Chapter 1
The Man With An Alien Heart
The Story Of The Story Of A 150 Year Old Man! Chapter 1
Sometime last year I got the shock of my life. A routine health check revealed that I had apparently suffered both a silent heart attack and a stroke. It was a hell of a shock since I had no recollection of feeling anything but well. I certainly do not remember any of the typical signs of having a heart attack or stroke. To make matters worse, my doctor told me it was serious, that my heart was in very bad condition and I needed immediate further investigations and probably some repair work before I dropped dead of another silent heart attack.
For about two or three days I was quite depressed with the bad news. Eventually I thought I can let this get the better of me and just mooch around the house feeling sorry for myself or I can do something positive to keep my mind off what felt like a death sentence I had been given.That something positive turned out to be a story about a 150 year old man, the first chapter of which you can read below.
In the end I published the full story on Illumination. However, I got such a kick out of writing that story that I wrote a few more in the genre of sci-fi, supernatural and likewise published them on Illumination as well. Eventually I assembled all my short stories into two volumes called 'The Mystical Rainbow' series and published them on Amazon Kindle under my other name, William P. O'Neill. Of course, I took the trouble to delete the stories from Illumination not least of all because I felt that the stories were more at home on Amazon, until.......
Recently Dr Yildiz decided to launch yet another publication called Illumination Book Chapters for authors. And that set me thinking what a good idea it would be to reverse engineer the books on Amazon to bring them, or at least parts of them, back home to Illumination. What I have published here is a taster from one of the stories with the hope that readers find it interesting enough to invest in the books, which are very cheap to buy anyway. I will of course be publishing yet more taster chapters over the next few days.
The 150 year old man
2104 looking back to 2020
It was just a normal day in a peaceful place called semi-retirement. Except for this day I had a routine medical check for swollen feet due to some Predolin, I was taking for PMR. The doctor wanted to rule out any other possible causes before settling on it merely being a side effect of the steroids.
I had a full-body catscan to check my vital organs and bones for any sign of inflammation or a tumor. It came up clean, thank the lord. Next, it was an echograph of my heart to make sure that that was all ok.
I was asked to take off my top and lie down on my left side on a trolley. Within a minute the young female machine operator was scanning my chest across my left breast. Suddenly she stopped.
An older looking doctor came in and took her place. After two minutes he too stopped and stood up to leave the room saying he wanted to see me later. On we went with the rest of the test and after forty minutes of scanning, I was asked to get up and get dressed. I was then told to go and see the doctor in his office. As we entered the room I could see from his face that all was not well.
“Ok,” says the Doc all matter of factly. “When exactly did you have the heart transplant?” And I’m like, “Whaaaaat? What the hell are you talking about Doc, I ain’t never had any transplant in all my born days”
“Oh yes you have Steve, and you wanna know the strangest thing? I don’t see any signs of any major surgery. No scars, no old stitches, nothing. And there’s more. Can I ask how old you are?”
“You got it there on my papers Doc.” I said tersely.”
“Ok, let me have a look……so, you were born in…….” he said as he rifled through various papers looking for my date of birth.
“Doc, I’m sixty-six years old, what the hell is wrong with you?” I exclaimed impatiently.”
“Steve, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I am looking at a sixty-six-year-old man with the heart of a twenty-year-old! What’s more, there is clear evidence that it is not the heart you were born with! In fact, I have never in fifty years of heart surgery seen anything quite like it. I am not even sure if that heart that is beating inside your chest is even of this world! Do you get me, Steve? Do you get me, for Christs sakes? And I am having whole lotta trouble comprehending it Steve. I mean, shit Steve, are you even of this world?”
“Hey Doc, I was born in Detroit sixty six years ago, ok? My pop was a line worker at the Ford car factory. My mom was a midwife at the local hospital downtown. Are you crazy Doc, are you kidding me? What in the hell are you on Doc? How old are you, cause you know what? It’s time you had a break Doc, like a really long break for the rest of your life!”
“Ok Steve, here’s what we’ll do. I wanna run some more tests to see if I can figure this all out. There has to be a rational explanation for what I’m looking at here. Let me see when we can get you in for some further investigation
I don’t know, maybe it’s some weird diet your mom fed you when you were a kid in diapers or something, I just don’t know. What I do know, is that I have never ever in all my born days seen anything quite like it.”
“You know what Doc, I’m out of here you crazy old coot. I am just a regular guy enjoying my retirement after fifty years of hard work, roping and sheeting forty tons of cabbages or god knows what and driving it from state to state on a multi-drop nobody else in the company would touch with a barge pole. Half a century driving from state to state, man and boy, sweating and busting my guts for a few dollars an hour, and now all I wanna do is go fishing and read a good book.
Do you know what they say about fishing Doc? It legitimises doing nothing, sweet F.A. And that Doc is exactly what I am gonna do, nothing. And I ain’t gonna let no quack like you, some well past his use-by-date poop expert, stop me from spending the rest of my days doing sweet nothing except cast a line and sit back and read War and Peace to my heart’s content. I’m out of here. See ya never, loser. You’re weird man, I mean really, really strange. You wanna know what I think Doc, you are not of this world!”
And with that, I got up and left the hospital never to go back ever again. And you wanna hear something that really is strange? That was eighty four years ago in 2020! That’s right, it's 2104 as I write and I am 150 years old, give or take a month or two either way. Of course, I have aged some, but I don’t look a day over fifty or so Laura the next-door neighbour with a whippet called Dandy tells me.
I moved here to nowhere in particular soon after I stormed out of that hospital, for my own safety. See, I figured that that Doctor was not going to let things lie. I could see he wanted to go out with a bang. Get himself written up about in some such medical journal, hey maybe with a little luck get himself a Congressional Medal of Honour or Nobel Prize for medical discovery or something like that. And before you know it, I reckon there would have been all sorts of government agents on my tail wanting to haul me off to some secret compound in the desert, like Area 52, so they could poke and prod me to their heart’s content in their laboratory to discover the secrets of an alien heart.
