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I showed up for my appointment at four o’clock. They kept me in the waiting room a little longer than usual. My favorite nurse looked apprehensive when she came to escort me back to an examining room. “Mr. Raymond, I’ll need you to strip down to your underwear and put on this gown,” she said. She made no eye contact. “What’s with the ‘Mister Raymond,’ Jennifer? I thought we were on a first-name basis.” “I’m sorry, Mister— I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “I have a lot …more Somewhere in the middle of the twenty-third century, it became fashionable to take on a new name whenever a generation was added to one’s family. Names were increasingly a matter of personal style, used to commemorate the landmark events of one’s life, as a form of hero-worship, to curry favor with a patron, or to express one’s distinct individual taste. They became long and unwieldy, and people relied more and more frequently on initials for everyday use, if for no other reason than to keep the size of business cards manageable. Then in 2298, the poet Alonzo W. J. F. P. H. F. McKenzie started a confusing new trend when he became the first member of his generation to adopt the name of one of his noteworthy descendants. Upon the birth of his first great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, …more The other day, one of my young friends asked in a solemn tone, “Aren’t you bored after all these years?” I changed the subject. I told her about a curious experience I’d had at the park. “Last Thursday, I discovered a new shade of purple. I was walking past the driveway of the arboretum, and I noticed a flowerbed that had been freshly planted. The tiny clusters of blossoms were a purple that I’m sure I’ve never seen before in all my many years.” …more It occurred to me today that I’m not as far along as I thought. I remember a time when I dreamed of what I could do with an extra hundred years, or two hundred, or three. I would become the world’s foremost authority on nineteenth-century French literature. I would develop the patience to cook a soufflé. I would speak flawless Spanish with a perfect Castellaño accent…or with the accent of the aristocrats of Mexico City or Lima, or of the marketplace in San Juan. I would learn to ski. I would win trophies at singles tennis—in my age bracket, of course, but that’s still a worthy accomplishment at 250. I imagined that with so much time …more “I don’t know whether I would have made the choice to enter the treatment trial.” Listen to you! There’s that word again, always coming up. The idea of “choice” became a defining feature of our lives in the early years of the twenty-first century. As medical knowledge—especially in the field of gerontology—moved forward in quantum leaps, we came to understand better the role that certain choices play in our destinies. To quit smoking, to enter a treatment program for addiction, to seek an optimal weight, to enroll in the clinical trial for a radical new anti-aging therapy…but I’m getting ahead of myself. These aren’t the choices I wanted to talk about. It’s easy to see …more Dr. Everett Clinton Raines, Jub.D., couldn’t find a single soul who enjoyed cleaning toilets. So 156 years after taking his doctorate and 27 years after playing a substantial role in the establishment of the Freude Three colony, where he remained a thought leader and a sort of elder-among-elders, he returned to academia, this time to pursue a degree—or rather to acquire practical expertise, if you asked him—in robotic engineering. This wasn’t the first time that Dr. Raines had reinvented himself, but the stakes had never been higher. At risk—the very founding principle of Freude Three: the premise that in a sufficiently large closed system of fully actualized human beings, if every citizen were free to follow his or her joy, all discord would disappear, and a utopia—a heaven-on-earth—would naturally evolve into being. In the early days, …more To be honest with you, I don’t make a lot of wishes. Somewhere near the age of seven centuries, I realized that I already had the power to bring into existence anything I desired. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not saying I can defy the physical laws of the universe to make the impossible possible. But around that time, I began to realize that I could mold my own desires to conform near-perfectly to everything that could be. And remember: the limits on what’s possible aren’t what they used to be. But you asked me to make three wishes, so here goes. Number one, I wish I could forget the wrongs that I never had an opportunity to make right. There aren’t many of them. When you live as long as I have …more Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the ones who didn’t make it to “escape velocity.” About my parents, who were already past their seventies when the longevity therapies were introduced. About my brother, one of the last victims of cancer, before we understood how it could be turned off and on at will. I think most often about my baby sister. She couldn’t overcome her moral objections to life prolongation, and so I watched her age catch up with mine, and then I saw her overtake me, grow old, and finally die of a disease that had been all but eradicated in our generation. We were of the generation that came to be called “The Millennials,” both because of the timing of our births and because we were the first humans to live a thousand years. |
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