You there! By the facet of the highway! Sure, you! Within the tattered clothes! Be you man or be you mirage?

Please, sheath your weapon. I imply you no hurt. But it surely’s been weeks since I’ve encountered one other human being alongside this arid and depressing path, and it could do my coronary heart good to converse with you for just a few moments. Cardiac well being is so essential, even—nay, particularly—in occasions like these.

Have I any meals? I do. It’s a meager assortment of nuts, however you’re welcome to partake. I shall not be becoming a member of you since I’m intermittently fasting. I solely eat throughout an eight-hour window, from when the solar is excessive within the sky till it reaches a sure level above the horizon. It triggers metabolic switching, which burns fats at a better price, serving to me preserve an excellent BMI for elevated longevity.

Sure… maybe you’ve got seen me earlier than. My visage is acquainted to many I encounter. Even after what some name the apocalypse, I’ve maintained an exactness of countenance that you simply keep in mind from pictures. For you see, within the earlier than occasions, when the oceans had not but swallowed the shoreline and introduced society to its knees, magazines ran a brand new profile story about me, I don’t know, each week or two. Sure, it’s I, that one man who lived each second within the service of staving off his personal mortality. Did it work? Effectively, seventy years after the final nuclear reactor on Earth melted down, leading to calamitous environmental devastation, I’m nonetheless right here traversing the wasteland that is still. So that you inform me!

From pictures, I do know it may very well be laborious to inform if I used to be a sixty-year-old man who has smoothed his pure wrinkles with a sizzling iron, or if I used to be a fourteen-year-old boy who has spent his whole life consuming nothing however rat poison sandwiches. Now I’m 133 years outdated, and I retain my look of an outdated woman’s elbow pores and skin stretched taut over an grownup human cranium. It’s referred to as “peak bodily situation.” Within the occasion that you simply stumble throughout a long-neglected library and its books stay intact and unmoldered… look it up, Einstein.

Do you thoughts if I run in place as we discuss? I spend my days wandering this barely liveable hellscape looking for sustenance and shelter, but when I don’t get my pulse as much as 140 beats per minute for an hour on daily basis, I can really feel the icy fingers of demise scrambling to realize buy round my throat.

However there I am going once more prattling on. I simply have so little companionship as of late. Everybody I knew within the earlier than occasions perished like fools years in the past after failing to stick to my strict dietary and biomedical routine. And the touring celebration I joined afterward solid me out for utilizing considered one of our provides of batteries to energy my infrared LED face masks. Simply because the panorama is cracked and desolate, nearer to the floor of Mars than the verdant Earth we used to know, doesn’t imply my T-zone must be. However our nomadic tribe’s fury at my battery misappropriation was a mere flickering candle in comparison with the inferno of rage that ignited round me once I revealed that I had absconded with a second battery to energy my infrared LED penis masks. Due to my rigorous schedule of penis-health therapies, I nonetheless have the pore measurement and erectile capability of a teen boy. In fact, there aren’t any teen boys, since all of Earth’s sperm, together with my very own, have been absolutely denatured by the ambient radiation years in the past. But when they hadn’t, I might be laborious at work repopulating the planet with any girl I might discover with an optimum waist-to-hip ratio for childbirth.

What do you imply my “entire deal sounds off-putting and time-consuming”? That’s ridiculous. I’m not “working from one thing.” As I advised you earlier than, I’m working in place for cardiac well being. Excuse me? I’m “obsessive about demise, even for somebody residing amid horrors the Bible couldn’t have anticipated?” Obsessive about demise? Hardly. I’m planning by no means to die in any respect.

Wait. The place are you going? Have I mentioned one thing that offended? I’ll absolutely apologize if you happen to inform me what I’ve completed. Please, good stranger! Come again! Oh expensive. Watch out close to the sting of that cliff, lest you—

Good lord, he’s jumped. Actually, the embers of life have been snuffed from his corporeal type after such a fall. I hope his bodily wounds will not be particularly grievous. I might actually use an infusion of contemporary blood to maintain my very own platelets infused with oxygen.

Some folks simply have little interest in caring for themselves, I suppose.