By Erin Curtice

Can’t someone kill me… please? I hope you’re out there; maybe some psychic working for the police or someone who has visions. If you can hear me, I’m in Room 217 of the County Hospital. Surrounded by medical staff who marvel at my condition. If only they knew.

Here I lay, in this hospital bed. I’m unable to move, to speak. But I can hear. I can hear the staff, as they work with me, as they wonder why I don’t get bed sores. My body heals itself very rapidly now. The spinal column severed by the guard’s bullet? If they’d reattached it in the first few minutes, it might have repaired itself. But they didn’t know and there’s now a gap, severing not just the nerves but any hope I have of escaping.

Up until a year ago, I was a research assistant at Genodyne Laboratories, working with the illustrious Dr Freeman. When we started, we had hope, though. I graduated from MIT summa cum laude and I’d read Freeman’s books on halting the aging process. Most of the scientific community laughed at him, but I was star struck.

Like everyone else I paid my dues at the lab, but soon I came to work with Freeman himself. My undergrad and graduate studies left little time for socializing or family life and with me being the only child of parents who’d died when I was in my first year of college, I dove deeper into school and work to divert the loss I felt. Freeman had never married so he had as little social connections outside of his work as I did.

And we did it! We’d been following his original theories about free radicals and growth in cancer cells. If a cell didn’t age, the free radicals could clean it continuously and the factors causing cancer cells to multiply could cause healthy cells to renew themselves. We were heady with success.

Then the damned FDA shut us down. They labeled us irresponsible because we’d used lab animals from questionable sources, there was talk of criminal charges and the University canceled his tenure. The important thing was, we didn’t lose lab access since we were working on other lines of therapy. We bribed one of the guards to let us in at night to keep doing the work. We knew everyone else was wrong and we were right.

As the funding evaporated and we couldn’t get access to more, there was still one final step to take—a human test subject. We had to be careful, for if something went wrong, we’d be liable. If not, this would be the first immortal man, the new Adam. We decided that I should be the one. Not just for my own benefit, but also if something went wrong, Freeman would be the only one who’d have a clue how to fix it. And to be honest, the thought of me being the first Adam of the new age was beyond thrilling.

It worked, at first. My back pain went away. My vision returned to the 20/20 I had when I was younger. Everything seemed so perfect, I felt like screaming our success to the rooftops.

Then the headaches began; mild, but increasing in intensity. One night, the pain relievers were no longer effective so I returned to the lab to see if work could take my mind off the pain. Dr Freeman called me into his office and as I entered, I saw a look of pity on his face. Then he told me. We’d run every test. We hadn’t found any reason, but that night, the cause finally came to him.

The serum had worked perfectly. Almost every cell in my body had been renewed. But there’s one type of cell which doesn’t regrow itself: brain cells. Yet that’s what our serum did. It used the growth factors to make cells renew themselves, replacing everything… but not my brain. So my brain cells were different from the rest of the body. When there’s a foreign object in the body, it causes a fever, causes white blood cells to attack the invader. I realized my blinding headaches were a side effect of this process, but I still didn’t get it. Until Dr. Freeman looked up at me from across the desk with horror in his eyes.

“Forever”, he whispered.

“What?” I said, rubbing my temples, the pain coming back.

“You’ll have that pain as long as you live and nothing will be able to help. Your body will metabolize it too fast. You’ll have it forever.”

I lost it. I grabbed him, I started screaming at him, “Help me, help me!” and somehow my hands found themselves around his throat. That’s how the security guard found us; the noise made him come running, and he thought he was protecting Freeman from a madman. He shot me, once, through the neck. The trial was held electronically, televised from my hospital bed into the courtroom, using closed-circuit TV. I was convicted of manslaughter, but the court gave me no prison time. The judge said my punishment was enough under the circumstances. How little he knew.

I’m unable to move any part of my body. I can’t speak now because I can’t control my lung muscles; they have a machine which breathes for me. I can blink somewhat but don’t have full control of that so I can’t communicate that way. I can’t tell them about the pain.

The headaches are increasing in frequency and intensity. They give me pain meds every day during physical therapy, but even if they gave me morphine around the clock, it wouldn’t matter. My body will get rid of it almost instantaneously. The pain, though, the pain I can’t get rid of. It’s there now, every second of every minute of every hour of every day and it’s increasing. I can’t speak, I can’t moan, I can’t scream at the agony, the pain that will be with me…. like my body… forever.

So, God, the Devil, somebody, anybody, I didn’t use to believe in psychic powers or prayer or anything like that but that’s my last hope. My last chance for anyone to come and relieve me of this suffering, this pain, to contact someone, anyone, anyone at all.

Can’t someone kill me… please?