September 13, 2172
I joined her at the breakfast table this morning. She was rubbing her implant; I couldn’t tell if it was absent-minded or deliberate. I sat across from her and she smiled at me, but it was the kind of smile that doesn’t reach your eyes. Sad. Empty. She extended her wrist toward me so I could see her countdown.
Zero.
Zero days.
I still wasn’t sure what the implant meant—no one tells you. Rumors are spread at school, but none of them were convincing enough. We all know that the timer counts down days, but none of us knew what happened when the timer ran out.
Her “expiration date,” she called it, like she was a carton of milk. “When your clock hits zero, you can’t have babies anymore,” she had said. Every day logged on your implant is a day you’re still fertile.
“What happens after?”
She didn’t answer me. She just sat there, continuing to look at the little zero in her wrist.
“What happens when the timer runs out?”
“They used to call it menopause. Your grandmother once told me that the women in our family always went through it relatively early. It only meant that you would stop having periods, stop having babies. But then they started putting the implant in every little girl once she got her first period and when their clock struck zero, when they normally would have just reached menopause, now—” And she paused. She swallowed. “They die.”
I don’t remember if I said anything. I don’t think I did. I think she tried to talk over the fact that this meant that she was going to die and she was going to die today. “It’s not just in your wrist. It’s not just in your ovaries. They also stick some probes right on your brain. It just—it just kills you.”
I didn’t really believe it, at first. But it probably had more to do with the fact that I didn’t want to believe it. Because I realized I had never met either of my grandmothers. My aunt, my mom’s older sister, had mysteriously died two years ago. I’d never even met any old women. Plenty of old men, though. And Mom had a tired look to her. She used to have bags under her eyes because she worked early and went to sleep late. Today those bags were a sort of gaunt depression. They were turning blue. Her cheeks started to hollow out. Her skin had started to gray.
“They don’t want us to do much more than give birth. Then they’re in charge of everything else.” She stood up, slowly. She had to balance herself by putting both hands on the table in front of her. “I’m going to go rest. Come sit with me a while.”
I sat by her bed for probably about three hours after that. Dad was still at work, but Mom said he knew that her timer had run out. “He wanted to be here,” she insisted. I’m not sure she was trying to convince me.
I watched her deteriorate in front of me. She became harder and harder to understand as the hours passed. Her sentences just became strings of meaningless words, then a series of moans. She held my hand throughout her expiration, but her hold began to soften. Like there was less of her there, less of her in existence. And suddenly, her moaning stopped. It had gotten really soft at that point, like a drawn out whisper. Then she went quiet. It was as though she had gotten hit really hard in the stomach and the wind was knocked out of her.
I untangled my fingers from hers. I didn’t really cry, though I wanted to. I felt more empty and scared than sad. Every time I thought of her being truly, absolutely dead, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. Like every part of me—both my mind and my body—was hurting.
I felt like I had to get my implant out. If it stayed, the same thing that had just happened to my mother would happen to me. I began tearing at the skin around my clock, trying to pry it out. Now I cried. My fingernails dug into my own flesh and it started to bleed and sting and the implant felt like it was throbbing and my nails felt heavy, thick, as skin began to build up under them and I stopped, not because it hurt too bad but because I remembered what my mother had said about the implant being on your ovaries and your brain and so I stopped.
I didn’t realize how heavily I had been breathing.
I would never be able to get rid of the implant. That was the point, I guess. That foreign screen was part of me until its clock ran out. No, even then, after that, after my expiration, after my death, it would still be a part of me. They would bury it with me. Or they would bury me with it.
I rubbed the blood off my wrist. That little clock read 11,733.