"Happy Death Day!" by Kareem Bagato ('24)
A man walked through a street filled with luminescent lights, he inhaled and exhaled air filled with toxic chemicals.
But the man didn’t care. He knew that the end was near, his tattoo burned in one last warning.
He sat down near a garbage can and thought about his life, thought about how he didn’t tell his loved ones how much he loved them, how now he was going to die without anyone being next to him, and how we wasted his life thinking about how close the end was and never on the present.
“Heh, there was this quote some turtle told a panda if I remember right the gist of it was that the present is a gift because it was called the present.” The man chuckled, amused about his last thoughts. “I’d like to think he was right, but when you know the future, the present isn’t much of a gift anymore, but a curse, after all? It matters not if I live if I am going to die anyway. We humans rarely think of when our death comes, we know it’s coming, but we always try and run from it, even in our thoughts,” the man cynically said to himself.
And suddenly without warning the man saw a skeletal figure standing in front of him. The figure wore a robe with a hood obscuring their face. In its left hand was a scythe and in its right hand a balance.
The man was however not frightened, he had long since known that this day was coming and with a smile that reached his now hollow eyes, he welcomed the figure.
“Happy death day to me”
***
I was born in an age where the day you are born is also the day where you find out when you die.
We called it a death day.
No one knew why such phenomena happened, but scholars theorized it was when humans started to research ways to extend their lives and attain immortality.
The research conducted succeeded with the production of a drug called Wakagaeri no Reiyaku.
WNR for short.
Some religions postulated that this was punishment by whichever god they believed on the heretical humans who dared defy death.
It was at the start of the twenty-fourth century after some humans reached a staggering age of four hundred that babies started to be born with tattoo-like markings in what we now know to be Akkadian numbers.
At first, we didn’t understand what these numbers meant but once people started dying on the same date as the numbers predicted we understood.
Death decided to punish us.
Of course, after everyone reached this conclusion some tried to burn off the skin where the tattoo was placed or even outright cut off various body parts.
It was no use. Whatever omnipotent being decided that, no we don’t get an out. And the tattoo just appeared somewhere else on our bodies.
There was this quote I remember once reading: “Ignorance is bliss.”
A bliss that was taken away from us.
When WNR was first introduced it cost an arm and a leg, and thus the only people who were able to receive a dose of WNR were the 0.1% of the 1% of the 1%.
People who received WNR were called immortals and were thus held at a higher status than us mere mortals. So much so that immortals got to do anything they deemed fit with a mortal. Death, torture, slavery, anything.
Nothing was off the table.
***
It came to me in a dream. I came from work after having a long stressful day filled with working at Uruk industries. My job as a head scientist came with the responsibility of creating WNR, and as you can imagine it came with a slew of criticism and hatred from the masses.
It didn’t help that today was a press conference day that announced that the drug was going to become even more expensive.
Yeah, not fun. Not fun at all.
So I was looking forward to the comfort of my bed and a night with sweet dreams.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen.
“Hello, Hecate.” A frightening voice came from the middle of the fog, where a shadowy figure carrying a scythe and a balance could be seen.
Now I had some weird dreams in my life, some included me as a dog chasing my tail, but never had I dreamed where I was lucid.
Hello, scary voice. I would introduce myself but you seem to have already got that covered.” I snarked indulging the dream.
The shadowy figure cackled its laughter sounding like an unholy combination of nails scraping on a chalkboard and fireworks going off prematurely
“Mortals, the funniest bunch I ever had the pleasure of reaping. Not like those boring go–” The voice suddenly stopped, gasping dramatically in the process” Oh my! I almost had a slip of the tongue there, never mind that let's get to the reason I am here. And no this isn’t a dream you silly mortal, but I came here to deliver you a warning and a request. Well more like a threat. I won’t be cryptic like that bitch Fate and just say it. Destroy the abomination you humans created to cheat me, and I won’t destroy all of humanity. Simple right?”
Simple my ass.
“I am sorry, but you have to be more specific here. What do you mean by abomination in this context? You see, throughout human history, we created an immeasurable amount of abomination. For instance, there is this thing called pineapple pizza and let me tell you-” I was cut off by the figure.
“Do you have selective hearing or are you unable to comprehend context clues and simple English? What part of me saying “cheat me” do you not understand? Like I am carrying a scythe and all. Anyways you have until tomorrow to destroy all traces of WNR, or it will be the end of humanity as you know it.“ The figure waved its boney skeletal hands and suddenly I woke up sweating and short of breath.
“What a weird dream,” I muttered wiping the sweat off my forehead with my hand.
Wait.
I looked at my hand again and noticed that my tattoo was gone. No, replaced would be the right term. Replaced by a timer similar to the one you see on a bomb. And I knew, I knew that that wasn’t a dream, but a warning delivered by death.
Now I could ask why me, and moan about the injustice of it all. But I did not have time for that. I had the collective weight of humanity on my shoulder.
I was however at a crossroads so to speak. Do I betray the organization that’s responsible for my well-being and the well-being of thousands of my co-workers by destroying their only product? Or do I ignore all of this and doom humanity?
Honestly, humanity is already doomed: with the toxic fumes all over the planet, and lack of human rights when it comes to mortals, rampant slavery, and lack of resources due to overpopulation. Not to mention the pandemic called depression for all that have Akkadian numbers tattooed on their bodies.
No. I could no longer run from it. Run from what I knew I was.
I am a woman who liked to indulge in the finer things in life, I am selfish, and maybe even a little evil. I made fun of people whose Akkadian numbers were particularly short, deeming them less than me whose Akkadian number was high.
I had to end this madness.
And so I did.
I stood up, took my laptop, and made my way back to my office.
Now, usually, it’s impossible to destroy all traces of something on the internet. And it’s damn near impossible to destroy something from a company so powerful that it controls the world.
However, Uruk is unique, in that the only one that knows how to make WNR is the head scientist.
That’s me.
So destroying the way WNR is easy to do, however, destroying the WNR that’s already in circulation is much harder to do.
However, like all villains that control the world, there was a self-destruct button conveniently placed in every facility that is responsible for the production of WNR.
Just as I was about to press the enter button so the self-destruction could commence, a cold sensation pressed against the back of my head and a voice suddenly spoke.
“Stop what you are doing Dr. Hecate.”
I chuckled amusedly.
“It was a good run. I guess this is my death day. Happy death day to me,” and I pressed enter. And the world turned black.
***
In a hospital, a woman was giving birth. Her husband sat next to her holding her hand as she slowly crushed it into a fine paste.
“This is hell! Get him out of me! YOU! This is your fault!” The woman screamed in pain as the obstetrician told the woman to take a deep breath and the baby is almost there.
“GAH!” With a final scream of pain, a cry of a baby was heard. However, something unique occurred that no one had foreseen.
When the doctor cleaned the baby up he noticed that something unprecedented had occurred.
A baby born without Akkadian numbers.