Brett LaFave (CRIMINAL REF # 2387421)

My years creep through my limbs, eroding my veins and stealing my touch. Although I sometimes wish for the strength and physical agility I had as a youth, my geriatric weakness reminds me that I am alive. I would not trade my aching body for the inability to feel pain, and I will not sacrifice my humanity in order to preserve life as a puppet. My mind is free because my body will die. My body's misery is my mind's freedom. I pity those who doom themselves to an aging youth, because life cannot exist without death. The people carrying the empty faces and lugging hollow dreams are doomed to consider their mistake forever. I'd rather live a life full of suffering and pleasure.

My daughter Eva visits every Tuesday. Tells me about the kids. Lets me know how Bobby's piano lessons are going; tells me all about Sarah's new boyfriend of the week or about her new plan to save the world. I smile and laugh, but Eva doesn't. We both cry sometimes, but the conversation always ends the same: with her begging me; pleading with me and demanding that I get the implant. She's been all over my case since last year when the Fraternal doctor told me I'd die soon without a reconstruction. She gives me a real guilt trip every time. Used to tell me Bobby'd be too young to remember me if I went now. Say how Sarah needed me at her wedding. Every time, my answer's the same.

Don't know why she doesn't see; if she did, she'd stop asking. I tell her how I've lived my life; that I don't regret a moment. Tell her that I love the kids and couldn't take seeing them get implanted the way she's been. Kills me to see people frozen in time, good as dead, and I couldn't see them that way. I don't tell Eva, but it hurts to see the plastic smile that the chip's given her. I can't watch another generation pass away, slaves to the chip and to immortality.

The Fraternal implants all of the youth these days: right after the end of Second Study. Stopped giving people the choice, calling the operation "necessary" and "civilized." The kids learn how important the chip is in the schools. They learn all about the tragic error I made, and how it makes me a threat to this society. Learn how invention is archaic, and how creating human life is the greatest evil imaginable. That teaching makes the mass sterilizations acceptable, I guess. The Fraternal has branded me a criminal, a sociopath, and a revolutionary. All I want is to show people the truth.

I could have gotten that implant twenty years ago, when the war ended and the Beijing Fraternal liberated us from our capitalist bondage by renaming it. In those days, the Fraternal took us away to the cities, mapped our DNA, and returned us to our towns and families a few days later. The Fraternal gave us the option then; had to give us the option or else they wouldn't have stood for a thing they supposedly stood for. I turned down their bait, told them when I came back to stay away. That I had nothing left to live for anyway since they killed Mary. Eva's mother. Anyway, they listened to me. They made a point of that in the early days, when the ideals they preached were still fresh: free will and equality for all. That's why they let us keep our language too; just had to go underground with the church. The Fraternal stayed away with their chip and I never got it. They've been waiting for me to come crawling back ever since.

When the Fraternal first took over, they set up the factory-plantations. They shut down all of the factories and stores, and sent everybody to the collectives: clusters of apartments and workplaces, stores and schools. Eliminated the capitalism of the old days and replaced it with Co-operism; had to scrap the word communism-too many prejudices came along with that word. I never did understand what difference a word made, and the Fraternal really set us up with a good gig for a while. I Worked in the factory-plantations-got paid better than I had before the insurrection. Beijing shut down the labs and ended scientific research-censored education altogether-so we didn't have any new technology to worry about. Only peace. We worked in the fields, in the shops, did everything to keep the plantations afloat. For me, it was a nice situation. I drank beer and chased ladies with the guys on off-cycles; it was just about everything anybody could expect out of life. Never faced any discrimination early on, either. I mean for not having a chip. That only started later. I had it real good and I almost forgave the Fraternal for what they allowed their soldiers to do to Mary during the insurrection, but I will never forget and never forgive them for that.

Most everybody else chose the implant: the little purple chip in the brain that gives you one long drink at the fountain of eternal misery. The Fraternal gave the chips away, a panacea and the apex of allowable technology. That chip would replace the centuries of guns and hate, they said. Turned it down in the beginning because I was bitter about Mary and didn't want to live, but now I thank the fates every waking moment that I didn't take it, because it turns out I'm one of only a few left alive: I mean really alive. I walk out my door each morning knowing that my heart might stop beating from the cholesterol that dam(n)s my arteries; I'm fully aware that one day my legs will just give out beneath me. That thought gives me a reason to exist. For me, every moment is thrilling: a near-death experience. The Fraternal will never take that away from me.

I lived twenty years with the Fraternal before everything started changing. Twenty years in, everybody got fake. There were no children after a while, because Beijing had to mandate sterilization to avoid over-population: the Fraternal created a society full of people in the prime of life, without the sounds of children. The chip made people imposters, and pretty much everybody got the chip. I had to stop playing cards with the guys; the women lost interest; and the Fraternal relocated me so I could keep up with the work. After a while, my unenhanced body became a burden to the Co-operist system. I thought about suicide in those days, because suicide is the only way a slave can be sure to hurt his master (even a consciously benevolent one), but the thought of the kids stopped me. I couldn't have done that to Bobby or Sarah, and Eva would have been devastated. I guess I've stayed alive for Mary too, as funny as that sounds.

The Fraternal developed the chip for their own benefit, to manipulate us; I wish people would've seen that in the early days. Beijing offered us protection from disease and from age, but only in return for our humanity; they offered us eternal life in exchange for eternal bondage. They forced everybody who took the chip onto the plantations. Progress was the enemy, so everything was static and pre-defined. The factory-plantations were pretty and comfortable, but they were devoid of meaning. To be human without facing death is not to exist at all. I'm proud to have lived as a mortal, and I give one last farewell to the people I've loved: especially Eva, Bobby and Sarah. I shiver with joy that soon I will see Mary again, but I fear that I will never again meet the young ones.

Brett LaFave

(June 22, 2050)