Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

After church, I rushed home and called him to accept his apology, to offer one of my own, but Michael didn’t answer.

And he didn’t return my calls.

“Five thousand dollars for peace of mind,” the med-world avatar said. I scrolled through the list of options: five grand for a liver patch, ten for whole one, twenty-five for a kidney and two hundred for a heart.

Organ replacement was a big business.

I’d done some research. Almost every time a human population faced an environmental collapse, it resorted to cannibalism as a way to rebalance: central Europe in the fifth millennium BC; the Anasazi in the 12th century; Papua New Guinea and Ukraine in the 20th century. The list went on and on as if it was a hardwired response to human-induced local ecosystem collapse. Now that local system spanned the entire planet. Human biomass would soon exceed 500 billion tons, more than any other single species, even Antarctic krill.

What am I doing? I sighed and closed my tablet. Without missing a beat, the voice in my head answered, Why not, though? It’s not like I’d hurt anyone, and nobody needed to know.

I made my decision.

I logged back on and the med-world avatar said that I needed a medical center if I wanted a delivery made. One phone call later and I’d set-up a drop-off at a local clinic with my friend Mary. I finished our call with a promise to plan an evening together soon.

Next thing, I was heading into the bathroom, wiping the inside of my mouth with a cotton swab and placing it into a double-sealed plastic bag. Moments later, I’d filled in the med-world forms and left the bag out on my balcony for a delivery drone to pick up.

It was done.

My phone rang. Michael’s number popped up. “Michael, hello! How are you?” I answered before the first ring had finished.

His face appeared on my screen. “Very good. Sorry about not calling back right away—”

“Don’t worry, I was just making sure you were okay.” I paused. “I didn’t see you at the church meetings” —another pause— “and I’m sorry about your dinner. About the way I acted.”

He took a deep breath. “That’s not why I didn’t return your calls.”

My heart was in my throat. “No?”

“No.” He wiped his face with his biological hand. “You have your own path to follow. Self-discovery is an important part of my faith.”

“That’s… well… I understand.” I wanted to tell him how much I missed our chats—how much I missed him .

“I’ve been thinking about you, Freyja. I wish you luck in finding what you’re looking for.”

It was the first time he’d ever used my full name. The tingling warmth I’d felt when I first met Michael returned. “Thank you.”

“You take care.”

With a smile, he severed the connection.

Fat snowflakes fell outside my kitchen window while jazz played inside. A real fire crackled in my old fireplace, the first time I’d used it in years. Buster was laid out at my feet as I prepared dinner. I dropped down scraps of veggies from time to time that he snapped up.

An entertainment show was playing on the wall of my living room. “ … billionaire Martin Ludwig is continuing his buying spree… ” said the reporter. I glanced at the display, into glittering photoreceptors. It was the same face of the small man I’d met at Michael’s party.

I knew he’d looked familiar. Returning to preparing my dinner, the voice inside my head said, You see? Those are the kinds of people you need to surround yourself with .

Delivery of my liver patch had taken two weeks. During the wait, I’d started taking Buster for long walks, waking up early to get back on track with my gene therapy research work. I even attended a rally for ending animal farming.

Slitting open the thermal bio-containment packaging that my liver had arrived in, I removed the organ. It was cold and wet, tinged purple and reddish brown. Closing my eyes, I squeezed it, trying to see if my proprioperceptive sense would magically expand to contain this new chunk of my flesh. I waited, eyes closed. Somehow it did feel like a part of me; somehow my skin sensed this wasn’t alien flesh.

This thing was a part of me.

I dropped it into the frying pan.

An intense hunger gripped me. I was used to being hungry, but this was different. Watching my liver sizzle, I began salivating painfully. My nostrils flared. Picking up a fork, I turned it, trying to brown it evenly, but then, unable to wait, I used the side of the fork to nip off a piece and popped it into my mouth.

At first I rolled it around my tongue. Then I chewed, sucking the juices from it; I moaned as I swallowed, remembering guilt-free days of eating meat as a youth, eating and enjoying . Stabbing and ripping with the fork, I ground off another piece against the bottom of the frying pan. It was still raw. Pinpricks of blood popped from the edges of the ragged meat, but I gobbled it down.

The pan was empty before I realized what I was doing. Using the back of my hand, I wiped a streak of spittle from the side of my mouth.

Buster whined at my feet, sensing something was going on. I looked down at him.

“Not for you, little Buster, this is all for mummy.”

He always preferred human food to his own food. Human food . And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I laughed, and then another thought: You are what you eat . I laughed again.

Personal organ stockpiling was something everyone with money was doing, I’d found out. I talked about it with anyone who would listen. I was finally sleeping at night. Michael got back in touch with me, and our coffee dates became regular again.

“Sharks kill eleven humans a year on average!” I exclaimed to him one evening, startling some other customers. “Do you know how many sharks humans kill?”

He shook his head.

“Eleven thousand an hour !” I slammed my coffee down. “What are we going to do about this?”

Michael shrugged and took a sip from his coffee. “What can we do?”

“Stop being hypocrites,” I said, sipping my coffee and looking back to my tablet. I had an order page up. A liver and a pound of thigh muscle. I chose two-day delivery to the clinic to make sure I would get them in time for my next private Sunday evening dinner party.

“What do you mean, you won’t let me send them there anymore?”

“Effie, I can’t imagine what you must be going through…” My friend Mary’s face grimaced in my phone’s display. “… but this is getting weird. My boss is wondering who all these packages are for. I thought this was just a once or twice thing? Why don’t you get them delivered to your own lab?”

I couldn’t tell her that half my deliveries were already going to my lab, and that my boss was growing suspicious as well.

“This project is just taking longer than we thought.” I used the royal “we” without explanation. My little white lie was becoming a big one, even with my credentials to back me up. “You’re right. Sorry. Listen, we should go out like we said.”

“Uh-huh.” She arched her eyebrows and disconnected.

Sighing again, I looked down at Buster. “Do you want to go out?”

Buster barked yes, and I went to fetch his leash. Spring was here, but outside it was still chilly, and we made our way into the small wooded park near my apartment. Walking through the bare trees, I remembered stories my mother had told me about the myling , the ghosts of babies who were abandoned in the forests at birth, left to die in the frozen wilderness, their souls forever doomed to wander alone.