Translations (standard:science fiction, 1401 words)
Author: Jorj	Added: Jan 24 2003	Views/Reads: 3283/2151	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
She does not understand what you say...only what you feel...

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story


But if you give us more money, you can watch her suffer. 

“Do anything you can, please. We'll do anything, pay any price.” 

Name it and you've got a deal 

They'd only kept her alive for the money. It didn't matter if she had
been decaying from the inside out, puking up gallons of blood and body 
parts, doctors would attempt putting them back where they'd come from 
if it met she was worth a few more thousand solaces a minute. 

She forced herself to stare at the second floor residents as she passed
them. Kinetics. Psychics. People that were insane. People who thought 
they were. People who wanted to be. Amnesiacs being nursed back to 
health with daily visits. Hopeless causes who had strayed to the large 
entertainment center, gathering dust from too many years of social 
neglect. She hadn't wanted to be them. Even if it met she would live. 

“I'd like you to sign this contract” 

I'd like you to sign her death warrant. 

“We're not exactly ready to sign anything else right now.” 

This won't cost more money will it? 

She came to a stop when she saw them. She hoped they could feel the
anger, the hatred, the disgust she felt, the rage she was giving off in 
radioactive waves, making a few older patients hobble in the other 
direction, grasping their canes tightly enough to leave small canyons 
where their fingers held tightly. 

“This insures that, if there is no hope, we will be able to recycle her
life force.” 

And kill her. 

“So, her life will benefit others, who may have a chance at the time?” 

Kill her. 

Their embraces meant nothing to her. They had betrayed her. Their
sentiment was wasted, as her anger had been, dying as it hit her 
mother's frail body, her father stout frame. They were going to have 
her killed. Their financial troubles were over. Yet, they continued to 
try and fool her. To make her believe that she was no longer a prisoner 
of these glass walls and dollhouse beds. The elevators and volts of 
electricity being pushed through her body. Never choosing her own 
clothes–the ones she wore now were years old, gifts from a recovered 
patient she had never really known. Never venturing outside to be with 
other young people. 

“If she doesn't make it...if we are forced to administer her life to
another patient, restitution for your loss will follow the operation 
immediately.” 

We kill her, you'll get lots of money. 

“It doesn't really cover the emotional loss.” 

But it will. 

She watched them leave, their eyes leaking that distasteful salty
liquid, of course. She did not cry with them––she didn't have to. Tears 
were inappropriate. What would have been denial and rage at her 
pointless death––and life––was now grim acceptance. Her rage was only 
turned on her parents. Two strangers who had dumped her in this 
sugar-coated hell as a child, a toddler, and left her to die. 

No, she could not cry with her killers, she decided as the guards led
her away to her death, taking her past rows of mourners, hired to weep 
for each person who died in the hospital. Later, she knew, the mourners 
would be sent away and the family of the person whose life she was 
literally dying for would be called. She would die to save another. 
Another that she, possibly, did not even know. She would die for a 
killer. 

She again stopped, just inside of the chamber where the doctors would
shock the life out of her and into an unsuspecting patient. Her eyes 
drifted over the face of the killer. Her killer. 

A young girl sat, strapped in her own seat, no older than she had been
when she had arrived at the hospital. They stared each other down, each 
aware of the mirror image that was her key to life. Or death. 

It would be a child, she told herself as the guards injected her with
the poison that would render her limbs useless, as they strapped her 
into the seat that would hold her. She glared at the child all the 
while. The little girl knew what was going on. She was sure of it. The 
girl wanted this. Just like everyone else. 

But, what if she hadn't? She was just a child. A child who had a chance,
when she had not. But, they were both afraid. Both stranded there, 
staring into the other's chocolate brown eyes. Both waiting for an end 
of their current existence. 

Were they the same after all? 

The girl began to sob and she waited for a translation of the action and
what it meant so that she could possibly join her in her last few 
moments of life. 

She translated in her mind. 

And laughed. 

~ #1 Grunj Munkee: Jorj


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