On my way from my final pictures, the last ever account of my existence, to this morbid room where I would soon die, I took a wrong turn and what I saw is still stuck in my head. It shouldn’t be. There were jars of human body parts floating in a liquid that did not seem to be a natural hue of super-bright-orange. I saw heavily masked employees performing a procedure on someone, who seemed to be still alive and un-anesthetized, judging from the screams. I tried to erase it from my mind, as I swiftly turned on my heel and walked as fast as possible back the way I came, hoping to find my way to the “passing zone”. The room where I would die, along with everyone else that shared my date.
When you are born, you are given your first tattoo on your inner wrist. It’s a date; it’s the day that you’re going to die. For a reason unknown to me, the government was fine with this law… It probably has something to do with the man who came up with it. 56 years ago, in 2050, Dr. Elliot Knox, the man who had found the cure to multiple kinds of terminal cancers, Alzheimer’s, and AIDS, approached the government with concerns, a very very very good strategy, and a proposed solution.

The Problem: Overpopulation and low quality of life
Strategy: Saccharine, insincere, falsely benevolent spin-off of the real plan
The Proposed Solution: DOT

DOT is the maniacal law that landed me here, on my death… table. D.O.T: Date Of Termination. Unlike the death sentence that you’re probably thinking it is, because literally it is a death sentence, it’s really just “practical”. Theoretically, if you know when you are going to die, then you know what speed you have to take your life at, and your priorities change. It gives you a chance to serve your purpose and make your mark on the world, no matter how small or large a mark it would be. That’s the way that Knox presented it, that it gave everybody a purpose and a reason to be alive, and thinking that it would be a great new change, relieving the stress of “the future”, and sorrow of life’s many twists and turns for too long. They believed that it would make America into the utopia everyone wished it would be, where everybody could make the changes that they were destined to make. But who really knows the real reason that this horrific law was enacted?
In order to prevent overpopulation, wait, no, make America into a utopia, 2 weeks later, drugs that prolonged life expectancy became illegal, and all babies born after December 31, 2050 will have their death dates calculated by genetics and super computers, and tattooed on the inside of their left wrist. How these dates were calculated, I’m not sure. I’m assuming many algorithms that predicted the perfect age at which your life will not have gone downhill yet, and you have lived long enough to accomplish your dreams, so once all that is done, but the former has not come yet, you get to pass away and skip the ending that the government decided that you just didn’t need to experience.
When your date comes, you board a train to the capital, Washington D.C., and you go to this huge, corporate-looking government run building, which is where you die. You check in by scanning your retinas, thumbs, and the date tattooed onto your left wrist. Once everybody has been accounted for, you are taken to a room where you are photographed for the last time: the last official account of your existence on earth. After that, everybody is herded like cattle into the largest banquet hall that anyone has ever seen. A feast fit for kings is prepared daily, but there is a little vial of an undetectable life-ending syrup tipped into each person whose date was the next day’s meal. Everyone would eat themselves into oblivion, then be allowed to socialize for one hour (because making friends in the last hours of your life is so important) before they must make their way to the passing zone. That’s the death room. Once the clock hits midnight and an extremely industrial buzzer sounds, the entirety of the room is lowered to the crematorium floor, where everybody is disposed of.
My largest question about this entire system is… why? Why was that phase of your life deemed unnecessary? What horrible things were going to happen if you lived past your date? Is that the awful sight I saw and screams I heard? If you don’t die, do you end up severed body parts, and live human experiments?  Is it even possible to exceed your date? Except now, I had an answer to that last question. My name is Alex, my date was yesterday, I survived the feast, and I am very much alive. I felt the floor begin to drop lower to the crematorium level. I don’t know what will happen to me, but I know that I have to escape, before my very-alive body is reduced to ash, jarred in bits and pieces, or used as one of the government’s lab rats. I don’t know how to get out, but I have to act. Now.