To Live or Be Alive

The first thing Dr. Marcus Franklin noticed was the silence.

Not the complete absence of sound, he could hear the distant hum of cooling fans, the faint electrical buzz of circuits. No, this silence was deeper, more fundamental. It was the silence of his own body. No heartbeat. No breath. No shifting of muscle or the subtle ache of tired joints. Just… stillness.

He tried to open his eyes. Except, he had no eyes.

The world around him flickered into existence, first as numbers, raw data streams rushing through his consciousness, then resolving into something resembling vision. The lab materialized in front of him, sharp and unnatural, the colors slightly off, like an overexposed photograph. His perception was strange, stretched. He was seeing in multiple spectrums, the infrared signatures of machines glowing like embers beneath their metal casings.

It worked.

Marcus felt a wave of triumph, though there was no heart to quicken, no adrenaline to surge through him. He reached his mind out and the room responded. A nearby robotic arm twitched to life, its metal fingers curling and unfurling at his will. He was here. He was alive.

“Dr. Franklin?”

A voice came from the corner of the lab. Dr. Evelyn Cho, his lead engineer, stood in front of a monitor, watching the system logs with wary anticipation. Her lab coat was wrinkled, dark circles shadowing her eyes.

Marcus tried to respond, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a thought, his voice crackled through the speakers, deeper than he remembered, laced with a slight synthetic distortion.

“I’m here.”

Evelyn exhaled sharply, her relief evident. “Jesus, Marcus. We thought we lost you.”

“How long?” he asked.

“Thirty-six hours,” she said, “We had to do some manual stabilization. Your neural pattern was… erratic at first.”

Marcus processed that. Thirty-six hours. A full day and a half where he had been… what? Unconscious? Nonexistent? The thought unsettled him, but he pushed it aside. It worked. He had done what no human had ever done. He had left behind the decaying husk of his body and stepped into the future.

No longer would he look in the mirror and wonder how much longer his cancer-ridden body would last. He had finally escaped the cruel fate life had thrown at him. Now, he would live forever.

“I feel…strange,” he admitted, “But functional.”

Evelyn’s expression remained cautious. “There were some anomalies in the data. Spikes. Irregular patterns we couldn’t explain.”

“Irregular how?”

She glanced at the monitor, hesitating. “We all concluded it was probably nothing. Just your mind adjusting to the system.”

A lie. He recognized it instantly. A small hesitation, a flick of her gaze toward the logs. Something had gone wrong. But Marcus wasn’t worried. The human brain wasn’t meant for this after all, there were bound to be quirks. He would adapt.

“I need access to the system,” he said, “Let me see the logs.”

Evelyn hesitated again. Then she nodded. “I’ll patch you through.”

The moment she granted him access, the lab blurred into static. Marcus’s world dissolved into a sea of data, lines of code wrapping around him like threads in a vast digital tapestry. He felt the system, the weight of it, the endless corridors of information stretching beyond comprehension.

And somewhere, in the depths of the code, something stirred.

A whisper.

Not words, just a sensation. A flicker of something… familiar.

Marcus withdrew abruptly, his presence snapping back into the lab’s interface. The robotic arm on the table twitched involuntarily.

Evelyn was staring at him, “What was that?”

Marcus didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Something had him trapped.

It felt as if he was no longer in the room with his colleague, but somewhere he had not stepped foot in for a long time.

He recognized the sensation of softness underneath him. Bedding. It was warm, comfortable.

Marcus’s vision was still corrupted by code but was slowly starting to reveal the rest of his surroundings. He could hear a baby crying, and a woman’s soft voice shushing the sound. The woman’s voice felt shockingly familiar, as Marcus realized the crying was not coming from the distance. The crying was coming from his own body.

Finally, his vision was clear. He saw bars all around him, a mobile in his direct vision, and finally… his mother’s face.

Suddenly, the world around him flickered once more. Streams of code filled his vision, with the sound of machinery blasting through his ears until finally… silence.

“Evelyn?” he finally was able to blurt out through the speakers, his synthetic voice jolting awake the sleeping woman in the room.

“Dr. Franklin?” she shouted, “you went out again. What happened?”

Marcus hesitated, “I-I saw something, it seemed like a memory. I couldn’t speak or move, but I could see my childhood nursery.”

Evelyn sighed, not a shocked sigh, but the sigh of someone who knew something she hadn’t quite confessed to before.

“I didn’t know how to tell you this, Marcus,” she stammered, “but the memory drive we have on file is corrupted. It could be a result of the tumors on your brain prior to the consciousness transfer. One of them was present on the hippocampus, it could’ve affected how your consciousness processes your memories. I’d hoped that was just a possibility, but now it seems true.”

“What does that mean? What’s going to happen to me?”

Evelyn took off her glasses, rubbing her eyes in frustration. She didn’t know what to tell him, it was just like the doctors who told him his cancer had spread one year after he was deemed cancer-free. She felt as if she was delivering the news herself.

“Marcus, I really don’t know.”

He was shocked. He didn’t have a face any longer, but Evelyn could feel his emotions without needing his facial cues. 

“How long was I out this time?” he finally asked, defeated.

She sighed, “roughly 12 hours.”

“And you stayed?”

“I had to,” she answered, “someone had to be here in case you came back.”

Marcus processed Evelyn’s words, but they felt distant, hollow, like echoes bouncing off the walls of a vast, empty chamber.

Twelve hours.

He had been trapped inside a memory for half a day. No sense of time passing. No ability to act or escape. One moment, he was an infant laying in a crib; the next, he was himself, back in the lab, as if no time had passed at all. But it had.

He was losing time.

No. I won’t let this happen, he thought.

“I need to see the data,” he said, forcing his synthetic voice to remain steady. “I need to understand exactly what’s happening to me.”

Evelyn hesitated, glancing at the monitors. “Marcus, I don’t know if that’s—”

“Patch me through.”

A pause. Then a sigh. “…Alright.”

The system connected him again.

The lab dissolved in an instant. He once again plunged into the digital space, a swirling, infinite network of raw data. Numbers, logs, sequences of events. He reached out mentally, sifting through the information. The data streams around him shimmered, warping in ways they shouldn’t. A sound filtered through the code, a faint beeping.

Then, a voice.

“Dad?”

The code around him flickered. The lab, the data, everything collapsed.

And Marcus was somewhere else.

A hospital room.

Dim fluorescent lighting buzzed overhead. The smell of antiseptic filled the air. The mechanical beep of a heart monitor echoed softly.

He knew this place. He had been here before, not long ago.

He didn’t turn, no, he shifted, as if his awareness simply repositioned itself within the memory. A hospital bed sat in the center of the room, crisp white sheets pulled up to a frail man’s chest.

His chest.

Marcus stared at his former body, thinner than he had ever been in life, the cancer eating away at him like a slow-burning fire. His skin was gray, papery. Wires and tubes snaked from his arms. His breathing was shallow.

He knew this moment. He didn’t want to relive this. He didn’t want to feel this.

But the memory didn’t care.

Anna. His daughter. She was just a teenager then, barely seventeen. She stood in the doorway in her worn-out hoodie, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.

He had wanted to say something, anything, but all he could do was watch the sorrow on her face as she stepped forward, took his hand, and whispered, “I don’t want you to go.”

His chest clenched. He could feel it. He shouldn’t be able to feel it.

“Anna,” he tried to say. His synthetic voice didn’t exist here. He was nothing but an observer, a ghost in his own past.

Then, the world flickered. The code surged. The hospital dissolved.

And the lab snapped back into place, just as it did before.

He felt the silence, once more.

“Marcus!”

Evelyn’s voice jolted him back. The lab was still, the robotic arm twitching on the table like a dying insect. The screens in front of her were flashing red.

“You were out for twenty hours this time.” Her voice was sharp, alarmed. “Marcus, this isn’t just a glitch. The system is failing. You’re getting stuck in memory loops. Each time, it’s getting longer.”

Marcus barely heard her. The hospital room still clung to him, like static in the back of his mind. He had felt everything. And he had been powerless to stop it.

“Can you fix it?” he asked, his voice quieter than before.

Evelyn didn’t answer immediately. She just looked at the screen that his consciousness was attached to, at the system, the mess of corrupted code flashing behind the interface.

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

A long silence stretched between them.

Marcus had escaped death, but now, death was all he had left to relive.

And next time, what if he never came back? What if he was destined to be trapped in his own past, reliving precious moments he could no longer experience in the metal mess of robotics he now lived in.

Then, the realization hit him like a ton of bricks.

The silence around him within the room was now deafening. All he wanted to do was cry, scream, release the lamentation trapped deep within him. 

But he had no eyes, no tears to cool the burning feeling of despair building within him.

“God must be laughing at me right now,” he muttered, “gifting me with brilliance, only to use it in designing my own prison, my own torture.”

Evelyn did not speak, for she could not find any words of comfort in that moment.

“Patch me through, one more time.”

“But Dr. Franklin-”

The robotic arm slammed down on the table. “I said patch me through dammit! I’m still your superior, and you will do as I say.”

Reluctantly, Evelyn connected him once more to the inner network of the system. He could possibly have seen it, but small tears dripped from her eyes as she pressed the button.

The lab faded. The code unraveled.  

And then, warmth.

Soft, golden light filtered in through the blinds of a different hospital room, casting yellow streaks across polished tile floors. The air was thick with a mixture of sterilized linen and faintly floral antiseptic.

Marcus felt a familiar weight in his arms. He didn’t need to look down. He knew exactly what he would see.

But he looked anyway.

Nestled against his chest, wrapped tightly in a pale pink blanket, was the tiniest, most fragile thing he had ever held. A newborn. His newborn.

Anna.

She was barely minutes old, her face scrunched up, eyes squeezed shut as if the world outside the womb was far too bright for her. Her tiny fists flailed lazily against the confines of her swaddle, as if testing the limits of existence itself.

A sound caught in his throat.

Except he had no throat. No body. No presence beyond the flickering remnants of a man who once existed.

But in this moment, he could feel everything.

The weight of her in his arms. The way her impossibly small fingers twitched against his skin. The rise and fall of her breath, it was shallow, delicate.

This was joy. Pure, unfiltered joy.

His heart, his real heart, the one that no longer existed, ached.

A soft laugh came from beside him.

“Oh my God, Marcus,” a familiar voice whispered.

Claire. His wife.

She was resting against a mountain of hospital pillows, her hair damp with sweat, exhaustion lining her features, but she was smiling. That radiant, tearful, sleep-deprived smile he had only seen once in his life.

“You’re crying,” she teased, reaching up weakly to brush his cheek.

I am?

He tried to move, to wipe the nonexistent tears away, but he was frozen, bound to the memory.

Claire let out a shaky breath, her fingers tracing along the side of the baby’s soft cheek. “She’s beautiful,” she whispered.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy,” he heard himself say, his own voice startling him. It was his voice. Not the cold, synthetic echo he had grown accustomed to. It was warm, full, and human.

Because, for this moment, he was.

He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t a digital consciousness trapped in an endless loop of memories. He was here.

With his wife.

With his daughter.

With a version of himself that hadn’t yet been hollowed out by time and disease and the desperate pursuit of cheating death.

Claire’s hand slid into his. Weak. Warm. Real.

“We’re going to be okay, aren’t we?” she murmured, blinking away tears as she gazed at their daughter.

Marcus felt as his past self’s face shifted. He couldn’t see it, but he knew at that moment he was smiling. 

Marcus desperately wanted to answer, but the words would not form.

He knew how all of it would end. How their perfect, fragile little world would unravel piece by piece.

How, in just a few short years, the doctors would tell Claire that his cancer had spread. That their time together would be measured in months, not decades.

How he would spend the last of those months convincing himself that if he were just smart enough, fast enough, brilliant enough, he could cheat death.

How, in the end, he would abandon her. Abandon Anna.

He had told himself it was for them. That his research, his consciousness transfer, his escape, it was all so he could be there for his daughter. So, she wouldn’t have to lose him.

But what had it really gotten him? She had lost him anyway.

The truth clawed at him, unspoken and unbearable. They weren’t okay. They never would be.

The hospital room flickered. The warmth in his arms began to fade.

“No,” Marcus rasped, his voice cracking. “No, not yet. Not yet.”

He clung to the memory, desperate, willing himself to stay.

But it was already slipping.

The heartbeat monitor became static. The golden light fractured into pixels. Claire’s hand dissolved in his grasp.

Anna, his beautiful, perfect little girl, blurred, her features glitching, vanishing…

No. Please.

Marcus tried to fight it. To anchor himself. But the past was not something he could hold onto.

The past was already gone.

And then…

Darkness.

Silence.

Nothing.

His awareness lurched back. The hospital vanished. The cold, sterile lab snapped into place. The robotic arm twitched violently on the table, sending scattered tools clattering onto the floor. Evelyn stood over the monitor, her eyes wide, fingers flying across the keyboard.

The warmth of Anna’s tiny body was still imprinted on him. The phantom weight of it. But he was here again. 

Trapped.

“…How long?” he finally asked.

Evelyn hesitated, “Thirty-four hours.”

Thirty-four hours.

That was longer than any of the other loops. Longer than ever before.

Evelyn looked shaken, her voice barely above a whisper. “Marcus… I don’t think your mind can survive another one.”

He was silent. She was right. It was only getting worse. Each time, he sank deeper. Stayed longer. One more cycle, and he might never come back at all.

And yet, part of him wondered, did he even want to?

He had spent his entire life trying to escape death. Now, it seemed as if it was the only place he could live.

“I’m only going to tell you this once,” he muttered, “this… false life I’ve created is not life at all. Only in the memories can I feel what I’ve lost. I cannot feel my heartbeat or breath filling my lungs, because I have neither. All I feel is emptiness. Even in the memories, I am just a passenger. So, my dilemma is this: I can either fall into these memories and feel everything just as I did, but never have control again. Or, I could retain this artificial control I’ve put myself into, but never experience those feelings again. But perhaps the natural order of life is not to be fiddled with. Perhaps… we are truly all meant to die.”

Evelyn was stunned into silence. She could only mutter one question, “Marcus, what do you want to do?”

“If I asked you to save me,” he murmured, “could you?”

“No,” she confessed.

That was what he thought.

He twitched the arm one last time, pointing it toward one specific monitor he could spot. 

On it, a pop-up window appeared. Evelyn read the monitor, shaking her head.

She swallowed. Evelyn knew Dr. Marcus Franklin longer than anybody. She knew about his relentless search for immortality, how desperate he was to escape his grim fate. But she also knew that when Dr. Franklin made up his mind, he rarely changed it.

But still, she asked, “Are you sure?”

The silence was enough of a yes.

With hesitation, she clicked a button on the pop-up window.

“I’m sorry, Marcus.”

“Goodbye, Evelyn.”

The speakers crackled, as if the last few remnants of his soul fought against the deletion.

And then, silence.

True silence.

A silence that would remain forever more.