A New Life - Part Two

[Quinn23]

I don’t actually know who JQ23 – Winston is, or was. He was dead when I found him, the victim of a mugging in the chaos of what was being left behind. People faced with the impending and yet still acting out of primitive greed, the reptilian emerging for last effort of fulfilling basic needs, but looting and murder are seldom basic.

 

Some people might consider it barbaric, but I noticed the identi-chip his predators overlooked, or left behind. Whichever it was, it was an opportunity. The blood was easy to come by. Winston was bleeding out on the pavement. The eye was a little more difficult. Several minutes went by, maybe half-an-hour before I could bring myself to excise it from the socket. But it was needed. Without the eye as a template, I couldn’t make the contacts, and it had to be before the eye clouded over. Some might call it luck that I found him there, fresh and still warm. There is no such thing as luck. Preparation and opportunity are deliberate.

 

Boarding had just passed the halfway point when I arrived in the throng, a sea of people escaping a sinking ship. I figured this was the best time, when the gate-keepers were most complacent, making cursory security checks but really looking for the end of the shift because everything had become routine. A scan of an embedded chip, a prick of a false thumb-pad, a scan of a well-crafted contact lens, and Winston was just another rat.

 

I couldn’t help but think of him lying there on the pavement, a victim of the mindlessness that accompanies the end of the world. Maybe he was the lucky one. A quick death. It might have been painful. He might have been frightened. But it was quick. At least he wouldn’t have to wait, watching death approach from a million miles away, and then a hundred-thousand. No one would ever see it actually hit the Earth, by then gravity would have probably been distorted and the planet would have started to break up, or not. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know these things. But I do know no one would still be alive, and definitely not Winston.

[ParagonExploiter]

Hang on a second did you scan his eyes, rip them out, or cut off the cornea?