Ralph A. Sperry (1944–2007)

When a story is told through one man's writings, in this case like rather sporadic journal entries, there is always some question about how much his personal perceptions have colored the "facts" which he is describing. In Ralph A. Sperry's "Status Quotient: The Carrier", this is even more so than usual. The "writer"/main character, Ancil Mekthedden, has a rare genetic disorder that makes him a regenerative. While many of us would welcome a condition whose symptoms include agelessness, immunity to disease, and rapid healing ( up to regenerating lost limbs ), because of the culture into which he is born, Ancil finds it primarily a source of shame and embarrassment, something to be hidden even from his closest friends and lovers. And this proves to have been justified when, after thousands of years of relative peacefulness and extremely low crime levels, his world erupts into a "disturbance" that has everyone killing each other and putting buildings to the torch, many with cries of "Burn the regeneratives" on their lips.

Ancil flees to the backwoods lodge of his father, once one of the most powerful men in the government, and hides from a world which he believes has completely destroyed itself. Because he had been a somewhat successful writer, he still occasionally puts down his thoughts on what paper he has left, though he is certain that they will never be read by anyone but himself, and it is in his flashbacks that we learn about his world and its ending. As the story continues, however, we become progressively less sure about the state of Ancil's mind, eventually leaving us to wonder: Was he more traumatized by the events of the disturbance than he realizes? Are the alien Imitators native to this planet using him as a subject of their mind control experiments? If a man's sanity falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

From the back cover:

Immortal... and alone.

On the entire planet of Ath, there is only one building left, and inside it is the last human being, Ancil, the only man to escape the horror which destroyed the human colonists who came to Ath thousands of years ago. Ancil is a regenerative. He can never die, but will live to see everything change with time.

Ancil is utterly, utterly alone except for the haunting legacy of the Imitators, man-like creatures whose planet this once was before the humans came and annihilated them.

Suddenly, a strange and beautiful cat arrives at Ancil's home, the first living creature he has seen for many years. But the cat is just the first of the extraordinary phenomena about to enter Ancil's life -- and before his story's over, you will wonder where the mind ends and reality begins...

( Duplicated from my Amazon review. )… (mer)