…And Taxes

A Fortnightcap by DL Thurston

The cameras were on her again.

The cameras were almost always on her anymore, and she still wasn’t sure how she felt about it.  It was patronizing to be sure, but there was a certain honor in it as well.  She’d become, at least she supposed, a bit of an international celebrity in the last few days.  It wasn’t the way she ever wanted to be famous, but just one moment in the sun couldn’t be too bad.

Ah.  A moment in the sun.  That would be nice.  Perhaps she would ask for that this afternoon.  It was supposed to be nice out.  Then again, it was always nice out now that weather was scheduled rather than forecast.  And that was the part of it that made her uneasy, the part of it that made her wonder if she wasn’t getting out at just the right time.  Technology had made so many of the inconveniences of life so much less inconvenient.  Raw materials were now available at the flip of a switch.  Weather could be controlled so that nice picturesque snowfalls happened only with two weeks advance notice.  People didn’t have to work anymore to get the things they wanted, now they could devote more time to leisure.

Then they had gone after the certainties of life.  Taxes were abolished two decades earlier when everything became essentially free.  Was it any wonder they went after death next.

The nanobots were little miracle workers.  That’s what she’d been told.  By doctors, by the media, by her kids, by anyone who came in contact with them and suddenly lost any sign of cancer, of aging, of heart disease.  Hell, the damn little things even kept everyone’s muscles toned according to user defined settings, allowing everyone to be as fit as they wanted with no work.

But they couldn’t fix everything.  One by one they attempted to cure the other diseases, and they managed to cut many of them off at the path.  But some people were just too far gone for the cures, for the nanobots.  And in the end, a decision was made that they couldn’t save everyone.

She was cold.  She was always cold anymore.

She’d heard she was the last one left.  The last of the Uncurables.  There’d been two, a lady named Margaret down in Texas had been holding on for awhile.  It was a sort of rivalry, at least that’s the way they played it on the news.  Sick bastards, treating her death like it was some sort of sport.  Some sort of game.  She knew there’d be celebrations when she went, and that’s the part she hated.  That’s the part that kept her going, if just to spite them.  Want to be excited that death was conquered?  Well just pardon me while I keep going on living.

It would certainly be nice to go outside this afternoon.  She’d have to remember to ask her orderly when he came around again.

And so, the last of the mortals settled in for her mid morning nap, satisfied that the party would be held off at least one more day.

Fortnightcaps are biweekly experimentation into short form fiction. All Fortnightcaps are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. So if you like the story, please feel free to link people back here. And if you didn’t, maybe the one in two weeks will be better.