Laurie Boris

When I finish the first draft of a novel, I set it aside for a few months before I start editing. This is what works best for me. Unfortunately, unless I keep the writing part of my brain amused during that time, little gremlins creep in and rearrange the furniture. I have to be extra careful about not locking my keys in my car or where I left my phone or coming home from the grocery store with everything except what I went in there to buy. Writing flash fiction helps. Here’s a piece I wrote this week. It’s a little dark, but I go that way sometimes.

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No updates available. The words ring through your head. You’d counted on two, maybe three more at the most for the deal you’d purchased with the last of your savings…but none? Zero? Nada? Your shoulders sag. The permutations of surviving the rest of your natural life on what you currently have installed in your brain spin around, form and unform patterns, familiar and unfamiliar. This is all you’re gonna get. Can it last? You can run schematics until you turn blue, but it’ll tell you the same damn thing. You’re done. Essentially you’ve reached the end of your operating capacity. No shiny new interface. Nothing. An old quote scratches its way out of your memory: “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

But you got duped. Had. Suckered. Hornswaggled by a grifter with white teeth and an oily smile. You’re stuck, pally. You’ve heard stories about the past, of folks degrading into undignified natural deaths. Stuck in a hospital bed, wearing a diaper, eating baby food, nurses who tend to you like a disappointing houseplant while they yammer on their cell phones to friends about how awful their jobs are.

This program was supposed to put an end to nursing home warehouses, to a slow, agonizing failure of bodily systems, to disputes about final wishes that often tear grieving family members limb from limb. It promised a dignified death at a time of your choosing, when you can properly bid farewell to your loved ones while you still have your full faculties, can make your wishes known and say what you’ve always wanted to say.

Now you’re working without a net, at the whim of your aging body. You can handle pain. Your biggest fear is losing your mind. Riding that hazy line when you’re just cognizant of what you’re losing. Coming back into your present no longer recognizing your house or your partner or your children.

You sit for a while, trying to make sense of your plight. Okay. Current operating system still functional, cool. For the time being, everything’s peachy. You have no idea when the software will crap out, but before the launch of this program, somehow humans had made it through thousands of years making peace with the not-knowing part. Somehow they negotiated the uncertainty of death before scientists who hadn’t learned the lessons of science fiction started tinkering around with humanity.

But until you can somehow become chill with not knowing the time and manner and circumstances of your death, how can you keep the not-knowing from driving you insane?

You need an out clause. Quickly you pull up the contract, scan it for any language about a mutual agreement to opt out of the arrangement, but you find none.

You also find nothing in the software’s historical archives about those who’d chosen to end their own lives. Unfortunately, the search prompts a series of messages to stream your way: Upgrade at a discount! Adopt a rescue animal! Start investing in crypto! You close windows as fast as they pop up.

And then the mental screen freezes. After a moment, a small button appears in the empty space of your mind: Restart?

You want to agree. You should want to agree. Right? But the silence, the darkness. Something is so calming about it. Soothing. Like babies must feel when they finally get the thing they were crying for but couldn’t make words to ask. You float on that calm sea of not needing to decide. The button fades out. You barely hear the front door opening. You barely feel the needle going in. Then you feel nothing at all.