Congestive Heart Success!
by S. FosterIt's been several weeks since they confiscated my strike-anywhere matches. I'd assumed that "anywhere" included modified surgical bays on half-frozen planets; this assumption was apparently incorrect. If I get out of here alive, I will certainly have a word with the manufacturer. The operating room's mix of methane and canned oxygen would ignite easily, I reasoned. However, once it became obvious that my fevered scraping of the little blue-capped wooden sticks against the stone floor was an attempt to kill everyone there, including myself and the Hive Overseers' surgeons, they beat me badly and took the matches. I don't know how much I screamed that day, since the anesthesia they gave me causes temporary deafness. (At least I guess it's anesthesia: maybe it's a tinnitus-promoter with unexpected analgesic side-effects.)
TURN THAT FROWN UPSIDE-DOWN, I keep telling myself. HAVE A POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE!
Just how it is that a highly-paid 48-year-old motivational speaker (me) came to be a networked pacemaker for over 222,000 semi-dormant mass-murdering methane-breathers a thousand light-years from Earth comprises a story in itself - quite a long and convoluted one, and that's why I'm not telling it to you now. Not the whole thing, anyway.
Deep down, almost everyone hates motivational speakers. Turns out, so do I. Long ago, early in my career as a corporate xenohepatocardiologist (don't ask), I observed these people: how they moved, how they gestured, how they manipulated crowds with a blend of caffeinated buzzwords and backwoods tent-revival illogic. What prompted my investigations, apart from morbid curiosity? Money, basically. Skilled motivational speakers made four times what I did. After a while, my reverse-engineering was complete, and I became one of them. But I never believed a single syllable of the platitudes I spouted to the millions of people who cheered for me in sports arenas and amphitheaters throughout the civilized galaxy, and that's probably why I was so successful. Detachment. Dissociation. Performance. That's what I've always been good at. We're all con-artists, motivational speakers.
I was also well-known for headlining the hugely profitable nJOiN retreats (pronounced "enjoin"; that was originally an acronym, but I don't remember for what), in which all the members of a corporation, from the CEOs to their secretaries, would gather in massive group-biofeedback sessions where I and they would resonate as a churning and thrumming collective. Looking back on it, I can see that it was probably a bad idea to have gotten so famous for being extra-good at that.
Biofeedback - of a grotesquely unconventional sort, anyway - is part of my new job, too: my nervous system has been woven into that of the Hive, and it has been woven into me. I am the only conscious, thinking portion of a slumbering army - an army that will certainly conquer Earth when reawakened. Naturally, if Earth Defense learns of this strike force's existence, they'll destroy me along with it. Earth Defense hasn't a clue, though, and that keeps me safe.
Relatively speaking, of course.
Now, I'm in a badly-lit, rock-walled chamber. My torso is cabled tightly against a backboard - which I've never seen in this foggy darkness, since I can't even turn around, and... I mentioned the foggy darkness, didn't I? Going in and out of me every which-way, I've got countless hoses, pipes, tubes, IV lines. The strong resemblance to their earthly counterparts is a consequence of the unavoidable physical constraints on such conveyances: no extraterrestrial, however unusual, would design IV tubing that looked more like, say, a cheese grater or a loudspeaker than it resembled normal tubing from Earth. So, in this world of fearsome curiosities, I can occasionally catch a glimpse of something familiar. This place almost smells like a hospital, too, even when a chill whiff of ammonia-tinged methane drifts in through a sloppily-gasketed pocket door.
Those who put me here know a great deal about our species; they intend to kill all of us, so they pretty much have to. So, they seem to know all about our visible spectrum: what we humans can see, and how well we can see it. As I perform my duties, information reaches me through various modalities; chiefly, though, it is conveyed by tiny red, amber, green, blue, violet, and white lamps on my eyes. By this I don't mean that I'm simply looking at these lights: they are actually touching my well-ointmented, clamped-open eyes. Coupled with the wince-inducing pinpricks I get from the other instrumentation that my face is ensconced in, the effect is not unlike that of being uncomfortably close to a Christmas tree.
One thing my captors don't know is that I plan to escape. I'm too weak now, but - assuming that all goes as planned - things are going to change.
I'm trying to motivate myself, to psych myself up for the task I must accomplish. SHIPS ARE SAFE IN HARBORS, I keep thinking, BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT TIGHTROPES ARE FOR. I'm getting my clichés scrambled. That's bad news for a motivational speaker.
I feel awful today, even worse than I did yesterday, and that's gratifying. My legs hurt, and my lungs have accumulated enough fluid that with every breath it feels like I'm drowning. (My lungs aren't half-empty, I tell myself: they're half-full!) See, I've learned plenty about the bio-computer system they've embedded me in; after all, I've literally got nothing better to do. Applying my knowledge, I've been steadily upping the level of iron in my nutrient-broth. The Hive Overseers make me stand ankle-deep in slush for days at a time, and that's not exactly great for the circulation. Maybe they recognize this. Maybe they need to keep me in this posture for some obscure technical reason. I don't know. The take-home message: with their unwitting assistance, I'm giving myself congestive heart failure, and that is a deeply noble act.
Here is why all of you ought to consider me one of the greatest heroes in the history of the human race, even though such an honor may be bestowed only posthumously. There are two possible outcomes. I've worked this out. Two things can happen once my heart fails, and I will become a hero in either case.
One, they won't detect the problem until it's too late, and the entire strike force will then die along with me.
Two (the more probable scenario), my condition will be noticed, and I will be immediately given a replacement heart, just as they've given me replacements for a few of my other organs. I'm banking on the likelihood that they won't just drain the excess fluid from my system or pump me full of diuretics: they'll see my heart failing, and they'll install a new and better one.
You see, they've tipped their hand. They're clever, but not as clever as they think. My years of experience, especially with nJOiN, have made me indispensable to them - so very indispensable, in fact, that they'd clearly prefer to give me hardware upgrades rather than to kidnap someone else and start over. And these replacement parts are absolutely top-shelf - even better than new.
With a properly functioning artificial heart, I'll have the strength to get myself out of here. Once I do that, I'll warn Earth. There's got to be a way to send a signal, and I will make it happen.
FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION! GO FOR IT!
Once I got famous, I was invited to write some of the captions for those awful positive-thinking posters that depict people climbing mountains, skateboarding, and generally enjoying life. My posters sold well, and not just because they had my name on them: I quickly became a past-master at the art of pithy poster-captioning. You'd be surprised at how many ways I've found for saying HANG IN THERE! and THERE'S NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT. And, as my vital signs steadily worsen and I feel my consciousness slipping from me, this is what I've been telling myself over and over, like a mantra:
It's not congestive heart failure... it's congestive heart success!
I'm dying. For the moment, anyway. Off in the distance, an unearthly siren has begun to wail. Heart aflutter, I manage a faint smile.
©S. Foster
S. Foster lives in the Pacific Northwest. You can read more of his work here: "Vintage Smog" at Bewildering Stories and "The Best Perseids Ever" at Chaos Theory: Tales Askew.