Falling into the Sun

I’ve been falling towards the sun for some time now. I passed through Mercury’s orbit a few days back, and the heat is building now. My shining casket still protects me from the worst, but not for long. Sentenced to die for wanting to help others come to their end. The irony is not lost on me. There’s not enough room in this sphere to lose it.

My jailers were kind enough to supply me with enough materials to keep my nano-biome operational until we burned to nothing. Maybe I’ll hibernate and skip the calories. The MREs aren’t too bad, but the packing material will be hard to chew. My nano-biome may force me to eat, but I think I can reason with them. We’re all going to die anyway, so why stay awake for the auto-de-fe?

Sometimes I feel sorry for them, my nanobots. They didn’t choose to be bonded with someone not cut out for immortality. Six hundred and thirty-four years was long enough for me. I was only four hundred and twenty-one when it started getting bad. The younger generations, as few of them as there are, seem to have a better handle on their undying futures. Most freeze their growth around twenty-eight. When the med bots were unleashed, I was already forty-eight.

As usual, the beginning was so bright and the future they promised blinded us from everything to come. First, they eliminated all diseases, even that little bastard, the common cold. Then, they figured out how to heal any catastrophic wound. Soon, they eliminated the requirement to age. Whether we wanted to stop or not. Forty-eight. I was lucky; an extra few hundred years as a ninety-year-old man would have been much worse, no matter how spry. The med bots learned to stop time but could only turn it back so far.

Sooner than most cynics anticipated, near-invincible armies met each other in fields and cities across the globe. Covered in dust and dried blood, we learned we could survive on grass and fine dust. Only the richest could afford to eat the poor. Why not give an arm and a leg for a place to rest? They’ll grow back. No one unleashed their stockpiles of atomic and hydrogen bombs. Despite the bombs and tanks, billions of bullets ripping through the flesh of millions, someone had decided life was too precious for that.

After hundreds of years of surviving, who wouldn’t want to be done with it all? Even as humanity stumbled towards an imperfect utopia I, like so many others, was just tired. Tired of other people. Tired of earth’s beauty, and I had seen so much of it after the wars. No place was off limits if you brought enough materials to fuel your nano-biome. A puffy jacket was recommended in the Arctic, but not required. Take a few extra tanks of oxygen and a spear to fend off squids, and the deepest seas were your oyster.

Maybe I just needed to rest again. Have someone remove my head, store it and my body for a few years, maybe twenty. For many, that was enough of a death that they felt reborn after reattachment. Throwing themselves a re-birth shower, though I found three or four of those for one person to be a little gauche. Desperate for attention. But I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t want to let someone else force me back into this world that might change but never would.

Fire. Man’s greatest inadvertent discovery was the only way I could think of to be done with it all. Not just any fire. Any one of us could walk through a burning building or lay down in a crematorium like a tanning bed. No, I needed the kind of fire that might set the atmosphere ablaze. It took me years and years of work and sold body parts to build a furnace to house the flame I wanted to set. Another thirty years to reinforce the building so the Earth would not be caught up in my malaise. Before I could even make a spark, they arrested me for attempted murder. My biggest mistake was I had been kind enough to test my facility out on a friend in even worse condition than I was. One of those ninety-year-olds I mentioned before. I should have started with myself and left the instructions behind.

It did not matter that the person I was “attempting to murder” wanted to die. That wasn’t the point, according to the prosecutor. The point was that if you’re not trying to kill someone at the direction of your government, it’s illegal. And immortals cannot live in peace without laws to keep us in check. It wasn’t a long trial. They’d caught me in the building I’d made, the controller for the furnace in my hand, looking at my friend on the monitor, who was tied to a metal slab. It was the sentencing that took a while.

They had done away with the death penalty as we knew it because the methods no longer worked. They had done away with life sentences. Our fragile economies could not sustain feeding immortals for the rest of eternity. There were arguments for forced head severing, especially from the countries longest under the yoke of monarchy, but just as many argued against it as barbaric. And there was the cost of storage to consider. I finally convinced them that there was only one obvious choice left - bring back the death penalty.

At first, they were wary of my motivations, but I won them over with a PowerPoint presentation proving the savings they would reap by ending me. We formed a committee to explore options and, in order to avoid the possibility of burning the planet to a crisp, finally landed on flinging me into space. Straight at the sun.

Even as it pulls me closer and closer., I know I’ll never actually reach the sun. No one would spring for the materials needed for that. Chewing on packing peanuts softened with my sweat seems a fitting final meal for getting what you want. Human beings could fit so many lives into the short time they’d had before. Stretch that out over centuries, and, for some, for me, it’s just too much. I know some will follow me. I am hopeful that most won’t. But I’m grateful that some in the future may be given a choice, a gift, of finality.

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Author's Note:

While I saw this story as an allegory for end of life care, I realize others may view it differently. To that end, if you find you are feeling any thoughts of suicide, or are just in need of help, you can call 988 in America. I apologize there are too many hotlines to list for other Vocal friends in the wider world, but encourage any one in need to reach out to family, friends, or a kindly looking stranger. I am not a professional at this in any way, so please just take this as a well meaning PSA.