They Both Die at the End

by Adam Silvera

“Mateo, kindly confirm this is indeed you. I’m afraid I have many other calls to make tonight.”

It’s 12:58 a.m. When it hits 1:00 I am forcing myself out of this apartment.

I squeeze my phone so I don’t throw it against the wall painted with little white and brown kids holding hands underneath a rainbow.

“Yo, Victor, be a person for one minute. I don’t know if you know, but I’m seventeen. Three weeks from my eighteenth birthday. Doesn’t it piss you off that I’ll never go to college? Get married? Have kids? Travel? Doubt it. You’re just chilling on your little throne in your little office because you know you got another few decades ahead of you, right?” Victor clears his throat. “You want me to be a person, Rufus? You want me to get off my throne and get real with you? Okay. An hour ago I got off the phone with a woman who cried over how she won’t be a mother anymore after her four-year-old daughter dies today. She begged me to tell her how she can save her daughter’s life, but no one has that power. And then I had to put in a request to the Youth Department to dispatch a cop just in case the mother is responsible, which, believe it or not, is not the most disgusting thing I’ve done for this job.

“You two are straight-up shadows,” I say. “That because we’re black?” Malcolm asks. “Because you’re always following me,” I say. “Loyal to the end.” The end.

I’m not a panda so the media doesn’t give a shit about me.

The Last Friend app is designed for lonely Deckers and for any good soul who wants to keep a Decker company in their final hours. This isn’t to be confused with Necro, which is intended for anyone who wants a one-night stand with a Decker—the ultimate no-strings-attached app.

No matter how we choose to live, we both die at the end.

Andrea mixed up several names, too eager to get from one Decker to the next. It’d be terrible timing to lose her job, with all the physical therapy she needs after her accident on top of her daughter’s mounting tuition. Not to mention it’s the only job she’s ever been great at because of one major life hack she discovered that has sent others out the door and on to less distressing jobs.

Rule number one of one: Deckers are no longer people.

Mateo points back at the booth. “Is it crazy to think the MTA won’t need any station staffers in a few years because machines—maybe even robots—will take over their jobs? It’s sort of happening already if you think about . . .”

“It’s going to take a while because evolution is never fast, but the robots are already here. You know that, right? There are robots that can cook dinner for you and unload the dishwasher. You can teach them secret handshakes, which is pretty mind-blowing, and they can solve a Rubik’s Cube. I even saw a clip of a break-dancing robot a couple months ago. But don’t you think these robots are one giant distraction while other robots receive job training at some underground robot headquarters? I mean, why pay someone twenty dollars an hour to give directions when our phones already do that, or even better, when a robot can do it for you? We’re screwed.”

I watched this thirty-minute documentary on Netflix a couple years ago about how much hospitals have changed since Death-Cast came into the picture. Doctors work closely with Death-Cast, obviously, receiving instant updates about their terminal patients who’ve signed off on this agreement. When the alerts come in, nurses dial back on life support for their patients, prepping them for a “comfortable death” instead with last meals, phone calls to families, funeral arrangements, getting wills in order, priests for prayers and confessions, and whatever else they can reasonably supply.

There are no cars, but there’s a man on the corner up ahead tearing through trash bags, furiously, as if there’s a garbage truck approaching to steal them all away. It’s possible he’s searching for something he accidentally threw out, but judging by the split leg of his jeans and the grime on his rust-colored vest, it’s safe to guess he’s homeless. The man retrieves a half-eaten orange, tucks it into his armpit, and continues going through the trash bags. He turns toward us as we approach the corner. “Got a dollar? Any change?” I keep my head low, same as Rufus, and walk past the man. He doesn’t call after us or say anything else. “I want to give him some money,” I tell Rufus, even though it makes me really nervous to do so alone. I go through my pockets and find eighteen dollars. “Do you have some cash to give him, too?” “Not to be a dick, but why?” “Because he needs it,” I say. “He’s digging through trash for food.” “There’s a chance he’s not even homeless. I’ve been duped before,” he says. I stop. “I’ve been lied to before too.” I’ve also made the mistake of ignoring others asking for help, and it’s not fair. “I’m not saying we should give him our life savings, just a few bucks.”

“I just don’t think I should be the judge of who actually needs my help or not, like they should do a dance or sing me a song to prove they’re worthy. Asking for help when you need it should be enough. And what’s a dollar? We’ll make a dollar again.”

The man hugs me, the orange that was in his armpit dropping at our feet. It takes me a minute to find my nerves and muscles, but I hug him too, and everything about him, from his height to his thin body, reminds me of Dad. “Thank you. Thank you,” he says. He releases me, and I don’t know if his eyes are red because he’s possibly without a bed and really tired, or if he’s tearing up, but I don’t pry because he doesn’t have to prove himself to me. I wish I always had that attitude.

You shouldn’t donate to charity, help the elderly cross the street, or rescue puppies in the hopes you’ll be repaid later. I may not be able to cure cancer or end world hunger, but small kindnesses go a long way.

“Don’t you have little freak-outs wondering if life was better before Death-Cast?”

There was a chance for her to see him one last time through The Veil—a video chat app that drains batteries quickly, but also creates a stronger personal hot spot for anyone who’s somewhere with weak service, like a Decker on a highway headed home—and she missed those invites, too.

I hail Rufus over and we walk to her apartment. It’s in the kind of projects where the superintendent sits on the stoop reading a newspaper when there’s clearly more work that can be done—like mopping and sweeping the floor, fixing the blinking lamp in the hallway, and setting up mouse traps. But this doesn’t matter to Lidia. The breeze she gets on rainy evenings charms her, and she’s taken a liking to her neighbor’s cat, Chloe, that wanders the halls and is scared of mice. It’s home, you know.

Here’s my vision of Utopia: a world without violence and tragedies, where everyone lives forever, or until they’ve led fulfilling and happy lives and decide themselves that they want to check out whatever’s next for us.

We pay two hundred and forty dollars each, the kind of price you can get away with charging people whose savings accounts would go to waste otherwise.

This isn’t the early 2000s, when people were dying without warning. Death-Cast is here to prepare Deckers and their loved ones, not for the Decker to turn their back on their loved ones.

I’m not about to go off on how removing pay phones from street corners is the start of universal disconnection

is crazy, though, right? Pay phones are gonna stop being a thing. I don’t even know anyone’s phone number.”

Cameras that use film are going extinct too, watch.” “Post offices and handwritten letters are next,” Mateo says. “Movie rental stores and DVD players,” I say. “Landlines and answering machines,” he says. “Newspapers,” I say. “Clocks and wristwatches. I’m sure someone’s working on a product for us to automatically know the time.” “Physical books and libraries. Not anytime soon, but eventually, right?”

“You’re right. You’re totally right. It’s all going away, everyone and everything is dying. Humans suck, man. We think we’re so damn indestructible and infinite because we can think and take care of ourselves, unlike pay phones or books, but I bet the dinosaurs thought they’d rule forever too.”

The Living Urn offers Deckers the opportunity to have their ashes put in a biodegradable urn containing a tree seed that absorbs nutrients and stuff from their ashes, which I thought was fantasy but nope. Science.”

“Oh. Cost for guests is going to be one hundred dollars,” the teller says. He looks at me and Rufus. “Suggested donation is one dollar for Deckers.”

In China, Lidia jokes about how she heard reincarnation is forbidden here without government permission, and I don’t want to think about that so I focus on the lit-up skyscraper replicas and people playing table tennis.

Death-Cast did not call Ariel Andrade because he isn’t dying today, but since he’s an officer of the law, getting the call is his greatest fear every night when the clock strikes midnight.

On the day Graham received his alert, he insisted on spending his End Day working.

The officers were pursuing a Decker who was signing up for Bangers, the challenge for online feeds that has had a heartbreaking amount of daily hits and downloads the past four months. People tune in every hour to watch Deckers kill themselves in the most unique way possible—to go out with a bang. The most popular death wins the Decker’s family some decent riches from an unknown source, but for the most part, it’s just a bunch of Deckers who don’t kill themselves creatively enough to please the viewers and, well, you don’t exactly get a second shot. Graham’s attempts to prevent a Decker from riding his motorcycle off the Williamsburg Bridge only got himself killed.

Last Message feature that will allow respective users to prepare their final tweets/statuses so their online legacy is more meaningful than, say, their thoughts on a popular movie or some viral video of someone else’s dog.