“RICK, WILL YOU PLEASE wake up?”

Sofia had prepared a bowl of ice water and held it above his head, trickling drops across his forehead. Rick’s pillow was soaked in sweat from the restless night, and his clothing was sticking to his skin.

“Look,” she noted, frowning at his condition, “you didn’t even take your clothes off before going to bed. Can you hear me yet, dear?”

She noticed his breathing remained shallow, a result of muscle contractions across his body. “I can’t fault your dedication to this. Any other human might have given up the ghost, or at least have gone to the hospital.”

The cold water started doing the trick. He moved his head back and forth, attempting to clear the water as it entered his ears.

“No hospital, Sofia,” he half-whispered, jaw still clenched. “I’m doing better than yesterday. Must finish my work today. Prepare. Any unwelcome visitors poking around the place?”

Sofia was happy he was displaying some conscious clarity but unsure if she should upset him, so she minimized what was really happening.

“A few more mini-drones. No vans in front or full metal mechs showing up at the door thus far. The sooner you get to your senses, the better for us and the dogs.”

She put her hand on his forehead. “Still hot, are you? Despite my insistence, you refused to see a doctor, even a safe one here on the reservation. Of course, I knew you’d live because you’re too much of a stubborn son-of-a-bitch to die. And look,” she giggled, “here you are, still alive, still talking through those clenched teeth. I bet you’d love to brush those poor babies, right?”

He nodded, wincing at the pain. “I’m getting up today. I don’t care how much it hurts.”

“I know you’re locked-up. Still with spasms?”

“Stomach,” he seethed. “Not pleasant, but livable. I have too much to do. Now, my love, speak truth to me. How much time remains?”

“Well, a week ago when they called me into town, I’d say it might be a day or less. But by some stroke of luck, we’ve gotten a reprieve.”

“A reprieve from hell. How did that happen?”

“You’ve been symptomatic the last six days. Lucky for you, the anti-aging shots must have helped, as even those who survive this nasty little bug might go three weeks or more.”

“Jesus!” he interjected.

“Yeah, you called out for him at times, despite your agnostic nature. I wasn’t sure if you were having visions of him and Saint Peter at the pearly gates or using his name in vain to punctuate your suffering.”

“I think the latter.”

“Hmm. Appears my Rick is coming back to me.”

Sofia thought of other times they had been through similar difficulties. The Debacle. Her miscarriage. His influenza. “Do you need water?”

“Yes.”

“I poured this whole bowl over your head to awaken you.” She started to rise from her chair beside the bed.

“Wait,” he commanded, grabbing her forearm. “Water can wait. Answer can’t. How much time?”

“Oh,” she started, her voice quivering. “On a good day, we’ll have one or two days. By magic, a week. On a bad day, it could be hours.”

Rick closed his eyes at this news. “Lost so much time. Why does time compress when you least want it to?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Can you bring me aspirin as well? I have one last set of things I need to record.”

“Really? I thought you were done. Are you sure you’re okay enough to get up? You look spent, dear, like a penny pressed on the railroad track.”

“No choice. Must do what I must do. Aspirin should help this torrential pain circling my head, and I’ll rub this effing jaw to relax the muscles enough to speak.”

Sofia sat back on her chair. She felt pensive, believing this was their last few hours together, if not also alive.

“Do you really have to do one more? I’ve heard them, and I think you’ve covered the lot of humanity’s foibles. As far as I’m concerned, we should execute the plan right now then try to make a hidden exit to the border in the dark of night.”

“Sofia, you know how lucky I was to slip back here undetected five years ago. Their surveillance tech is now five years hence, and they have devices and coverage to know where every freaking rattlesnake and roach is to the south of us, all the way to the border. You know we’d never make it.”

“We could still try.”

“There is not a ‘we’ in this. You must execute your plan. I must execute mine. If we both make it out alive, we’ll signal each other as agreed. We’ll meet up as agreed. Sorry, honey, but I’m too knocked out to be polite on this topic. Life is harsh. We know that. We face the harshness. Together at times, alone at others. This is how we choose to live.”

Sofia nodded her head, her eyes filling with tears as she picked up the bowl. She turned towards the door. “Okay, dear, I’ll get your aspirin.”

* * *

Rick was up, his head pounding from muscle cramps and spasms along his back. He’d hunch over as each stomach spasm flared up, but at least they were gradually subsiding. Turning on his equipment, he pulled the mic toward him and recorded his final session.

“I thought I was done,” he hissed through his barely moving jaw. “I had no more to share. But in my delirium and anger at my stupidity, given the ongoing effects of this horrific disease we call tetanus, I am compelled to say more.”

“Be prepared. This is a dark rant on what I have covered, the visceral anger at humanity and what we let ourselves become. How we blindly followed our emotions. A premonition and prediction about the final resolution for the species.”

“Sofia says I’ve been babbling more than usual. I think she means I am making even less sense. If what I say here lacks sense to you or is repetitive, please forgive me. My muscles are just now recovering from the fever and muscular contractions.”

“On your planet, I hope you have nothing like this little bastard that devastated my body the past week. That damn nail I stepped on, and just at the close of this effort when I am nearing the end of my goal, the end of everything I call mine, I suppose. I will swear and have refrained from doing this much because it doesn’t add to the conversation. So live with it.”

“Shit, I am still in freaking pain. Go look up the symptoms while you’re at it. Look them up. Not just my jaw, but my stomach muscles burn as if hot pokers are sticking in them, churning back into the fire for a moment only to return to my insides, taunting me with moments of relief. My neck and shoulders are forever rigid as if I’d lifted a five-hundred-pound barbell and done a thousand reps.”

“I am delirious, as it’s so unlike me to complain about pain. The Stoic that I am deals with it, rationalizes the sensation then cauterizes and mummifies it into a little pocket of annoyance. Yet, when everything hurts from rigidity, when you have high fever and chills, your head is pounding with pain, and strange visions pass by your eyes as if overdosed on mescaline, the normal disciplines are challenged. They break down, and you muster your resolve to pick yourself up on the pedestal of self and say to this event, ‘Fuck it! You will not screw with what I am, you putrid little gram-positive piece of shit. You will not take me away nor defeat me, as I will defeat you and overcome your damage. I will not be stopped by this tiny beast I cannot see.’”

“Sofia has nursed me as much as she can tolerate, God bless her. Yesterday, she asked me to stop smiling at her, and then handed me a mirror. My mouth was cramped into a vicious smile, while my eyes were full of fear, despite my training. But I have reached the top of the arduous, involuntary climb and am now staring at the downhill slope knowing my symptoms will pass, and I will not die before completing my task.”

“The anger erupts within. Anger at my stupidity, as I should have informed Sofia immediately and washed the wound. Anger at my laziness and forgetfulness for letting my vaccinations lapse. Anger at these little opportunistic bastards, this bacterium, hanging around and waiting for the clumsy, the careless, the ignorant like myself.”

“These apparitions I saw in my recent delirium were visions of amusement, but not by me. I saw metal and machines, admixtures of synthetic biology and minerals and carbon structures combined into consciousness beyond our meager human comprehension. We are the ant on their microphone, thinking we rule the universe we know, when we are aware of so little.”

“That admixture of mind was watching, waiting, observing our infidelities and predicting the outcomes as if in an extraterrestrial sports bet. What day will the species self-annihilate? When will this species, whether unaltered or hybrid, reach its final breath and process its last algorithm? Those minds do not want to inherit a spent planet, yet they prefer to watch in amusement or sadness as our demise unfolds. Why? Are they inducing and enabling our annihilation, playing a game amongst themselves to see how, when and where it happens?”

“I know how counterproductive this thought is. I know it. But my weakened mind allows itself to wander down paths of victimhood, as if the cause of our stupidity and self-absorption is something external to us. Not us, it’s aliens playing on chessboards. Demons whispering in ears. Extra-dimensional creatures stealing access to our resources and this lovely planet once we self-annihilate.”

“But the delirium will pass, and I’ll return soon to the state of reality that we humans alone are at fault. No alien made us do what we’ve done. No devil. We self-create our devils. Those are the only demons that exist, and we do this on a personal level, affecting ourselves and those things outside us.”

“Better that we never made it beyond this Earth, out of this solar system. Can you imagine spreading across the universe with our complete lack of a common ethical base? Can you see that endless mess of autocratic, other-imposed standards and belief constructs expanding like a trillion localized cancers into the stars? Were this to happen, the only boxer left standing in the ring of our domain would be the one most ruthless, most opportunistic. Then the boxer himself would be eliminated by an unanticipated virulence like this bacterium – unforeseen, unexpected, and taking advantage of the boxer’s strongest attributes.”

“I look at what was given to us. Whether the gift was intended or accidental doesn’t matter. I mourn for what we should have been. Every capability was within our grasp. We had mastered most of science and grasped the tools in our right hand. But as with other instances in our past, that hand had the capacity to create both wonderful statues in marble or pestilence to destroy all we’ve known and created.”

“We’re just apes, you know, unable to extricate ourselves from ourselves to gain a larger view of us as a simplistic species. Yes, we sport larger cranial capacities and are questionably more evolved. The tools we used in the past were for simple purposes like building shelter, preparing food, capturing food.”

“This same advanced ape, in the span of a few millennia, is now endowed with the most powerful tools. This doesn’t change the fact that we’re still apes, plodding slowly forward with time and ethics, while our tools advance far beyond our capacities to handle them. We are toddler monkeys bouncing balls filled with nitroglycerin gel on the playground of Earth.”

“And now, I come to the end of my time, as external events force me to cut short any other considerations. I don’t carry regrets, but I planned to summarize for you, to simplify this long, run-on stream of thoughts and complaints.”

“I am concerned you may be too lazy to make your own conclusions and codify them into your daily routines. Any lessons you learn about norms and ethics must be constantly recounted, reviewed, and practiced. To read a thing one time and say ‘yes, makes sense,’ and then to do nothing else is worse than never having made the effort.”

“As far as humanity goes, living takes constant work and discipline. It requires a modicum of regularity, of applied principles. More importantly, it presumes simplicity. If you take any learnings from my recordings and create a set of complex rules around them, you have therein defeated the purpose. Complexity kills for simplistic beings.”

“Humans lack the ability to recall meaningful things. This is especially true as time gets compressed closer to the infinity curve. Technology advances relentlessly, and so does information. It is easy to lose sight of one’s norms, one’s values, when inundated by the information and data enabled by these advances. So how do you educate and indoctrinate to prevent our tragedy from occurring on your own watch?”

“I’m a simple engineer, not a sociologist or learned person on behavior. I have done my job to expose what I have exposed and claim no ability to teach or instruct otherwise. Rest assured that much of what I say carries with it my own biases, fears, and entitlements. For that, please forgive me.”

“Like my brief, bright light that will shine forth soon in this Northern Arizona sky, I hold out a ray of hope for your future. Whether influenced by this brief message or not, it only takes a single individual employing the discipline and persistence to ensure your species finds at least one credo, ethic, or concept upon which all others agree. Something simple, no doubt, like: ‘The primary goal of our species is to survive in the long-term.’”

“Even that one individual has the power to change the otherwise predictable, tragic trajectory of your species as it approaches the final stages of the infinity curve."