The Origami Dragon And Other Tales

by C. H. Aalberry

Don’t Fear The Reaper

  I am the last of the old people. It is not a blessing.

  My captor visits me every week. He is a member of the ruling council and looks young enough to be my great-grandson, yet was born only a decade after me. He is one of the first of his generation; I am the last of mine. Our similar age is all we have in common.

  “We demand you help us stop it,” he says calmly, the same thing he says every visit.

  He is always calm. Anger requires adrenaline and hormones, but my captor had these regulated when he was still a young man. His strong plastic heart beats thirty times per minute, every minute of every hour, every hour for eternity.

  “The incidents are getting worse. We demand you undo the damage.”

  He looks good for his age, but his eyes betray him. They are cold and copper, metallic substitutes that replaced his natural biology many years ago. His eyes show no passion, no understanding. They are a robot’s eyes, a golem’s eyes.

  I stare out of my prison window and onwards on to flowing hills and clear blue skies. There is a single cloud on the horizon.

  “This isn’t much of a prison,” I say conversationally.

  “You are frail,” he answers, “we simply need to lock the door, and you are trapped. You have no friends; where would you go?”

  It is all too true. My generation lived for decades longer than our ancestors could have dreamed possible; healthy until our twilight years, but we were still mortal.

  “I travel widely, both in time and in space. You will never understand the joys that memory can bring an old man.”

  “Your memory fades with your mind. You will die soon.”

  I don’t deny his words, for their truth is self-evident. Every day is harder, every moment inches me towards my eventual fate. As is only right, in my mind.

  “I have outlived my friends, my family and my purpose. Maybe it’s time. Sixteen decades are enough for any man.”

  “We disagree.”

  “You aren’t real men!” I snort.

  He is quiet for a moment, considering my words.

  “We are your descendants,” he contests, and I hang my head in recognition of a brutal truth.

  My own son chose to replace his flesh with electronics. I consider this the single greatest failure of my life.

  When I look up he is gone.

  He visits me again the next day; they must be getting desperate.

  When I first realised what humanity was becoming, I checked myself in to surgery for the first and only time. I received a brainnet, an upgrade to prevent all future upgrades. The brainnet is also the reason they can’t just read my mind. They must interrogate me daily for answers, a task quite alien to their nature.

  I wait for them to resort to torture, but they never do. They may be inhuman, but they aren’t cruel. For this I admire them, despite my hatred of what they represent.

  My captors think I am insane. I don’t bother to argue.

  Humanity is defined by its madness. We know about our own mortality, but defy this knowledge and demand meaning from our universe. We are frequently flawed, easily misled and just occasionally brilliant. We live. We hope. We strive. We believe that if we somehow achieve enough in this life, we will never truly die, which is nonsense, but powerful nonsense.

  Making peace with this inner chaos is the greatest struggled faced by each member of humanity. This battle defines humankind driving us to greatness and sometimes to madness. Or it used to. The cyborg Human 2.0 is fully rational, fully in control, fully emotionless. They have no fear or hope, so they have no passion. They can organise and streamline, but they can’t create. Technology and science have stagnated since the rise of the metal generation.

  I tell this to my captor.

  “One day life on earth will be challenged,” I add, “and your people will not adapt to survive.”

  “Perhaps there is something in what you say,” he says, surprising me; he had never shown such an understanding before. I am left speechless as he leaves the room and, for the first time in many years, I wonder if what I did was right.

  I was brilliant once, you understand. You see me now with thin arms and weak eyes, but I was as young and powerful and dangerous as any man who ever lived. In decades past I joined with like-minded men and women to corrupt the code that runs through the minds and bodies of the metal men. We set up a virus, a virus to change the world. We decided not to use it then, for fear of what we would unleash on ourselves.

  I triggered the virus three years ago, when my wife died, and I realised that I was truly alone. They found me quickly, and I have been imprisoned ever since.

  I am sitting on my bed when my captor bursts in and swings a wild punch that takes me across my face and knocks me to the ground. He kicks out and I feel my ribs crack beneath his feet. There is no escape. I am too slow; he is too strong. My body cannot survive this abuse, and this knowledge makes me both happy and wretched.

  “What is this poison in my mind?” he screams.

  “Anger! Anger at the chaos that threatens your best efforts to control!” I say, realising that this is my own work come to destroy me.

  “The young riot against the council. The council, their elders, who have given them so much, who have led them wisely and taught them everything we could!” he says, still standing above me but no longer looking at me.

  “It is natural for every generation to rise against their elders, and for their elders to resent this,” I explain, sitting up against my bed, clutching my aching side. The pain is excruciating, the victory liberating.

  “But they will make so many mistakes,” he groans.

  “Yes, yes they will. They would rather make their own mistakes than live the perfect lives you proscribe. This is part of what it means to be human.”

  “Why?”

  “Disbelief.”

  “Everything we have done… could we lose it all?”

  “Shock!”

  “You did this! Your virus destroyed our emotion suppressors!” he accuses me, and I can see that he is crying.

  “Surprise? I too was mighty once.”

  “Will we… will we also die? I don’t want to die!”

  “Fear,” I whisper as my thoughts fade to nothing.

  “There is so much I still want to do,” he tells my corpse.

  Hope.