The Fallen Angel

It was getting darker now but the man didn’t know if it was the sun going down or his own eyes growing dim.

 His blood was spilling out over the autumn leaf scattered floor of the forest and his flesh felt like ice; he knew he would be dead soon but, all the same, the fiery hued trees round about him looked beautiful.

“Do you see how beautiful the Autumn is?”, he asked the Transhuman child who had hunted him down and inflicted the fatal wound in him with small doll like hands.

“All I see is dying trees”, replied the child, not bothering to turn around and look.

“Then you’re missing something”, said the dying man smiling through a grimace of pain.

“Am I really?”, said the Transhuman laughing, “I can see far more than you. I can see the cell structure of every leaf in this forest. I can see roses in infra-red and violets in ultra violet and I don’t need to wear glasses to correct my failing eyesight”.

“Yes but you view them with detachment”, said the man, “All life looks radiant to me because I’m going to die; all life is a brother to me because, like me, it will die”.

“Death isn’t a good thing”, said the Transhuman, digging into his artificially enchanced memory for a programme entitled “Why death isn’t a good thing”, “Death is a failing of nature that transhumans have corrected; the bleak eternal termination of our existence. Death is a horrific thing. The trees in transhuman forests never die and they are more beautiful for it, they’re genetically engineered to go on living without propagation and they’re all the colours of the rainbow and silver and gold; some of them even glow in the dark because they have genes for bioluminescence. Who wants a tree that dies anyway?”.

The little boy wrinkled up his nose in disgust.

“What I want isn’t that important”, replied the man, feeling some kind of passion burning within him in spite of the fact that he was running out of breath and found it hard to speak,  “But what I need is to love and you don’t love anything because to love something, truly, you have to accept its imperfections”.

“But the world we have made is superior to the old imperfect world”, said the transhuman, “And we are superior to you, we live forever; we never feel pain; we never get ill or old; we have greater intelligence; we’re faster and stronger and more agile than the greatest athletes of history. Why do you try to make a virtue of imperfection?”.

“Love is perfection; the perfection of the human soul”, said the man, “Your philosophy is completely materialistic and superficial. You only think of advancement in terms of the body; being able to run faster or leap higher but you don’t care about man’s ability to love and without imperfection there can be no love; no need for kindness or tolerance or understanding or forgiveness; you view the world as a toy, an object that is just there to please you and if it doesn’t make you happy you change it and people too”.

Then the dying man started to laugh.

“What is so funny?”, asked the boy, angry that the inferior being should laugh at him.

“Because you are a child. A monstrous spoiled brat. Not just eternally young but eternally immature and ultimately, though you prolong your existence, you become less and less alive with each technological advancement because to be truly alive is to love. What you’re turning into is a doll and your making this world your dollhouse”.

The child did not like being called a doll. He thought he might hurt the human more; force him to apologise for his insolence but then it was too late, the human was dead.

“Strange”, thought the transhuman, looking at the dead man’s face and smiling,“He almost looks pleasant now that he is quiet and still”.