The Hope of a Last Breath

When she felt the wind on her face, Sarah hoped this would be the last last breath she would pay for.

It’s not that the breeze felt artificial; it was appropriately warm and deceptively gentle, like a quick, puffing exhale from a puppy making room to continue its staggered sniffing. It tasted the way it was supposed to, like salt and warm sand and seaweed. It quietly matched the dead silence of the exposed ocean shelf before her. The ocean had retreated quickly, draining away, rolling and mounting at the horizon, no doubt gathering into the wall of water that was sure to follow. No, the wind, the sand, the sun, everything was perfect. 

But it was a lie. And what made it worse was she knew the truth of it.

“I’m not really dying,” she said, tightening her fists. “Dammit.”

In the past two years, she had been stabbed during a home invasion, shot in the face by a shotgun, burnt to a crisp in a forest fire, beheaded by a guillotine and even froze to death on Mount Everest. Like three-quarters of the population, she had been diagnosed with Generally Overstimulated Dysphoria Apathy and Numbness (GODAN) syndrome. When her doctor explained the symptoms she could look forward to (staying in bed for days at a time, short-term paralysis or, in extreme cases, actual death), she was ready to talk about options. 

Of course, hooking into alternative positive realities was still fairly popular. In fact, when a class action lawsuit shut down APR giant EdenNow, they just slapped a warning on their products and kept rolling. But she had seen too many friends spiral down into a fantasy world and not come back to feel comfortable trying it. 

So she started by visiting the kind of low-grade chopshops, so prevalent now on every corner. The ones with the flashing signs that read Check Cashing! Raw Experiences! All Insurance Types Accepted! True, they don’t cost much but leave you feeling deadheaded for days after. Once, after a particularly uncomfortable experience had left her nerves fried, body ghostbruised and having nightmares for a full week after, she had almost lost her job. 

When her company finally got on board and started providing free passes for a few of the mid-range centers approved by her health insurance, she eagerly plowed through them. Not bad, but not enough. Never enough. Not a cure, just another way to keep you coming back and paying those high premiums. 

All that eventually led to this, the cream of the crop, where a simulated death cost as much as a week’s vacation in real life. She actually got a chuckle out of that. Just like when she first got her diagnosis. “Makes sense, doc. Leave it to humans to value perceived loss above perceived gains. We’re wired to care more about almost dying than really living.” 

But this was supposed to be different. This was supposed to make you feel, actually feel something, for at least six months post-event. It promised a unique (and expensive) combination of an AI-generated holiday, culminating in a custom death. By stimulating both the pleasure and extreme pain centers of the brain, their slogan promised to ‘...make you feel real again. Results that last longer than dying alone.’* *Not approved by the FDA.  

“Well hi there,” the perky receptionist had greeted her with a bright smile, inviting her to sit down. “Thanks for coming in. And how would you like to die today?”

Sarah had thought long and hard about all her past simulated events and experiences. The childhood traumas relived, the nightmares brought to life, the free, but incredibly brutal stints she had signed on to experience as part of a provider’s trial series; all had left her more numb than before. And to make matters worse, she remembered them. That wasn’t supposed to happen. All the brochures had said the same thing, some small type legalease that promised the REM stimulation wouldn’t be recalled.

“I want a day at the beach. With a handsome, tanned boyfriend, and a picnic, and warm, sunny weather.”

“Ah-ha,” said the receptionist, making notes on a tablet. “And?”

“And then I want to get hit by a tsunami.” 

The receptionist’s eyes went wide, a mixture of surprise, awe and envy. “Oooo…that’s good. Very good. If you could go to room three, down the hall on the right, I’ll get this to the engineers and we’ll get you started right away.”

Now, her toes crunching the dried sand, the wind building gradually on her face, the long, moaning cycle of the siren warning her to run for her life, she wanted to feel afraid. She wanted to feel anything; regret, fear, overwhelmed. She searched her feelings but nothing came. Closing her eyes, she focused on the slow roar building in the distance, like a freight train rushing towards her. 

She had always feared tsunamis. It was the one death she had been afraid to actually try throughout these experiences. She pictured it in her mind, the water withdrawing, gathering tall as it rode the seabed towards the shore, the wind like a jet engine, the roar so deep you could feel it in your legs, and the unstoppable rush of a wave the size of a skyscraper, plowing over and through anything in its path. They say if you see it coming, it’s already too late, she thought. What else in nature can make such a boast? What other force pushes, crushes, drowns and defigures the landscape in such a way? It was the perfect death. The death to beat all others. And it was her last hope.

She felt a tear land on her sunburned cheek, stall and evaporate in the sun and increasing wind, and fell to her knees. “Please,” she wept, “please let me feel this. Please don’t send me back to the world without something real. Something I can hold onto. Please!”

She opened her eyes. The sky had darkened. The wind, being pushed in front of the wall of water, was now blasting sand against her skin. Her red bikini, that had fit so perfect, was getting pelted and stretched by the onslaught. She tried to shield her eyes from the combination of sand and mist, tried to see it coming. 

And it was there, just offshore. A blue wall of death, building and rolling and rushing towards her in what looked like a slow, cylindrical gathering, although it was actually driving at speeds that couldn’t be outpaced by any vehicle on Earth. She was alone on the beach, her computer-generated boyfriend having run off long ago, after pleading with her to come with him. The picnic basket, towels and umbrella had blown clear from sight, and the last of the shore birds were gone, having frantically flapped towards higher ground. 

She watched it come, the hand of god sweeping towards the shore, about to hit her like a thousand sledgehammers. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and…something happened. Her eyes flashed open in surprise and she almost screamed with joy. 

Because even as her nerves felt the bite of a billion tons of force and water and salt and rock, even as she knew it was all going to be over in just a minute, even as she begged for meaning, she had felt it happen. As ridiculous as it was, as pointless and fruitless and stupid, she’d done the most genuine, real, human thing imaginable.   

She’d held her breath.