it could make us immortal, it said, like jellyfish bounding around the blue, bodies propelled by waves of indifference to pain and decay. it said it gently, as if it already knew how I would answer. I took the hook or it hooked me, either way, I indulged in the indulgence. advertised to give relief. relief akin to a soldier’s experience when his brother in arms is hit instead of himself. don’t be left out, or be the one shot, it said.
I took the pill, the shot, underwent the surgical neural replacement, swallowed the bioelectrical regulator, the regenerative rejuvenation, the whatever, as pain became historic anyway. I am immortal, perfect, as I now sit alone, waiting for nothing with nothing to do. always tomorrow. my sister’s message has sat unopened for eleven years. I will answer it soon. the lights in my room have never once needed switching off. I became ponderous, a shoulder-shrugging animated corpse, untethered to fate.
“There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything; when one took things for granted merely because astonishment would have been as tedious for oneself as for others.” James Hilton, Lost Horizon
“Utopian,” it said. perfection in agelessness, in freedom of consequence, it said. I am the machine’s creation, creation of perfection, perfection without corruption.
“The vision of rightness in Revelation is realized in the picture of a perfect time—as messianic eschatology; the vision of rightness in the Ideal is realized in the picture of a perfect space—as Utopia.” Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia
yet the mind, that stubborn mass, remains, retaining memories of its mortal past. like a phantom limb grasping for a vanished reality. like a medusa floating amidst tentacles of truncated thoughts, of meaning with loss. a mind once made with measured purpose of the limited, now paralyzed. it screams out from behind what is faded, the desire to do something today when it can be done tomorrow or the next year or centuries from now, the animal self that misses the striving through effort.
“. . . the timeless state of immortality would eliminate the condition of survival.” Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time
the machine did not account for this. or did it?
