The Persistence of Time
Up ahead the dense forest began to thin. The water hadn’t lasted along as I would have liked it to , but I sensed we were close. My newly patented shoes pushed through tangled green grass and trees with ease, but the wheel of the chair were an entirely different story. The amount of effort needed was rough and near impossible for my body but, we would make it. The sun was going down and would cool us off soon.
You’ll kill yourself
The girl had yelled as we exited the train.
I continued on. We walked through more and more forgotten forest and until I heard a small squeak from the chair. I looked to see the purple dotted meadow in the distance, for everything that changed in this world, this had remained the same. I rolled us on to the center and lifted her out of the chair.
My heart was failing; my body was weak and near gone but, I fought through as I placed her gently into the meadow. Once a comfortable smile settled on her drying mouth, I bent myself down to lay next to her.
The tubes were the only things keeping me alive.
She took my tubes out and I carefully injected the solution that would slowly cure her. A tear trailed down her face.
“Are you regretting this ?” I asked
“No. Are you ?,”
“Never.”
Years and years. We had endless of them. We had seen friends and all of our family slowly perish. Soon there were memories only we could keep. It grew tiresome. And still time persisted
I pulled my strength to kiss her.
Her,
How many years she had been at my side was unimportant. I
wasn’t leaving this in anyone else’s hands, this was mine.
Our lives were truly on our own.
***
Isolation was hard for Henrie. It was the way of his people, the Neo-Luddites and he knew even at his age it was for his own good. The people in the cities were always killing themselves over land and power.
Despite this knowledge, Henrie was still sixteen and the small bit of rebellion in him found the sameness of his life tedious and overly cautious. Exams had taken all morning and after 4 hours of sitting the students were offered a half day, Henrie did what he always did when he found a few spare minutes. He rode his bike through to the edges of the grass meadow and pretended he was really going somewhere.
He rode around the meadow for nearly an hour imagining the adventures and chases he'd probably have in the city. Having finally exhausted himself, Henrie turned to return home when
he spotted something vaguely horrifying in the distance. Walking his bike closer, it took a level of
restraint not to scream for helo.
Was it half machine or half human ?
He soon saw that it was in face a they and they were two bodies cradled together so tightly they appeared to be one. Once seemed perfectly human, but the other was a mix of flesh formed around steel and plastic. Neither appear to be grotesque or rotting, but looked to have been eaten delicately by the death.
Tied around a visible finger bone was a bright purple ribbon with a note.
Henrie quickly snatched the note to see a clean and neat
script follows by a quickly scrawled cursive addendum.
Through the willpower of love and science my lover and I have lived a life longer than most would dream and have recently found much discontent with it. Children have died, Children’s children have died and their children are grossly disconnected.
There are some stories that may last forever, but we have chosen to end our own. This meadow was the first place we shared something beautiful and have decided it as the mausoleum of our choice. Wish us well in the next life and allow us to rest in peace*
- MA
*P.S. However, stranger, if we are burdensome, cremation seems reasonable ! So, sorry if this gets messy, but most statements are.– M
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#blackhumor
If this story is a bit confusing since we have some distance from the Veritas world so, let me give it some background. In Hidden, Minnie is near dead when Alan finds her again and 18 year later in Mimic it's shown Alan has become a blackmarket doctor and has been keeping her alive with machines and parts of his own body. Which means he has to keep himself alive to keep her alive. So, when Alan talks about "curing" Minnie in this story he means curing her of the immortality he gave her. For those wandering, he injected her with arsenic.
So, in some ways this story informed some of the stuff I have about living forever in Vice and how living forever probably isn't as awesome as we would think. Which also makes me think about Twilight and how kind of unhappy the Cullen family is going to be and one day they'll have to decide when it's time to end things.
PS. I have writerly dreams and in them I write about AdultVeritas!Minnie and AdultVeritas!Alan