Die and Let Live

Timing is everything.

by Kevin Ahearn

On the night of March 6th, 1836, in a dark corner of a mission stable, 75-year old Michael Walsh materialized out of Texas air. His musket loaded and his spirits high, Walsh was on a mission of his own and knew exactly where to go. Heavily medicated, he fought through agonizing pain, knowing this would be last thing he’d ever do.

Walsh staggered into the courtyard into the middle of a firefight. Cannon and shot lit up the night. The old man knew the battlefront better than anyone alive. He headed for the south wall. Up the ladder he climbed. Every rung a torture, he refused to flinch.

Then he saw the man he had admired all his life, and as bullets flew and cries of the wounded and the dying rang out, Walsh presented himself.

“Colonel Crockett,” he said with a stiff salute. “Michael Walsh of Nashville, Tennessee, reporting for duty.”

“Who? said Crockett. Never seen you before. When d’you get here?”

“Just now,” said Walsh. “I volunteered.”

“Santa Anna’s got us surrounded,” said Crockett. “How’d you get through?”

“It ain’t where or when you’ve been, Colonel Crockett, but who you’re with, what you’re doing, and where you’re going.”

Crockett stared at Walsh. There was something about this volunteer — clean and store-bought new — as if he’d just stepped out of one of those fancy shops back East.

“Get back with the women and children, old timer,” ordered Crockett. “This here’s no place for grandfathers.”

“This is my place and my time,” said Walsh. “Got a disease no one’ll know how to spell for three hundred years and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let it kill me. I’m here to go out with my boots on.”

“Suit yourself, Mister Walsh, whoever you are,” said Crockett. “We need every Tennesseean we can get!”

“That’s my man! said Walsh,” drawing a bead on a Mexican soldier. As they say in Music City, ‘If you ain’t busy livin’, you’re busy dyin.’ So let’s get to it.”

Within a few short hours, the Alamo would be overrun and every last defender killed. The oldest of them would be buried with the rest, but his identity would remain a mystery for centuries.

Michael Walsh was not the first. Nor would he be the last. Far, far, far into the future, when humanity had solved all its problems and lived in permanent peace and prosperity, technology had been perfected to allow those who found no future in the present to find final peace in the past.

“Doctor Kerrigan,” said the young man as he placed his right hand on the Data Glass. “My name is Jonathan Scott.”

“I see that, Mister Scott,” said Kerrigan, three times the patient’s age.

The Data Glass, absorbing a single molecule of DNA, flashed a complete bio on the screen. Mate, children, and pets — negative across the board. This one would be relatively simple.

“You’re determined to go through with this?” asked Kerrigan, scanning the screen further. “Good job, no health problems, fine education, a full life to look forward to.”

“I am,” replied Scott adamantly.

“And you understand that certain times and places have long been reserved or already taken? Little Big Horn, Thermopylae, Masada, the lead column of the Light Brigade. If you’re bent on a heroic finish, I can get you in a Russian punishment battalion at Stalingrad. Sent to the front lines, with their own men ordered to shoot them if they retreated, and the Nazis dug in; none survived, but all got medals.”

“No,” said Scott. “I’m totally against war of any kind.”

“Understood,” agreed Kerrigan. “Are you religious? I can put you in the Roman arena with the Christians, or at Auschwitz during the Holocaust or if you’re Islamic, we have spaces still open during the Crusades.”

“Thanks, but no. My belief in God is personal.”

“We’ll respect that fully. If you’d like to be a part of something historically significant, I can put you on the top floor of the Tower Number One. You’ll be able to see the plane come in. Or perhaps you’d like to be one of the first firefighters or EMTS to arrive at the scene?”

“No, no, insisted Scott. Those people were innocent victims of a terrorist attack. To crash the event would tarnish their courage and sacrifice.”

“Well said, young man. You’re not the first to have felt that way, however, as many of the remains were never recovered or identified, policy allowed us to place a few on nine-eleven.”

“I’ve read your data spread, doctor.”

“Then you’re aware that your death must be totally anonymous. May I suggest a natural end? Krakatoa or Mount Saint Helens or in the path of a killer tornado or hurricane? And then there’s the third millennium tsunami in Asia.”

“No, none of those,” insisted Scott. “I want to do what’s fair. I want to do what’s right and I certainly don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Except yourself,” concluded Kerrigan.

“There’s no other way,” demanded Scott. “I just can’t go on living.”

“Okay, take it easy,” said Kerrigan. He hated it when it came to this. But it so rarely did; people came in knowing exactly how and when they wanted to go. “We can work this out.”

“Thank you, doctor,” said Scott. “I have to do this, but I need your assurance that it can be done.”

Kerrigan leaned forward, his eyes full of trained sincerity. “What exactly do you have in mind, Mister Scott?”

“I see,” said the doctor after Scott had explained. “But what you require may be beyond the policy envelope. Are you sure I couldn’t interest you in one of our pioneering tragedies? There were two thousand, three hundred and twenty-four souls aboard the Heinlein on the way to Mars when it was struck by a meteor. The Gargarin space station disaster in Titan orbit killed even more.”

“No,” stressed Scott, pounding his fist on the data screen. “What I must do has to be done. What should have been done years ago. You’ll either permit me to seek my own end my own way or I’ll...”

“Please, don’t!” Kerrigan begged him. “We’ll consider your specific request and inform you of our decision.”

Scott folded his arms. “I’ll wait right here.”

“Sorry. Even if we ruled immediately, the law mandates you sleep on it,” said Kerrigan, imagining yet again how it must have been during the abortion era. “Come back tomorrow morning and we’ll proceed from there.”

The Policy Committee met that afternoon. After Kerrigan had briefed its six members.

“The young man’s demands are noble, to say the very least, said the chairman, But do we have the capability to grant them should we agree to?”

“Yes, we can get him when and where he wants to be,” said the head of the R&D branch. “But this will require an insertion rather than the customary addition. Moreover, a split-second either way and Mister Scott could lose his life for naught.”

“Either way, we’re going to set precedents,” said the legal chief. “It’s a question of going back or moving forward.”

“It has to be the latter,” insisted the ethics authority. “We exist to allow people who wish to end their lives to do so with honor and dignity.

“No more husbands and wives discovering the bodies of their spouses in bathtubs, their wrists slit and the water blood red. Do we want to back to group suicides in parked vans or religious fanatics poisoning themselves and their children en masse? The police-assisted suicides which also caused the deaths of innocent bystanders? People throwing themselves in front of trains or driving their vehicles off cliffs or diving their aircraft into the ground? Humanity has earned its global freedom. This is part of the price and we have to pay it.”

“But why right away?” asked the pharmaceutical director. “We’ve got a litany of drugs that will help the patient deal with his guilt or whatever else may be causing his depression. That’s what it is! Group therapy, individual care. We can put Mister Scott back together again. I am sick and tired of sending people to their deaths.”

“The old, old argument yet again,” huffed the chairman. “Next you’ll suggest we put Mister Scott under observation. We don’t have that right. Not any more. Once we perfected DNA-splicing in the womb and cured mental illness, nobody can be certified suicidal. This is what they want to do and it’s our job to let them do it right. After a life our patients no longer believe is worth living, we give them a death worth dying for. Because if we don’t, or if we hesitate and Mister Scott goes off and kills himself and injures or kills others, it is we who will be held responsible. I, for one, do not want to be charged as an accessory to murder.”

The Policy Committee nodded in unison.

“Then again,” said Kerrigan. “Mister Scott may not come back. Seven out of ten never do.”

“Maybe,” said R&D. “But just five years ago, it was nine out of ten.”

The next morning, Mr. Scott was waiting when the doors were opened.

“The Committee voted to allow your departure,” said Kerrigan. “You won’t be requesting a ceremony, will you?”

“No,” said Scott. “That’s the absolute last thing I want.”

Kerrigan tried not to show his relief. Many departees, especially the older ones, would invite friends and family for the send-off, a combination Irish wake and bon voyage party. Usually all went well with good luck in a previous life and a well-chosen death, but too often the wife or the husband or the children would lose it at the very end and the scene was not unlike one of those ancient executions with people crying and begging and shouting and demanding the procedure be aborted. Only the “guest of honor” could do that and only a couple of times, strapped in the box and ready to go, did a departee suddenly shake his or her head. It was such bad form.

“You brought the clothes you wanted; good,” said the doctor without delay. “While you change, I’ll have the team get everything ready.”

Scott got into his gear. After ten years it still fit fine. Kerrigan and three assistants led him to the chamber and strapped him onto a vertical gurney. Scott nodded as they closed the door.

Kerrigan stood by the control console. The computer had taken over. As with insertion, substitution placement had to be precise. And as it had always been, timing was everything.

Then came the definitive moment. It would the last time, give or take a few seconds, that anyone would ever see Jonathan Scott alive. Would this be a willful waste of human life? Kerrigan grappled with the thought. Any era needed more people like this young man, and he was sending him to his doom.

In less than a heartbeat, Jonathan Scott was gone forever.

Ten years before, high in the Swiss Alps, a pair of climbers neared the summit of the Matterhorn. Linked together by a rope secured by pitons hammered into the icy mountain wall, they would be the last couple in the club troupe to make it to the top.

“C’mon, you two lovebirds!” the leader yelled down at them. “People are starting to talk.”

Mary Lynch and Jonathan Scott had been sweethearts almost since they had learned how to talk; ties that bound them together infinitely stronger than pitons and rope.

“This is a molehill compared to the marriage we’re going to have,” Jonathan called up to her. “And without this cold wind howling.”

Just above him on the rope, Mary replied, “Spoken like a true husband-to-be. From now on, nothing but hot times for us.”

At that moment, Mary thought she saw a sudden change in Jonathan, as if the climb had aged him ten years in an instant.

“Hold on to the rope, Mary!” he cried up to her. “Don’t let go, whatever happens.”

“Of course, I’m going to...”

Suddenly one of the pitons pulled loose. Mary and Jonathan dropped ten feet and slammed against the mountain wall.

“Don’t let go, Mary!” Jonathan screamed. “Don’t let go!”

A second piton pulled loose from the force of the drop and then a third. Up above, the tour leader scrambled and began rappelling down to them.

The third piton snapped out of the ice. Jonathan looked up at Mary. “I love you,” he said. “I always had.”

Then he let go.

“Nooooo!” she cried as he grew smaller and smaller and smaller.

The last piton pulled out and Mary would have followed her lover, but at the last possible instant, the team leader grabbed her by the arm and held her.

And when she had been brought up to safety.

“If only he had held on for just another second,” she cried.

“If he had,” said the leader. “You both would have died.”

“No,” she said. “I was about to let go to save him.”

“I think somehow he knew that,” said the leader. “He couldn’t have lived knowing you gave up your life for his. He’s given you the greatest gift a man could ever give anybody. Treasure it every single day.”

“I’ll try,” said Mary, her tears still flowing.

For a decade, she did. But then...

“Good morning,” said the young woman as she placed her right hand on the Data Glass. “My name is Mary Lynch.”

“Yes, Miss Lynch,” said Dr. Kerrigan. “We’ve been expecting you.”