2015
They called it the only suicide note that any of the players had left. Imogen held it in her hands, clutched it to her chest, and then pressed her lips against it, as she had done almost every day in the two years since Jonny’s death. Because of its links to the worldwide phenomenon that was Affrayed, the note had been shown on the news, and people had tried to decipher it- the last ever communication from her husband to the world he’d left behind. Many people put forward possible explanations. Everyone had an opinion. But nobody knew. What could anybody hope to understand from a stupid picture? That’s all it was, a stupid picture on narrow ruled notepaper of stick people on top of skyscrapers. The people had their arms stretched up to the sun which was beating down on them, except instead of rays of light the sun beat down rays of weird code- 0G11ATC00G- repeated over and over, the order changing, but the letters and numbers always the same. Above the whole scene, written dark and black across the page, was the statement “I’m not Affrayed anymore”. The words had some obvious potential meanings, but people had had a go at interpreting the “code” as well. The letters A, G, C and T had been suggested to represent the four bases in a strand of DNA- adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine- that made up DNA sequences. This made no sense to her. Jonny hadn’t been a doctor, or a biologist, or anything like that. As for the zeros and ones, even she could see that they were binary sequences, but that made no sense either. Jonny hadn’t been a computer programmer, or a mathematician, or a physicist so she didn’t know why he’d draw anything full of binary code. He wasn’t sciencey like that. He had been a thinker, but he hadn’t thought about science. He thought about people, and the world. That was what he loved. It was that love which had killed him.
