There’s a switch in the panel in front of me. I flick that one I am free. No worries, no trouble, no pain.
It turns me off. Kills me, if you will.
A painless death, I’m just turned off. All my functions stop. Instantaneous.
No time for my senses to register a thing. Just all electrics gone, and no residual charge is left behind. My body too breaks down, into particles far too small to see with the naked eye.
For the longest time, I thought that I was human. I was scared shitless of growing old and dying. Never realized just how good a deal that actually is.
And then the day came I was hit by a car and did not die. I should have. Would’ve died, had I been human.
That car rammed me so fast against a metal railing it cut off both my legs. The rest of me went right over it and kept on flying for a while. Then began to fall. Kept falling for so much longer than I flew.
I hit rocks where I landed. I was crushed. The worst of it is, I was aware. I felt every bit of damage that had been done, and could not turn it off. Could not pass out and die like an actual human being.
I sensed where my legs were. Crushed between the car and railing. I sensed my broken neck, my broken skull. Every broken bone and ruptured organ that there was within me.
I felt it when they began to heal. It was fast, but nowhere near fast enough.
That agony was enough to drive a body insane. Yet my mind was clear. Clearer than it had ever been in all the time I mistook myself for human.
My legs freed themselves from where they were pinned by breaking into thousands upon thousands of tiny little pieces. Each piece then began a journey towards where the rest of me was. I felt every single one of those pieces as me, scattered about and moving. With a singular goal in mind: return to one.
The rescue people never noticed a thing until after I was gone. There was no way I could’ve survived a fall like that, so they focused all their attention and all their efforts on saving that drunk asshole who hit me with his neighbor’s car. His own he had lost due to priors.
My pieces found me. Reassembled into legs. The rest of me also finished fixing itself, and I ran.
I ran a really long time. I ran faster and further than I ever had before. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t out of breath. All I knew was I have to run. It didn’t matter where.
I ran all the way to the other side of town and into some fields of flowers before I stopped. I sat on a big rock right in the middle of the field and tried to think.
What the hell just happened? Did I dream it up? Had I gone insane?
Eventually I made my way back home. Sat on the bed and turned on my tv.
It took twenty minutes for the local news to come on and mention the mysterious disappearance of a victim of a car accident. “Do you know this woman?” And they gave a description of me.
I had not imagined it. Nor was it a dream, unless I was still asleep.
I didn’t feel like I was sleeping. I felt awake, alert, clear-headed. Apart from not having a clue how any of this could possibly be happening, of course.
I had to get out of town. I felt the need to leave so strong in every fiber of my being.
Maybe I wouldn’t be found out. The description was not so perfect as to be immediately recognized by strangers. But my friends knew I’d be on that road about the time of the accident. They were expecting me, and I did not show up.
It occurred to me to listen to my voice mail. Twenty eight messages from Charlie’s number. There was no way I’d be able to explain what happened. Where I’d been.
I had to get out. At least until I knew myself just what to think about it all.
I threw some things together. Packed them in my rucksack.
I was used to travelling light, so I didn’t take much with me.
If I’d fully realized that I’d never again return home, I might have packed some mementos too, but I didn’t. Everything I took was purely functional. And so it’s been ever since.
To this day, my only possession that has any sentimental value at all, is a small bone I wear in a chain around my neck. Finger bone of a man I fell in love with so many centuries after the day I first left my human existence. A reminder never again to be so foolish. But I digress.
I bought tickets on the first bus out of town that I could get to on time. Not caring one bit where it was headed. It didn’t matter, so long as it was away.
I found myself in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Got a room in a boarding house.
I experimented on myself in that room. Got a knife and cut myself. Watched myself heal. Again and again.
It all seemed so unreal.
The pain was real enough. It hurt like hell every time. Still hurts like hell whenever I am injured, but the pain kinda loses its significance when one heals no matter what. You learn to breathe through it. Let it be.
Never lasts all that long anyway.
I still wish sometimes that I could pass out. Like when that acid burned off all my skin and more than half my musculature. Or when a nuclear blast breaks me into trillions of pieces scattered all over. God, that hurts. But I always stay aware. I always stay alive, no matter what. And I always heal.
I’m hoping this switch will change that.
Anyhows, you can only cut yourself so many times before it gets old. So eventually I left that room, and started to build myself a brand new life.
It wasn’t easy. Not without new papers, no social security number. But I found myself a job where they paid all cash, and didn’t ask me any questions at all.
Eventually I got new papers too. Someone suggested I talk to someone, and so it went.
I had a pretty good life there. Kept to myself mostly. Sometimes drinking with some people in the beginning, but I couldn’t actually get drunk. That took the fun right out of that. And so I kept to myself the rest of the time.
Nothing good lasts forever, though.
After about eight years in that small town in the middle of nowhere, I had another accident. Someone got careless with a forklift, and a whole pile of heavy crates fell right on top of me.
They were planning to take me to hospital in an ambulance. I couldn’t have that, and so I ran again. At least this time I had plenty of cash saved up, just in case, and I already knew how to get new papers for another new life someplace else.
So I went someplace else. And then another someplace else, when people started wondering how come I don’t seem to age like everybody else.
Went to Hollywood for a few decades. Still, even plastic surgery can’t explain everything. Plus I got real tired of people asking for the name of my surgeon.
On and on I went. Place to place, town to town, name to name, country to country.
Over the years I experimented again and again on what all I could survive. Tried drowning. Apparently I don’t have to breath. Getting hit by a train. No different from being hit by a car. Getting shot just hurts, and so does falling from an airplane without a parashute. Drank poison. No effect. Blew myself up with a few sticks of dynamite. This time all of me broke into those tiny little self-aware pieces, but I still survived the blast just fine.
The time it took to put myself back together could vary. The amount of pain experienced could be different. The end result was always the same: I was fine.
Then I had a brilliant idea: If I can’t be killed, I may as well make some money out of that!
I learned everything I could about all sorts of weapons, bombs, and styles of fighting. First I became a price fighter. Then I got enlisted. And finally I became an assassin, mercenary, and terrorist for hire.
There’s a fortune to be made both in assassinations, and in the wars around the world. Especially if one can’t be killed, or even maimed for more than a moment. One just has to have the stomach for killing others. And not too many scruples about who or why.
I never could have imagined actually killing anyone way back when I still thought myself human. Fortunately, by this time I’d seen enough people be born, grow up, and die of illness, accidents and old age all around me, while I stayed young and healthy, I’d begun to see human life as fairly meaningless. Myself as something else.
Not necessarily any more meaningful, mind you. I do believe by then I already took myself to be every bit as pointless as everyone and everything else. Just I was, and could not cease to be, so I may as well make a fortune out of that. Helps pass the time.
The first time I actually killed someone was awful nonetheless. Took me ages to get over it.
But I did.
I killed someone. And I got over it. Both the killing and the getting over it got a whole lot easier over time and with more practice.
I moved around the world where whimsy and my contracts would take me. And when humanity went to the stars, I went right along with them.
Took a few centuries not killing anyone. Just exploring space. Getting to know new species. Learning all these brand new languages and all these alien cultures.
Ultimately got drawn back into conflicts, of course. By this time it was mostly out of the hope that surely someone somewhere must have invented a weapon that could actually kill me too. I was so tired of being around. But no. Didn’t matter what their weapons were, I always survived them all.
A planet was blown up beneath my feet, and I shattered right along with it. Only to be aware of all my tiny bits and pieces floating around in space, and eventually gravitating back together again.
Well, I say gravitating, but actually my pieces seem to have some kind of a propulsion system that works even in empty space. Haven’t really figured out just how it works.
I did not like the sensation of floating around in nothingness until I was picked up by a passing ship. I did not like it at all. So I try not to repeat the experience too often. I try not to have too many planets blow up with me still on them, and not too many ships either. Not without an escape already arranged.
About a hundred and fifty years ago I started hearing stories about others of my kind having existed once. You can guess the part that appealed to me the most in that story: the fact that that they had ceased to do so. Whoever they were, wherever they came from, and whenever the hell in history all this happened, they’d found a way to die.
I wanted that for myself. An end to my own story.
I listened. I learned. Little by little I made my way towards that particular part of infinite space where my people came from. The closer I got, the more detailed the stories became.
Finally I found this world. A planet completely empty of any life at all. Loads of ancient cities full of most amazing technology. Anyone would be thrilled to get their hands on all that. But the defensive system around the planet vaporized both you and your ship if you got too close to the planet.
Unless you were like me.
The defensive system did destroy my ship. But I myself survived the fall down to the planet’s surface. Put myself back together, and started studying the place. The place and my own true origins.
I was made here. Millennia ago. Sent into space as a seed. A seed that just happened to land and sprout on planet Earth. Grew up in foster care.
There’d been billions like me on this planet once. But my people had grown weary of existence, same as me. Only difference was, they had access to the very technology that had created them in the first place.
They created a way to shut themselves down. A way to put an end to all their existence. Break themselves down into pieces too small to see. Pieces that would not be putting themselves back together again. Pieces that finally wouldn’t even be aware of themselves at all.
They made records of everything. Filmed themselves telling their stories. Left instructions on how the switch was built and how it works. And then they used it.
An entire civilization committed suicide.
I watched story after story, person after person. I spent weeks, months, getting to know my people, all of whom were dead. There were far too many stories to watch them all, but I saw enough to finally understand just who and what I was.
I wasn’t the only seed that had been sent to space. Others could show up here. And others had. They too recorded their stories, and those I watched them all.
Their stories were remarkably like my own. The stories of other seedlings, I mean. Everyone seemed to gravitate towards a career in killing. Which was funny. Considering the originals of my world were mostly peaceful scientists and explorers.
Must be the trauma of growing up without your kind.
Eventually I got tired of watching the stories of my ancestors and done with all the stories of my siblings. Turned my attention back to my original purpose in coming to this planet: the kill switch.
I studied how it was made. I learned just how it functioned.
A painless death. An instantaneous ending to a life that had already lasted a thousand years too long.
I was ready. I was so ready for this.
It had been over nine hundred years since the last seedling before me had arrived here to self-terminate. I hadn’t heard any talk at all of another living one like me anywhere in any of the galaxies I’d ever been to. And I had been to many.
I still recorded my story just in case I wasn’t the last to arrive here. Seemed only fair I do so too, after watching so many others.
Who knows, maybe someday the defensive net around the planet would break down. Then people who were not the same as me could come here too. Most likely they’d ransack the place for everything it’s worth, but who knows. Might be someone actually interested in our stories too.
So I recorded mine. I made my own little suicide film, that someday someone might actually see. Or maybe no one ever. Didn’t matter. Still seemed like the right thing to do.
And now, here I am. Done with absolutely everything. Looking at the switch that will shut me down. Turn me off. Kill me.
At last.
I’ve no idea how long I’ve been standing here just staring at it.
No point putting it off any longer.
I watch my right hand as it extends and reaches for the kill switch. I touch it. It feels cold beneath my fingers.
I flick the switch.
And nothing happens.
I flick it again and again. This cannot be happening! It has to work! But it doesn’t.
I’m still here.
Now what do I do?
I was so looking forward to being dead.
I sit on the floor before the panel, completely numb. I feel betrayed. My very last hope seems to be gone.
I don’t know how long I’m there on the floor before I decide to get up again. I’m going to check the whole system. See if it is something I can fix.
Or maybe it was all just a hoax. Maybe there never were any others like me.
I may be doomed to exist through all eternity. That thought feels even more unbearable now that I’ve tasted actual hope of dying.
I cannot think that way. I have to believe it’s real. I need it to be something I can fix.
I take hours inspecting the thing. I take it apart so careful. I certainly don’t want to break it any worse than it already is.
I hope and I pray. To whom, I don’t know. Whatever deity is behind it all, I suppose. With millions of religions to choose from in this galaxy alone, I don’t care who I worship, just so long as they let me die.
I find it at last. One tiny little wire that has corroded. I clean it up. Finish checking everything else, and then put it all back together again.
I thank my ancestors for having the foresight to leave such detailed instructions behind to whomever may possibly need them. My relief is so great it makes me giddy.
Once I’m done, I sit on the floor for a while again. Just breathing. Centering myself.
I’m ready to try again.
I get up. Reach for that cold, metallic kill switch. Flick it. And die.
Two thousand years later. Click.
– “God damn it! Who turned me on again??!!”