Time's Up

A wise man once said, that when one's time is up, it is truly up, and no one can do anything about it. It seemed to be something that was matter-of-fact, yet many never believed in such pessimistic tendencies, and instead believing in the concept of hope, and that miracles do truly occur. She was like any typical person in her day, believing that technology and scientific know-how was sufficient to deal with the emergencies of life that occur. That is, until she realised the sad truth behind the meaning of what the wise man meant.

It was a time of great technological progress. Many hailed it the new Golden Age of civilisation, what with all the new-found knowledge that people have accumulated over time through the untiring efforts of scientists all over the world in all sort of fields. Science and technology was such an ``in'' thing amongst the populace that conceitedness seemed to be the dominating force these days.

``But there is nothing that Science cannot deal with!'' The masses cry out in defiance to critics of the cause. Priests and other holy people shook their heads at the return to the pagan ways.

She was born in that era, and thus was led to believe that Science could indeed deal with all the calamities that humankind would face. Already cancer was a thing of the past, and the much-feared AIDS is no more than a passing memory to those who were old enough to remember the times when the pandemic raged on.

All through her life, her firm belief in Science held on, unwavering. A person of almost perfect logical reasoning, she found that there was little that she couldn't handle with the application of logic and technology. She grew up into a fine young woman with a strong and firm mind, and impressed both admirers and critics alike with her razor sharp wit and illuminative understanding of things around her. Her parents, both eminent scientists in their own right, were proud of their only daughter, and they showed their pride each time that they could do it.

She graduated from the university with her PhD and was head-hunted by a rather powerful technology company to work as one of their principal investigators, a post that only the most senior of all the research scientists could hold; such was the extent of her capabilities. Heralded as the Einstein of her field, she won many accolades throughout her career, and earned praise from her initially skeptical peers.

Each time they wanted to promote her, she turned it down, citing the reason that she liked solve problems with logic and technology, and not to perform management roles that were the mainstay of those who were higher up on the hierarchy. At the end of it all, the company decided to force a promotion upon her with threat of dismissal should she refuse---flatly declining their offer for a final time, she deduced that the threat was illogical and counter-proposed with her dismissal as they had planned. Exasperated, the company had no choice but to follow up on their words and let her go.

With enough money to boot and the distinct lack of a regular job, she found that she had a lot of time on her hands and didn't quite figure out how best to deal with it.

At first, she thought of starting her own technology company. But when she realised that she would be compromising her position of solving science and technology problems and staying away from management issues, she put that thought away.

She was stuck in a stasis for several years, thinking about what she wanted to do with her newly found free time. As time passed, she found herself becoming increasingly alone, as her friends and family start to distance themselves from her, labelling her as a heretic. The only thing that they hadn't done was to get her declared insane and commit her to an asylum.

Decades pass, and when she suddenly found out what she wanted to do. But then, her time was almost up, and with that, she passed away, never ever having the chance to do what she wanted. All her life was spent in theorising for so long that she never got to actually do what she wanted.

As the wise man said, ``when one's time is up, there is little that one can do about it.''


[Ed: This story turned out worse than I thought it would be. Just proves that I shouldn't plan multi-part stories like that in the future.]