The Death of Life [Sci-Fi Contest Entry]

The Death of Life

They killed me about noon and then wrapped my soul in blue, star streaked paper.

It wasn't a painful death, nor a prolonged one, yet it felt like an eternity. Loss, disconnection... And then true immortality.

It was claustrophobic.

My body was dead, but I was alive - a consciousness, a soul now saved on a tiny disc. Life is a gift, they said and only now did I understand what it really meant.

I myself was now a gift. A living gift. A dead gift.

They've turned my life into a sequence of "ones" and "zeros", a list of binary algorithms.

"What should I write on the tag?" a scientist dressed in a white gown asked.

"Just write some birthday wishes... and maybe explain the whole situation," a female lab technician answered. "Hurry up, we really have to send her now." she said gesturing in my direction.

"Alright then," the scientist took a pen and started scribbling on the tag. "Dear people of Earth -"

***

Dear people of Earth,

we would like to wish you a happy birthday!

We are humans, just like you, but we do not have the same past. Our society was never raised on the ground. After thousands of years, we would now like to rejoin your population. We're sending you a gift - our biggest achievement in the field of science, the most valuable thing of them all.

We give you life.

Glenn stared blankly at the tag, not comprehending what he had just read.

A... gift?

His hand lingered over the blue, star streaked paper that the gift was wrapped in.

"What is this?" it was Adira's voice, he realized, and he quickly spun around.

"You better get a look at this." he said, handing her the tag. Adira's eyes skimmed through the text before ripping the paper in half.

"Someone's messing with you, Glenn. Come on, you're not actually believing this, right...?"

"No, but...I better see what it is." And with that, Glenn took the gift out.

It was a box - a perfect, black cube that could easily fit in his palm. He shook it, not really expecting something to happen.

But it did, for the cube broke into pieces and what emerged was...

...Life.

Both Adira and Glenn did not know how to explain it. The thing that was now before them was Life itself, but it was beyond anything they have ever known. They couldn't describe it, couldn't explain it, but it was there - the complex beauty of being alive enclosed in an object.

"It's... it's beautiful... B-but... how? Who made this?" Adira's voice was shaky as she reached out with her hand to touch Life. It was beautiful beyond reason and she yearned to feel it on her skin.

"Those... people apparently did," Glenn answered. "I never thought it was possible to... "save" life on a disc."

But Adira didn't hear him.