Day 258 - Life-force Story

Life-force Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Carter had a problem – his life-force had inexplicably and unfortunately become tied to his choice of activity. When he wasted time he aged more rapidly. The rate of rapidity depended on how wasteful the activity was. And when he did something dangerous his aging slowed or sometimes would even reverse. The rate of returns for this function was also directly tied to how dangerous and life-threatening the activity was.

Carter had discovered both abilities at almost the same time. At one point in his life, Carter had sat around getting stoned a lot. One night he freaked himself out when he looked in the bathroom mirror and found his facial hair had turned prematurely gray and his hair was thinning and falling out. In shock, Carter tripped backwards into the shower behind him and smashed his head against the wall. When Carter recovered consciousness he felt young and vibrant and alive. He assumed the vision from before must have come from smoking something tainted, so he dismissed the whole incident.

As Carter went about his daily business from there on out, he found that every time he goofed off or wasted time or played a game or anything that lacked real and distinct purpose he began feeling aged and worn down. Even the simple act of zoning out and daydreaming had negative returns.

And every time he did something dangerous, from speeding in his car to eating poorly to taking a chance and hitting on a stranger, he always felt younger and better and more alive.

It still took a lot of accidents to even begin to suspect what was happening. Even once he had some sort of inclination, it wasn’t an exact science. There was experiment after experiment just to discover what was occurring and then even more to begin to figure out at least a little of how the whole thing worked. There was no clock moving this way or that. It was like holding the fast-forward button and hoping you were lucky enough to let go at the right time. Carter didn’t know all the ins and outs yet, but he was learning as best he could in as safe a manner as he could.

Everyday he was faced with the conundrum – what to do and just what exactly it was that he wanted to achieve. There were days he didn’t feel like doing anything. There were days with no energy. There were lazy days and hung-over days and rainy sleep-all-days. Those were all days he couldn’t afford to have. Carter found, that despite his actual desires, he had to keep himself pretty busy, so if nothing else, he would just age at the normal rate. He didn’t always want to have to resort to doing something dangerous, just to undo an entire day of sloth. There were, of course, the days where he cut himself some slack and let a little time slip away.

Carter was thirty-three, or close enough that it didn’t really matter just how old he really was. He had been older, not a lot older, but older. He had been older many many times. And he had always taken a chance, risked his life in some deadly fashion, and turned back the clock. He didn’t remember the exact number of times he had done it, but he knew it was too many. A man could only have so much luck, he thought. One of these tries, he was going to get unlucky really quickly and then there wouldn’t be any coming back from that.

Carter didn’t actually know if he could die or not, but he wasn’t inclined to try and find out. He assumed that he, like everyone else, would die of old age, if only he allowed himself to reach it.

Carter had been doing a pretty decent job of keeping himself around the age of thirty-three. He had gotten back into his twenties a couple of times, but decided to let that decade go. He liked his face better in his thirties. He had a better sense of balance and calm composure about himself. In his twenties he still had too many hormones and too much anger and rage. Whenever he grew younger he found all sorts of emotional instability returning. Sure his metabolism was better and his body felt stronger and didn’t have the random effects of aging, but he decided the emotional benefits outweighed the physical and allowed himself to creep into his thirties, again. He enjoyed being a little more even-keeled and a whole lot more Zen.

It had occurred to him that there was some chance that even though he seemed to be thirty-three on the outside, he was really still aging on the inside and that his life-clock would expire at some predetermined time just as if would if he were really aging the correct way. Maybe he was really forty-four because that was the number of years he had been existing. Maybe he was meant for thirty more, but that would be it. If that were the case, he would be the healthiest, youngest looking seventy-four year old there had ever been. He wondered if as soon as he died, if his aging would catch up to him and his body would rapidly degrade in front of whomever was watching. That would be a sight to see, he was sure.

But maybe that wouldn’t be the case at all. Maybe he would be some young guy dying of a stroke or Alzheimer’s or something like that and people would have no explanation as to why someone so young had such an old man’s disease.

He didn’t know. He tried not to dwell on it. It was sad and morbid and rather depressing. And he had found that while depressed he didn’t do too much and was prone to fits of unwanted aging. That was time he couldn’t afford to waste.