I am dying, and I hate everything about it.

Oh, keep your seats. I’m unlikely to croak mid-sentence. This has been happening for two years now. I should last for long enough to do some moaning about it.

Where do I start? Ahh, the weather, right? It’s only polite to do some small talk before cutting into the meat of the matter.

Well, the weather outside isn’t doing my mood any favours. It is dark and stormy, and… You know what… I’m not feeling at all polite. Let’s get to moaning about my woes…

I wish there was something else I could do. I hate being tied to this hospital bed, wasting away like a pathetic meat sack.

C’mon, I’m barely in my thirties, and look at me—a spent husk! For someone who’s spent his life tackling problems head-on, this is crushingly infuriating. Damn mortal frailty!

I’m rambling again. Besides, I can’t possibly start my story there. You won’t be able to follow if all I do is vent.

In my defence, they fed me more meds than I cared to count. “Premedication” they call it. And it makes my ability to think all…wonky.

Give me one moment to collect my thoughts…

HA!!

I can’t believe I started whining back there. I was never that guy, the whining and moaning type. Ask anyone. I don’t cry about my problems; I deal with them. Which is the root of the issue. How do you cope when you have a problem that is killing you and can’t do anything about it?

Let me try to take it from the top. This time I promise to make more sense…

…Let’s see… Who am I? How did I get here, and what the hell is wrong with me?

My name is Ryder, Corvo Ryder. I grew up an orphan, became an affluent businessman, and then turned to politics.

Now, before we move on, there are a couple of things I’d like to clarify. It will take a bit of time, but it will be worth it. Context, and all that.

Orphans, businessmen, and politicians all come with powerful images attached to them. When you hear “orphan,” you might imagine a dirty, shifty-eyed kid on the side of the street. Maybe covered in welts and bruises from the last time he got caught stealing.

A businessman? Perhaps a slick, ruthless man who values profit above all else.

And the politician? Surely a hands-rubbing-together schemer, out to rob the masses of their hard-earned property by abusing the rules he set in place to begin with, right?

Well, in my case, no. But let nobody lie to you—tropes don’t fall out of the sky. There’s a reason those associations exist.

Make no mistake, I’m an opportunist, and I let people make those assumptions when it suits me. But there’s no reason to lie here and now.

So…How am I different from the stereotypes, you ask?

Simple, I made none of those my identities. I was just wearing those titles, and many more besides, like a costume.

I wasn’t an orphan. I was just a kid who lived in the orphanage. I wasn’t a politician either; I was a man who tried to improve his lot in life, started chafing underneath the rules imposed by others, and decided to do something about it.

My goals were always to self-improve. Be the best man I can become and in the best world I can create for me and mine. All else were just the tools for the job.

There is more I can say on the topic, much more. Perhaps, someday, I will. But for the time being, all that is just window-dressing. None of it has much to do with my current condition. Which was what I was supposed to be getting to, right? Right.

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As I mentioned before, that issue started a couple of years ago. Though it was quiet at first. I noticed that my training was taking more out of me than it should have. I complained about it to some of my friends, and it turned into a “Ryder is getting old” joke. Friends, am I right?

“Welcome to your 30s, Ryder,” they said. “Hangovers are a terror, dating scene a horror story, and workouts twice as hard for the same result. We do hope you learn to enjoy it because that dial goes up again when you hit 40.”

It stopped being funny when I started losing weight rapidly. The bad kind of weight loss.

When I mentioned my zeal toward self-improvement, I wasn’t just talking about it in a spiritual or intellectual sense. I maintained a very strict diet and exercise regime. And when I say strict, I mean strict. I hesitate to call my body a “temple” because I know some people who do that, and I don’t particularly care for them. But my dogged, consistent efforts showed. I had a body and the mobility of a professional athlete. Since I had almost no fat to burn, the weight I was losing to illness was mostly coming out of my muscles. It was terrifying, watching myself decline. All the hard work, just gone.

When I first came to a hospital, they did some routine blood work, imaging scans and then sent me home. The results made no sense. On paper, I was healthy, yet my weight kept dropping like a rock. I was getting past slender and dipping into a gaunt territory. My cheeks were starting to hollow, and my eyes sunk in, noticeably so. My skin used to look alive, vibrant. Now it’s a pale, clammy thing that clings loosely off my bones.

The next time I came in, I stayed in the hospital. They ran me through a gauntlet of tests for everything they could think of. At one point, I was even in a “Full quarantine room.” It’s called a room, but it felt more like a cell out of a horror movie, with its sterile white walls and the constant hum of the air filtration system. The glass barrier between me and the rest of the world made me feel like an alien specimen under observation.

Thankfully, that didn’t last too long. They released me as soon as they failed to find anything infectious. By the laws of the horror genre, I should have turned into an alien or started a zombie apocalypse with my secret infection as soon as I was out. But that didn’t happen. I do look like a zombie, but I suppose I’m the boring, non-infectious kind.

At some point, Dr Milan Petrovich flew in, and on his own initiative, no less. He’s a living legend of diagnostic medicine, and there are 2, maybe 3 people on the planet he considers his peers. The man is breathtakingly arrogant and has the social grace of Godzilla at a tea party, but you have to respect his single-minded determination. Put a puzzle in front of him, and he’ll either solve it or die trying.

Not even a day after he came in, the word spread that he was in town and working on a possible new and undiscovered disease. It sparked a media frenzy overnight. The man didn’t even blink before he emptied a hospital wing of the “Old-people-whose-kids-probably-can’t-wait-to-see-boxed-anyway,” and made me his sole concern. The media people knew how Petrovich is, so they gave us a lot of space. Regardless, we couldn’t go without at least a small parade of crazies and glory-seekers.

There was a candlelight vigil under my window for a night or two. Which I understand is a show of support but made me feel uncomfortable more than anything.

There was also an incident where Dr Petrovich ended up spending a night in prison. It involved a witch doctor if you’d believe it. Hooded cloak, handmade bone ornaments, feathered staff. The whole regalia on display. He told Dr Petrovich to move aside so he could cure my “evil eye curse”.

The doctor jumped him, bit his neck bloody, and wouldn’t let go. What happened next was a bloody mess, literally. Phones got pulled out, videos got taken. People screamed and stampeded. Multiple brawls broke out. With the weather we’ve been having recently, everything and everybody got caked in cold mud.

The cops that were on standby, keeping order, zapped the doctor with a taser. It made things worse. Petrovich’s jaw spasmed and almost made him bite the hunk of neck meat off the unfortunate wizard-man. The sad part is that he wasn’t even the one most injured in the mess. A woman got trampled in the stampede and ended up barely surviving. To make things worse, the guy that started it all turned out to be some sort of social media influencer, looking for cheap publicity.

Most of the hubbub has eased off since. That lady ended up mostly recovering by now, too. Though I wish I could say the same for my own condition. I am still being poked and needled incessantly. Everything they try keeps failing. They had given me so many meds by now that my liver shrivelled up like a prune.

To give you an idea of how far I have deteriorated — some time ago, they started administering treatments through Intraosseous infusion. For you lucky enough not to know what that is, it’s what they do when your veins become too brutalised or brittle to use for administering treatment. They inject medication straight into the bone marrow.

We are running out of time now. The issue is that my body keeps eating itself. It keeps demanding more energy than I could supply, no matter how much I ate, or how many nutrients they pour into me. To make things worse, I can’t even feed myself properly anymore. Too weak for that.

There is still a plan, though. Not something that would fix the issue, but something that should buy the doctors some more time to find a solution.

Medically induced coma.

Which is why I am all drugged up right now. They don’t knock you out all at once; you see. There’s a process to it.

Nobody is sure how much more time this would buy me, if any. The idea behind it is to reduce metabolic demands on the body and keep me from being in constant gnawing pain. Hopefully, something they do ends up stealing me away from the ripper.

How optimistic am I? I’ll just say that I filled out my will four months ago and leave it at that.

My friends and I all know the reality of my condition, but there was an unspoken agreement not to voice it. No one wanted to consider, let alone say out loud, the real possibility that I might not wake up from this...

...

“Ryder?” A husky female voice called.

I opened one bleary eye. “Yes?”