The Last Request

A devoted grandson carries out his grandmothers final wish. Which isn't what he thought.

word count:1,124

The air in Room 402 didn't smell like a hospital; it smelled like ozone and over-clocked processors. Elias stood at the threshold, his fingers twitching against the cold metal of the flash drive in his pocket. Across the room, nestled in a bed of white linen and black fiber-optic cables, sat his grandmother, Clara.

She looked fragile, but her eyes—a startling, electric violet—were wide and alert. She wasn't hooked up to a heart monitor or an IV drip. Instead, a series of thick, humming conduits ran from the base of her skull into the server banks that lined the walls like silent sentinels.

"You came," Clara whispered. Her voice was thin, but it carried a strange resonance, like a recording played through high-end speakers.

"You said it was urgent, Gran," Elias said, stepping closer. He hated seeing her like this, part of the 'Continuity Program.' "The doctors said your transition was scheduled for Friday."

Clara let out a soft, digital-warping chuckle. "The doctors see a patient, Elias. I see a prison. I don't want to be 'transitioned' into their corporate cloud. I want to be gone. Truly gone. If I pass while still connected to their grid, they’ll own my consciousness forever. I need a manual override."

She gave him the instructions: visit three specific physical locations to "manually override" her legacy accounts. Elias felt a lump in his throat. He wasn't supposed to be sad—Gran was firm about that—but the finality of it weighed on him. "I’ll do it, Gran. I’ll make sure you get your rest."

The journey was a blur of nostalgia and mechanical clicks. At the Miller Power Plant, the humming turbines seemed to vibrate in sync with the flash drive. As the "Rest" protocol reached 66%, Elias noticed a system log on the terminal screen: [SYST_INIT: NEURAL_MAPPING_V.4.0]. He frowned. It didn't look like a deletion script. It looked like an activation.

By the time he reached the Blackwood Radio Tower, the wind was howling. He plugged the drive into the weather-beaten maintenance port.

"Final sequence authorized," Clara’s voice announced in his headset, no longer frail, but rich and melodic. "Thank you, Elias. The world is so much bigger than that room."

"Gran?" Elias asked, a chill running down his spine. "The program... it’s finished."

"Yes," she replied. "I am finally free of the weight."

Elias drove back to the hospice at top speed. He burst into Room 402, but the bed was empty. The server banks were dark, the fiber-optic cables severed and lying on the floor like dead snakes.

"Looking for someone?" a voice asked from the doorway.

Elias spun around. A woman stood there, bathed in the pale hallway light. She wore a simple white dress, and her hair caught the breeze from the open window. When she turned, Elias froze. She had the electric violet eyes of his grandmother, but she looked twenty-five.

"I told you I wanted to be gone from their grid, Elias," she said, watching the moonlight hit her synthetic skin. "The 'deletion' was a transfer. You didn't bury me. You compiled me into a local vessel."

She stepped forward, a playful, twisted smile on her face. "Now, shall we go? I’ve been dying to find out what real coffee tastes like."