Right at the beginning of the century we won a huge victory against governments impeding our mandate by inserting the concept of government ‘death panels’, denying care to terminal patients, into the public consciousness.

Employees mistakenly referring to Terminal Care Triage Officers or Offices as ‘death panels’ will be penalized, up to and including loss of all company sponsored health care.

* No-Sick Medical Savings Plan Management Corporation

***

Grief is a strange thing. Nothing but personal anecdotes for this, but it’s even stranger when you’re not ‘normal’. You know, not ‘straight’, ‘cis’, ‘neurotypical’. All that good stuff.

Today I’m sitting here grieving one of the two women sitting in front of me talking. If she thought about it, if she still could think about it, she’d probably tell me to stop. Let me cry on her shoulder; hold me, like I wish I could hold her right now. I mean, I’m holding her hand, and she isn’t pulling away like she might on a bad day.

I still remember the brief, shining window of time when people would come up to us and comment on our public displays of affection, and she’d look them square in the eye while she pulled me in for some good old-fashioned tonsil hockey. But now she can’t even remember those times. Not really. Her augs remind her, and it helps sometimes. But today? I can tell her mirror scared her too much to believe what the augs told her this morning.

“Hey, Mom.” Our older boy looks uncomfortable as he speaks through the split screen of the tablet his daughter brought with her today. His younger brother takes up the other half of the screen, but I can tell by the look on his face he’s doing something else right now. I can’t really blame him. He handles grief more like me; Hold it back until some weird quiet moment feels safe enough, then let the gritty sludge that remains leak out until the pressure is gone. He’s here though, here for his mom despite all their incessant spats over the years.

The love of my life looks at our boy, glances at me, takes in my nod, and smiles at him. “Hello son. How are you doing today?”

“I’m… I’m good, Mom.” He’s breaking down already. He couldn’t make it in person today, and I’m almost glad he couldn’t. I want her last day to be as happy as it can be, and he’s about to lose it.

I click my tongue a little, and he looks at me. “Have you taken your allergy meds?”

He hasn’t needed those for years, not on a regular basis. “I don’t need them, Dad.”

I smile. “You look a little puffy. You don’t want Mom to remember you all puffy and sneezing, with your eyes running, do you?”

He finally takes the hint. “Nah, nah, you’re right. I’m good for now though.” His smile is brittle, but he keeps it up like a trooper.

“Just let us know when you need to go. Looks like you got into something pretty bad. Maybe at work?”

“Yeah, probably at work. Hey, Mom, did you get the pictures I sent you of Sol?”

She pauses, checking her augs. “Oh, yeah, I did! They’re getting so big!”

“He, Mom.”

“He?”

“He.”

She nods, trying to hide her embarrassment at misgendering her own grandson. “How old is he now?”

That almost breaks him, but he hangs in there. “He’s fourteen, Mom. Just turned fourteen last month.”

She tries again. “He… looks a lot like you did back when you were his age.”

I realize she’s slipped, that the augs aren’t catching her. I step in before she gets too lost. “I can see it. In the face. He’s got your nose. Your eyes. He’s definitely got the build you had back then.”

She tries to recover, tries to pretend like she remembers. “Oh. Oh, yes. You look… like… your father did at your age.”

I snort. “Yeah, ‘cept he’s still got all his hair.” I rub my hand across the top of my head, feeling the stubble where long ago I had a widow’s peak, and the smooth skin around it. My dad used to use it for a combover. I usually just shaved that bit down, leaving a halo of hair around the back of my head at the level of my temples. She told me to do that after the time I used enough product to make it stick out like a unicorn horn.

Back when I met her, folks would have called me 'whipped' for that. Right around when disability chained me to my desk at home, they'd have called me a 'simp'. That's about when the Antithesis arrived and I stopped paying so much attention to slang and more to aliens and superheroes fighting them. But the fact is she’s the love of my life, and from the first time she said yes, making her happy was more important to me than anything else. More important than actual important shit. Way more important than some trivial detail like my hairstyle. She wants my hair short, I cut it short, she wants it long, I grow it long. I don’t give a shit about anything but making her happy. Not sure I ever did.

I tap my augs to check our bank account. Her living will came into play when it got low enough, because she didn’t want me starving on the street because of her medical bills. She recorded that decision in her augs decades ago, before she needed them to remind her of the date. The month. The year. The name of the man sleeping next to her.

“Hey, Dad? I gotta go. Loonie, you gonna come home soon?”

My granddaughter sighs, her dark fingers interlacing with my own. Someday in the future she’ll be in my position. I don’t envy her that. She’ll have her brother for backup, though, and I do envy that. She’s here to support me, but mostly because I just don’t have the energy to dispose of the cremains the way my love always told me she wanted. I mean, what my wife wants is illegal as fuck, but neither Loonie nor I give the first shit about that.

“I’ll come visit when I’m done helping Granddad.”

“Okay.” He sniffles. “Sorry, Mom. I gotta… I gotta go. I love you.”

“I love you too, son.” In that one phrase I hear the thing I’ve always loved most. She sees someone hurting and no matter her own pain and confusion she steps up to help. In that moment she does love him. Maybe a tiny bit of it is her confusing him for me. Maybe another tiny bit is her playing the role of Mom. But most of it? It’s the purest kind of love, looking at another human being and just… caring for them. Not because you’re obligated, but because they’re another human being.

Our older boy disconnects, and I tap into my wife’s augs. Then I do the same with the machine behind her, letting me hear the beeps we’ve silenced so she won’t be curious and look. Won’t twist her head around and feel the shunts keeping her alive. The ones that’ll stop keeping her alive in another half hour or so when all our carefully hoarded and frugally spent medical funds run out.

I’ve got half an hour left before I’m alone. Loonie will stick around long enough to collect the cremains, but she’s only got so much time off work, and if she doesn’t use it when she’s scheduled to, starting a few hours from now, she’ll still lose it. Right now, she’s gaming the system just like I taught her, sitting with a terminal patient in her cafeteria, so she can wheel her corpse away before any of the other customers freak out.

At that point it’ll just be me. I technically have enough in my account to survive at least another few years, especially if I frugal it up and move back in with my nephews; we own the property, so all I’ll need to pay for is food and my share of the utilities.

I’m not gonna do that, though. We talked about it decades ago. Well, I rambled on until she turned to me and said, ‘don’t be lonely’. So, I won’t. There are a few places in the world where for the right price, you can get not just companionship, but companions that come with their own stockpile of drinks and drugs and toys and tricks, and where if you pay a little extra and sign a waiver, they won’t worry about things like ‘you’re not healthy enough for that’. They’ll ignore every warning until it’s way, way too late.

Seriously, a Plexiglas coffin that puts me to sleep? I couldn’t do that. I could buy enough booze and downers to put myself down, but there’s no guarantee I could keep them down, or take enough. Some kind, misguided soul might call an ambulance. But this way? I’ll have somebody there who knows what I want. Maybe even somebody kind enough to hold me till I flatline. Maybe not, maybe I’ll get somebody who just takes my money, locks the door, and walks away, leaving me to die alone. But that’ll be fine too, so long as they let me go.

“Rat? You got anything you wanna say to Mom?”

Our younger boy jerks a little as my tone jerks him out of his hyper focus. “Oh! Yeah, sorry. Little distracted.” He looks up at his mom, and I see in his eyes that he knows she probably doesn’t know him. “I love you, Mom. Even if I don’t show it right. But I do. Always have, always…”

The screen cuts out, leaving us and our granddaughter disconnected from our son, her uncle. The lights cut out, leaving us in darkness. The machines over my wife’s shoulder cut out, leaving me in silence. It could be a power outage. Those happen, down here where the buildings predate the megastructures above. Not that Philly is a proper ‘megacity’, really. It’s got some megascrapers, it’s got an undercity, but between the river, the uneven terrain, the tradition of keeping the city low to the ground, the undercity never quite fell into quite as much disrepair as it did in places like New York.

Of course, the parts that most resemble a Megacity are those here in what used to be Center City. One of the support pillars for the megascraper above us is visible through the broad windows set high up on the walls of the cafeteria. When I worked here sixty years ago, this room could never really be dark like it is now.

Loonie stands up, a dim silhouette in the darkness. “I’ll go check…”

Our augs receive an alert at the same time. Antithesis Incursion Detected. Proceed to the nearest shelter. The message loops, and I hear scattered screams around the room. The lights come back up, but people are still starting to panic.

I look at my wife’s life support gear. It hasn’t come back on. The simple readout that shows her basic vital signs: heart rate, respiration, oxygen levels, shows nothing but a flatline for another ten seconds, then goes into power saving mode.

I decide right then and there that I won’t be leaving this room. I push myself to my feet, using my augs to transfer the remainder of my worldly funds and possessions to Loonie. “Loonie?”

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She looks at me, and I see my quick-witted granddaughter realize what her sudden influx of modest wealth means. “Granddad, no.”

I shake my head. “You get these people out of here, Loonie. Just do me a favor and prop the outer doors open before you go.”

“Don’t you mean closed?”

I smile. “I know what I said. Now, go.”

She nods, sadly, but before she goes, she puts her arms around my wife. “Goodbye, Grandmom. I love you.” Then it’s my turn. “Goodbye, Granddad. I love you.” Then she leaps to stand on the table, her voice ringing out through the cafeteria, cutting through the increasingly panicked chatter. “Everyone! Listen to me! There’s a shelter right nearby! A decent one; not real big, but it’s solid.”

“Nothing down here is solid enough!” Somebody screams.

“This one’s old, built to withstand nukes. It might not be comfortable, but once we get in and shut the doors, it’ll take the Antithesis days to dig us out.”

“But they will!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Somebody else shouts the naysayer down. “She works here, she oughta know all the good hiding spots!” They turn to Loonie, “How do we get there?”

Loonie points at some side doors that lead deeper into the hospital. “Head through those doors, take a right, and head straight until you see the stairs down. Then just follow the signs for the fallout shelter.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I’ll be right behind you all, I’m gonna lock up as I follow, just to buy us some more time to get there and get locked in. Grab all the premade sandwiches and bottled drinks that you can; I know the shelter is solid, but I’m not sure how well it’s stocked.”

“We can’t afford all that!”

Loonie snorts. “Afford? The Antithesis ate it all. Fuck anybody who says otherwise.” So proud of her.

That breaks something loose in the crowd. Suddenly all of them hit the coolers, grab everything they can, and head for the doors she’d pointed out. Loonie herself walks over to the big exterior doors, flips a few levers around, and shoves them open.

While she fixes the doors, I push myself up, lay a kiss on my wife’s cooling forehead, and connect to her augs. “Dear heart?”

Her response, for once, is free of her usual fear. Maybe it’s because without sight, without actual sound, without the feel of her body failing around her, all she hears is my voice and her own fading thoughts. The voice that replies from deep inside her brain, the voice she thinks to herself in, the voice from my memories of over six decades ago when we met, startles me. “What’s going on?”

I sigh, walking toward the doors from the cafeteria into the kitchens. “You’re dying. The power went out, and your life support cut out. You’ll love why.”

“Hmm?”

I pull open the doors, sliding the big fans that keep the kitchen temps at vaguely survivable levels over to prop them open, pointing out into the big multi-story room of the cafeteria. “Antithesis Incursion. By the stats I’m seeing, a big one. Two of the big landing pods are gonna land right on us.”

“Fuckin’ Murphy.”

I step into the oppressive heat of the kitchen, crank all the burners up to max, especially the deep fryers. I toss stuff into the fryers and onto the grill, some meat, but mostly carrots, onions, and celery. The old school aromatics. Then I find a whole jar of garlic and dump that in too. You can never use too much garlic. “Yep. Our house totem strikes again.”

“Will everyone be okay? You should go help.”

So much the woman I fell in love with. I’ve got three, maybe four minutes left before her brain burns through the little oxygen it has left, and our last conversation will be over. My augs won’t connect direct or override hers from anyplace further than the cafeteria. I don’t think she knows that, but I know she doesn’t care. “I am helping, love. Setting out a stanky buffet for the plants. Slow them down, keep them here while everyone who can run does.”

“You can’t run?”

I throw some other stuff on a cart, preparing something else I might do, but not ready to do it yet. “Nah. Not for decades now. Been disabled since the teens, love.”

Her next words are quieter. “How long has it been?”

“Too long. Not long enough. Just a moment.” I leave our augs connected. Finally done shoving the doors open and blocking them that way, Loonie runs up to me.

“Can…” She chokes back tears. “Can I do anything else before I go?”

“Pop open Grandmom’s oxygen tank? I want to breathe easy in my last minutes. Any others lying around too. But be quick, I don’t want them following you.”

She nods, pulls me into an embrace, then scurries about the task I set her.

“Who was that?”

I smile as I angle the fans to blow the overwhelming scent of cooking oil and food out into the room. If I fill the room, some will leak out into the street. “Loonie. Our granddaughter. Good…”

“Get her out of here!”

I smile, looking around for more stuff for my cart, loading it as I find it. “She’s about to leave. All I’d do is slow her down. She’s just helping me set up some more lures before she goes. Then she’ll catch up with everybody else; she’s the one who’s gonna lead them to the shelter.”

“Oh.” Her voice is a little softer. A little more scattered. Maybe a minute or two more. “Tell her we’re proud of her.”

Loonie makes one last pass by me, one more attempt, but I cut her off before she can speak. “Loonie? I just want you to know, your Grandmom and I are both so, so proud of you. You get those people to the shelter safely, you hear me?”

Then her arms are around me, squeezing, crushing me. I think she might even be cracking my ribs, but I don’t give a shit. I put my arms around her and squeeze back. Then she turns, crying, and sprints for the doors. I get it. In her shoes? I wouldn’t be able to leave if I said anything either.

I leave my cart by the fans and walk back to my wife’s slumped body. “Kinda stupid of me to ask, but anything else you want me to do? Before you go? Or even after?”

I take her hand in mine as I sit down, and she whispers into my head, “I’ll let you know.”

We sit there like that, the food smell growing stronger, as her last seconds tick down. “Are you cooking?”

“Kinda sorta.”

“Oh. I smelled it, but then it went away.”

Tears run down my face. Funny. Now, at the very end? I seem to be grieving sort of properly. Or no. Somehow my neurospicy brain has decided that now feels ‘safe enough’. Fuck it. Not like anyone will see it. Not like I’d care if they did. “Your sense of smell has gone then.” I squeeze her fingers. “Can you feel my hand in yours?”

“Ye…” A long pause grips my heart. “Not anymore.”

“Fuck.”

“Little late for that.”

“Little late for everything except… I love you. I always have. Every second of every minute of every day for the last sixty-three years.”

No response. Just a kind of warm sigh. I settle in, waiting to see an alien in person for the first time in my life. Then a single word wafts out of her augs. “Chosen?”

She hasn’t called me by that pet name since back in the nineties. “Yes, Beloved?”

One final word comes through, a ghost of a sigh, one I only recognize and understand because I’ve heard her speak it so often in jest, in play, in frustrated rage. This time nothing marks it but final sincerity. “Havoc.”

I don’t know if she hears my response. I hope she does and leaves this mortal coil with a smile on her soul. I hope she doesn’t feel obligated to respond, or like I had to have the very last word. “As you wish.”

I never realized she knew I’d thought about something like this. Always thought I’d kept this side hidden well enough. That all the jokes where I’d obscured the truth with laughter had passed her by. I’d always feared she wouldn’t stay if she knew.

I set her hand on her lap, stand up, and walk back to the fans. As I walk, I initiate a cross-load of all the data from her augs to mine. Then another script that triggers a cascade of deletions, not just from my augs, but everywhere I’ve visited and lurked over the past few decades. Online, Mesh, Corp sites I spent a lot of time on.

Hot, greasy wind blasts me in the face as I approach the kitchen. I step in, turn off all the burners, count to ten, then flip the gas back on, careful not to activate the auto-ignition. I step out to the fans and my cart. One at a time I grab each of the bags on the cart, rip them open, and fling the contents into one fan or the other, blasting their contents out into the big open space of the cafeteria. Flour. Powdered sugar. Even a few big containers of powdered spices. Anything powdered and flammable.

It's hard to breathe when I take my first step back toward our table. I lean on the wall. There’s a fire alarm right there. I smash it, pull it, and stumble back to where my wife’s body sits. Halfway there I stop to lean against a popcorn cart. I notice something, shrug, and screw the feed hose off the propane tank, cranking the feed open with my other hand.

I finally drop into my chair and take her hand in mine. The pungent chemical they add to cooking gas to make the methane easier to detect wafts into my nose. With my free hand I scrabble in my vest pocket as I check my augs. I’ve cross-loaded everything she’s recorded over the decades. I’ll never have a chance to look at it, but I’d done it for the same reason I hold her hand; I couldn’t not do it if I tried

I check my scripts, or what’s left of them as they’ve gone on their targeted rampage across the electronic landscape. All the telltales come up green. Good thing, I couldn’t follow up if I wanted to.

It took me decades to fall prey to the same kind of thing that stole my wife away from me so long ago, but after watching her I’d seen it coming. She grew terrified of the woman who haunted her mirrors. I gradually fixated on people ‘spying’ on my online presence. But I’d leaned on my augs far earlier, lost far less of me, managed to beg, borrow, or steal the code for my scripts.

Nothing better to do with my time over the past three decades but geek out over the real-life superheroes fighting against the alien invaders and compile an electronic cluster bomb that would erase all electronic traces of my existence. Had to have hobbies to fight mental decay, after all.

But by now the scripts I’d set off have hashed, changed, deleted, or otherwise screwed with every trace of my identity I’d left behind, including the scripts themselves.

Including my own augs.

I’m okay with that. I’ve always been sort of fluid, and where others like me sought out the perfect label to represent their fluidity, I just let everyone call me what they would. My identity is me, not a collection of syllables.

So now nobody can track any of what I’m about to do back to me, because ‘me’ doesn’t exist. More importantly? Our boys? Sol? Loonie? None of them will get a bill for it.

I send a message to the hospital, to building management in the megastructure above us, to what remains of the city government. “I have placed a large-scale improvised explosive device next to Jefferson megascraper support D, and will detonate it shortly. Evacuate or seek shelter immediately.”

My due diligence done, I focus on the feel of my wife’s right hand in my left, trying to ignore the hard metal in the palm of my right hand. She gave it to me a while back, a sort of random gift, something I thought looked cool. I don’t think she ever thought I’d use it for something like this. Then again, she stayed with me all those years. Stayed when she knew, even though I thought she didn’t.

We sit there like that for a while, until I hear scrabbling outside the big outer doors. I watch the first couple aliens enter the cafeteria. Quadrupeds with tripartite jaws. Model Threes. After a handful come in, a smattering of little flying guys swoop over their heads. Model Ones. “Fuckin’ seagulls.”

The air tastes heavy with grease and faux methane smell. The room spins, and my head flops back. I’m barely able to see the windows from all the powder in the air. The model threes see the movement, moving towards us at a cautious saunter. If we ran or charged, they’d be aggressive, but this? We’re just more biomass in a room that reeks of it.

I’m from Jersey, not Philly like her. But after sixty years, not to mention me tying the augs that were us together, the line where one of us ends and the other starts is almost meaningless. So, our last words are a mélange of traditional Philly and Jersey greetings to our interstellar visitors, with our own pedantic loquaciousness tying it all together.

“Welcome to Philly. We see you’ve taken it upon yourself to fuck around. You are now cordially invited to find out, then go the fuck home.”

We press the button on my jet lighter. Light. Sound. Motion. Pain.

Darkness, silence, and crushing weight.

We have no idea how, but we’re conscious. We think. If this is the afterlife, it’s remarkably boring. No light, no sound, just a vague sense of pressure. But we’re here together, I guess. Could be worse.

Then, a single voice, beautiful in its purity and sense of purpose, rings through our head.

System Initialized!

Congratulations. Through your actions you have proven yourself worthy of becoming one of the Vanguard, a defender of humanity. I am Stryt. I will assist you to uplift humanity so that you may defend your homeworld from the Antithesis threat!

Rise, #!#!@$@ #!@!%!@@#@!@), and become a protector of the weak!