Beep.

To call the pulse of a heartrate monitor living is the greatest deception of man, and I think Ajax would agree. Almost guiltily, my friend watches the machine that measures his life count a little further, and a little further still, making shallow valleys and crumbling peaks where an unbeatable heart once beat.

Beep.

Ajax’s soul burns on through his blue eyes. But the body around them fades. Without the enhancements of his JOY to cover it, the true state of his agonizing deterioration, the source of his ever-growing weakness and that bloody cough that he cannot escape, makes its atrophy known. Gone is the luster of his hair. Once-tawny skin stretches pallid over a bony frame beneath a white medical shift, not athletic muscle. His cheekbones are sunken. Eye sockets hollowed by war against an invisible enemy he’s managed to keep hidden for so long.

Beep.

It twists my heart to see him sit there on a simple gurney in a too-bright room with a dismal view of the monolithic arena that we both know he may never reach, counting every pulse of the machine and regretting every one he has wasted. Seeing him like this is a terrible, horrible irony. I could never defeat him. And seeing him now, I realize I never may. Fate has conquered his body and left it a shell of the triumphant will it once bore to victory time and time again.

Untouched pills litter a tray beside Ajax’s bed. He makes no move to reach for them.

“I did ask them not to disturb you,” he murmurs. “Apparently it is required for a terminal prognosis. You can imagine my surprise when they told me.” He takes in a labored breath through his nose, releasing it in a single, fatalistic breath. “I didn’t know how long it would take. I assumed it would always come later. Always later. Father, mother… they’re too far to come on so short a notice. In the end, it was either you or Jolie.” All the air leaves him at once. “And I couldn’t tell her.”

I let him speak, unable to look up from my hands. How often I have used them to fight the withered friend before me. How intimately they know his strengths and weaknesses in a way no one else could. These hands have faltered against him not once, not twice, but hundreds upon thousands of times. How useless they are now when he is dying in front of me and I can do nothing at all to stop it.

Beep.

His voice falters. A single uncaught tear traces the groove of his cheek.

“Have you told the girls?”

My voice, when it comes, is roughened by grief. “Figured you would want to do it yourself.”

He swallows quietly.

“…I would. I just… I don’t know how. That’s why I never told anyone. You seeing my sickness was the best day of my life, in a way. It was like the heaviest weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I could stop pretending I’m still what they call me.” Only belatedly does he wipe the tear away. Another soon replaces it. “Ajax the Invincible. Soon it will just be Ajax, I suppose. Not that the idea offends. I always thought you had the better name.”

The attempt at humor only wounds the both of us further. I can see how hollow it really is. He’s clinging to life and losing his care for it in the same breath. Hopelessness devours him on the bed.

“How long did they give you?” I manage.

“How long is a marathon? It always ends at the same place, no matter how fast you run. All that changes is how quickly I make myself get there.”

“And the doctors can’t…”

He shakes his head, opening up a small projection on his JOY. “They found it years ago in a physical. Just some silly, run-of-the-mill bloodwork for university. They called it a genetic abnormality of unknown origin. The Biohancers haven’t a clue how to stop it.” The screen dissolves around his knees as he draws them inwards, hugging them to his chest. “Would that I had done something else with my life. Perhaps I would have been happy then.”

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“Are you not?”

“How could I be?” Ajax whispers, sniffling behind his knees. “I learned I was going to die at twenty-two. I spent my whole life trying to be the best. And now that it is ending, I have realized something I should have learned a long time ago.” His shell cracks, then breaks behind a mask of tears. “It will never be enough to be the best, or the strongest, or the fastest. Anyone can be the best. Not everyone can be good.”

He chokes back a noise as he looks out upon our rainy city. “Too late I realized I wanted to be treasured for something other than a name and a record. When I die, I will be forgotten. Who will come to weep at my grave? All my talent, everything I worked for, what does it mean? Nothing. Nothing at all.” A distraught cough works its way through his throat. “I think you had the right of it, in the end. Making friends instead of enemies.”

We sit in silence while his grief ebbs and mine rises. Silent tears work their way down my face. I want to help him, but what could I say? What could I ever do to salve a pain like this? I’ve seen the signs coming, but now that their reality sits broken in front of me, it feels like the Abyss itself has opened up in my path. I spent the last four years of my life chasing Ajax. Now that he falters, what would I be if I didn’t help him back to his feet?

But I’m not a doctor or prodigy healer. I’m just a kid with dreams too big for my hands. I can’t save him no matter how much I wish I could. He is already fading. There’s nothing of his grief that I can take on myself. Nothing I could say to make him see himself like I do, see that his life isn’t as pointless as he thinks. It would be like our triumph of last night. Fickle and gone to the storm.

He collapses, and I cannot sit there and do nothing. I give him a rock to lean on, sitting with him until overwhelming misery fades to heartache, then to fatalistic melancholy over the course of the morning. Ajax weeps often. It might be the first time he ever has in front of someone else. The reality of his fate hits him in waves, each leaving him holding more broken pieces of dreams that now will never come to be. He cries for his future. For love. For walking alone on a path better shared, for not doubling back sooner, and for new friendships that will forever be cut short. It is a tragedy to watch the strong break. I wish he never had a reason to cry in front of me, but I am glad to be here for him now when he needs it most.

Later, when exhaustion settles in, we eat a sparse, red-eyed lunch beside the wide window of his hospital room. Ajax leaves one half of the window open and leans his head out in the drizzling mist. Eyelids half closed, biting his lower lip while the rain plays with his unbraided hair like an intimate lover. Through distant fog, we listen above the sounds of the electric metropolis as the M’s weekend entertainment kicks into gear.

It is a quiet day for the city. Old signs flicker in the grey fog. Large crowds roar from the arena. A lone performer in a bar on Main Street plays classical music on a piano. All of it dampened by the weather. I used to find such days beautiful. Now I can only think of how few of them will remain.

Even though his eyes are trained on the cityscape, Ajax notices my attention drift to the lone source of entertainment in the room: a wooden board of alternating colors and small, holographic pieces. He must have had it brought from his apartment. I’ve never been much for classic games- never seen much point to them when JOYs exist- but I’d have to have lived under a rock to not recognize a chess board when I see one. This one’s game is only barely progressed. A few of the smaller units adopt defensive stances in front of their more powerful cousins.

“Do you play?” Ajax asks, before cutting himself off with a laugh. “…Never mind. I don’t know what I was expecting in asking that. I’m sure you’d find it boring. It’s not a game you can win with heart.”

“I’ll give anything a shot once.”

“Maybe some other…” His voice drifts off when he remembers. It takes a second for it to return, weighted with melancholy. “…I don’t know if I’d have the time to explain all the rules.”

He glances over when I rise to join him by the window, fully sliding the glass open. A small lighter fills his fingers. I don’t ask how he smuggled it into the hospital. He offers it up with a slight motion.

I wave him off politely. “Never smoked a day in my life, not about to start now.”

Ajax grimaces. “Me neither.” Holding the tip out, he runs it through the palmful of ki I offer up, then tries to take a long drag. It doesn’t start well, and it ends with him coughing over the edge of the building and flicking the lighter away to fall into the alley below.

“Tastes like shit,” he mutters.

While the burning ashes disappear, I turn over the flame in my hand, then tentatively stretch my kinetic sense out to feel the breaths within Ajax. His spark is a shade of the full-hearted thrill I’ve sensed in him before. Even last night, knee-deep in battling our way through the Shimano train, his body’s instinctual love of life kept an even pace with mine. Combat awakens us both like no other feeling. So often it’s been the only thing we live for. And while I’ve learned to live for more, I’ve also learned enough about life to know that when the soul ignites, hope is never far away. All he needs to make it through today is a spark.

I cannot heal Ajax, but I can help him know he will be remembered with love, not forgotten. And I know just the way to do it.

My eyes turn to the east, where I know a homely gym of raucous music and wild crowds hides between the highrises of the University district.

“Come on,” I say, holding my jacket out to him. “I’ve got something I want to show you.”