Today at the end of a long hallway, an old man shuffled to his bedroom closet, opened a box, and swallowed a pill.
It began when the old man raised himself for what felt like the first time. Tattered at the arms and frayed at the skirts, the chair he lived in screeched metal on metal as springs met fasteners. His audible exertion announced his intention to slump his weak limbs across thick-cut pinewood floors.
His skin, dry and cracked. Dead white flakes molded 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 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 dead eyes followed his movement even when their bodies sat motionless.
The sofa was empty of everything but pillows and filth. Rot accumulated from drafts in the air. The room was one big shadow of colours as faded as the ghosts he kept time with. His gaze wandered. 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 he'd made for his mother. Back together, whole, as though they hadn't shattered into unfixable pieces.
He was upright.
Ice-grey winter windows gave no news of the world outside its view, broadcasting only silence. No tracks. No movement. No changes. The invisible world reaching ever outward while the old one stared on in a slow cold rot. Why bother looking outside anymore? He hadn't yesterday. He didn’t today.
Fragments of his last conversation with his wife surfaced as he moved.
A wash of humiliation purpled with regret became a grim mixture with the memory of his voice bouncing from wall to wall in that little kitchen. Five or six different conversations from five or six different 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.
It presented as fury and control, 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. The end of us. The end of what we know. His parents would be spinning in their moldy mausoleums. Boney rakes tearing their satin prisons trying to command their kin from beyond.
Genetic reconstruction and upload into DNA data storage. And from there to the devil's internet. Countless new species polluting unknowable dimensions of virtual space. 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. They had stolen his family.
A conversation in a conversation, he spoke in barks and bites of when he was the one who brought the answers home. Reminding them all of his importance. She kept the kitchen island between them when he was like this. 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 both for his audience and in complete ignorance of how it landed in the boy's mind.
A man is a force when 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 he pulled the boy out from under the bed by his ankle. That time the woman's mouth went too far. That fucking sound she made, screaming like a child with a broken toy.
Down the hall, he passed the room their imperfect original bodies laid in. Forever entrusted to representations of representations. Like words for ideas. Another layer of abstraction. Ones and zeros for atoms. He hovered a moment, to ache against the doorframe.
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 spit the material out. Take one pill. Be reborn. No more driving around a slowly decaying meat sack.
Robots eyed him waiting for a command and a purpose. The webbing between his toes, snipped and bitten by clumsy bots. 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. An old tin car in the rubble of an attic, in a memory of a town, on a soulless planet.
Here in this moment, the cold air pushing through the threads of his clothes. A 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. He had years of exploring the feeling of his entire species leaving him behind to act as his fuel.
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 blue-light fires. The few frames that were still powered from indirect daylight bouncing into the hall. Repaying the favour at night with their false moon reflections.
This hallway he never walked before or maybe a thousand years ago. It had been there for so long it almost wasn't ever there at all. Occupying a space in his mind rarely touched. Now it had its own gravity. He slowly slipped into the space it made before him.
Indifferent to his eyes or robot eyes, the memory videos on the wall played on. Birthdays. Weddings. Some played too fast. Some too slow. Some twitched like they only had 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. But not in him.
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 God made little green apples. As certain as his bastard son looked 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. For the first time in a long time he felt something new. An ache made of an alien heat and a cool resolve. He couldn't wait to see their faces. He couldn't wait to be wound-free. Faster. Most of all - powerful.
Today at the end of a long hallway, an old man shuffled to his bedroom closet, opened a box, and swallowed a pill. And then he smiled. He smiled and smiled and smiled feeling his youth return. His muscles rebuilding. His hair growing back. Skin growing back. Bruises and cuts healing. The dream of his change ended. In his awareness, a fade from black to white to the same dead ice-grey light of winter he left. His reborn eyes opened.
He looked around. He was still in his bedroom. But it was newer. It was... younger. He looked in the closet mirror. He was young again. And the world outside was just as empty as his house. He hadn't gone anywhere. 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.