The Void

Eternal life is complete bull. The sort that both melts the cow on its way out and still has energy afterwards to reduce the fabric of society to gurgling mulch. It renders civilisation useless, unpicks the strings puppeteering it and lets it jolt closer to the ground with each loosened knot. All whilst dancing and taunting and smacking you in the face with this is what you wanted.

This is what people wanted. Eternal life. To live forever. Young and beautiful and alive, permanently.

Bull.

People who begged for eternal life clearly never considered that they’d outlive everyone they ever cared about and everything that ever mattered.

I presume when people pined for immortality, they imagined all their loved ones would be undying too. Maybe they even believed their own extended shelf-life would stabilise the Earth—climate change would reverse; society would continue as it always had. Perhaps they fancied that everyone would be made resilient to disease, that all ten billion people on the planet could have their brains Transferred.

Again, bull. There’d never be enough money to perform the Transfer on everyone. Once the Institute for Cybernetic Evolution (I.C.E) had perfected a method to create life-like android bodies capable of harbouring human thoughts, feelings, memories, brains, it hadn’t taken long before the richest had paid to secure their own eternities.

People had been sceptical. Almost no-one trusted it before the trials and the proof. Before the first ten, twenty, thirty androids were booted up in perfect imitations of those whose brains they carried.

Then came the ethics. Was this right? Was this human? What was a human?

There were riots, arguments, fights in the streets and torched labs. The conflict lasted all through the Wars, the climate change, until there were no more of the non-Transferred left.

All the most influential people had been Transferred by the time the first riots broke out. The richest were eternal, the politicians undying, the CEOs and bankers immortalised. More men than women were accepted. Not because more men applied but because of the unending sexism.

You must be sure, scientists would say. You won’t be able to have children.

The only reason I was Transferred was because I won the competition. I.C.E ran a lottery three months into my four-month death-sentence. Terminal cancer had me, I was dying and Bastian was desperate. He sent them a letter, begging and frantic for some way to stop my lungs from liquifying. Some way to pull me back from purgatory, back to the warmth of the living.

Bastian hadn’t really expected to win. Nobody ever seems to win these things, so he hadn’t told me he’d entered until they called him up to congratulate him. I’d been so shocked at the chance to claw back my life, the chance to watch our daughter grow and learn and live that I’d signed the documents before I could stop to realise what I’d done.

Our daughter was three, then. I was twenty-five, Bastian twenty-four. We lived to see our daughter grow, and her daughters, her daughter’s sons, her son’s children. All their funerals.

“Decent weather, isn’t it?” Jeff says. Jeff was a politician, back when there was anyone around to need politics.

He’s standing at the jagged window of the decrepit little semi we’ve spent the last six months in. I watch as he pushes at the spikes of glass spider-webbing out from the bullet holes in the window. He pokes a finger through one of them, pushes it as far as it will go until the window gives way at last and shards of glass flutter infinitesimally onto the green mould bubbling up between the rotten floorboards.

“Haven’t had a morning like this in weeks,” Sandra replies cheerily from where she sits to my left at a rusting metal table we found about a mile away. Sandra is Jeff’s wife. I fight the hot curl of jealousy in my gut every time I see them. They get to stay together, get what I was rabid for.

I try to remain impassive, try to remember that I can’t spit at them for being the living embodiment of I will love you until the end of time.

“It’s not morning,” I tell them flatly. The bug-eaten mattress beneath me squeaks as I sit up.

“Sure looks like morning,” Jeff presses. He has his back to me, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his torn jeans, but I can imagine his face. The way he must be chewing on his upper lip, distorting his dark moustache.

“It’s the fallout. We’ve been through this.” Between increased volcanic activity and a long-finished nuclear war it’s always a dim, ashy orange outside. Clear sky is a myth and sunlight a legend.

I join Jeff at the window, glass crunching under my bare feet, and look through its empty frame. We’re in an old suburban street, though the pavement's been split open by overgrown greenery. With no one to cut them back, the trees have forced thick, roping roots up through the cement and coiled slowly around great, heaping chunks of the ground. It’s like they’re dragging anything man-made back beneath the surface. Tightening and strangling around all the unnatural niceties like roads, houses, streetlamps and hauling them down to the Earth’s core to melt and eat.

Humans made Earth something of an android itself, I suppose. Made it into a metropolis of natural and not. Stripped it, made it convenient for us to exist on. I can’t blame it for taking the chance to devour the heaving cities we forced upon it, for spitting up fresh dirt between the deep cracks in the ground.

“Do you want tea, Erika?” Sandra asks, ignoring us.

“I’m fine, thanks,” I reply. Jeff sucks his teeth sharply and turns to face his wife.

“Shouldn’t you save that tea?” He chastises. “You’ve been having a cup a day for two weeks. Who do you think you are, the Queen?”

Jeff and Sandra bicker like a normal couple even on the brink of nothingness. I’ve been living with them for upwards of two-hundred years at this point, half for the company and half because Sandra is exceptionally good at performing maintenance on us. She used to work for I.C.E before the riots.

Bastian died in a riot. Not one of the first, but far later when we were certain all the non-Transferred were dead, when we thought we were safe from targeted attacks.

It’s hard to kill an android. We’re waterproof, shock-proof, invulnerable to pollution and extreme temperatures on either end of the scale. Though we have lab-grown organs, they’re flexible and the outer membrane bends when stabbed—we can’t be shot or impaled. They’re mostly for show anyways. We don’t need to eat or drink, breathe or sleep, but we can.

I’d always wondered whether we were fire-proof. We aren’t. We melt and our organs burst. That’s how I found Bastian—a smouldering pile on the ground with the consistency of hot tar and the moveability of chewing gum on the underside of a desk.

Today is the anniversary of his death, or round-about. There’s no real way to tell the time or date, there’s no electricity and all the watch-faces are frozen. We just draw a line on the wall every perceivable day for thirty days and call it a month. Once we’ve drawn six months’ worth of lines on whatever shack we’ve cobbled together or house we’ve decided to squat in, we move on.

“There’s so much of the world to see!” Sandra always says, as though there’s anything left out there. We’ve been on so many boats and rafts I don’t even know what country we’re in anymore. There aren’t any viable maps.

“We’ll pay our respects to Bas and then leave tomorrow,” Jeff says, turning back to me. He places a hand on my shoulder, it makes my skin crawl.

Sandra presses a cup of tea into my hands even though I said no.

“We’ll head towards the river tomorrow,” she says gently. I want to take the steaming mug and smash it. I want to throw it at a wall, at her. I don’t.

I blame the grief for making me like this. I think it’s sending me mad. You’d think they’d erase undesirable emotions when they Transferred you. But they didn’t and grief without end is unbearable.

I nod and go back to my mattress, my heart jangles with Bastian’s.

Bastian had gone with Jeff to find a new place for us to live, but only Jeff had come back. The two of them had separated, and my husband was torched by rioters. I could tell it was him because his shoe had fallen off and inside it, under a cut-away flap near the heel, was one of our daughter’s old hair ties. The sort with chunky plastic bubbles that clacked together when she skipped.

That, and the locket, is all that was left. I.C.E attached them to our machined hearts like key-chains when we were Transferred, most people didn’t even know they were there. I’d taken both from the carnage and wrapped his locket’s thin chain around mine, which I’d once ripped out when I’d wanted to see inside myself. Bastian had stopped me when he’d heard the screams, but I’m glad I did it.

Now I wear Bastian’s with my own, on a chain around my neck, and when I walk our little metal hearts clink together over my chest.

“Six months went fast this time, didn’t it?” Jeff sighs.

“Why don’t we just stay here?” I ask. I don’t want to move, not this time.

Jeff and Sandra look at me the way people do when they’re trying not to be patronising.

“We have to move on,” Jeff urges. He looks to Sandra for support, who places a hand on Jeff’s upper arm. They’d both been in their sixties when they were Transferred but had requested to look as they had at twenty-three. It’s disconcerting to remember and almost impossible to tell their looks are synthetic.

Androids don’t have any seams—we’re designed to look as human as possible. I could tell Bastian was different after he was Transferred, though. I’d have known him blind, had him catalogued in my head. I could pair every sound he made with everything he did—I knew his footsteps, the sound of his breathing. I knew how his heart pounded beneath my hand and how his back teeth clacked together when he was pissed off.

After the Transfer none of that was the same anymore. I had to relearn him. I still loved him, but he was different. I was different.

I wish I could remember him, how we were before. I wish they’d invented time-travel instead of androids, so we could’ve lived a thousand different lives and avoided the end.

We were meant to be forever.

The world has been on a constant simmer for a couple of centuries now. Politics, war, climate-change—it just got worse and worse and worse until there was nothing left but wreckage and the Transferred. I don’t want the world to simmer anymore, I want it to boil.

I want it to boil and burn and take me with it.

When Jeff and Sandra leave this time, I won’t go with them. I think I’ll go to the coast, somewhere nicer than the urban ruins Sandra likes to lounge around in like holiday resorts.

I’ll sit by the oil-stained sea and hope that in the future, when I’m eventually gone, someone will find what’s left. I hope they’ll find my locket, Bastian’s locket, and know that we existed.