You are what you are until you aren’t.
A string of three letters and seven numbers, a barcode unique to you and you alone, sits unremarkably at the top of a webpage that maybe ten people will ever read. One more blip of information in an endless sea of data. My eyes don’t even register it as I scan the rest of the page for details, the most important of which are conveniently located at the top. Species: Homo sapiens. Sample: Whole lung dissociate. Sex:
Female, age 22. It’s September 2018, the first day of the last college class you’ll ever take, your last chance to confidently ditch a lecture for the first time in your life. A chance you, ever the perfect student, will never take, no matter how many friends advise you to “lighten up a little.” So one o’clock rolls around and there you are, three rows from the front in a lecture hall with twenty-five, and still you wish you could’ve gotten a better seat. You’d save the one beside you for your roommate if there was even the vaguest chance that she’d show up, but she’s never signed up for a class she couldn’t skip. So when three thirty comes and lecture ends and you walk back home alone and your eyes get absentmindedly caught on a bird—a hawk you think, wheeling through the sky above, feathers awash with the crimson glow of the midday sun—there’s no one to stop you from taking that fatal step into the street as the light turns green and the car comes screaming into view and you think oh no and then it’s upon you and you’re
Male, age 71. It’s May 2016, the first time that you’ve ever sat in the passenger seat of a car being driven by your own grandson. The sight of his hands on the wheel is enough to remind you of a thrill you’ve long since forgotten, enough to make you smile at the steely determination—the eagerness to impress—etched into the furrow of his brow and the firmness of his grip. He takes the turns fast, maybe even a little too fast, but on a country road as wide as this one it surely can’t hurt. You laugh as he opens up the throttle, this young man fifty-five years your junior, blood of your blood, every bit the daredevil you briefly remember once being yourself. The car is ancient, so ancient that you used it to teach the boy’s mother. So ancient that when the steering jams and the car begins to roll and you feel yourself being launched into the air your first instinct is not terror but annoyance, initially at the car but then at yourself for letting the kid drive a piece of junk like this in the first place. You’ll have to do better next time, you think, as you hurtle through the air and the heat of the unpaved road rises to meet you and
Click. I’ve hit the wrong button, returning me to the list of samples rather than giving me more information about the one I’m currently on. Great, I think, fifty samples in this set alone. How am I supposed to find that one again? It was perfect, too, no unhealthy lifestyle choices or diseases to speak of. Just a healthy, seventy one-year old set of human lungs. Perfectly aged, actually, not too young like the one right before it. An excellent addition to the control group, if only I can find it again. I am not being paid enough to find it again—actually, undergrads don’t get paid at all—but unless a better sample comes along, I don’t see that I have much of a choice. I sigh, hovering the cursor over a random sample. There’s nothing for it but to
Click. Female, age 48. In October of 2017 you’ve finally decided to join the PTA, a move that manages to drive both your daughter and your husband crazy. He’s mad that you did it without considering the cost of hiring a babysitter every time you need to go to a meeting while he’s still at the office. She’s mad because making gingerbread houses with her classmates isn’t as fun when she knows that her own mom helped plan it, never mind the fact that she wouldn’t be making anything at all if you hadn’t pushed for it. These are the things that run through your head as you step out the front door and into the
Click that’s not it. Forty-eight isn’t bad, I think, but it’s not great either. If I could just find that old man again
Click female, age 35. In January 2015 the pansies in the front yard are blooming more gloriously than ever before, and you think to yourself that on the way back from the office you might pluck a few and
Click too young, where’d the old man go, maybe it’s this one
Click male, age 51. The market fell on July fourth, 2019, not at all what you were expecting, but with a steady hand you might be able to
Click nope, not that one either. Maybe
Click female, 43
Click female, 27 oh come on where’d it go
Click male, 19
(hey that’s my age)
I stop, my head cocked involuntarily to one side. Male, 19. Did I read that right? Yes. Male, 19, with no history of lung disease and no preexisting conditions. From what I can glean—admittedly not very much in the space of about four lines—a perfectly healthy young man.
For the first time, I dig. I read the paper the sample was sourced from, query database after database, even resort to googling the ID in the vain hope that something, anything, will turn up, some shred of who this person was besides a nineteen year-old male, something to separate him from me. I find nothing. No trace of the life he lived, the fears he conquered, the people he loved. Every day of his life erased, added up and boiled down until only the last day remains, the day he died and his tissues were excised from his body and put on ice, later to be ground up and run through a big machine that would generate a data file saved to the internet for me to eventually discover. Nothing left but that final, fatal day, the day that would forever define him as Species: Homo sapiens. Sample: Whole lung dissociate. Sex: Male. Age: 19. I bookmark the page.
Click. It is April 2021 and you are one among many, a data point among data points, one of thousands of equally anonymous ten-digit IDs stored in a spreadsheet. You are cells that have been sliced up, frozen, liquified, suspended, analyzed, and digitized, made immortal as a string of letters and numbers that very few people will have the opportunity or interest to read. But before that you were a person, a person perhaps not terribly unlike me, a person who signed up to be an organ donor without ever imagining that you would actually have to be an organ donor. You are here not because you wanted to be here but because you allowed yourself to be here, here in this digital graveyard where the sun does not shine and the stars do not twinkle.
I cannot help but wonder why. Was it a thoughtless action, all those years ago, where you checked a box and signed your name and wondered when all the fuss would be over? Or perhaps you knew, somehow, that such a tiny thing would one day be your legacy—that as one story ended, another would be waiting to be told. In the end, does it even matter? Whatever the reason, thoughtless or noble, you made a choice—a final, inherently hopeful choice—and the choice in turn made you.
It made you, in the final accounting, a dreamer.
Liam is a UC Berkeley student double majoring in microbial biology and English. He is also one of Atrium‘s editors.
