“Are you sure? You don’t seem very sure.”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
“A few questions, then. How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
The clerk laughed. “Twenty-five? There’s no way. May I see your identification?” The man took out a small, coin-shaped metal device with a red button on one side and a yellow button on the other.
“You sayin’ I look old?” I noticed his clean white suit and his gold link watch. “Ah, no wonder. You live above us, don’t ya? You one of them highlanders?” The clerk did not respond. I continued. “I thought you knew that everyone here looks forty years older than we actually are. You’re part of the problem - you’d be the first to know, right?”
He ignored me and handed me the coin-shaped device under the glass pane. I placed my thumb on the yellow button and pushed. A sharp needle pierced my finger which siphoned a drop of blood into the device. The clerk took the coin and placed it into a small divot behind the counter. The glass pane lit up blue with monochromatic images of myself from various angles. Tables of data and walls of text sprawled the entire glass pane. The dataless areas of charts and diagrams were the only windows in the neon blue wall. The data disappeared, then the clerk looked at me and smirked.
“Hate to break it to you man, but you look like you’ve already expired. The restoration office is right across the hall.”
“You like making jokes, huh? Like you ain’t the problem? You dump all your waste and trash down here. That’s why we look so old.”
“Calm down, grandpa. I work down here too, you know.”
“Yeah, but you don’t live here, do you? Most of us don’t even make it to 60, but y’all live forever. My dad expired at 51. Lung cancer. I’m lucky, I expire at 79.” I looked at the clerk. “When you expire? 500 years? 600?”
“Transfer or sell?” the clerk asked, disregarding my complaints. I looked down at the “sell” section of the conversion rate paper the clerk gave me. One year for 300 dollars. My eyes widened. In comparison, I made 120 dollars a year, which is probably the highest salary anyone can get around here. I glanced down the paper to find the ‘purchase’ section, only to find the bottom of the page.
“Why can’t I purchase? That’s why I came.”
“Ah, you didn’t know? You can’t purchase years in lowland machines, and you can’t sell in highland machines.” The clerk smirked. “It’s how the state controls supply. They say time flows in one direction: upward.”
“You highland folks really are something else, ain’t you? Just because you live way up in the clouds, you think you’re better than us. You think you can just play with our lives. You know how my friend died? A damned brick. One day when we were kids, some highlander dropped a brick all the way down from the clouds when we were playing outside. BAM! Brick smashed straight into his skull. Swear I could hear the punk laughing all the way up there. You all- ”
“Sir, I’m a clerk, not a shrink. And you’re holding up the line.” The clerk was now visibly agitated. “Transfer or sell?” He repeated slowly, enunciating each word.
“Both. Transfer and sell.”
“Transfer rates are 50 each year.”
“Fine.”
“To whom would you like to transfer?”
“My daughter, Eden.” I looked down at my daughter as I held her hand. She looked up at me, confused about the whole situation.
“How many do you want to extract?”
“All of them.”
“We can’t take all of them - that’d be assisted suicide, obviously illegal. However, we could do your whole life minus a year. And, by your expiry date, that is...” He glanced at a screen. “Fifty-three years.”
“That’s fine.”
“Identification for your daughter, please.” Like before, the clerk handed me the coin under the glass pane. I pushed the yellow side up against Eden’s finger and she gasped with a loud cry. I handed the device back to the man and he analyzed Eden’s identification.
“Her expiry date is in June? That’s in three months.”
“Yeah. Doctor said surgery wouldn’t work for her disease. Transferring my time to her is her only chance.”
I don’t know if the expression that flashed over his face was one of genuine sympathy or sarcastic sorrow. Either way, he quickly returned to his familiar smug attitude. “Alright, then. Finalize your details on this sheet and we can start the procedure momentarily. Remember to sign.” The man handed me another coin and a paper for my information. Years to be transferred: 25. Years to be sold: 28. With the money from the procedure and my entire life savings, I’d be able to buy her citizenship to the highlands and set her up for a comfortable life. In the bottom right corner of the sheet was a box for my signature. I pressed down hard on the red side of the coin device with my thumb, which coated my finger with a thin layer of blood. I signed my thumbprint in the box and handed everything back to the clerk.
The clerk brought us to the operating room and laid us on our backs. He wrapped metal shackles around my arms and legs, constraining them to the table.
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“For your safety,” He said bluntly. He stuck me and Eden with various metal wires sprawling across the ceiling.
“Ain’t we be supposed to be sedated for this?”
“We’re all out of sedatives,” he shrugged. “No worries, though. Your daughter won’t feel a thing.” The clerk’s face lit up as if he had come up with a brilliant idea. He hastily positioned a mirror directly above me. I looked up at the mirror and I saw my own face staring back at me in terror. Before I could protest, he flicked the machine on. A sharp and constant pain coursed through my body. I tried to scream, but there was no sound. I saw my skin gradually become a rough leather and creases begin to race through my body. My hair grew rapidly, clumping up in one great knot. The giant ball of hair began to whiten and then finally fall off. As I rotted, I looked over to my daughter's eyes shut through the comforting hum of the machine. I watched my daughter as my time continued to fade away.
My transformation was finally complete. With much effort, I seated myself up. A sharp pain pierced my abdomen. “As you know,” the clerk informed, “You’re dying of kidney disease. You’ll expire in exactly 365 days.” The clerk continued. “If you’d like, I can pull up you and your daughter’s new expiry dates.” He rechecked our identification. I had 53 less years to live and Eden had 25 more.
I immediately bought Eden’s citizenship to the highlands and transferred the rest of the money into her balance. I shook my head in disappointment. I had successfully turned my daughter into the very thing I had loathed for my entire life - a highlander. Was I a hypocrite? Was I wrong to blame them as a group? If my daughter could be a highlander, doesn’t that prove at least some of them may be good? Despite everything he had done, I thanked the clerk on my way out. “No, thank you,” he replied with a smirk.
The dimly lit street lights were fireflies, flickering and buzzing as I dragged my feet down the narrow tunnel of apartments. Drops of water echoed around me and dotted my skin. I looked up and could barely see the sky which was concealed by miles upon miles of shambled apartments. When I was a boy, my grandfather always told me stories about the sky. He told me there used to be a Sun - a giant, bright light in the sky that was so bright it hurt your eyes if you looked at it. He told me the highlanders took the Sun away so they could have it all to themselves. I smiled. I smiled because I knew that the darker it was down here, the brighter the Sun would shine up there on my daughter. I continued on my way to an elevator which would carry my daughter to the clouds.
The claustrophobic tunnel of apartments opened up to a large, grassy park. Placed squarely in the middle was a bright beacon of white light extending upward into the darkness. The elevator room. Trees and marble pathways were sown throughout the park. Lowlanders gazed out windows, admiring the scenery and daydreaming about impossibilities. As I approached the white room, the steady hum of electricity faded away. Right outside the door, I stood still and admired the beautiful silence. I gazed up at where the beacon met the darkness and was entranced by its beauty. Eden laughed in her cradle, reaching towards the light like a moth to a flame. It was time. I took a deep breath and entered the room.
The blinding white of the room was interrupted by a group of fully-geared guards wearing all black. They sat neatly at two tables adjacent to the path to the elevator. I approached the nearest guard.
The guard stood up as I approached him. “Let me see some identification,” the guard said. I took the coin and brought it up to Eden’s finger. I returned the coin and he placed it into a handheld device. He nodded and returned the coin. “Now yours.”
“Only she is going up.”
“Minors need to be accompanied by a legal adult. New rule. Too many kids up there clogging up the orphanages and wasting state resources.” He plopped back down into his chair.
“Fine, I’ll just give her to someone who’s going up.”
The man shook his head. “You really think any highlander gives a damn about her? We hate the highlanders, and the highlanders hate us. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it always will be. A month ago, a woman came to us with the same bright idea as you. She asked every single highlander that crossed to take her child to an orphanage up there. And they wouldn’t even go out of their way to drop her off. Look, I hate the rule as much as you do, but I have to enforce it.”
“Please,” I begged. “You hate them too, right? You just said it. We’re on the same side! Just put her in the elevator and send her up, someone will take her. Please!”
“What you just asked me to do is to break a law punishable by life extraction. And I am not into repeating myself or the idea of having my life sucked away so some foul highlander can take it from me. Now, I’m tired of talking, so I will have to ask you to either show some identification or get lost.” The guard grabbed his rifle and stood up. The other guards glared at me, gripping their weapons, still as statues.
I reached into my coat pocket where I brought my pistol. I had nothing to lose; I was going to die in a year, anyway. I clenched my fist around the grip and positioned my finger around the trigger. And there was no way I was dying from kidney failure, that’s for sure. No one was going to stop my daughter from getting up there. Not the state, not some new rule, and definitely not a few guards trying to keep her down here. As fast as my feeble hands allowed, I pulled the pistol out and aimed it directly at the guard’s head. My arm shook. Every guard instantly stood up and trained their rifles at me. Lasers dotted my forehead.
“Let her through!” I yelled desperately. “Let my daughter through or I’ll shoot you all!”
The guard’s expression transformed from fear to entertainment. “Look old man, I get it. You want your daughter to have the best possible life. We all want our family to have good lives, trust me. I sympathize with you. I have a daughter myself. That’s why I’m not having my men spray bits and pieces of you all the way to the clouds. But, if you don’t drop your gun, I’ll have no choice but to order them to do just that. And with her caretaker dead, I’ll have no choice but to take your daughter, plug her up, and transfer her life to me and my men.”
“Stop,” a voice said from behind. “You filth always have something to fight about, don’t you? It’s tiring. I’m just trying to go home when I see you hoodlums waving your guns everywhere like monkeys playing with sticks.” I turned around. It was the man in the clean white suit and the shiny gold watch. The clerk. He looked at me and said, “I’ll drop off your daughter.”
“Get out of the way, boy! You’re in the middle of crossfire!” The security guard yelled at the clerk.
“No,” The clerk walked up behind me, guided my gun back in my pocket and grabbed the stroller. “You get out of my way. I’m going home, and you’re blocking the path to the elevator. Now check my and this girl’s identification, or I’ll have your ID number for wasting my valuable time. Then, the state will find you and make you look like this old man over here.” He nodded towards me.
The guard reluctantly checked their identifications and opened the door to the elevator. The clerk gave me a nod of approval and that familiar smirk as the elevator closed and ascended. The guards trained their weapons on me once again, but they were nothing but blurs. Their shouts and orders became muffled, as if they were screaming underwater. I ran outside the room and gazed up at the elevator. I shouted thanks to the clerk who generously helped give my daughter a new life. He looked down at me and mouthed something back. I thought about Eden’s new life with the warmth of a Sun and clean air. Her life without buzzing street lamps and falling bricks and trash. I thought about my parents who told me that the only thing they wanted was for me to be happy. They had accomplished their goal, and I had fulfilled my purpose. Looking up at the elevator as it faded away into the darkness, I pulled out the pistol, placed the barrel to my head, and pulled the trigger.