Death Prevention

The Collation Ring

I sit down next to a dumpster in an alleyway off the main road and produce my collation ring from my pocket. A standard item made by the government to help prevent terrorism has become a privacy nightmare, the ease of access it allows to police or even any passing onlookers has made it understandably useful to government officials looking to arrest someone in the name of getting their quotas up to standard. 

The freezing metal has shrunken in the night, but I manage to finagle it onto my finger with relative ease. The skin on my fingers is worryingly thin and broken these days. I smash my hand on the ground, making it bleed but managing to lodge a stone underneath a small bracket on the bottom of the ring and allowing me to rip the chip out quickly, a commonplace activity for those down on their luck. It represents I have truly surrendered my life and am ready to die, no civilian matter interests me anymore. 

The alleyway is briefly filled with soft blue tones as my HUD roars to life, somehow still working even though the chip is broken. The news headlines swirl around in my head, the word salad produced by the common media has a surprisingly common presence in this new world. People tend to swallow whatever garbage the Capital Government produces out of its own ass as truth, even their relatively lazy attempts at covering up the nuclear monstrosity back in the early 2020's has been accepted by the public worker drones. 

I gesture my bleeding finger slightly and the world around me changes into a field, illuminated with summer sunlight as a light breeze rustles through my hair. Its strange, seeing a vista this serene in such a recent memory. Just 30 years ago now, this was. The grass not yet torn from its place in the ground, the earth not yet laden with gigantic radioactive craters of man's own creation. I twitch my hand again and I am transported to my old office, the pictures of my family not yet defaced, my boss not yet lying dead on the floor. I look down at my hands, they are younger, not yet broken and covered in someone else's blood. I try to type at the keyboard, but my fingers fall though and touch the cold concrete beneath me. The rain quickly falls between my legs and swirls around my feet, making me shiver. 

It was my fault. 

There is nothing I can do to help her now, except die. 

I gesture one final time and I am whisked away to a house, a gentle fire buzzing in the fireplace. The place rings familiar in my natural memory, I am one of the few to still possess such a commodity. Something seems off about the place, an unusual mood hangs in the atmosphere, shrieking at some female figure to get out, screaming at me to leave now and never return, but I have no control over what the ring shows me. Even if I tried to leave, the memory would just follow and surround me like a bad dream. My Father stands in the kitchen, preparing a meal for my two sisters and my mother. The cold ground underneath me is transformed into a soft couch as I fall into the memory, the smell of home cooking filling my nostrils with bittersweet sentimentality. 

The warm glow of the fire douses the house in a yellow blaze, and I watch in stunned silence as my immediate family is burned to a crisp in front of me, again and again. I look towards the fireplace and see myself playing with matches. I watch my own deliberate movements as I coat my stuffed toys in gasoline and throw them into the fire. They called me crazy, even back then. I cannot look away as I throw a lit match into the pile. The fire twitches for a second, inviting me closer. It hangs motionless, then explodes, throwing me backwards into the back wall. That same hot liquid sensation can be felt in the back of my mind as my family stops their screaming to save me, pitifully unaware that I was the one who has started the fire in the first place. I remember my mother lifting me out of the house. The blaze worsens as they all try to escape, some of them emerging with skin peeling from their limbs and body parts. One of my sisters barely makes it out with half her face missing, dripping a sticky mess of blood and seared flesh onto the floor.Her eyes and teeth ooze from her face as she screams. I remember smiling at her suffering, seeing her excruciating pain made me feel good inside. 

The buzzing in my head turns into an incessant pounding as I confess my wrongdoings to my parents and am handed in to the police on the grounds of being psychologically ill. 

The pounding turns into a shriek, echoing around the dark innermost recesses of my mind. I roam the streets looking for work on parole. I find a job. Work for a year and a half. Get made redundant, kill my boss in anger. Get set on the street. Almost die from the cold every day. 

My HUD closes itself quickly, shutting off the memories, the excruciating pounding in my head slowly fading as a set of footsteps echo through the alley.