"Good morning," he said. "Shall we begin? Now as some of you from the press may be unfamiliar with medical jargon, I'll try to stick to layman's terms. But first, a small caveat. While our tests can't be considered foolproof, the sheer quantity of data and the unequivocal agreement of it cannot be wished away. Since we have nothing comparable by which to judge the subject's condition, there is, to be quite candid, some element of faith involved, but I would by no means refer to it as a leap of faith. Consider it more on the order of a small hop. Or perhaps even a skip. Okay, then, on to the main presentation of our body, or rather, well, you know what I mean. ."
There were giggles in the gallery. The lights dimmed. The Mechanic slid a videocassette into a dark notch in the wall. Out of speakers mounted in the ceiling came the whir and sputter of an old film projector. Nice touch, I thought, listened as a chimey melody, familiar somehow, seeped into the room. It was American educational music, that old warped hope in major chords, and it bounced along to the vistas skating by on the screen: mountains and mountain valleys, jungles and jungle clears, lakes, rivers, streams, each yielding to the next in a bright ceremony of splice and dissolve.
Last was a light-filled forest, where all manner of creature began to stir, make their first nervous pokes from burrow and mound. I'd seen footage like this before, felt fourteen again, dozing in my snowboots, waiting for the afternoon bell. How much I'd always envied the tight life of voles. The hidey hole was happiness.
No expectations down there.
Now the shot pulled out a bit. Here a stunted horse drank from a creek. There an odd bird jerked worms from the earth. Here came a rustle in the brush, a gentle tremoring that sent bugs the size of bullets to wing. Something huge burst into view, a shambling immensity I knew from coloring books, dioramas of yore. The woolly mammoth. Hairy-hided. Shovel-tusked. A great shaggy thingness. It looked about with what could have been innocence and not a little fear in its eyes. I wondered how much it cost to rent a toothless elephant, trick him out for another geological age. There wasn't much time to wonder. The music tripped into a darker key, some molester-on-the-carousel lilt. It was the end of innocence, or the end of something.
It was bum luck for the mammoth.
A band of humanoids lumbered up, a hunting party, crude men with crude spears in their tufted fists, loud language on their tongues. They whooped and hollered, circled the beast, rushed in and out and in again, stabbed until the mammoth's hide blew bright spouts of mammalian blood. The woolly fellow thumped to his knees, bellowing, bellowing, us thrust up now into the black pain of his mouth. His cries and the taunts of the hunters started to fade. There was darkness now, silence. There was darkness with a few faraway pricks of light. The universe. Universal shorthand for the universe.
We were moving through it now. We were gliding toward a greenish-bluish ball. Our ball, the home sphere. Sea and tree and all those organic shenanigans, all that fluke life. We were flying right smack into the middle of the fucker, flying and flying until it wasn't flying anymore, it was falling, and we were falling now through clouds and sky and down upon the body of a city, row house bones and market hearts and veins of neighborhood, arterial concretions of highway and boulevard and side street, falling now to a low float over pavement, a hover here in some lost alleyway, a superannuated little gland of a place, where a solitary figure walked with his hands stuck in his windbreaker. The figure began to glow, as though suddenly sensor-read, his organs swirls of grained color, his skull a glassy orb of dim pulses and firings, the lonely weak electrics of homo erectus. The man stooped for his shoelace. The picture froze at the beginnings of a bow knot. Through the speakers came the sound of sprocket jump, the flutter of reel's end. The screen swiped to test bars. The music leaked away. The lights went up.
The Mechanic took the lectern, spoke into a thimble he'd slipped upon his thumb.
"Any questions?"
There were questions.
"Should we assume the figure, the visible man, as it were, is the subject?" called a woman with a series of laminated cards clipped to her pantsuit.
"What's with the woolly mammoth?" said a kid with a video rig strapped parrot-like to his shoulder.
"Forget that," said an old man in a hunting vest. "What is the point of any of this? Is this some kind of gag?"
"I assure you," said the Philosopher, leaning into the Mechanic's amplified thumb, "this is no gag. Nor could it be construed as a bit. The visual aid is merely meant as a tool to help you better understand the scope of what we're about to tell you. Ladies and gentleman, the subject, who, as some of you may already have ascertained, is seated here among us, which I note as a precaution against insensitive comments regarding his condition, this subject is the first known sufferer of what I believe will and should be referred to from now on as Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, named, I might add, for its discoverers, Dr. Blackstone and myself."
"Without being technical," said the kid with the parrot cam, "what exactly is the nature of PREXIS? PREXIS for short, right? I mean, what's the deal, nontechnically speaking? And why should we care, given all the diseases out there right now?"
"To put it bluntly," said the Mechanic, "those other diseases already have a name. And with it, a cause: viral infection, chemical compromise, cellular glitch, inheritance on the genetic level. This syndrome, though now named, still has no identifiable cause, which does not mitigate its unquestionable fatality. This man is going to die. But here's the kicker: he's going to die for no known reason. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, and irrevocably. He may show no signs of it yet, but he will, trust me. And though he may be the first, I assure you he is not alone. Like the beast in the film, and the prototypical bipeds who felled it, all of us here, too, will someday be extinct. And not from nuclear catastrophe or chemical weaponry or environmental collapse, but from something else entirely. Who knows? Perhaps the cause is sheer purposelessness. At any rate, be advised, this subject, Steve, this mild-mannered thirty-seven-year-old ad man, is but the first in line. Maybe you've been lucky enough to dodge everything else, the cancers, the coronaries, the aneurysms, but do not consider yourself blessed. Goldfarb-Blackstone, or PREXIS, if you will, is guaranteed to claim us all."
"Aren't you just talking about death?" said the old man.
"Unfortunately, yes," said the Mechanic.
"But don't we already know about death?"
"What do we know? We know nothing. Now at least perhaps we have what little light the work of Dr. Goldfarb and myself can shed on it."
"I'm interested in what you mean by purposelessness," said the woman in the pantsuit. "Do you mean boredom? Do you mean to say this man is actually going to die of boredom?"
"That's one way of putting it, yes," said the Philosopher.
"Dynamite," said the woman, darted out of the room.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" I said, back in the Special Cases Lounge.
"We weren't sure."
"We couldn't be certain."
"All the data accounted for."
"All the numbers in."
"Sorted."
"Crunched."
"Mashed."
"Mealed."
"Until a granular quality obtained."
"Then checked and counterchecked against findings in our database."
"Adjusted for error."
"Baseline error."
"Human and otherwise."
"Human and counterhuman."
"We had to be precision-oriented on this one. Or orientated."
"Either way."
"We had to be scientists about it."