[WP] The year is 2050. Everyone has a chip in their body. You are a nurse at an ER. Someone comes in without one.

I can still remember reading in school as a child, the enchanting thought of the uncontacted Amazonian tribes. The idea of a human person, a human mind, still living in a primitive state. Without the great and terrible advances of civilized man's morality's, methods or shortcomings weighing on them. A tiny haven of culture in a huge melded world that was growing towards sameness. The things we could learn from them. How easily they could be corrupted. I wondered what it would be like to be them sometimes envying them. That's the fantasy that first struck me when I saw her readouts as she sat there muttering nonsensically in my HGC-Scanner. Patient 42. Everywhere I checked, the readings came up as null. Non-Geometrix life form, even a tadpoles chipped and copyrighted cells would register somewhere on the Geometrix scale. The lack of data caught me off guard. I could see all the image data I could want. It was all there… Except everything. I should have gotten constant readings from her bio-chip, the actual good useable information, everything one needs to actually diagnose a patient. Everything I was accustomed to seeing was all reading null. I looked up and over my display to check she was still in fact there, still... a person. I don't know what I expected, there she sat,a kid just fidgeting with her robe and squirming. I felt a strange mix of confusion and awe, with a subdued sense of understanding washing over me as a slowly feel back into my seat. Something my brain wouldn't allow because of the extreme taboo of it. She couldn't really be without a chip, and if she didn’t have one there's no way she could have ended up here in front of me. It just wasn't possible, chips now are there from conception, from both your parents it's hijacks a ride and you're born with it, that's just the way it is now-a-days. I was a first gen, my “Biolife-Chip” was installed after birth, at 27 in Original 2050. But that was hundreds of years ago, back when they stopped the clock. The families figured once immortality chips were a thing, why have years anymore. That's just one more thing to push the masses over the edge. Duped is about the only way to put it. We embraced the chips and our newfound immortality with open arms. They dangled just the right carrot in front of us. It seemed so good then, the nightmare of forever life was only seen by the families back then. The old wealth understood what a perfect life was, one that is lived complete and finished was the only fulfilling natural life. Ignorant we all signed on and in the blink of an eye the few that didn’t were gone. Time isn’t the same as I remember back then, so I don't really remember how long it took. How long until we realized we had become slaves to life. A workforce never needing to be retrained or remolded. Unable to make the choice to even end our own lives. The one thing we really used to have control of. And without even that limited choice we all submitted. Gave into our situation, our lives of pacificity, taking the scraps of joy we were fed from the families. They were our celebrities, we watch them live and die, wishing it was us. Loving and hating them for what they had, each of their lives starting and ending became our only real sense of time. Our deaths are what they took from us, it was the only end to the horror of eternity. But what sat in front of me was a different. My mind reeled with possibility, fighting an eternity of training and conditioning that told me this couldn't happen. 42 didn't have any sort of chip, the curse was never given to her. I silently wondered how? A gift from another time, dimension, or was it as simple as she was a daughter of one of the families, displaced and missed somehow? I didn’t care as an unnecessary sense of urgency went over me. The next part was easy, death was lock that had long lacking a key. But now it was just there. I did a full scan on her and stored what was there. The data seemed so minimal, so animal… But beautiful in a clean simplistic kind of way. It was my turn... It seemed as simple as copy and paste, and moments later I looked back to the display as the scanner arm hovered over my wrist. There was nothing. Nothing but human me. All the scan readouts I was accustomed to gone, now read as null. The risk in mortality seemed terrifying and exhilarating. At that moment I sat there on the cusp, I could still go back, I didn't have to finalize the graft. I had lived this way so long, without a option. Now I had a choice, the only choice. I made it. I pressed the “cleared for admittance” button on 42's screen. A moment that felt precious, a moment I would never have again. A slice of my remaining life, accomplished and gone now. I smiled and stood. I picked up my suitcase. Without sparing a glance back at the uncontacted Amazonian wonder that had presented itself to me, I walked out the door. My time left was a short a mere 40 years maybe. But it was enough to give the same gift I was given, back to the world.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread