At #AlbertEinsteinHospital because of my #ChronicPain #Fibromyalgia #RheumatoidArthritis #ITP got #Transfused 2 units of #BloodO+ will be sent to a #RehabilitationCenter by Monday. (at ALBERT EINSTEIN HOSP)
(Originally submitted as an entry in Sci-Fi London's 48hr Flash Fiction Challenge 2017.
Dialogue: I put whiskey in my milk to kill the germs.
Science: Technology allows people to hack their DNA sequence and recreate themselves to their liking.)
Some twenty years back, I had cause to be travelling through those still untamed parts of the Highlands with only my backpack for company and some ill-formed notion that I could better find myself among the hills and glens than in a city's crowds. The land there, as any who has visited knows, is characterised by an exquisitely beautiful desolation, where on a clear day (as rare as those are) one can stand on a high place and see right the way to the horizon.
The scarcely-there lazily winding path I took led me around the side of a mountain I shall leave unnamed. Ominous clouds were gathering overhead, and I was just beginning to think of looking for shelter when, it seemed to me, the ground opened up beneath me into a deep divot, perhaps half a mile long and a quarter wide – a small valley hidden on the mountainside, invisible until one almost stumbled into it.
A lush green hillside spread out under my feet, bruised with heather, rolling gently down to the borders of a small copse of birches.
t was at this point that the heavens made good on their rumbling threat, unleashing a torrent that would soak me to the skin in minutes, and I dashed beneath the trees to wait out the worst of it.
The trees were well-spaced and healthy, but their leaves provided less protection from the rain than I had hoped. I resigned myself to a future full of wet socks.
Almost as soon as entering the narrow strip of trees I stepped out the other side of them into grim heathland. I was glad to see a short, squat house nestled against the side of the steeply rising mountain. Wasting no time, I hurried over and rapped sharply on the door.
My heart rose as the door swung open. A man stood there, grey-bearded and grizzled. The rain had plastered my hair to my forehead, so I pushed it back and gave him my best smile.
'You're wet,' he grumbled in a deep Scottish burr.
I agreed.
He considered. 'Best come inside. I've just put the kettle on.'
The house had only one room, close-packed with old books and odd trinkets. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the ceiling beams and sacks of fertiliser stacked in a corner gave the room a not-unpleasant earthy smell. Two chairs sat facing a coal-burning stove, on which a cast-iron kettle was sitting.
The man took my sodden coat and hung it over a rack in front of the stove, where it gently steamed. I sat and stripped off my boots and socks.
We sat in companionable silence for several minutes, listening to the pounding of the rain.
I ventured a compliment of his home.
'I likes it well enough.'
And the location – absolutely stunning.
'Oh, aye.'
I asked if he had lived there long.
'All my life.'
Alone?
'No.'
I sensed that I had touched on a sensitive subject. I was glad of the interruption when the kettle began to sing. The man bustled for a minute or so, then handed me a mug of milky tea. I thanked him, took a sip, and choked.
'I put whiskey in my milk to kill the germs,' he said.
I smiled weakly, and carefully put the mug down.
'You're from down south?' It wasn't a question. 'Know much about Transfusers?'
I half-nodded, half-shrugged.
'My daughter, she brought one home, years back. As if I'd know the first thing about how to use it.'
I offered to run through the basics with him, and he brought out the familiar green box. It was an older model, but perfectly functional, and before long I had him fairly comfortable with its usage. In the old days a person would need three doctors to sign off on a procedure before they would be allowed within a hundred yards of such a device, but now it was considered no more difficult and significantly less dangerous than operating a vehicle.
'Thanks. I'm not as young as I was.' He chuckled. 'But I soon will be. Marvellous thing. You young people don't know how lucky you have it.'
I mentioned that I had recently entered my second century.
'Like I said. Young. Now take me. I was what we used to call middle-aged when they invented the Transfuser. Eternal youth, they said, though of course that isn't all it does.'
He took a long draught of tea-infused whiskey, clearly warming to his theme.
'I used to be a woman, you know – at least that's what people called me. I thought I was radical. But the things you weans do to yourselves... Treating your DNA like kittens play with yarn. Have you? Done anything extreme, I mean.'
I related my gap year, which I spent in the Hebrides as a dragon, or as close to one as the limits of biology permitted.
He shook his head. 'Maybe I'm just out of touch. Now my daughter, she's like you. Never happy as she was. Oh the doctors, they say it's all just chemistry, easily mended. But you can't mend what's not broken, she'd always say.'
I asked where his daughter was now, but he didn't respond.
The rain had stopped by that point. A brave sunbeam was creeping through the window, and I began to make my excuses.
He showed me out. Before closing the door, he hesitated a moment on the threshold, staring out at the birches swaying slightly in the sun.
“I don't know which one she is, so I take care of them all.”
I turned to say something, I don't know what, but the door was already shut.
As I returned the way I had come, a gust of wind gently shook the trees. They whispered as I passed.
Transfused into a life of neutrality. My mind almost numb from the nohing-ness. Life forms alluring the enchanted. Into a place which pays no respect to time. Clocks warp into mouths, swallowing up the generations. Leaving only a bitter taste in the mouths of the regretful. Staining the sheets in a fused interaction, of love sweat and blood. Two lives dangle on the edge of one life and another. Is this fate tempting me? Or is this death with one of his sinister games? Teasing me, dangling the carrot of hope in front of my donkey nose. Then anger bursts into my mental state. And atrocious thoughts of brutal acts, flip through my mental vision. I cringe at my own thought, and then stop and ponder the act. Of which I was currently partaking. I seldom felt the feeling of anger. Until only not so long ago. What has changed so much to create such a metamorphosis of my mind? A strong feeling of realization sweeps across me. And I smile. Yet only for a brief moment, as my mind transcends into the cosmos, and I swallow the universe whole.
