3rd January, 2357
This page of my diary is going to be very different from others. It was on this day last month that I had seen the face of my grandfather the last time, and I have been missing him all along. So depressed had I been since his death that I did not write my ‘daily’ diary for a full month.
I won’t be able to forget Grandpa even if my brain is totally replaced, which is already scheduled for a date nine years from now. Let me mention here that the concepts about humanity have been changing extremely fast since the first full brain transplant a decade ago. We have long achieved a sort of immortality, thanks to in-situ cloning of organs, organ transplants, and whatnot. The concept of being a grandfather, even a father, has almost lost its meaning. Yet, only if you had suffered the loss of your grandfather – or grandmother if you were lucky to have seen one – would you realize their value in your lives.
Until the last moment of his life, Grandpa was as active as a child. Part of this energy, I am sure, he had regained from our child Coxy. He would play with her all day till he and the child went to bed together early in the evening. He would tell her his real-life experiences of the world he had lived in over two centuries ago, which Coxy often refused to believe.
Unlike others of his time, Grandpa had decided to let scientists experiment with a form of extremely low-temperature hibernation and resurrection on him. His only condition was that when he was made ‘alive’ again after two hundred years, he should be allowed to live as a normal human being of the twenty-second century, and no experiments done on his body. He wanted to live naturally, as an old man of seventy years plus.
Scientists did succeed in resurrecting Grandpa– it is no great deal, but to chill an active man until he was nearly dead must have been traumatic for scientists in the twenty-second century. That shows in the piece of paper they kept beside him, begging forgiveness if the scientists were unable to bring him to life after two centuries.
Once the last humanistic movement against interfering with nature was crushed by the ultra-progressives a hundred years back, all types of human engineering experiments have been taking place at a frenzied pace. Almost nobody dies these days. Whosoever dies does not die in the old sense of death; each of his or her organs is used for either research or transplantation. But Grandpa was destined to die, as per his will he’d written in his own hand, in an English almost alien to us today. By the way, Coxy says, Grandpa speaks ‘wing-lich’.
Grandpa’s ‘untimely’ death has shaken my family to the core. Sarah’s and my parents died almost unnoticed, we being too busy in our daily routines of near-mechanical precision. When Sarah’s father – the last of our parents – was declared dead, his organs were immediately disposed of. We had felt sad, maybe for a day, before we completely forgot about him. One consolation was that his organs would be ‘living’ on others for a long time.
In this age of scientific overkill, we are bothered and excited about only the inventions taking place by the minute. We are a fully integrated inter-planetary village now, with every bit of information on our implants or wearable computers. Anything can travel at lightning speed to any corner of the globe and our space colonies. Our spaceships reach a new galactic object every week. In fact, writing about what we are achieving every day is of no relevance; by the time you read it, it starts looking ancient. Only I must be writing a diary, and I hope I will keep my old-world habit in spite of my busyness.
“We have completely become zombies, without a trace of human-ness”– Grandpa had made his last remark on our generation when both Sarah and I had received a dozen messages and calls on our computers in a span of five minutes, and we had to leave the dining table halfway through breakfast. Reverting to an olden, relaxed lifestyle is not possible, and yet we have adopted a number of old-world habits from Grandpa. For example, we still take breakfast instead of gulping food pastes and tabs.
That fateful day, Grandpa must have left home for my office after Coxy had slept in the afternoon. Like always, he would have thought to return home before she woke up a couple of hours later. Despite his contempt for control of everything by technology, his visit to our lab a mile from our house to ‘watch you play with your tech tools’ was as regular as his morning walk and a silent prayer at one corner of his bedroom. Walking along the path briskly with the help of his stick, the fully grayed Grandpa must have been a weird sight for whoever saw him through their car windows [if anybody had time for that]. There were signs that his frail heart and shaking limbs would not last long; in fact, Sarah had been pleading that he allow them to be replaced, but Grandpa always affectionately told her to wait till he felt the need for that.
Grandpa did not reach my lab. Instead, Sarah and I received a flash on our implants that he was in the emergency ward of the city hospital. We reached there in a few minutes. Grandpa was on life-saving equipment.
“Mail his will in ten minutes or he will go waste,” the doctor told me when I insisted that beyond treatment and efforts to save his life, there should be no experimentation on him. I searched the will from the data warehouse and transferred it to the doctor’s computer.
The doctor examined the ‘live’ reports on Grandpa’s body coming on a dozen screens by his side. All the while, Sarah kept on accessing details about the accident on her computer. A graphic presentation of the accident, along with its CCTV footage, was soon available on our screens:
A fully automated van had suddenly stopped in the middle of the road due to a rare metal failure and instantly caught fire. It led to a pileup, with other cars catching fire in a few seconds. The adults ran out of the emergency tunnel that was created instantly, but two children remained trapped inside the kid box of a car. Nobody could go near the vehicle due to fanning flames and fumes, and the mess created by molten plastic. Even fire engines took their time getting ready to approach the van. Suddenly, an old man with prehistoric features appeared from somewhere. Not caring for the flames, he plunged into the fire and managed to reach the van. Then he broke the pane of the kid box with his stick, pulled the children out, and protected them from fire by folding himself around them. The fire was doused in a few minutes, and the children were taken out safely, but the old man had been charred beyond recognition.
After a quick video conference with the international medical board, doctors declared that Grandpa’s life could be saved only if all his vital organs, including part of his brain, were replaced by artificial organelles. “He must live. We must save him at all costs. The Board does not approve of his death. We must not be sentimental,” the leading doctor said, “I want your final word, and now, so that I can make an appeal to the Board.”
I looked towards the bed– a mass of flesh existing on artificial life. It was not Grandpa. “Please switch off the equipment,” I said to the doctor, my artificial heart bleeding silently.
The doctor gave me two minutes to think again.
I had nothing to reconsider. “Please go by the will,” I said. “I hope Sarah agrees with me.”
“You are right,” she said in a choking voice. “Let Grandpa die.”
Her moist eyes were paying tribute to an immortal Grandpa.