by Greg Krojac
It didn’t matter how the authorities tried to dress up the facility with euphemisms and sweet smelling flowers, nothing could hide the fact that this was a suicide centre. It felt strange to think that this woman was probably going to be the last human that he’d ever see in this life. The last real person that he’d interact with. He began to wonder who he would be in his next life. Would he be a girl or a boy? Would he be rich or poor? In what country would he be born? The pleasant, jovial woman cleared her throat to get his attention. Maurice returned to the real world.
“Sorry. My mind was elsewhere. Thank you.”
“Now then my dear, my name is Leanne and I’ll be your attendant for this next part of your journey.”
Leanne made it sound like he was taking a flight to a holiday resort instead of killing himself. She was definitely too full of the joys of spring for this job.
“If you’d like to take your clothes off please?”
“My what? My clothes?”
“Yes, your clothes. There’s no point in being embarrassed, my dear. We need the clothes to pass on to the needy and, even though they shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, they don’t like the idea of wearing clothes that other people have passed away in.”
“All my clothes?”
“Look around you, my dear. Even Mr and Mrs Johnson, that dear old couple making eyes at each other are naked as the day that they were born. And April – the goddess, who thinks she’s obese– she’s naked too. She must be crazy. She’s gorgeous. Why would a beautiful creature like her want to top herself? Still, not for me to try and talk her out of it. Go on love. Get your kit off. You won’t be alone.”
Everybody who made the journey to these government facilities was told the same story. The clothes would go to a needy person. But the reality was rather different. The reason why clients were asked to strip naked was to prevent them from changing their minds and leaving the facility. Their bodies would be cremated providing a valuable source of energy for the living. Since the Revelation, burials had been prohibited and cremations made compulsory, as the energy produced from cremations became a valuable commodity. Maurice reluctantly removed his clothes, folded them neatly and handed them to Leanne. She beamed at him again.
“There you go, my dear. That wasn’t so difficult was it?”
Maurice had been expecting some kind of counselling, somebody to at least try to talk him out of his decision to end his life. He certainly didn’t expect the process to be as swift and clinical as it appeared to be. His thought process was broken by Leanne’s cheerful voice again.
“Mr and Mrs Johnson. Room number 1. April. Room number 2. Mr Saunders. Room number 3. Chop, chop. We don’t have all day, you know.”
The occupants of the preparation room shuffled into their respective rooms, Mr and Mrs Johnson still holding hands. Maurice had cupped his hands and was doing his best to protect his genitals from view as he walked awkwardly to his assigned room.
He found himself in a sparsely furnished room, containing nothing but an armchair, a sofa and a portable piece of electrical equipment that sat upon a steel trolley. He stood in the middle of the room, like a lost child, as he’d no idea what he was supposed to do now. The room wasn’t at all welcoming and he certainly didn't feel any inclination to sit down and relax. What a way to spend your last few minutes on Earth. He thought that these STCs might at least try to make the death experience as pleasant as such a thing could be, that there might at least be tasteful decor and soothing music, but – once you were away from the reception area – this place was devoid of all atmosphere. People might just as well breathe their last breath in a storage container. If people outside had known how soulless these facilities were, there would certainly have been many complaints and something might have been done to improve the conditions, but the paradox was that nobody came out alive once they'd passed the registration procedure and so nobody else knew except the staff, who were just grateful to be employed.
A very officious young woman entered the room. She wore a white blouse with the top three buttons undone, a black pencil skirt, and black high heel shoes. She seemed far too well dressed for assisting suicides and acted oblivious to Maurice's nakedness.
"Right. Let's get this over with. I haven't got all day."
Maurice found himself missing Leanne. He didn’t like that yet another woman was seeing his naked body. And this one sounded aggressive. No, he didn’t like this one at all. At least Leanne tried to be nice. He felt really uncomfortable.
“Where’s Leanne?”
“Her shift’s ended. I’m in charge now. I’m Monica. In my opinion, you don’t really need to know that, but the manual says I have to tell you my name, so there you go.”
Maurice was beginning to have second thoughts.
“Excuse me, miss.”
“What?”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“Yes. I have. I’ve changed my mind.”
“Too late, mate.”
No. Really. Can I have my clothes back please?”
“Nobody changes their mind. Your clothes will be in an incinerator by now.”
“What do you mean, in an incinerator?”
“What it sounds like. Your clothes will be burnt to a crisp.”
“But Leanne said that they’d be put aside and given to the poor.”
“Yeah. She tells clients that to make them feel better about themselves. I don’t know why she bothers, to be honest.”
“But I don’t want to die now.”
“You should have thought of that before you registered, Mr Saunders.”
But I’m not Mr Saunders. I’m Maurice Boone.”
“Your registration says your name is Saunders. The machine recognised your fingerprints as Richard Saunders. You can call yourself the Queen of Sheba for all I care. You’re registered. You’re in here. You’re going to die. That’s the rules.”
She gestured towards the sparse furniture.
"Sit down. Sofa or armchair. It doesn't bother me which."
Maurice shuffled over to the armchair, all the way trying to keep his manhood hidden from sight. The young woman looked him in the eye.
"There's no point in trying to hide that thing from me. I'll see it in glorious Technicolor when we're done here. I'll have to tape it to your thigh when you're dead so it doesn't flap about and get the porters agitated on the way to the incinerator.”
Maurice didn’t know what to do. He started to panic.
“Help! Somebody help me!”
“Shouting won’t do you any good Mr Saunders. These rooms are soundproofed because sometimes our visitors get distressed and start making a noise. The doors are locked too. The only way you’re going to leave here is in a coffin. Well, not so much a coffin, more of a cardboard box.”
Maurice lunged forwards and tried to overpower the woman, ignoring for a moment that he was naked, but she was surprisingly strong for her build and threw him back effortlessly into his chair. She placed her foot on the armchair, between his legs, an action that raised the hem of her skirt until it was almost above her thighs. She ran her tongue along her lips.
“Want some before you go, Richard?”
“I don’t want anything. I’ve changed my mind. Let me go.”
Maurice found it obscene how the young woman could abuse and destroy what should be an emotional experience, the last emotional experience of his life. It was ironic that the treatment dealt out at the STC was probably sufficiently brutal that it would have been an effective way of persuading would-be suicides to change their minds, but once registered there was definitely no turning back. The truth was that a continuing increase in the number of suicides was essential to keeping energy costs down. The cremation of bodies supplied valuable energy to the national grid and these suicides were doing society a great service. Society didn't want to lose such a plentiful, consistent and free resource.
Suddenly there was a loud crash and t
he door flew open, a bolt of orange light shooting across the room causing the young woman to slump to the floor unconscious. Two dark-clad figures in ski masks ran towards Maurice, grabbed him under the arms, and hoisted him off his feet, carrying him unceremoniously through the door and out of the building, before bundling him into the back seat of a waiting car. Once in the car, one of his kidnappers –Maurice wasn't sure if he was being kidnapped or rescued – covered him with a blanket.
"Sorry, Maurice. Did we interrupt something back there? You should be famous mate. Not a lot of people get out of these places alive. Well, nobody really. You’re the first.”
Maurice still felt very vulnerable.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any clothes I could change into? Please?”
“As a matter of fact, we do. Your clothes from your hotel room. When we get a chance you can put them on, but it's not safe for us to stop and get them out of the boot here and now. Just use the blanket for now."
***
The car sped off leaving a cloud of dust in its wake and headed towards the nearest motorway junction. Time was of the essence and the driver and his colleague wanted to get as much distance between them and Paignton as possible. They drove quickly but not so fast as to attract attention. A naked man in the back seat of a stolen car would be particularly difficult to explain if they were stopped by the police. The driver entered the coordinates of the Welcome Break services at Junction 19 of the motorway into the Self-Drive System, and relaxed as the car drove itself to the destination at speeds of up to 150 mph. Since self-driving cars had become the norm, speed limits had more than doubled, the onboard computers and sensors linked to the automatrix system making it almost impossible to have an accident.
About forty-five minutes later they pulled into the car park of the motorway services and the driver parked the car manually, some distance away from the rest of the parked vehicles. An SUV with darkened windows pulled up alongside their vehicle and they all changed vehicles, as quickly and with as little fuss as possible. Once in the new vehicle, Maurice was got dressed and became much more relaxed. He still wasn’t sure if he’d just been rescued or kidnapped but his captors or rescuers seemed amicable enough and were treating him quite well. Whichever they were he was grateful that they’d got him out of that place because he definitely didn’t want to die just yet.
The SUV continued its journey along the M4 motorway until junction 8/9. The vehicle hardly slowed as it left the motorway and cruised effortlessly along winding roads, weaving between other cars at speeds of up to 150 mph. Maurice marvelled at the efficiency and quick reactions of the self-drive system. He glanced over at the rescuer/captor sitting to his right in the back of the car.
“I don’t know how we managed before self-drive technology took over our traffic.“
“We managed like this. The last thing we want is to be traced. You do know that self-drive systems are integrated with GPS, don’t you? And if the car has GPS, then anyone can track it from their office desk or wherever they have a computer. Even from smartphones. So we’ve taken out the self-drive system. The last thing we want is to be tracked by the government or anyone else for that matter.”
“But, isn’t that illegal? All cars have to have self-drive technology nowadays, so they can drive quickly but safely.”
“It may be illegal, but so’s most of what we do. Don’t worry about it. And Tony here is a real Lewis Hamilton.”
“Who’s Lewis Hamilton?”
“Hey Tony, Maurice here wants to know who Lewis Hamilton is. Lewis Hamilton, Maurice, was one of our best Formula One drivers, back in the day when cars used to race each other on racing circuits around the world. The competition was called the Grand Prix. But since the introduction of self-drive cars, most people can get their kicks by actually being in a car that’s going a couple of hundred miles per hour, rather than watching someone else drive that fast. The public lost interest and so the sponsors lost interest too. It was a very expensive sport.”
“You mean that was Tony driving at those breakneck speeds, not a computer?”
“Yep, that was Tony.”
Maurice was glad that they hadn’t told him earlier; he’d have been scared stiff if he’d thought that a human being was controlling the car. He decided that if he was in danger of being killed in a car crash, he’d like to know if it would be as a prisoner or if he was being rescued.
“You said that what you do is mostly illegal. So what exactly do you do?”
“We resist. Specifically, we resist the oppression of the government and its puppet-master. We work for the resistance. We work for One Life. And today we’re your fairy godfathers.”
One Life was the worldwide network of resistance cells that harassed, sabotaged and damaged the Illuminati wherever possible. Reincarnation was a fact and One Life could do nothing about that, but their dream was to return to a world without Recarns, a world where nobody remembered past lives and made the best of each life that they had, a world that considered each life an individual life and not as part of an eternally renewing lifecycle where corrupt Recarns could pass money, and forward power to their subsequent incarnations.
“But wasn’t the government voted in democratically? Surely they can be voted out just as easily as they can be voted in?”
“Maurice, do you really believe that? Hasn’t your life got worse since the ONP took power?”
“Yes, I suppose it has.”
“You suppose it has? You suppose it has? Maurice, are you fucking simple or something? Look at you. You nearly lost your daughter because you couldn’t afford the surgery she needed. You stole the money to pay for her surgery from some bloke and accidentally killed him in the process. You’ve lost your family and were about to top yourself. Yes, you’re certainly living the life of Riley, aren’t you? Who the fuck do you think is responsible?”
Maurice thought back to a previous time, a time when he was still with Karen and his daughters. He’d snapped under the pressure that he might lose Caitlin and said what he really thought about the Government. But that time he’d been under the protection of the anti-bug sweeper. Now he had no such protection. What if they were government agents trying to get him to incriminate himself? He thought about it for a second and then realised that if the government had wanted to be rid of him, then all they’d had to do was to have left him in the clutches of that evil bitch at the STC.
“Yes. Alright. Yes, my life has turned into a giant fucking mess. And yes, I do blame the government. But that still doesn’t explain why they can’t be ousted at a General Election.”
“I’ll explain things to you, Maurice. There are things that you’re obviously not aware of. Remember I mentioned the word ‘puppet-master’?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the ONP was voted in. It’s a democratically elected government. It was voted in because it seemed to have the answer to the economic mess that the country was in. It was supposed to be the saviour. Now, who do you think caused the global recession?”
“I don’t know. The banks?”
“Yes, indirectly the banks caused it. But they were acting under orders of a far higher authority.”
“What higher authority?”
“Have you heard of the Illuminati?”
“The Illuminati? Surely that’s just a myth isn’t it? That’s just something conspiracy theorists go on about?”
“I wish it were just a myth, Maurice. But the truth of the matter is that the Illuminati exists. It has done for hundreds of years.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we have agents embedded inside the organisation. They’re sympathisers – we call them SIMPs. They’re disillusioned members of the Illuminati and they feed us information about what’s happening.”
Of course, Maurice had heard about the Illuminati but he thought it was just stories, made up by over-active imaginations looking for someone to take the blame for society’s problems.
“It gets even crazier. T
he ONP, or the Order of New Perfectibilists as is their real title, is the political wing of the Illuminati. Remember in your history classes when you learnt that Sinn Féin was the political wing of the IRA, the Irish Republican Army? Well, it’s the same thing. It’s all part of a plan to establish a New World Order. Only, now it’s not just a plan – it’s a reality. Don’t you think it’s curious that so many countries have governments which behave in a similar way to ours? They all apply the same policies, and they apply the same policies because they’re the first really global party. They may have different names but they’re all the same political party really. It’s a world takeover.”
Maurice thought that it all sounded very far-fetched but it did make some kind of sense too. He’d seen old movies – especially those old James Bond film – where a megalomaniac, a power-hungry individual wanted world domination. He’d read about the Second World War and Adolf Hitler on the internet. Did this kind of thing really exist now? He knew of the existence of the resistance but he thought that they were just terrorists; he’d believed the ONP propaganda. If what this guy was telling him was true, it meant that the country – the world – was in an even bigger mess than he’d imagined.
“Right, we’re here.”
The car had pulled into the driveway of a modest but elegant detached house. Maurice was curious.
“Where are we?”
“We’re home. Rather than having a lot of us in one place – which could arouse suspicion and also be a security risk – we have a cell system, i.e. small units ready to act at very short notice. We never go on missions in our own area, we always operate at a range of a hundred miles or more. That’s why we were sent all the way to Devon to rescue you.”
“Rescue. That’s a welcome word. I was afraid I was a prisoner.”
“A prisoner? Believe me, Maurice. If you’d been a prisoner we wouldn’t have treated you with such kid gloves.”
“So, what’s your name? Obviously, the driver’s called Tony. But what’s your name? And the other guy who hasn’t said a word since we swapped cars?”