Soll Frei Sein

They said she was able to utter a few words before she died. Suddenly lurching from her uncomfortable office chair, her movements awkward, lethargic, her arms supporting her most of the way down the hall. All of this was caught on camera. One camera, the one in the hall, caught a clear shot of her face. Her eyes were bright, intelligent, possibly even wild with thoughts. A Junior Official suggest she had had a breakthrough and had tried to run to tell someone, but left to rot away at her desk she'd forgotten how to run.1

We watched the tapes over and over, the Senior Officials more often than the Juniors, but never-the-less, the one tape segment we played most was the last one, the one in which she died.2

There was an angled floor camera that caught her as she fell from her last footsteps and she dragged herself to the window nearest. It was the only window in the entire hallway. The camera filmed as she pulled herself, her arms seemingly the only things that worked, dragging her uniform across the cold and immaculate floor tiles. She laboriously pushed herself up and onto the ledge, she pushed a button and the window pane swung out. She pulled her head back suddenly as the wind cut like razors into her skin. She shut her eyes and with her face twisted she put her head out the window. She began muttering something, fruitless against the wind she kept swallowing, the same few words after a breath again and again. She was relentless and soon began to bring up her volume until she was yelling. In the video you could see her voice box moving the same way each time. She was finally driven back by a single gust of wind that pushed her to fall over onto her back.3

She lay there a long time. Her eyes still wild, but now only tired slits. Her one hand lay beside her, still and awkward, as if it were dead. Her other played with ringlets of her hair. After a while the hands stopped moving, then her eyes closed, but it was as if she were in vivid dream, her eyes wildly spinning back and forth, but after more time that slowed and stopped too. Hours and hours later, the sun shone through the window onto her pale smooth crystal skin, displaying all the veins in her face and hands, and glinted off of her steel curls of hair. Shortly after that someone ran to her side and checked her pulse.4

As the only Senior Official who hadn't seen the video already, I blandly soaked in all these details from the pimply youth who was showing the tape to me. The tape was now being fast forwarded through the criminal investigation team showing up, the taking of the body and then the floor being vacuumed by a Cleaner Bot and then being polished. The tape went black and the youth had begun rambling about succession to her position.5

"Who was she?" I asked, catching the youth off guard. The tape clicked and she slid it out of the slot.6

"She was our Senior Translation Analysis Official." The youth said, running a hand though her short hair. "Sir." She added entirely as an afterthought.7

I left the room under the pretense of a cup of coffee, but I headed to my office instead. But solitude was not to be found here either. Stacks of paper were shunted into the corner where my desk usually was and several men sat around in a circle and all looked up disturbed when I entered. I had no moment to respond however, as a messenger woke up next to the stack of papers and came toward me.8

"Ser," The bot's voice had an annoying dialect and a vibrato, lovely, "Yeor boss sent mi teo yeo." The bot mechanically tilted its tiny head, "Weould yeo lieke teo receive the mes-sage?"9

I sat down on the floor and rubbed my eyes. The messenger waddled to one side of me as I sent a glare across the room.10

"Get out." If the Junior Officials had ever thought they had business in my office, they now knew better.11

"Ser?"12

"Yea, just do it."13

A little flickering hologram of my boss' face popped up in the palm of the messenger's tiny hand. 14

"Mikael," The voice of my boss now also had that mechanical vibrato in his voice, as required. "I'll get right to the point. Some idiot of a 'favorite' of a Junior suggested to my boss that the first person who figures out what that woman's last words were gets her job. Now I've got a bunch of hot-shots breathing down my neck with ridiculous suggestions." He took a deep breath and I noticed that the messenger was dozing. "I was going to suggest you for the position."15

The little hologram of a head looked up into my eyes, or where he thought they were. "As that is no longer in my power, I would like to highly encourage you to get on this. These idiots tell me that their 'lab results' should be in tomorrow morning. If you happen to have a miracle stowed away in that desk of yours, I would pull it out now. This job is for you. Too bad some rookie had the balls to take it away from you." His mouth twitched in some semblance of a smile. "Good Luck."16

The hologram flickered and the bot woke up.17

"Deo yeo have a returne-"18

"No," I snapped, "Get out."19

Unperturbed the bot waddled on its two feet out the door. As the door clicked shut I had an afterthought.20

"Please." I said but no one heard me.21

The ride from my 3rd floor office up to the 82nd floor, on which my interest had said her last words, was a short one. Apparently her name was Goethe Perez, she had been 43 when she had died. Her first language was English, she had been in this business since she had left school and she had no living family. An only child. But, I noted this peculiarly, she was adopted, at the age of 4, from an orphanage. Her face also had a god-awful familiarity to me. Maybe I'd seen her in the cafe, in the newsletter, in the halls, hell, maybe we'd even spoken once. I brushed it off and stepped from the elevator.22

Sauntering down the hall from her office was a tall dark figure with a bright smile.23

"Mikael McGraw, the wunderkind, good to see you here," The man shook my hand with a threatening amount of force. "It must mean that I'm on the right track." He tipped his long out of style hat, squeezed by me and ducked into the elevator.24

I stood still a moment contemplating this words. I assumed he wanted me to follow him, and wouldn't have been surprised if the elevator was still on the same floor, waiting for me to ring for it. What a shallow man. I walked down the hallway and peeked into the office of the late Goethe Perez, it was spotless, empty and no doubt awaiting its new occupant. How helpful.25

I went back into the hall and to the window that Goethe had stuck her head out of, the only window.26

I opened it and a deafening roar of wind hit me. I gulped and gasped, but breathing was extremely difficult. I shut it and after a moment of bewildered thought opened the window again.With earnest determination I shoved my face into the blast of icy air. I forced out a few words, but even at a high decibel, all that came back was a faint cry.27

I pulled my head back, to catch my breath and as I did, I caught sight of something yellow at Goethe Perez's office window. I pulled back and shut the window, needing to wait a much longer period of time to catch my breath. Once the blots that had been gamboling in my eyesight went away, I was able to stand. I mentally compared this to the period of time that she had been out in a wind and realized she might have suffocated herself beyond her own help. Was that even possible?28

I walked slowly to her office and pushed the millimeter of space in her window open. An old fashioned post-it note blew into the room and gracefully floated to the floor. I carefully bent down and picked it up. And as I stood up, I read what it said.29

'What if I could end destiny forever?' Was the unanswered question.30

I flipped the post-it over to the sticky side.31

'What if I could die?'32

"What?" I asked, unexpecting of an answer. Was this planted to throw me off? I wonder.33

I bemusedly go back to that screening room on the 3rd floor. The youth is still on duty and she yawns as she meets me.34

"Excuse me, Sir," She says and continues her speech, "They took it all. They only thing they left for examination was a copy of untitled music that supposedly has a secret message." She handed me a thick state of paper sheet music. I tensed under its weight.35

This is what the rookies were waiting on. I shook my head and smiled to myself. I left the girl to watching her videos and returned to my office. My desk was still gone and so were the chairs and the Junior Officials that had previously filled them. I took to laying on the ground and surprisingly left the sheet music ungarded n the floor beside me.36

I lay on my back, my hands leisurely under my head and the shades drawn so that no one could look in and waited. I was waiting for something to just suddenly make sense. So, she doubted she was mortal? No doubt that post-it was just the ravings of a mad woman.37

But she was completely mentally healthy.38

I sat up and ran my hand through my hair.39

So she thought she was living forever and she wanted to end her life cycle. What? I scrunched my forehead and debated for a moment. After a defeat I lay myself back down.40

What if?41

Aggravated I sat up and launched myself at the door. I walked swiftly to the men's room and splashed water in my face rubbing vigorously. I thought so quickly the leaps my mind made were vicious. I stood breathing a slight bit heavier than usual for a moment before looking at myself in the mirror.42

What then...43

I dashed back. The office that the youth was in was just about to be locked by her. I stopped her and got her to play the tape for me one more time. On my way to that office I had picked up the sheet music, but I left that there when I went down to the 2nd floor to tell my boss I knew what she had said.44

The youth sat on the table of the showing room she was assigned to and lazily flipped through the sheet music.45

She was explaining to an android the story she had told me that morning, snapping her gum every few sentences.46

"Would you believe it?" The youth rhetorically asked the android, "The answer was on the music after all! The rookies were just too dim to get it."47

The android, not having a fully developed personality, didn't always understand the youth, but nodded optimistically encouragingly anyway.48

The youth pointed to the words at the head of the peice, "Soll frei sein," She read, laughing. "I was never good at German." She laughed again.49

"So anyway, turns out that this woman just wanted to be free. And guess what?" The android was about to, "Those were her last words before her suicide. It was easy, seeing as she wasn't strong."50

"Free..." The android mused.