No Body

He remembered the day he woke up with no body.

It was dark, darker than the night of his home world, shunned from the light of Sol. It was a darkness so empty of meaning or purpose that light seemed to have been a vague dream of his past. No sound either. He was used to being in silence, but it was usually punctuated by the noise of others, or of machinery, or of his body. His body. He couldn't feel it. He couldn't feel anything. Not his feet, his fingers, not even the slight pain he had grown accustomed to being ever present in his chest.

He was alone, completely alone, utterly alone. Alone with nothing but his thoughts. God, his never-ending thoughts. Even at the end of sense, his thought barreled on, beating against his skull with an unbroken rhythm.

His skull. Oh, Lord, he remembered it now. That visit to the clinic. Something about his heart. His heart, always rebelling against his body. He remembered the looks of his children, like they were staring at corpse with maggots already eating his decayed flesh. He remembered the visit from that businessman, prideful and arrogant in the way only Terran men were, with the contract in his briefcase that offered a chance at a second life. A new life. That final trip to the spaceport, no one to accompany him because he was "one of them now." The journey Terranbound, every second worried that his cardiac muscle would give out before he could make it there. The facility, shiny and new in the Sollight, so bright it hurt his eyes almost as much as his legs hurt just standing there. The hospital gown. The doctor with the plastic mask and a dozen screens around his head competing for attention. "Now, I want you to countdown from 10." Ok, Doc.
10... 9... 8... rest...