I received the message. Friday, April 19, 7:30 am. I clicked the link, and it showed me a map. I saved the address, then called Sean to have him pick up my car.

“You tell your wife?” he asks as machinery hums in the background.

“No,” I inform him. “Don’t know if I should.”

I knew the time would come sooner or later. Government edict. National mandate. Twelve years after the Mayan calendar ended. It starts with the old. Continues in waves through Boomers and Xers. A worldwide culling. A remnant the earth could sustain.

I registered the day of my sixtieth birthday. Tuned in every morning to Good Day LA. A slow crawl of digits like lottery numbers. I stare at the image while fractured sunlight burns through the window. A fiery iris, broken and bent. Nature’s mascara. A chorus of gulls, jewel-tipped missiles flapping their wings.

“You need us to send someone over?” A scheduling assistant, who calls herself Lilith, transmits a message I promptly ignore till she texts me again.

“No need,” I finally respond. She sends me a list of instructions.

I get up at six, shower, and dress. A button-down shirt and a nice pair of slacks. I swallow the pill I ordered online and walk to the kitchen. Soon, I feel nothing. Reflexes muted, my mind in a trance. I set out some food for the dog and the cats, crack open the door, and go into the bedroom. A motionless world of time standing still. I glance at my wife as she lies in our bed. Quiet and still, her face aglow in the fresh-fallen light. I caress her cheek with the back of my hand. Twenty-five years, I say to myself as I pull up the blanket. Her dark eyes flutter in the soft amber glow, retreating back into a dream. “I love you,” I whisper, then slink through the door and get into my car.

Backyard sunlight, cemetery greens, asphalt rivers stretched under the freeway, the railyard below, tracks black and webby, gaunt fissures winding their way between rows of barbed wire. Storefront hostels, traffic lights blinking, a neon arcade. I pull into the lot. Concrete fractures, faded white gridlines. A stonewashed edifice, the rod of Asclepius, a bronze serpent entwined on a pole. A young lady greets me inside of the lobby, scans my code, then hands me a cup. I sit down to read, but my hands are too shaky. An old lady next to me quietly clutches her rosary beads. I breathe deeper, more slowly, taking a sip, then another as her face starts to melt. A doctor appears in a halo of light, then suddenly, she’s no longer there. My name is called, and I rise from my chair. I pass through a door, then another, then another with a sign that reads “Portals of Naru.” A nurse leads me into a chair by the window. Curtains are lifted, and trees start to dance. The warm spring sun steals the chill from my hands.

“A teacher?” she asks as she taps on my arm. She says nothing else, just smiles as I nod. Moloch, whose mind is machinery, whose heart is an algorithm. Moloch, whose blood is a hydrogel, an infernal network of polymer chains.

I think of my wife as the needle breaks skin. My body warm, like a grandmother’s hug. A cell phone vibration, the link to a site. Electromagnetic frequency waves. A slow crawl of numbers, a phone call to Sean. An Oculus network where we now exist.