I Wouldn’t Dignify This with a Title By Mohammed Hassan
The end. That is what has always been on his mind since the beginning. From the moment he was saved as an entry-level member of civilization and rolled off the assembly bed at the free trial hospital, his inevitable demise had been the dominant leading thought of his manufactured existence, and the underlying source of every ‘why’ argument that accompanied – and often cancelled – his actions. As a program coder, he had been underwhelming at best, but as a coded program, he had been exceptional, according to the testimony of his parents and the science of genetics. To this day, he still wonders why they didn’t simply leave him be as programmable code. His parents’ attempts at convincing him that he was a ‘gift from above’ fell far short of succeeding because they had already blown their cover by telling him they planned his birth around a schedule of his mother’s peak fertility hours and his father’s least demanding work hours. Plus, he knew from his experience as a copywriter at a now-ground-zero wedding gift shop that real gifts tend to have the element of surprise. “Surprise her with” should be the preface to every gift advertisement, his thengender-specific owner had told him. He decided to quit that job when his boss didn’t give him an honest answer as to why the aliens only zapped his gift shop and none of his underground militia hideouts. Soon afterwards, he gave up on working for a living, and decided to just work instead. Once he collected enough money from the many fortunes that fell in his lap while he was busy not looking, he was able to gather enough intelligence to build a time-machine and explore other possibilities in the hopes of knowing why he always wonders why. His stint as a time-traveler proved to be a waste of space, as his past and future selves kept populating his original timeline, all sharing his enthusiasm of time-travel and adamant in communicating their own technological discoveries and innovations in the field of time-travel to their source document. They all had no doubt that he was the first one of himselves to become a time-traveler. They knew himself too well. They were all sure of it. All except him. They never did know why he was so skeptical. As he got older, and his lines of code grew to become a jumbled mess, he had found himself in need of one of those self-proclaimed re-coders who tell you that you can unjumble your code through the sheer magic of ‘communication’. He found it unpleasant at first to go through his entire recorded history in aimless direction, however, his re-coder did succeed in extracting one singular memory from his existence where his obsession with death and demotivation towards living took second place in his consciousness. It was when he first experienced vomiting. He finally had a goal in life: to perpetually vomit so as to completely forget about his demise. The relief that he had been searching for since the beginning.