“The beeps and alarms, stethoscopes and scrubs, these things seen in movies that couldn’t possibly be real, only images made up in a director’s mind of what sick people should look like. He passed room after room, peaking ever so nonchalantly into them. Voyeuristic glances, praying to see person after person who was worse off than he was. It was not schadenfreude, there was no pleasure; it was its own behavior, something that drove him to see the medical misfortune of others with a curiosity of how far life will go, wondering what will be the breaking point. It was a vaccination for death, little bits and pieces creeping into his body, terrified of the whole, trying to get a taste to stow away for later when the disease finally comes.
In the end, we all will lose the battle. We are electric. Currents run through our neurons. Sodium and potassium pumping back and forth, negative to positive and back again. One day, the system will break down, the charges will dissipate, a computer unplugged. There are nothing but elements, atoms that conveniently sit in the right place at the right time and we decide that it’s consciousness. There is no discernible difference between the EKG monitor and the person it’s connected to. A long list of if/then statements. We are animals who have perfected cause and effect, computers who think that there is a language more sophisticated than binary, but your eyes are either open or closed, your arm is bent or straight, you are either alive or dead. The lottery is always fifty-fifty, either you win or you lose.”

This excerpt from The Captain of the Crew comes from the main character at the hospital his son is being treated in. He is feeling hopeless and tired and takes a moment, while walking through the hallway, to reflect on the futility of life.
Working in the medical field, especially on an ambulance, we see people at every stage in life. From fit, bucking, twenty-year-old men to decrepit, unresponsive, nursing home patients to pronouncements of the dead in their homes. Looking over the dead body of a person that you don’t know quickly reminds you how simple life is. The more you study the inner workings of cells and organ systems, the more you see how binary people are. Everything we do is based on cause and effect. If this then that. You learn when you are a child that if you push a glass off a table, the glass breaks. From that point on, your brain has coded the algorithm, and for the rest of your life, you cycle through all the algorithms that you have coded.
There are theories and debates, mostly out of fear, of where those algorithms, our consciousness, goes when we die, but at the cellular level there is no consciousness. The neurons in our brain are no more self aware than the software in a computer. Once the electrical system runs out of fuel, the system shuts down. I feel lucky to have the algorithms I have. That I have trained my algorithms to make up new algorithms and call it an imagination that I use to write. At the end of it all, I will run out of fuel and those codes and systems will dissipate into nothing. When we erase a computer, we don’t wonder where the pictures of our friends or the essays from college go. They are just simply gone. We will be just simply gone. And that’s okay.