Kit was quiet again. “You know, that heart monitor is really gettin’ on my last nerve.”
“Yeah.”
Kit stared ahead for a moment. “So,” he said, “I can either stay like this right up until I die if nobody does anything, or, if we go with Manny, kill me and hope I can come back with one of those heart shocker things.”
“Yeah.”
“So I can either be almost dead for years, or be completely dead all right now.”
“Yeah.”
“Stop agreein’ with me so much.”
Romeesha smiled sadly. “Sorry. But, yeah. I mean, you could snap out of it. There’s always a chance.”
“So they say.” He was quiet again. And then he looked at her, curiously philosophical. “What would you do?”
“Me?”
“If you were in my position. But had the choice.”
Romeesha didn’t reply.
“This is your daydream. Gotta play it out, baby. Isn’t this what it is all about? ‘What would I do if it were me?’”
“That ain’t fair.”
Kit glared at her. “Damn if it ain’t.”
Romeesha fell silent again.
“Don’t do this to me, Pom-pom.”
She looked up. “Huh?”
“Babe,” Kit said, his voice suddenly softening. “We are all gonna die at one point. That’s just the way it is. But not like this. Don’t leave me like this. I’ll shrink down. I worked hard to get this body of death, and now—“he laughed at the pun—“and now ‘death’ is jes’ tappin’ his foot, waiting for me to go. But I won’t go, will I? I’m stuck like this. I’ll be in that persnikity vegetarian cheese-grate—“
“’Persistent vegetative state!’”
“—forever. Don’t you know what this is? People go into them. They don’t come back out. I am here for good, baby doll.”
“People come out of comas all the time!”
“But I’m not in your run-of-the-mill coma, now, am I?”
Romeesha went pale. “You…you could wake up. What doctors can do—“
“They can’t do shit,” Kita admonished. “Unless there’s a doc out that there specialized in psychic attacks. Manny is, and he can’t get through my noodle no how! Two days! We all know how Vagabond works. You fight him, and it is over. He hits you all at once. One big ol’ grand slam. There ain’t never no round two. There ain’t never no survivors.”
The cyber-chick steeled up. “I ain’t killin’ you. I ain’t killin’ nobody.”
“Well, then, it’s a good thing that Manny here is steppin’ up.”
“That ain’t the point!”
“Fine! You tell me what is! It’s my life, dammit! When did y’all become God and get to say when it’s time fer me—ME! NOT YOU—to go and when it ain’t?”
The first time she had ever heard “euthanasia,” Romeesha, then just a girl, had misheard and thought people were talking about “youth in Asia” and couldn’t figure out why they were all about dying. “Jus’ because we don’ know what to do now doesn’t mean we won’ in the future!” It had become a battle of the accents.
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