated and travelled and accumulated elsewhere from slow drafts of air. Sometimes he thought there was snow piling in the corners of the room or cracks of outside silver invading through the walls. This room was one big shadow of colours as faded as the ghosts he kept time with. His eyes cast over familiar filth. His eyes spent little time on the things he'd once broken in rage. His son's gift of a clay ashtray for his cigars. The vase the boy made for his mother. Back together, whole, as though they hadn't once been shattered into unfixable pieces.

Ice-grey winter windows gave no news of the world outside its view, broadcasting only silence and a hate made colorless for every living thing. No tracks in the snow. No movement. No changes. The invisible world reached ever outward while the old one stared on in slow cold rot. Why bother looking outside? He hadn't yesterday or the day before. He didn't today.

Fragments of his last conversation with his wife surfaced into his memory as he lurched from one leg made of cement to the other. Ideas rose and fell into his awareness without source and without discernible cue.

Humiliation purpled with regret became a grim mixture with the memory of his hollering that bounced from wall to wall in that little kitchen. Five or six different conversations from five or six different events over years steeped in his mind. It manifested into bursts of smart things he could have said. If only he'd thought of them at the time.

Every time, it presented as fury, no matter that he aimed and missed for the right measure of care and concern. To remove ourselves from natural evolution... to integrate with simulated realities would only bring down the wrath of God who will not be mocked. The end of us. The end of what we know. His parents would be spinning in the moldy carpets of their mausoleums. Boney rakes tearing their satin prisons trying to command their kin to do as they would have done. He could see them twisting. His own digits squeezed into white knuckled fists.

Genetic reconstruction and then DNA data storage in 3D printed bio containers kept alive with an infinite cycle of fruit flies and waste. And from there to the devil's network – the internet. Endless digital universes generated by tireless automated agents with access to unlimited computation and energy. Countless new species polluting unknowable numbers of virtual dimensions. Infinite consciousness. He couldn't say it but he knew what ten-dollar words hid. It was total bullshit. They all fell for it, of course. Latte-drinking liberal heathens. Those snowflakes had tricked and stolen his family.

His mind was clouded - all clarity stolen by storm. A conversation in a conversation, he spoke to himself in barks and bites, in fits and starts. Memories of when he was the one who had the answers they needed. Right is right.

She had learned to keep the kitchen island between them when he was rampaging. For each utterance he faced his wife and the floor and the walls and the heavens he trusted in. Not at the son. A performance that was at once both for his audience and in complete indifference to it's reception.

He was strong when they were weak. A man is a force when the family gets out of line. He was the wall they hit. The check they needed. He kept them from humiliating his name, his parents' name. That time the woman's mouth went too far. That time he pulled the boy out from under the bed by his ankle. That fucking sound he made, screaming like a child with a broken toy.

Further down the hallway, he passed the room their original bodies laid in. Forever entrusted to representations of representations. Like words for ideas. Another layer of abstraction. Ones and zeros for atoms. He stopped to ache against the doorframe and be mystified. Dust floated in the angle of light that cut the room.

There was no apocalypse or great rapture. No major event on the news. It kind of just happened. Someone's fingers snapped and he was alone. A jolt awake from a daydream. Before the dream he was of a family and of a race. After the dream everything he looked at had been replaced by a synthetic duplicate.

A tasteless, dusty mix with bits of some bio-mechanical genetic-editing fucking garbage-shit. Thats what the fuck it was. He didn't know how it worked, only that it did. For most of the world, their home food printers downloaded the pill instructions and coughed the material out. Take one pill. Be reborn. No more driving around a slowly decaying meat sack.

Robots, sentinels, eyed him for a command and a purpose. The webbing between his toes, snipped and bitten by their clumsy limitations. Always trying to bring an awkwardly-held object or drag a damp soapy cloth over him with sharp pliers for digits. Blood dried and scabbed on spots all over him. Shins blue-spotted and dented from walking into furniture. He was a beaten up, old, tin toy car in the rubble of an attic, in a memory of a town, on a soulless planet.

Here in this moment, the cold air pushed through the threads of his clothes. That familiar sting on his skin. Was there ever heat in here? He lifted his legs one step after the other a little higher and a little faster.

His grandfather, father, and his son. And the rest. Mother, wives, cousins, and his wife's asshole friends. The faces on the wall laughed, danced, and lit silent OLED fires. The few frames that were still powered from indirect daylight bouncing from here and there. Repaying the favor with their false moon reflections when the darkness was winning.

He never walked this hallway before or maybe it was a thousand years ago. The path that led him had been there for so long it almost wasn't ever there at all. Occupying a space in his mind rarely touched. Now it has its own gravity. He slowly slipped into the space it made before him.

The memory videos on the wall played on. Birthdays. Weddings. Some played too fast. Some too slow. Some twitched between only two frames. They performed for his sagging face. His wet eyes. His shuffling feet. No tearful goodbye calls made when the pills came. No celebrations. No discernible transition. The people around him all had something in them that he didn't. Something that couldn't be weighed. Yet it was in them all the same.

Everyone, the world-everyone, assumed everyone else would be on the other side. And they were. All except for him. He felt it now as sure as the cold wind on his skin and the cuts all over his body. As sure as his son looked just like his mother. They never wanted him there. With them forever. In full control of an immortal avatar.

That he could never figure it out! Decades it took, sure. He figured it out. It was another trick. It had never been his idea to stay behind in the first place. He felt something new. An ache that began as a shout in a tin can tied to a sting from the deepest cavern in the deepest ocean direct to his malformed brain. He couldn't wait to see their faces. He couldn't wait to be wound-free, faster and most of all - he couldn't wait to feel powerful.

Today at the end of a long hallway, an old man forced his way to his bedroom closet, opened a box, and swallowed a pill. And then he smiled. He smiled and smiled feeling his youth return into every cell in his body. His muscles rebuilding. His hair growing thick and full colour restored. Healthy skin pushed dead skin off like a boa. The dream of his molting ended. In his awareness, a fade from abyss black to the brightness of a hangover dawn to the same dead light of winter he left. His reborn eyes opened like a hothouse flower bloom.

Still in his bedroom. But it was newer. It was... younger. No spaces between floorboards. No leaks in the roof. He looked in the closet mirror. He was young again. And the world outside was still just as empty as his house. He hadn't gone anywhere. His sentence was renewed. Spotless robots with freshly sharpened digits collected in the doorway to stare. He screamed. He screamed and screamed. Like a child with a broken toy.