A More Perfect Man: Part One

Somewhere in the City
Rilo

A faint hiss sounded from the wall. With a barely audible rattle, the pill fell from the chute and into the depression that had been eroded into the desk by countless others like it, falling to their appointed spot week after week for countless years. Rilo silently reached out his hand toward the capsule. His eyes never strayed from the screen in front of him as he felt the cool touch of the concrete. He pinched the tiny white pill between his fingers and lifted it from where it had settled. His muscles moved without a thought, in complete automation. They were doing their job, just as they always had. Once a week, the pill would fall. Once a week, the hand would reach out. Once a week, the fingers would grasp. Once a week, the arm would bring the pill to the mouth. Once a week, the body would be nourished. Perfectly smooth, perfectly automatic, perfectly functional. Perfect.
Rilo’s lips parted as his unfeeling fingers placed the pill in his mouth. Not a conscious thought left his brain. A week’s energy slid down his throat, pushed and pulled by muscles as smooth as those controlling his arms. They existed solely to provide nutrients passage to the stomach, where the task of fuelling the body would be passed on to the next member of the chain that kept this human factory running. As the throat carried on its task, the eyes never veered from theirs. Since the time the egg coloured capsule had fallen they had not moved, had not once betrayed any indication that they were aware of anything but the screen that was their sole focus. Back and forth, back and forth they swayed with all the regularity of a pendulum’s swinging hand. They followed their path unerringly, tracing a line eons old. Swinging, always swinging. Numbers, always numbers. The swinging and the numbers had always been there, and always would. They were all. Rilo existed to read the numbers, and so his eyes kept swinging.

Somewhere Outside the City
Harry Tullman
It was a beautiful sunny morning in early May, and not a soul in the world knew it but Mr. Harry Tullman. As he sat on his porch, his rather roundish figure alive in the prime of his old age, a pipe held lightly in his hand and his twinkling blue eyes looking out into the sunlit forest beyond the freshly cut grass of his lawn, he wondered what was to become of the world, and of himself in particular. Many times over the course of his life had he asked himself these same questions, only to reject the dismal answers he found and start again from scratch, searching for some conclusion that would leave room for hope. For Harry was alone. In all the world over, in all the vast continents and wide oceans, he was the last living man. And soon enough, he too would pass into dust, and the world would move on. But Harry was a very tenacious sort of man, and he refused to let such a thing come to pass without a fight. So he sat on his porch that lovely spring morn and thought, trying to find some means by which he could salvage what remained of humanity and give it another chance at life.
His hope was not so foolish as one might the last man on Earth would warrant. For, though it be truthfully said that Harry was the last man, the last member of humanity as we know it and as history has always known it, he was not in fact the last member of the human race. Truth be known, the entire world, excepting a few pockets of wilderness such as Harry’s scattered here and there, was filled to bursting with people, an anthill city crawling with countless millions of people. But they were hollow people. People without souls, without emotions, without minds or thoughts to fill them. Empty, sexless, voiceless people. People without cause or reason or desire. They were humans, but they were not humanity. They were sons of man, but they were not men.
All across the planet, from pole to pole, the City shone silver, reflecting back at the sun its springtime present. Nothing grew in the dead, brilliant, utterly peaceful world. The concrete ziggurats and iron temples stretched their glimmering boughs high overhead, their trunks full of the clicking of innumerable keyboards, yet silent, lacking so much as the slightest whisper of humanity. Inside the man-made hives, hidden away from the sky, countless ants worked in complete, efficient silence. Yes, this was surely the end of history. Not some apocalyptic war to close the veil of unnatural winter over the eyes of human life. No hell-sent rock from the cosmos drowning the world in fire and stone. Not the slow cooking of the earth by her children. Alas, no, the world of man was doomed to a much crueller end. Doomed to be forever gray, to spend eons withering away, atrophying until the very will to live had been so removed from man that he simply sits himself down to die, forgetting the greatness he once held.

It had started many generations ago, long before Harry was born. Man had reached the apex of his youth, had climbed far up the mountain of godhood. He cleansed the Earth of her diseases and her parasites. He freed the human genome from all its defects and abnormalities, and given birth to a more perfect man. And then, at the peak of his glory, he at last conquered that timeless enemy, Death. Since time began Man had struggled against Death, had fought a losing battle against this greatest of enemies. But he had been slowly advancing, had been pushing Death back further and further; had held him off, first at arm’s length and then pushed him out the door. And now at last he had shut the door and locked it. And Death, no matter how hard he might rail, could never re-enter. The key to Man’s victory lay within that earlier achievement of science- the ability to engineer the perfect embryo. At first even these manufactured men, perfect though they may have been in form, flawless in their beauty, entering the world without any of the weaknesses or infirmities inherited by humans born the old natural way, even they would succumb to those most terrible agents of Death- Old Age, Corruption, and Entropy. But then Man in all his knowledge discovered something: it was not the human who grew old and corrupt, not the perfectly engineered child of science who grew weak and frail under Time’s heavy load, but only his parts, only his tissues and organs and cells. And if you can build the perfect man, then you can build him perfect parts to replace the ones that break down, to replace the battered tissues and failing organs and dead cells. And so at last, after centuries of pushing him off and delaying his coming, Man had defeated Death once and for ever, and sealed unto himself this far worse fate.
With the lazy sort of sigh a man gives when he has decided he can put off the day’s work no longer, Harry lifted himself from the porch swing and set out into the yard at a contented pace, crossing the grass, damp and silver with dew, to his small garden. The problems of the world would have to wait, at least until after he had fixed himself breakfast.

* * * *

A warm light filtered through the partially open blinds, letting in the brilliant rays of the mid-afternoon sun. In the yellow light, beneath the shadows of the dust dancing in the musty air, were numberless books, their golden titles gleaming in the radiance streaming through window, their leather binding alive with knowledge, the knowledge of a thousand generations. Volume after volume, covering tables, chairs, completely lining the walls in oaken shelves, books stacked upon more books, mountains of paper and ink and knowledge reaching the ceiling in some places and covering the floor in all. Fitzgerald, Pope, Orwell, Austen, Homer, Donne, read golden letters upon leather spines. Here in stacks and piles and shelves lay all the tale-tellers of a hundred cultures, from the great Russia writers of murder and morality to the great American authors of adventure and avarice. All the Thinkers too. Thinkers Greek and German and French, who wrote lengthy volumes on such things as Beauty and Truth and the Good; men of the Keynesian and Austrian schools; religious men, Calvinists and Catholics and Confuciunists alike found their home in the this ancient forest of parchment and leather. Against the windowed wall of the room, its back facing the sun, was a large, comfortable looking armchair, its dark maroon upholstery the only surface in the room completely free from the invading forest of books, and only lightly covered in the dust which everywhere else settled like virgin snow. Sitting in the chair, the bright light of window streaming over his shoulders, was Harry. His puffy ball of a nose let out an occasional wheeze as his eyes, ever bright and alive, danced their way across the page before him. His lips moved rapidly, silently mouthing the words as his eyes touched them.
Reading was the last link Harry had left with the past, a lonely golden thread with a world only he remembered, his sole escape from the monotonous self-willed servitude chosen by his fellows. It was a false world he lived in, one created by the clever liars of a thousand generations, but it was a beautiful one, a land of colour, of life; even if it was but a backward reflection of the lives of its creators.

Of course he wished for company some days- most days really. All the books and stories in the world can’t give the same warmth as conversation or love, though they do make a noble attempt. And all the knowledge of all the Thinkers who ever lived couldn’t help him now- none had ever been in such a place as the world had turned. Some had predicted it, sure. Some even might have been said to have caused it. But none had lived it. One small volume among all the others was of any true value to Harry in his quest to find an answer, but it was more a guide how to avoid the world he lived in than a manual to escape it. Written countless years ago, by a man more known for his children fiction, it spelled in uncanny detail the exact method by which one generation, one man even, could seal the fate of all humanity to follow, could remake mankind into an image of his will alone. Harry had read and reread the work more times than could be remembered, had read it until the binding had grown thin and bare, the pages torn and wrinkled. The Abolition of Man. How prophetic that phrase was.
With a sigh, Harry Tullman sat his book on the dark polished wood of the nightstand next to his chair, gingerly brushing aside the resting dust mites and taking care not to damage the book in any way, as it was irreplaceable in this day and age. A Tale of Two Cities, read the title. In the afternoons he read for pleasure only, filling his time between gardening and studying with reading of a lighter bent.
And then he had a thought. Very small and subtle he saw it in the deeper recesses of his consciousness. It could have been there for years and he had merely never taken notice, like a deer lying in the grass, a deer the hunter has looked over a hundred times, until suddenly he chances to spy the outline that doesn’t belong, and a form takes shape among the tangled thorns. All his senses came together at once; every part of his being focused intently upon this new thought.
“Now there, there’s an idea. Why didn’t I think of this before? It makes so much sense now. Why, I do believe Sydney Carton had it right,” he said with a chuckle, tapping the book he had so recently been reading. “When one has nothing left to live for, he may as well give life to someone else, and hope that they make some better use of it. The trick is of course to find the right sort of fellow, one who’s not so far gone as all the rest, one with a bit of a chest left to him for me to work with. How to do that though, how to find such a one, that’s my problem.”