Rebirth

All I could think of was: the red hair was fitting.

That and she had to be the most beautiful human I have ever seen.

The faint smattering of freckles emphasized the green in her eyes, framed by long lashes an impossible shade of dark auburn. She was probably intending to appear friendly and attentive but instead her gaze felt like emerald daggers.

I didn’t like people looking at me. Especially not beautiful people.

Her gold-plated name tag said “Annie.”

“It will hurt, but that’s normal.” Annie explained, her voice surprisingly soft, her lips a bruise of a smile as she talked. “It’s the process, you see, we’ve all gone through it. We joke that it doesn’t work unless it hurts.”

I gave a tight-lipped smile back. Surely she meant hurt in a figurative sense? “You mean, it will be a challenging experience?”

She tilted her head, amused. “Sure, yes.”

Damn it. I need to be more clear with my language. Be more concise. Avoid ambiguous words. It was one of the things I was supposed to be working on.

I cleared my throat awkwardly. “Can you elaborate more on what exactly will… hurt?”

Her expression remained unchanged, unreadable. “All in due time, Mr. Colligan.”

I bristled. “Mark is fine.”

“Okay.” Her smile widened a bit. “Mark. Make yourself at home.”

—

When my life hit rock bottom my initial response was to run, check out. I’ve always been an escapist, you see. Maintain the peace, fly under the radar - that was my motto. It worked for me, mostly.

That was what I told myself anyway.

After all, I wouldn’t be here if something didn’t screw up somewhere.

I don’t know what these other people told themselves.

My first day at the facility was surprisingly uneventful, peaceful even. It was full of meetings with eerily beautiful people, like Annie, who were all apparently products of the procedure. The tour of the place made it feel like a luxurious hotel and all the amenities screamed top of the line. I suspect it had all been designed to lull me and the other clients into a sense of calm.

The physician assistant who escorted me to my room described the Phoenix Protocol as revolutionary nanotechnology. A simple injection into an arterial line and just like that billions of smart machines would be deployed to fix every physical and neurological defect at the DNA level. Anxiety and depression? Impulsivity? Gone. The nanobots would balance out dopamine and serotonin levels and optimize your frontal lobe. Acne? Dry skin? Fixed. Hormone levels will be perfectly balanced, no more oily T-zone or easily blocked sebaceous glands.

Apparently the procedure could also fix seemingly macro defects like scars, scoliosis, and asymmetric or inappropriately sized facial structures. It even adds height to certain individuals whose growth was stunted by malnutrition in their youth. It promised to erase any developmental disabilities, raise IQ, and even correct chromosomal anomalies.

Now, I may not have a nano-enhanced brain but I wasn’t born yesterday. The whole thing sounded too good to be true. But honestly, by this point, I had nothing left to lose. I lost it all when I lost my family.

Whoever said everything happens for a reason was deeply mistaken. Sometimes life just fucks you over for no good reason at all. And no, it does not always make you stronger. More often than not it just breaks you.

It broke me.

If there was even the slightest chance these magic nanobots could fix what broke deep inside me then I would be a fool to say no. I was done hurting. One way or another I was going to stop hurting.

—

My day of “rebirth” was scheduled for the next day. Annie was my personal support guide, tasked with making sure I was comfortable every step of the way. First, I was to be put under general anesthesia. This was necessary, they said, just like for a major surgery. The transformation would be so profound that the pain would be unbearable awake, like a million tiny bombs exploding in every cell of my body.

I would still feel some pain, Annie warned repeatedly, but at least it would be dulled as much as possible.

After the physical pain was the hardest part: waking up as an essentially different person. There would be a period of deep confusion, Annie explained, upon waking. I would feel like a stranger in my own body and my body a stranger to me. Mentally and emotionally I would also feel out of sorts, given the immense change that would have occurred in my baseline neurotransmitter levels.

It was only fitting that my day of Rebirth was scheduled exactly one year after my wife and daughter died.

A senseless tragedy, the newspapers called it, a car wreck on the way home from the store, a simple mistake by a distracted teenager. To me it felt like a cruel joke. The weather was uncharacteristically pleasant that day, and my last words to my wife were so unkind, so unnecessarily petty.

She was always forgetting my daughter’s inhaler and I was irritated. “You’re too damn absent-minded, Claire.” I had snapped at her. “Maybe if you thought about your daughter half as much as I do, you wouldn’t forget something so simple.”

It was below the belt and I knew it. Claire was insecure about her abilities as a mother, working full time and trying to do it all. I knew my words cut her deep the moment I said them, but I said them anyway. The way she looked at me after that gutted me. But I was too proud and angry to apologize. I didn’t even hug my daughter like I normally did before they drove away.

Little did I know my sole reason for living would be taken from me that day. The whole year that followed a blur of gray.

And now here I was. As empty as I felt on that horrid day.

I look at Annie. “You mean I would wake up actually wanting to get out of bed?” I joked without mirth, and she smiled at me blankly.

“You will wake up as the person you were meant to be if everything in your body and brain were in perfect working order.” Annie’s voice was cream and velvet and sounded a tad too much like a practiced sales pitch. “You would be reborn as an unblemished soul. Wouldn’t you like that?”

Something about how she phrased that last sentence made me bristle, a nagging feeling forming deep in the pit of my stomach. But I nodded. “Who wouldn’t?”

At that moment the physician assistant from yesterday peeked into the room after a light perfunctory knock. “Ready, Mark?”

And so it began.

—

I remembered the pain. Every cell of my body felt like it was actually physically rearranging itself. There was a real sensation of burning and visions of red blinding light. I remembered it so very vividly but at the same time it felt far away, like a distant memory of a hurt from years ago. Yet, cognitively, I knew I underwent the procedure only yesterday.

Looking in the mirror for the first time was jarring. My skin was butter smooth, no visible enlarged pores or blackheads dotting my nose. My hair had a shine I didn’t know it could have and each strand somehow landed in all the right places. There was not the slightest hint of red in the whites of my eyes.

I knew I should probably be feeling a little disturbed, but I didn’t.

I felt… fine.

Annie was there upon my waking and for the first time I didn’t feel self conscious when she looked at me. She was smiling, and I smiled back, and I suddenly saw with clarity that we were finally on the same wavelength. We were both beautiful people, comfortable in our skins, confident in our voices.

Unblemished. Perfect.

I felt so good that I had to try really hard to remember what was so wrong with my life in the first place. What was it that made me so unhappy? How did I ever feel so much less than I do now? I couldn’t fathom it.

Today... Something about today nagged at me. It was supposed to be an important day. For the life of me, I just couldn’t remember. Maybe it wasn’t so important after all.

—