Utility
She would die in exactly nineteen minutes. He knew this because he had seen cessations like hers many times before. It always starts and ends with a physical body. The legs give up first. They no longer carry a person but lock them in place. Then the arms refuse to function and they lose their ability to create. Then the senses dull—sight, hearing, smell, no longer are they faithful guides.
The person’s mind and sense of self are the last to fade away. This happens within mere minutes before the final curtain call. No mind. No thoughts. No individual. Weak and helpless, people lay in bed, no longer able to perceive the material world. Their contract is expiring. The world, the society, cannot extract any more value from their lives and so they die. They must die.
He couldn’t understand why anyone would engage in self-destructive behavior knowing the fatal consequence. To save himself a cerebral short circuit, he preferred to explain such sabotage by a virus. The Erysichthon Virus he called it.
The world was now different than it was fifty years ago. At last, the Order prevailed. Each individual contributed to the prosperity of society, sharing the best of their abilities and eliminating the parasites. Concepts of famine, violence, and injustice ceased to exist. It was an era of certainty and resolution.
All that was accomplished by people like him, people who knew the price of progress and could sacrifice their paltry individual gains for the greater good. Was she one of those engines of progress? No, of course not. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be lying here, waiting for her time to expire.
“You can no longer speak. The world no longer needs your words,” he said aloud. The eyeballs under her eyelids started trembling. She heard him—no doubt about it—but her destiny was to remain a silent listener. She would never speak again.
He continued to voice his thoughts as he believed she had to hear what he had to say. No matter where she was about to depart to, or whether there were any other worlds beyond this one, truth must be acknowledged.
“Your words were not consistent with your actions. You repeatedly agreed to be present at the Prioritization Group meetings, but you never showed up. How could you not tell others you wouldn’t be attending? Did you understand how disrespectful you were to those who value their time?
“Or how about your negligence in the workplace? You took the responsibility of providing the upcoming generation with the sifted knowledge database and yet, somehow, you let the notion of desire slip in. Your carelessness was detrimental not only to your career as an educator but to the next generation of our otherwise well-curated society as well. How could you not show remorse?
“But the gravest errors of all—your slanderous questioning of the New Law. It is not to be questioned.” His voice became a steel knife, cutting through her body.
“The New Law—that fulfills all human needs and lubricates all of our societal mechanisms—is beyond question. You had it all. We gave you everything. Liquids, solids, security, and, the most precious of all, time. And you wasted these gifts.”
He looked around the room. A white cube with nothing but a bed, and yet, it had everything. All the tools, wires, and sensors were hidden. They served their purpose in the most elegant way—functioning properly without being visible. Temperature, humidity, and noise levels were perfectly adjusted so that the human body could function at its full capacity. Even the scent, which couldn’t be detected by his nose, stymied his brain and drowned out the smell of her imminent death.
“All the amenities you have were created by society, a group of highly functional individuals that I am proud to be a part of. And you… You had the abilities, yet you chose not to contribute. The inconsistency between your words and actions created chaos and accelerated the process of your termination. Nature does not encourage the propagation of destruction. Neither does society. Unproductive life is a waste of resources. Lives that do not benefit society must end.”
He caught himself quoting lines from the New Law. But how else could he convey this beautiful creed to her? His own thoughts had long since faded under the grand wisdom of the Law. He no longer remembered what it was like before mankind found the optimal way of existence, that is cultivating productive members and weeding out the unproductive ones.
He belonged to the highest caste, the Kreints. Those who were at the forefront of technologies that improved the present and led to a bright future. Always bright, always superior to any times that were before. The other castes, less prestigious and influential—The Gvidilos, The Perantos, and The Instrumentistos—all worked to ensure that the envisioned bright future wouldn’t be hindered. And the Sklavos, the lowest, served them all, without any notion of the future, or the past, as all they had was today and their today was enough for them.
The castes did not interact at work. Any attempt to mix them in the past resulted in low performance, so now every group had their own workspace, nap room, gym, and dining area. How did it happen that their paths, of The Kreint and The Instrumentisto, crossed? A malfunction in the canteen seating. She struck up a conversation swiftly and at ease. She wanted to understand the principle by which the PsychTech department, where he worked, divided individuals’ thoughts that spark actions from those that hinder them. Did they rely on the word “no” detected in their thoughts? Did they take into account the past history of a person’s actions?
Thus began their friendly relationship, which boiled down to him answering her endless questions. ” ‘No’ is an unreliable word, we look into chemical imbalance,” he had said. “The past does not necessarily predict the future. I’ve been working here for 76 years, how about you?”
It turned out that she had just completed her education. She refused to use the Memorization Chip and was only starting her career at 32. Why she rejected that beautiful piece of technology was beyond him. The world had accumulated so much knowledge that learning the basics took two decades. His predecessors at the PsychTech department gave people the opportunity to expedite the process to three years and thus extended an individual’s career. Although there were occasionally rebels who did not want bits of information to be implanted directly in their brains and preferred to employ their eyes, ears, and touch instead. She was one of them. She also claimed she picked up a job not because “it was the highest moral thing one could do” but because she created a mission for herself, and to accomplish it she needed to be employed.
Her frankness, the ease with which she addressed the innermost tenets of his world, thrilled him. In theory, they should have angered him and he should have denounced her to his superiors, but her smile, and curves, tinted his judgment. He could have sworn that her indistinguishable scent, in particular, was the one to blame for his attraction.
And now, like so many times before back in the dining room, he still found himself unable to move away from her.
“Two days ago,” he started, almost hoping for some kind of response, “we finished testing a new technology responsible for thought-switching. We’ll liberate people from useless, empty thoughts and confabulations. No longer will there be a broken record in their heads. We’ll be able to use the free space of mind for the creation of cutting-edge technologies. We are moving forward fast and steadily. I am proud of the actions I perform and the results I obtain. Is there anything greater than this?”
Her eyelids were motionless. Even on her deathbed, she was protesting the New Order. He could have stopped moralizing the ungrateful listener who had no chance of changing, but he persisted. Time was running out, and the most important things had not been said.
“You know how dangerous emotions can be when they are volatile, when there is no control over them? I warned you against your emotional indulgences but you kept exercising your outrage and disaffection, making yourself, and me, miserable. And what did all your offenses, crying, and self-doubts achieve? They ruined your potential and infected mine.”
He was getting somewhere with his words, but the aim, clearly visible a couple of minutes ago, was now drifting away. He felt tired. Being a man of action, not words, he wasn’t used to much talking. He should have stopped, left the room, and never looked back—there’s so much to invent: Switch for Feelings, Memory Eraser, Conscientiousness Booster—but the unidentified force kept him next to her. If only he could solve that mystery, he would be truly free.
“I will miss you. I don’t know how I know it. But I sense that with your cessation, I am destined to grow more attached to you. A cruel joke, I imagine.”
His hands started trembling, and unable to stop his unfortunate physical weakness, he squeezed her hands. Still warm.
“I must expedite the Switch development for personal reasons. But let’s just keep this to ourselves.” He could have sworn by the New Law that the corners of her mouth twitched.
“Do you remember…? It’s foolish of me to ask knowing that you can’t answer, I know, but I will ask regardless. I remember you used to call me ‘the creator of smiles.’ I used to make you smile, didn’t I? It’s a pity I don’t remember how I did so.”
He felt thirsty. The hydration level of his body fell below normal and his train of thought weakened. To correct this deviation, he licked his lips and a compartment on the wall next to him opened. He took a glass of water and hastily drank it.
“Do you remember one evening you lured me outside–to a cold, snow-covered street that mercilessly stole away at our bodies’ heat? And what for–to make a snowman? What a futile endeavor. The snowman melted. It always does. But here’s what I didn’t share back then: I enjoyed the very process of creating something from nothing and for nothing. Why? That is so unlike me.”
He felt a shiver in her fingertips. A couple more minutes and those fingers would never twitch again. He leaned to her face. Aware of the madness that possessed his mind, he kissed her. He was ready to renounce all the progress just to feel the reciprocal movement of her lips. Unvoiced desires whirled in his head as unrelenting emotions flooded his chest. What was he doing? There’s nothing to be achieved here but wasting time, standing and holding a soon-to-be corpse. He should return to work. But moving away was beyond his control. His willpower stretched to the limit and bounced back. To her.
“I loved you.”
The tone of regret poisoned his confession. He didn’t intend to share this weakness, even less did he mean to turn it into a rebuke. No matter how painful his love was, no matter how inefficient it made his days, he clung to it as if it were the answer to his existence.
He pulled back. He must not look for answers. All the answers that he ever needed were already provided by the New Law and must not be questioned.
“I loved you and it made me weak. I cannot afford to be weak. Human fallibility drove the world to the brink of collapse. People nearly exterminated themselves giving into capricious wishes, animal desires, sinusoidal emotions… Our generation is beyond them. We now create great things. We maximize everyone’s potential and prosper. We eliminate regrets. We…”
A fragment of his phrase hung in the air. She was gone. Her chest stopped moving and her jaw fell slightly open. Low-temperature freezing air started to fill the room and thus began the cryonic process. He stared into her young face. That couldn’t be true. He shook her body, trying to trigger its mechanism back to life. He shook himself, trying to stop his tears. He knew her death was coming, he thought he was ready to let her go and proceed with what matters—inventions for people’s prosperity. It couldn’t be that one inept soul, so disorganized, so variant would alter his trajectory of life.
The truths of the New Law echoed in his head, but they ceased to have power over him. She won. She counterposed his beliefs against his feelings. She weaponized his chemicals against his survival. She accomplished her mission while he lost the dearest he had—answers and her.
The platitudes he so prickly scattered became empty phrases that never made sense and could have no future. He realized with horror that he, too, had no future. The pain that came with her death had torn through the wall of certainty that the New Order had built in him. He could no longer hide behind its definitive answers and auspicious progress. To go on living, he must question her death and his life’s purpose. And the New Law is not to be questioned.
He failed the test and the account of his days went backward.