SHORT STORY --- IT'S TIME TO DIE

Even before the sun had risen, Anna knew that her days were numbered.

She knew more than that, she knew this would be her last day.

Not that she was unwell, just that more than others, she knew when enough was enough.

She would invite her loved ones to come to her bedside,

Inform them of her imminent death, close her eyes and die.

Her husband would make her coffin….. her sister would lay her out with her usual dignity.

There would be nothing to be ashamed of at all.



She got out of bed to begin the last day of her life.





How can you know when you wake up that today is your last day?


It had all begun innocently enough, just 8 months ago. Anna was at a dinner party that her college friend Margaret was giving. The ensemble had just started the second course. That was when one middle aged gentlemen, supposedly an eminent scientist, mentioned that he had seen a item in the scientific journal New Life.

It claimed that scientists now thought that they had discovered the death gene. Of course the results were, at this time, entirely preliminary. Yet the research was showing great promise. Apparently, the research showed there was a gene called D4DR that was the triggering agent for heart attacks. The reason for this was surprisingly simple. It appears that at birth individuals are born with only so many days to live. When those days have passed, this gene triggers a heart attack

Of course, if yours was a family that died of cancer, this information did not apply to you. But if your family had a history of heart disease, the investigators claimed, then it was now possible to determine the time of death.

When the team first discovered the gene, they thought the indicated time of death would be so vague as to be unusable. They thought that the window of opportunity would be in the range of many years.

But as the research progressed, it was found that the complete opposite was true. That the time of death, the actual day of death, could be pinned down to 24 hours.

Preposterous, Anna expostulated, a woman of science herself. This sounds just too ridiculous. This is probably nothing more than an obscure group of researchers, at a little known university, trying to grab some attention and generate some research grants.

The history of science is full of dilettantes, charlatans, fraudsters or even outright crooks, who make outrageous claims that could not possibly be true. She thought back to 1989 when two Utah scientists claimed that they had achieved fusion at room temperature. Patently absurd on the face of it, and of course that is exactly what cold fusion turned out to be. Complete dishonesty and balderdash.

Of course she didn’t know that much about genetics. Her field was zoology. She did know that in 2001 the complete sequence of the human genome had been published, and it showed that the human animal carried 34,000 genes.

The visiting scientist who had mentioned the item, in the face of the Anna’s stern invective, backed down immediately and changed the subject. But before he did he mentioned that anyone could take these charlatans up on their absurd premise. All they had to do was wipe a Q tip across their tongue and send it, along with $20, to the Medical Research Department at the University of Vermont.



It wasn’t until a few days later that Anna remembered that dinner table conversation. It made her blood boil to think that good scientists, every day, were getting black eyes from fraudsters who made preposterous claims…..none of which would ever be duplicated in respected laboratories. Why should these charlatans get all the glorified press coverage, even if it was only in the supermarket tabloids.

It was then that she got an idea. Someone has got to stand up to this kind of incompetence. Someone has to stop this kind of black magic science…and I guess that someone will be me.

She thought.

“I will send in a sample. If the research team hasn’t yet been laughed out of town, I will hopefully get their response. Then I will expose the entire fraud at a press conference. I will shut these clowns down, and hopefully they will never have the courage to show their face in the scientific community again.”

And so it went. By noon the next day, the Q tip, and the $20 bill, were in the mail

THE LETTER

The letter came a week later. She was surprised how fast it had come. She had thought that , once she had called their bluff, there would be no response at all. She thought these charlatans had either made up this research out of whole cloth, or had massively deluded themselves with the possible implications of their findings. She thought they would now recognize their mistake and quietly go away. After all, they knew who she was. She was well known in the scientific community. She was in the Who’s Who of American Scientists. At one time she had been kind of famous in the literature for debunking fraudulent research.

It was rather a plain envelope….just the University of Vermont logo in the corner.

She opened it. It wasn’t a letter. Actually it was just a pre-printed form on a card.

It said:

“In the matter of the Death Date of Anna Sorensen. According to the DNA provided , we have determined that the Date of Death will be:

October 15, 2018

Stunned, she looked at the date. There it was in black and white…. very plain. Supposedly the date that she will die by heart attack.

But what really shocked her is that she was already living in the year 2018, and October was only 7 months away.