THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#35)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

There was a commotion in the hallway and one of the attendants went to the door. He scurried back and whispered in the stocky man’s ear, “Dr. Aldrich, it’s the Duke! The Duke’s come to watch!” Through the glass window in the door I could see the face of a hard-eyed dark-haired man with a grey-flecked goatee. At once the stocky man dropped the wires, walked to the door, and bowed low. “Your Boldness,” he said. The bearded man made an impatient motion with his hand, and Dr. Aldrich returned to my side muttering, “Will wonders never cease.” He finished attaching the wires to me and then stepped back, motioning to the lanky attendant who stood by the big machine. The attendant threw an ancient rusty metal switch.
The wires sparked and crackled and suddenly every cell in my body was drowned in a blast of pain—pain on an order I’d never experienced before, alive or dead. A deep howl I did not recognize as my own erupted from the depths of my body. My liver and kidneys were cooking. Then my torso burst into flames, which were quickly doused by one of the attendants using white foam he sprayed out of a rusted metal can, but by that time my heart had stopped. For one heavenly moment my poor soul lifted out of this tormented body and I found myself looking down from the ceiling on the stocky man and the attendant bent over the blackened, pitiful form strapped to the chair. During all this time the face at the observation window showed no emotion.
“Test results positive!” Dr. Aldrich called. What he meant was, I had passed the Kachfeldern-Rheingold-Smytherite Measure of Bioneurogenetic Integrity by dying and thereby proving myself human. So far as anyone knew, no one accused of lack of bioneurogenetic integrity had ever failed the test, a circumstance that was thought to give comfort to their families at the same time that it rid the duchy of genetic undesirables.

(to be continued tomorrow)