ELDER CRUISER: V

© 2012 by John Shirley

Voices echoing through a pitch black cavern, phasing in and out of audibility...

“I don’t think there’s any doubt he’s dying...” A man’s voice in the darkness. Someone Len hadn’t heard before. “...don’t think we’ll get him into suspension in time, and the ambulance—another twenty minutes minimum. He’s fairly old anyway and—”

The white security guard interrupted, “Mr. Burstein says—”

A woman interrupted him. “I don’t care what he says—he can fire me if he wants!” Len recognized the woman’s voice. Anne. His Anne. “I’m taking care of this man right here and now. Just get the hell out of research!”

“Ms Feldman, hey—listen, we also got to think about deniability, he’s been in this lab, whatever he saw here, he can’t be talking about it out there.”

“I’ll be responsible for that too,” she said.

The unknown man’s voice once more. “You can’t do it without the program’s approval and you can’t get that without using an account—and you don’t have an account to use.”

“We do have one.” Anne’s voice.

A pause. Then his father’s voice, almost whining. “It would give it all to him. And I’ve come so far with this, Anne...”

“Just...” Anne’s voice was fading. “Let’s lift him up on the...” Len was too weak to hear the rest. Strange to think of being too weak simply to hear something. Wasn’t that almost the definition of being dead? Wasn’t that...

“I’ve got him stabilized,” Anne said. “I don’t know for how long.”

If I’m hearing Anne, I’m probably not dead.

Len opened his eyes, and through a blurring filminesss he saw he was in a kind of coffin, with the lid partly tilted back. Sarcophagus.

“Anne...Listen...” His father’s voice. How was that possible. Wasn’t his father dead? “I don’t know how I feel about it...I mean, I’m sorry about the deception but...”

Anne stepped into Len’s line of sight, smiling down at him. The sight of her face struck through him. He was seeing her now—and decades ago. Seeing her hurt expression as he pulled his hand from hers in the vertical farm. Farther back, after their third date: Anne waking up beside him, a sweet, almost maternal look on her face, something like the expression she had now...

She squeezed his hand, her touch strong and warm. “You awake? Your heart gave out, but we’ve got it going again. I don’t think you have a lot of time, though, Leonard, unless we do something radical. You want to see if we can get you to the ER? I’m not sure you’d survive the transition, hon.”

He shook his head. Managed to speak through a throat that felt coated in dust. Rasping, “Stay here with you.” Christ. I’m talking like a four year old.

“Barry, listen...” She was looking at Len’s father, her voice charged with a soft urgency. “Your own son is lying here, dying of old age. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Of course it does,” Barry said earnestly.

Yeah, right, Len thought. Give him a Daytime Emmy. Were there still Daytime Emmys?

“We have one treatment we can give,” Anne said, gently. “Barry—if I don’t give him your last one, he dies.”

“But—I started my treatment already. You said there’d be a telomerase cascade...” Now he sounded sincere.

“Yes. If you don’t have the last treatment, you’ll start to age, right away. And it’ll happen at an accelerated pace.”

“And then...what? I’ll die? Is my death really the right thing, here? That’s...not fair.”

Len felt a bone-deep weakness creeping up on him, threatening to make his limbs crumble like old timbers with dry rot. Pain was welling up like a slow thick fountain of cold, toxic fluid in his chest. But all that was secondary to an instinctive, visceral sense of pure rejection. There was something primeval in the feeling. His father had rejected his own blood, trading it for vanity.

Len could barely speak. And if he could speak—what would he say to all this? He could never say, “No dad, you should die—not me...”

“Maybe we should ask Len,” Anne suggested, almost too softly to hear.

Don’t do that. Trying to answer that question might kill him. He wanted time to talk to Anne a little more...

He took a deep breath, and made himself speak. “Anne...”

Even that was too much. He fell back into darkness...

Len blinked, cleared his eyes, and stared at the slanting bars of translucent gold, scintillating through the window. He focused, saw that the slanting goldness was simply sunlight and the scintillation was dust particles churning in the light. But the sun seemed unusually vibrant, almost solid. He could feel it humming, inside him...

“You awake, Len?” Anne asked.

He turned his head. Was surprised when the motion didn’t hurt.

She was smiling at him, sitting next to his bed in the clinic recovery room. Soothing pale blue walls. Digital seascapes, the sea moving gently within the frame.

“He...my dad—he gave me the...” He was surprised at the sound of his own voice. It didn’t have that old man’s huskiness anymore.

“Yes.” She looked away, compressed her lips.

“My dad did this for me? He gave up his last treatment to save me?”

She cleared her throat. Sounded almost convincing as she said, “Yes he did.”

Len looked at her. Then he shook his head. “You never had a gift for lying. Lots of talents, you. Not that one. What’d you really do?”

She sighed, and shrugged. “You’re right—he didn’t choose you over himself. I chose. After I did it, he asked me to tell you he’d let you have it—so he could go out with you forgiving him.” She smiled ruefully. “I got fired for it. I’m out of a job. But I gave you his last treatment...”

She shrugged again, reached out and took his hands between hers. Her touch was alive, almost electrical. And he saw that his hands, in hers, were not those of a very old man, nor a very young one. “All the wrong people seem to get rejuvenation. I wanted something for us, Len. We paid our dues.”

Len turned his hands so that her fingers slipped within his.

“Listen...have I said I’m sorry, Anne? I’ve spent the whole second half of my life being sorry I was so stupid...” The touch of her hand in his was as intimate as anything he’d ever felt.

Len waved at the nurse supervisor, and strode past the vital care admission desk, into the hospice hallway. Mahela didn’t recognize him, with the partial rejuvenation.

His father wasn’t in the same room Len had been in—he was on the other side of the building. This window looked to the west and they could see the mercuric expanse of the sea, a quarter mile away, gnawing at the eroding buildings of sunken Santa Monica. Barry could watch the past sinking.

Anne was already there, seated by dad’s bed, holding his hand—holding Barry Winniver’s withered, age spotted hand.

You can’t interfere with stage three, unless you start the stage over. And Barry hadn’t any way to pay for the third stage, once Anne had given it to Len.

The reaction had set in; the telomerase cascade had come; the geriatric regression...

“You look good, son,” said the withered old man, lying in the bed. His voice a croak. But the ironic smile was bright enough. That Winniver smile.

“Thanks.” He had nothing to say that wasn’t awkward. He knew there was no reason he should feel guilty—but he felt vaguely guilty anyway. “I feel good.”

“You can’t get Len all the way to full retread, Anne?” Barry Winniver asked, looking out the window. Barry, “Zach”—Leonard Winniver’s father.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t get away with that—didn’t have access. It was hard enough to get him off the hook for breaking in to Jensen...”

Len put his hand on his father’s bony shoulder. He could feel the aging, the deterioration under his hand. He was stunned at how quickly the reaction had set in—the regression. He took a breath, and tried out his own acting. “You sorry you gave it to me, dad?”

Barry Winniver shook his head. “I was having trouble being a retread. Couldn’t quite live with it.” A weak smile. “So to speak. Maybe ‘Zack’ did drop a hint or two to you on purpose...” He shrugged. “I wanted you to have it, son. Even before you showed up at Jensen...”

Len nodded. Not bad, for a sick old man.

Dad cleared his throat. “I just wish...you could have had it all. Full treatment.”

Len patted his father’s shoulder. “I’m just fine with being forty-five years old, again—biologically forty-five. Thanks, dad. I know it wasn’t easy. I’ve been there. I know how hard it is to face...” Least he could do was let the old man off the hook.

Barry glanced at Anne. “He won’t lose it all of a sudden, like me?”

She shook her head, her lips pressed together. “Nope. Len will age at a normal rate, here on out.” She stood up, patting the old man’s hand, and turned to Len, and said, “We should go, Len. We’ve got a three hour drive down the coast. Your dad needs rest.”

“Sure.”

Len’s father squinted blearily up at his son, frowning, foggily puzzled. It was as if Barry Winniver wasn’t entirely sure how he’d ended up like this—their positions reversed. Not long ago he’d been the strong young man at the bedside. “I don’t know,” his dad said aloud. “I don’t know. But...” Turning his head to gaze again out the window at the old buildings lapped by the sea. “...I’m sorry it took me so long to do the right thing.”

Barry's rheumy old eyes filled with tears. His best performance. Or maybe there was something real in it.

“That’s all right dad.” Len smiled. And continued the pretense. “You saved me in the end.”

“Well, you two...should go,” the old man murmured. “I need to rest.”

Len reached out, and squeezed his father’s hand. Just once.

“Goodbye, dad,” he said.

~ end ~




ELDER CRUISER

by John Shirley







Be Sure To Return
~Next Friday, the 13th~
when we present

the short tale
SATAN'S DOG
by Gil James Bavel



Only on
the FREEZINE of
Fantasy and Science
Fiction

ELDER CRUISER: IV

© 2012 by John Shirley

Once more he was tempted to confrontation. He could tap Anne on the shoulder, demand to know what was going on. But if he did, all she had to do was brush a finger over a corner of the screen on her workstation, and the data would vanish. Considering the high security trappings here, the secrecy—she might well lie to him. Or shrug him off.

Len toggled the elder cruiser back, then triggered it into opening up. Trying not to groan aloud—barely managing it—he climbed out, keeping a hand on the cruiser to steady himself. Then he adjusted its manual controls, hit the GO button, sending the unoccupied elder cruiser zipping around at random as he stepped to one side of the door to the adjoining lab, leaning against the wall. Dizzy, but determined. The elder cruiser was banging into things in the lab with an apparent air of anarchistic glee. Crash, a table; thump, a wall. Crash, another table. It was making more noise than he’d intended. Going to bring the guards...

It brought Anne first, as he’d hoped. She came striding through the door, muttering—jumping back to avoid the cruiser. “What the hell is this doing in here!” She didn’t see him pressed to the wall in the corner, behind her. He slipped through the door to the adjoining lab, glancing back—seeing her trying to turn off the cruiser. It darted perversely out of her reach. She cursed, and told it to stop instantly and it ignored her. Wrong voice.

He chuckled, and limped unsteadily over to the transparent sarcophagus, a queasy suspicion forming as he looked at “Zach,” tubes feeding into his nude body. Len turned to the display in the workstation. Blocks of color floated in the air, each one holding a file. He touched the nearest. A name came up on it. He squinted, read the name over three times, and his heart seemed to crash around in his chest like the elder cruiser in the lab.

He touched another block labeled restoration unit maintenance. He flicked a finger into End Program. A window popped up.

Warning. Your Subject Will Awaken. Continue? Yes/No

Kind of reckless of him to press yes. So...Yes.

The high-tech sarcophagus clicked, and whirred, and a series of lights along its base went yellow. Its upper half tilted slowly back, opening, releasing a cryptic smell—a concentration of that background smell mixing the humanly organic with chemical harshness. The man in the translucent sarcophagus stirred, slowly waking.

Len watched, keeping a hand on the workstation for balance. Vaguely aware the banging had stopped in the other room.

The vertigo was returning...black dots swarmed and receded...his knees wobbled...He’d pushed it too hard. He felt close to collapse. Another energizer would probably kill him.

“I’ve called security...” Anne’s voice, behind him.

Len turned—saw her standing there clumsily holding a high-end taser in her hand.

Pointing it at him. He shook his head. “You ever fire one of those, Anne? The one time I wanted to take you shooting, when we lived together, you wouldn’t go. ‘Course, that was actual guns. You remember I had a rifle? You always hated it...”

She stared—and lowered the taser. “Leonard?”

“What’s left of me.”

She let her mouth drop open. Then she raised the taser again. “No—you’re not.” She nodded toward Zach. “That’s Leonard...So who the hell are you?”

His turn to gape. He stared at Zach. The kid did look like him.

Zach was pretending to be him.

He shook his head at her. Felt his heart trying to knock its way from his ribcage. “Anne...that’s—he said he was my nephew. He’s—if you think he’s me, then he’s pretending to be me...He’s...I don’t know, a clone of me, uploaded or something.”

“Oh yes?” She snorted. “A clone? When he came to me first he was an old man. He’s a retread now. That is Leonard Winniver—rejuvenated. It’s...”

Oh, no. “He was old, when he came to you?” Rejuvenated...

Len hobbled closer to the sarcophagus. He looked closely at “Zach”—and thought about his childhood. Picturing his father’s face. “Oh Lord. He’s made some facial changes so it’s not too obvious, but...”

His father’s funeral had been closed coffin. They’d thought it was vanity...

She lowered the taser again, turned to look at Len. She gasped, put a hand over her mouth. “You are Len. You are! Oh my god, you have to be. Look at you.” She pointed at ‘Zach.’ “So...who’s that?”

He had to steady himself on the edge of the workstation. “That’s...I think it’s my father. A pretty damned good actor, after all. Pretending to be me, for you, because he knew...about us. And...” Len had to take a long, steadying breath.

She reached out and touched his face, making him shiver. A pleasant shiver. “You have blood on your face!”

“Do I? Oh yes. A little...mishap. Nothing serious.”

“How’d you ever get in?”

Len shrugged. “The roof and.... Anne—this man...”

“You don’t really think it’s your father...Your father is dead.”

“I never saw him die. He wanted to be alone, when he went. He said. Which—seemed strange to me. And then—this guy turned up in my hospice. He said he was my nephew—and I saw him as my nephew. Because—he was acting. Anne—” He touched the sarcophagus. “What is this thing he’s in?”

She seemed to vacillate. Then her shoulders sagged. “That ‘thing’ he’s in...Um—is a nano immersion unit. MicroRNA ‘walkers’—the unit guides cell repair nanos. Telomerase rebuilds, cell regeneration, RNA reset. Cell by cell repair.”

The supine man groaned, and muttered. The man’s voice a croak. “Lenny...”

She stared at Len, trying to process it. “You’re Lenny...and he’s...”

Len nodded. “My father...”

She stepped closer, absently touched her tongue, used the tip of her finger to wipe blood off Len’s face. “Lenny...”

Len turned to look at the open “sarcophagus.” The man in the immersion unit opened his eyes. He looked at Len, his gaze clearing, sharpening. They knew one another. He cleared his throat. “Thought I heard your voice.”

“Dad?” Len shook his head. “Oh Jesus. What did you do?”

Blinking rapidly, the man who’d played the part of Zach Winniver sat up in the sarcophagus. Plastic tubes disconnected themselves from his limbs, and slithered away. Where they’d connected to him his skin looked slightly bruised but unbroken. He swallowed. “Oh God. I feel sick...” His voice was froggish.

“You may as well get out of the unit, Barry,” Anne said leadenly. “The process is interrupted. It’s a mess now. Going to take time to reset. If it can be done at all. You’re going to feel shitty for awhile.” Her lips trembled. “You seemed so much like Lenny. You really are a lying son of a bitch.”

Barry Winniver grimaced. “I guess I am.”

“He’s an actor,” Len said, ruefully. “You study video of me from late in my life, dad?”

His father smiled faintly and shrugged. “Yeah.”

Len felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “You had to be hiding a hell of a lot of money. You faked your death—you let me shrivel up so you could...” Len blinked away tears. “You know, dad—that’s not the arrangement people usually have with nature.”

Anne sighed, opened the lower panel on the sarcophagus, helped Barry Winniver out. He seemed as unsteady as a very old man, though he appeared physically young, perfectly formed.

“I...nearly did die,” dad said. “I was sick, genuinely sick, close to dying.”

“He was in semi-suspension for years,” Anne said. She found a white bathrobe in a metal drawer under the sarcophagus, and helped Barry into it. She moved about methodically. As if she had to do something, keep busy.

Len tried to imagine his father engineering the whole thing. “Semi-suspension...” The technology slowed the body down to less than a crawl. Iced but not frozen, chemically treated, a suspended animation so people could wait for medical breakthroughs. And it seemed the ultimate breakthrough had come—for those with the money. “He had some kind of deposit with this company?”

She nodded. “Jensen brought him out of it,” she went on, methodically massaging Barry’s arms. “When it was ready for him.”

“But—what name was it under? Barry? Leonard? Zach? What?”

“Um—Suspension Patient three thousand...something. Their original names are commonly fudged. Just, you know, special bank numbers, that sort of thing. People slated for rejuvenation often don’t want it out. You find out though—I mean, I recognized Donald Trump because my aunt used to work for him, and when I was a kid—”

“Who? You mean the guy with ‘that thing on his head’? Had some casinos, a TV show?”

“Yeah. Pretended to die. Like...” She gave Barry a look of mild disgust. “...and, you know, they come back young as someone else or someone related. Like your ‘nephew’ here or like Bloomberg did. Or Donald Rudock—”

“No way. Rudock? The creepy old multimedia billionaire? Come on, he died years ago!”

She shook her head. “Rejuvenated. He’s a retread under another name...”

“But—” Len shook his head in sick disbelief. “I mean, Bloomberg wasn’t…isn’t…a bad guy...but Costin and Rudock…it sounds as if some of the worst people get rejuvenated.”

Barry and Anne nodded, simultaneously—Barry with a look of mild regret. “You got that right,” Anne said sadly. “Who can afford rejuvenation? Some of the worst people around. Michael Costin “junior”—what a jerk he was to work with. The most commercial, narcissistic entertainers. The greediest tycoons. They don’t want average people to know about it, demanding rejuvenation so they come back...as someone slightly different. But the same.”

“So...” Len rubbed his throbbing head. He badly wanted a tall glass of beer, right then. With a whiskey chaser. Though it might kill him. “So we’ll have some of the worst people from big media and politics and business—around for hundreds of years, maybe thousands? Just getting worse and worse...”

She whined. “When you put it like that...”

Barry chuckled. “It was Don Rudock who told me about it when I did some work for Tox News. All this...” He waved at the lab. “This has been quietly in the works for a long time...Retreads, Lenny,” added Len’s dad sadly, voice still hoarse. His dad, Barry Winniver.

Who was a hundred-and-seven—who looked like a young man in his twenties. “That’s the slang.”

Dad put a hand to his mouth, looking like he was trying to keep from throwing up. “Starting over, like me. I’m starting over as Zach Winniver.” He smiled ruefully. “The ‘young actor.’ My own grand-nephew.”

Len looked at Anne—and saw she was silently crying. But she was looking at him as she wept—not at his father.

“I’m sorry, Len,” his father said, finally. “I thought about arranging it for you. But it was you or me.”

“Yep, that would have decided it right there,” Len said, his head whirling.

“The money wasn’t there for us both and—I just couldn’t face what was coming. It was a chance to do my life right. Do my career right... And—I wanted to see you off. Say goodbye. As Zach. Least I could do.”

“So guilt brought you to me. Visiting me in the hospice. Pretending to be Zach.” Len squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again, trying to clear his vision. Those leaping black dots leapt away, and back again. “Was it maybe a little penitence, dad? Punishing yourself? You were going to just let me die. I might have said okay, anyhow, if you’d talked to me about it, asked if I minded you getting the treatment and not me...”

“I couldn’t talk about it. We’re all sworn to secrecy. The whole thing is...not quite legal. It’s unlicensed, and it’s just a big, fat secret. If people knew, in a crowded world....and—Len—the process is unbelievably expensive. Astronomical. A billion for most people. I had to use every last dollar...”

“And when you woke up—there still wasn’t quite enough money. You found out Anne was here...and you played her...” Len gazed in dull amazement at his father.

Barry Winniver nodded. “I didn’t have the whole fee, but...I thought she might help me...She got me the suspension and...”

Len looked at her with a sudden shock. “You’ve had the treatment too...”

She shrugged, wiping away tears. “Only one stage. I’m not fully rejuvenated. The company won’t let us do stage two without paying. I can age normally from here but—if I wanted to be any younger...physically younger...there’s stage three—it’s got to be done right. Or you don’t stay that young for long. Your dad needed to finish that one, Len—and you interrupted it! You can go one stage without a second but if you do two stages...” She fluttered her hands. “There are risks if you go that far. Big risks.” Her lips buckled. “Len— I really, really thought he was you. I wanted... I just felt...you were the love of my life and you got so distant from me, and you just—let me go. And he seemed so much like you. He acted so much like you, but...nicer.”

“He acted.” The room was spinning, faster and faster. “Oh God. Dad—you seduced her! You—”

The door to the hall clicked, and swung inward, and two big, heavily armed men in private security uniforms came in, one of them looking like he was from Tonga, the other one palely blond and tanned. “That’s him, Charlie,” the Tongan said. “From the roof.”

The cloud of black spots was swarming angrily through the room. A buzzing noise became a roar in Len’s ears. He felt profoundly weak. Empty. The black speckles formed into one enormous cloud that consumed the world.

As he fell face down, Len thought, Is this what dying’s like?

Click Here
for the Conclusion

ELDER CRUISER:III

© 2012 by John Shirley

Jensen Genetics was a sprawling ten story building in Century City, made mostly of translucent panels that showed only human silhouettes inside, up to the ninth floor. The tenth floor, though glassy, was entirely opaque. Shadows of people moved about the first nine floors. Len watched from across the street as Zach and Anne joined the shadows, vanishing into their translucent box, quickly indistinguishable from the other shades. The obese were few now—everyone was about the same shape, except for height and voluptuousness. Anne didn’t bother with breast enhancement. Her sensuality was somehow always exactly modulated, at one with her intelligence. He saw her, in his mind’s eye, a young woman...

I’m living in the past. That was so long ago. He was getting all mixed up about then and now. Not a good sign.

And Len was tired. He’d have to risk another energizer, if he was going to continue with this. He took the little prescription vial out of a medical panel on the side of the cruiser, lifted his visor, drank the citrusy fluid down. He felt lighter, more optimistic, almost immediately. But then came a heaviness in his chest, an attenuated streak of pain in his left arm. Just a warning—his heart was laboring to keep up with the designer stimulants.

What of it? Suppose he did die, bopping around in his cruiser? Wasn’t that better than gasping goodbye to some stranger in the cotton-lined box of a hospice room?

No turning back, Len. He directed the elder cruiser up to the front door. It opened for him and he rolled inside.

The lobby had been some architect’s experiment with unsymmetrical angles; it reminded him of “the crazy-walls room” of a funhouse he’d been in as a boy. Which he hadn’t thought about in years. Another descent into the past...

To his surprise, a living person was sitting at the reception desk. A stocky black man in a security guard’s uniform, a pleasant expression. “Help you, sir?”

“A real person, at the Jensen front desk,” Len said, rolling nearer. “Classy.”

“I’m as real as they come, sir.”

“As real as they come. We won’t digress into the ambiguity of that. I’d like to see Anne Feldman...”

“You have an appointment, sir?”

“Not exactly.”

The security guard grunted doubtfully. “I can call up, but she’s in Research and when they’re in Research they pretty much don’t see anybody outside the department. Your name, sir?”

Len opened his mouth to tell him—then closed it again. He’d been clandestine till now. If she was with Zach, she’d mention it to him. This is weird, my ex is downstairs, I haven’t seen him for years. And Zack would have a chance to smokescreen whatever he was up to.

More senescent paranoia. Dramatizing. He should go back to the hospice and get some rest. Len said, “I’ll just call her. See you later, ‘real deal’.”

The guard smirked—just a flicker of that, Poor confused old character look. “Yes, sir. Later on.”

Len wheeled around, glanced at the directory on the wall. RESEARCH was on the tenth floor. Naturally that was the opaque one.

He trundled out the door, down the street, still feeling energized, renewed, more alive than he had in years. Tempted to get out of the elder cruiser and walk around. He wasn’t supposed to walk more than a few feet except with the physical therapists. Too dangerous, they said. And he was slow and stiff and brittle. Maybe fall over and break something. He’d had his bones re-knit a few years ago but he’d probably lost calcium since then...Old age is absurd, he thought. Why did nature bother with it? Why the slow fade? Why didn’t the rose simply drop its petals all in one instant?

He looked up at a soft droning sound from overhead—and saw a group of Asian tourists flying over in a convertible Casimir Car. The car drove itself, whipping by, the tourists waving, probably on their way to look at the sunken city of Santa Monica...

More than an hour getting the private Casimir tour car, setting up his elder cruiser in the back of the vehicle. Zach might’ve left Jensen by now. The tourist grid guided the sleek, glossy white, wheelless car about two hundred feet over Santa Monica Boulevard, heading west at a moderate speed. The convertible was open; the wind fluttered Len’s thin gray hair. It was chilly up here—he enjoyed that. They were protected from temperature variations in the hospice.

He was distantly aware of the car’s telenet chattering. “The Army Corps of Engineers denies that the dike around Manhattan is likely to break in the coming New York monsoons...” The city unreeled slowly beneath him and he thought: Going to need another energizer soon. It might kill you. Yeah, what’s your point? Got to die somewhere. Might be a good thing to check out floating above the city, the car carrying his dead body slowly over Los Angeles. Finally running low on power, settling in some random place on the tourist grid. Perhaps on Hollywood Boulevard, where his dad had a star on the sidewalk...

“On your left,” said the car, “is Jensen Genetics...ahead on the right—”

“Slow down!” he told the car. “Independent course...” He was restricted on how far he could take the vehicle off the pre-set tourist grid—the manual said it would divert only two hundred yards. “Uh....north, due north...now a few degrees east...slow down...very slow...”

The car turned, edged over to the roof of the Jensen building. He saw no surveillance cameras on the roof, but they could be there; hard to tell with all the solar panels, the glare off the spray-metal roofing, and some sort of air conditioning unit bulking in the center of the roof. “Due south, two miles per hour,” he told the car. It obediently drifted slowly south, bobbing a little on its cushion of Casimir force as it sensed the resistance of the roof about eight feet below. “Good. Right here—set down on the roof.”

“I’m sorry, that is against the rules of the rental,” the car told him, its voice human and friendly and reasonable.

Hell. You couldn’t argue with them. “Can we get lower?”

“That is against the...”

“Okay, okay—we’ll just pass slowly over the roof...keep going.” The door of the car wouldn’t open high above the street—but it might mistake a roof for the ground.

Len clicked off the restraint holding his cruiser in place, and looked over the side. The car was passing over the external air conditioning unit. His heart was thudding painfully. His hands felt numb. You senile old dope. Don’t do it. You’ll be a laughing stock, if you live...or if you don’t. He hesitated, licking his peeling lips...

On the dashboard telenet, a small 3D figure gestured from a podium. “Mark Bloomberg, the new, fresh-faced mayor of New York City, a young man who is closely related to the Michael Bloomberg who was mayor at the start of the 21st Century...”

No more stalling. Do it or get out of here.

He thumbed the elder cruiser onto manual, opened the car door, and pressed forward. The cruiser whirred, as if anxious, but obediently rolled out of the car—falling for a split second, clanging onto the top of the big boxy air conditioning unit—a bone-rattling thump. His jaws clacked painfully together, his back whiplashed in the cruiser. But it stayed upright on the air conditioner box.

The car drifted on, murmuring about unauthorized exits, seeking a parking space. His elder cruiser wobbled in place. The air conditioner had a slanting duct on one side, angling like a ramp down into the building. But damned steep... and he was rolling very slowly toward it. He thought of telling the cruiser to stop. But then what? Stay up here till someone found him?

The edge came closer and he saw way down was steeper than he’d thought. This wasn’t going to work. This—The cruiser tipped over forward, the metal-sheathed roof rushed up at him.

Couldn’t have been unconscious more than a few moments, really. Could he? Painfully lifting his head, Len made out that he was still in the cruiser, lying face down on the roof—but tilted, the back of the cruiser still partly on the air conditioner.

His nose was bleeding. He could taste the blood.

The cruiser could straighten up from horizontal—but not angled this way, with its wheels higher than his head. Too much weight pushing downward. He was going to have to get out. He looked for the flying car—couldn’t see it. The car would report “misuse” and they’d be out looking for him. Laughingstock.

“Cruiser, open up.” No response. Then he remembered it was on manual. He felt along the chassis, found the tab, clicked it over to responsive. “Cruiser, open up!” Something clicked, and loosened around his middle. He reached out, grabbed a bit of vertical vent piping, and pulled himself forward. “Shit!” The movement hurt like a son of a bitch. He hoped he hadn’t smashed a disk. He was pretty sure his insurance wouldn’t cover this.

He laughed, and winced at the pain of laughing, and kept inching forward. Pulling up onto his elbows, doing a feeble push-up, dragging his legs out of the cruiser, getting to his knees, pausing to rest.

The pain throbbed, reverberating in his joints. But no bones were broken or he’d never have gotten this far.

Feeling dizzy, Len took a deep breath, and the dizziness cleared. He crept around on his hands and knees to the cruiser, and got a grip on it, used it to lever himself up, just managing to stand. Only one groan escaped him as he stood there, trembling on his wobbly legs. He’d really let himself go. Eighty-seven was supposed to be the new sixty or something, wasn’t it? But with the toxic load of his generation, lots of elderly people were barely maintaining...

He found himself swung about in another wave of dizziness. He steadied himself against the whirlpool tug of vertigo. The pain was mostly in his neck. Odd how the twinge almost seemed to support him—as if it were keeping him awake.

“Okay, cruiser. Let’s see if you’re broken,” he told it. “Restore to vertical.”

“Everyone nearby stand clear,” it said.

A panel opened in its front section; its wheels shifted and locked. It extruded a strut, did its own pushup, then jerked upright. The panel closed; the front section hummed invitingly open. He eased himself into it, and reached for the medicine...

Thinking: Suppose there’s no door into the building from up here?

But there was.

The cruiser could go down stairs, the articulated wheels doing a lock-and-walk. But at the bottom of the stairs, it stopped, flummoxed by the small space. The door handle was to his left, not easily in reach. The cruiser couldn’t turn in this cramped space—nor could this model turn a doorknob.

Len nearly pulled his left arm from its socket, straining out to twist the handle, but at last got the door open, and the cruiser drove into the warm, carpeted hallway of the tenth floor. He felt light-headed from the painkillers, and it was a good thing he wasn’t having to drive the cruiser himself. It smelled of raw chemicals in here, and something else; something mysteriously organic. This would be the top floor—and that’s where Research was. A door on the left was marked only 1023. He heard faint voices from the other side—couldn’t make out what they said.

He stopped at the door, pushed at it. Locked. There was no knob on the door—there was a badge scanner, and a combination pad. He had neither badge nor combination...

“I don’t know, just some kind of alert from the roof,” someone said, down the blank white hall.

“Crap,” Len muttered, under his breath. He drove the cruiser to another door across from the lab, this one with a knob. It opened—it was a large, long utility closet. He rolled in, closed the door behind him, was suddenly in deep darkness. In a closet...

If Mahela could see me now, he thought, he’d put me in advanced dementia watch.

Footsteps were barely audible on the carpet outside the door. He sat there, breathing hard, suddenly very much aware that his vertigo was back, and the aches were still there, just muted. The darkness seemed to thicken and whirl around him. His stomach twitched.

“Door to the roof’s open...” came a voice from the hall.

“So we’ll check up there.”

He waited a full minute, then said, “Night lights.” The lights on his elder cruiser came on, near the floor. The long rectangular closet was empty—no, there was something in the shadows off to his right. After a moment his adjusting eyes delineated a janitor bot. It was outdated, bulky, shaped like a saltshaker, with a cluster of clumsy jointed metal arms—prompting another memory from his childhood—some wicked television robot. Not exactly but...almost.

He could just make out the brand name on the bottom. Grist Industries. Outdated tech—someone was cutting corners at Jansen. Basically the same bot they’d had doing basic maintenance at Vertical when he’d retired.

The same? He muttered to the cruiser, rolled over to the bot. He said, “Janitor: activate, maintenance.”

No response. He reached around the janitor’s back. There it was—he flicked the switch, and a diode winked on like a green star on the front of the bot. A fuzzy, plainly artificial voice—very out-of-date indeed—said, “Un-scheduled wo-ork?”

“Yes,” he said. “Room ten-twenty-three needs maintenance.”

“There is an ob-struct-ion.”

“That would be me. You’re not the only one who thinks so. Cruiser—back up, wait till I open the door, then into the hall.”

The cruiser backed up to the door, he opened it and rolled through, looking for the security guards. No one there. The janitor followed, then rolled briskly past him to Room 1023, and made a humming sound within itself. The door clicked, and swung open.

Len just managed to follow the janitor into Research 1023 before the door shut.

As he entered the lab, looking around at the arcane equipment, he felt dreamlike, surveying the murmuring consoles, the colorful DNA-decodes unfurling in holotanks, brushed steel panels holding up what seemed milkily-transparent, high-tech sarcophagi—deliberately styled to be reminiscent of Egyptian sculpture.

There was an adjoining lab room, the door standing open; someone, just out of sight, was humming a vague tune in there. Didn’t he know that tune? Wasn’t it Trust me, Always Trust Me, by “The Whispers”? Anne had loved that band.

Len put his cruiser on manual, and rolled it slowly, very slowly, toward that open door.

He got close enough to see Anne, in a long white lab coat, her back to him, standing about four yards away, close beside another semi-transparent sarcophagus, fingers fluttering over a small workstation; alternating between a keyboard and flicking her hands in the air over its sensors to move blocks of data.

He could see through the slightly glazed, transparent material of the sarcophagus-like container. A man lay naked in it, stretched out on his back, apparently unconscious. The man was his grand-nephew. Or the person who claimed to be his grand-nephew. The man calling himself Zachary Winniver.

The family resemblance was stronger than ever. It made him shiver. Too much like seeing himself in a coffin.

Cloning, maybe? And was “Zach” his clone?

~Click Here~
for part IV

ELDER CRUISER: II

© 2012 by John Shirley

“Mr. Winniver? Where exactly do you imagine you’re going?”

It was the Nursing Caretaker himself, Mahela—in person, a hulking physical presence right there in the hallway, blocking the Elder Cruiser. Mahela was a wide-bodied, dark skinned man, a slight South Asian accent. He wore the traditional white uniform but he had melanin-fades of family scenes printed on his neck and forearms, silhouette images woven into a lacework of faces and gestures. Moving tattoos and melanin fades were among the things Len had finally gotten used to—like flying police cars and The Execution Channel. Getting old was increasingly like moving to another country entirely, one that made up new customs every couple of years.

“Going for a spin in my elder cruiser,” Len said. “Cruise the young women. The usual salacious old man thing. I’ll behave. ‘Look, don’t touch.’”

Mahela shook his head emphatically. “You haven’t got the strength to be driving around in that thing for any reason. Certainly not that reason! Your heart is giving out, Mr.Winniver. We want you to be comfortable when...if anything...” Mahela pursed his lips, looking for a delicate way to phrase it.

Len snorted. “You should have all your euphemisms down by now, Mahela. But then you’ve only been at this job a few weeks—so maybe you don’t know which patient’s got a legal right to leave whenever they want. That’d be me. I’ve taken my meds...” The ones that didn’t make him feel tired. He’d skipped the others. “And some energizers, and I’m feeling pretty good...”

“You’re not supposed to take energizers at all! And if the doctor says you can’t go on this little jaunt, you’re not going!”

“Yeah. Try seeing the doctor in person to ask. Good luck with that.” He had to get out of here fast or he was going to lose Zach. “’scuse me. Cruiser, proceed around obstacle. Rapidly. Next elevator down.” The cruiser was voice activated, or manual—his insurance company wouldn’t pay for cerebral control.

The elder cruiser whipped around Mahela, making him gasp with indignation. It went with pert responsiveness to the elevators.

Mahela called after the cruiser, yelled at it to stop—but it was Len’s, bought when his circulation problems got bad, and it obeyed only him. The elder cruiser drove into the elevator, turned neatly around, a moment before the doors pinched off Mahela’s outraged expression.

Escape! Amused at his own childish gleefulness, Len watched the indicators till the elevator reached the bottom floor. “Straight ahead, when the doors open, medium fast...”

The doors opened, and Len rolled across the big, airy, glass-walled lobby, looking for Zach, aware of his heart pounding laboriously and hoping he didn’t black out. People hummed past him on self guided scritters or tramped by on foot, talking to no one visible, some of them using sensors to help them walk without crashing into things as they chatted on socials. A couple of black guys talking earnestly to one another stuck out in the crowd because they were talking face to face.

The cruiser took him out through the front doors, into the reflective sunshine of a faux-marble courtyard. The sunlight was always young.

There was Zach, at the corner, paused to talk to someone who wasn’t visibly there; frowning, maybe arguing.

Len muttered, “Hold on, cruiser.” And the cruiser stopped. Zach turned—and for a moment Len was afraid the young man would look through the mind’s eye projection and see him. But Zach was focused on the seemingly empty air in front of him. Parked to one side were a number of small motorbikes, including an old-style Vespa. The engine was electric, but the retro body was the same. On one of its numerous mirrors someone had hung an electric-blue helmet.

“Ease over slow to the right,” he told the elder cruiser. It edged up to the scooter, and he scooped up the helmet. He instantly put it on his head, lowered the visor. The helmet would look funny with an elder cruiser but so what, people’d think he was an over-cautious old geezer.

He grinned to himself, thinking, Good Lord, I stole something, right out in public! He couldn’t remember ever stealing anything before. “Follow the person directly ahead,” he told the cruiser. Zach glanced disinterestedly at him as the light changed and started across the street. The helmet worked as camouflage.

Sneaking out of hospice, using energizers, stealing things—was this some childish manifestation of advancing senility? Not enough blood to the brain?

Better than being indoors; better than dying in a hospice. It was May, and not too hot. Through the visor, the sky seemed candy blue. In the distance, between buildings, he glimpsed the ocean that had swallowed up Santa Monica, in the aftermath of climate change.

Zach was striding on, and the elder cruiser droned audibly as it strove to keep up. Then Zach turned left, and Len followed into a pedestrians-only side street lined with delicate looking little trees. Small open-air cafés were crowded with bright faced young late-lunchers. An elderly woman with a young woman’s face breezed past Len in her own cruiser, staring curiously at his helmet. He knew she was elderly from signs in her hands; her eyes.

Zach walked through the gate of a sidewalk café, and up to a table, waving at a woman who was clearly waiting for him—a kind of light switched on in her face when she saw Zach. She was older than Zach, at least twice as old. Maybe more. And she was...Len felt a visceral shock, seeing her. But it couldn’t really be her.

Still, it was amazing how much she looked like his Anne...

He rolled past the café, watching her stand up to be kissed on the cheek. Zach sat down across from her. It wasn’t until Len was passing them by, that he was sure. It was Anne. Anne was as old as he was. This woman looked thirty or forty years younger than that. Late forties, early fifties. Was she some daughter of Anne’s he didn’t know about? No. He’d lived with Anne Feldman for two years. They’d almost gotten married. There could be no mistake...

It was Anne. And she was holding Zach’s hand.

How many decades ago? Four and a half? When—2014? The early days of vertical farming. It came back with aching clarity...

She’s holding Len’s hand as they walk up a ramp, in the vertical farm, wearing their light green inspector’s coats. It is the third farm he and Anne have inspected this week. This is VF #11, part of a new complex along the coastline in San Diego. Pipes of white bioplas run from the sea, which glints like polished steel beyond the glass walls, drawing briny water to be desalinated for the packed-in crops—tier on tier of corn and rice and high-yield grains, terracing up in stairway spirals. No pesticides needed, in this precisely insulated environment. Another ten such buildings line up over the waterline nearby. New ones are being completed offshore, west of Catalina, their next stop.

They feel a special connection to every vertical farm they inspect. The smell of greenery, earth, blossoms; the exactly-modulated warmth of the reflected sun through mirroring skylights; the musing hum of the bees, the soft swishing of the artificial creeks, the splash of fish ladders winding through the crops, the feel of mist carrying the yeasty perfumes of life...it is all quite personal to them. Anne doesn’t have to be here—she’s an important researcher, increasing fish and plant yields, a gift for doing it without genetic-engineering risks. But she likes doing the inspections with him, when she can. They’re both in early middle age. Been together for years. They’re both aware they have to deepen their bond or lose one another. And lately...He glances at her, somehow enjoying the fact that she’s almost a head taller than he is. Wondering why that is. He’d always liked a tall, willowy woman.

He stops to look at the artificial creek, the specially engineered fish swimming, jumping, imagining themselves to be emigrating long distances, but going round and round in the building till they spawn or are harvested. The fish had been his idea—well, partly his idea. Taking their nutrition from the plants, and earthworms, their waste becoming fertilizer; putting out CO2 for the plants, eventually becoming meat. Such a great idea—and it hadn’t paid him personally. Maybe now was the time to talk to Anne about it. He’d been waiting his moment. “You know, Anne—I should have taken profit participation, instead of the higher salary,” Len admits. He feels a nagging torment, at times, thinking of the fortune his father had thrown away—so now deferring money comes hard to him. He likes to see it appear in his account every two weeks. “But—they could make me a partner...the fish fertility exchange, the specialized bees—my ideas. Initially, anyhow. You know they’re gonna make billions from the fish, when they get more of these places up.” He looks at her sidelong. It was his oblique way of asking...

She sighs and he knows the news isn’t good. “I did ask about it. Gary just flat said no. He said he’d have to give a partnership to all kinds of people who contributed if he gave one to you. He said you have good benefits, good retirement, you got a bonus.” She shrugs. “I don’t think they’re going for it, Leonard. Not their fault you spent the bonus...”

He feels his face flush. “You could stand up for me, Anne. I mean—we’re engaged, for Chrissakes. You don’t have to just blow the whole thing off.”

She looks at him, hurt. He can feel the tension in her hand. “We’ve been engaged for so long—but somehow we never go the next step. Is this what it’s about—competition? What differences does it make who has the partnership? I can take care of us, Len. I’ll have extra money. So we’ll both have it.” She shakes her head. “Males are so primeval.”

Len tugs at her hand. “It’s just that—we should be partners in everything. If they’re not standing by me you shouldn’t stand by them. You could tell them, ‘Make him a partner or I quit.’” Len hesitates—then says something he regrets ever afterwards. “You don’t stand by me now—why should I stand by you, Anne? It’s like you’re not committed...”

Anne looks at him in shock. “So if I don’t threaten them—you’ll leave me?”

He should say, No, I’d never do that.

But he fails to say it. He simply scowls, and looks away.

They stayed together for awhile. But Anne seemed to drift away from him after that. Till at last they broke up entirely...

Len shook his head, now, as he directed the elder cruiser to the Social Access shop across from the café. The vividness of the memory seemed to underscore his failure to do the right thing, that day in the high rise. The day he’d lost her. He could scarcely remember last week but this memory from decades ago was as intense as an icy wind.

Running through it yet again, he winced at his own remembered childishness. A grown man—and still an adolescent at the core, in those days. What had he expected of her? She was a real scientist, not an engineer; she was a gifted researcher, far more valuable than he was. And she was in love with her work. Of course she was a partner in Vertical. She was enormously important to them. He’d had some ideas but he’d signed them away for the cash flow...Len parked himself in the small Social Access shop, at a social-connect table facing the window, where he could use the wall charger. He could see Anne and Zach, talking earnestly in the café, across the pedestrian mall. He seemed insistent about something. She was a bit taller than Zach, too, he noticed.

He took off the helmet, deciding Zach wasn’t going to look in here, put on the rather old-fashioned headset. He was lucky it still worked—most people used either implants or nano-impregnated contact lenses.

The small headset lenses swung to fit snug over his eyes; the table activated the air above it. A Deep Digital logo appeared in the air, in throbbing three-dimensional gold: Glowing Ds gracefully switching places with one another every two seconds. He gave his billing code and then said, “Mori Redonza, search FullBody Active.” Formerly Mori Feldman, Anne’s daughter.

A holographic flickering through FBA, and then a group of people appeared over the table, miniature people moving casually about a vaguely pleasant virtual space that seemed to go on forever in some misty cyber continuum. They strolled about, waving to one another, sometimes congregating in clots. He adjusted his lenses for immersion, and the people became life sized, fully dimensioned. One of them, about to saunter past, was Anne’s daughter from her first marriage, Mori—or a somewhat idealized avatar of her, as if she were still in her thirties; she had a bob of shiny black hair, large dark eyes, pensive mouth. Her colorshift pants suit cycled through shades of beige, tawny yellow and bronze. He said, “Put up a semblance for me.”

The table checked his billing code, and he appeared in the Social. People glanced his way curiously, but no one recognized him; this was a group of Mori’s “friends”, and he hadn’t checked in with her in years. It appeared he was still “friended” though.

He waved at Mori—she frowned and walked over to him. “Len Winniver? Really?”

“Yeah. You’re seeing a semblance at least fifteen years out of date. Looks better than me in an elder cruiser. How you doing? You look good.”

“This image is just as outdated.” Her frown got deeper as she looked at him. She was Anne’s daughter and so unlike her. More like her angry, intense Latino father. “You’re wondering about Mom?”

“I am, yeah. I just saw someone who…well, it was her. That little scar on her chin I talked her out of fixing…. It’s just…She looked way too young.”

“You won’t allow her some avatar vanity?”

“It was her, in person, Mori. In a physical café. Talking to a guy who claims he’s my grand nephew. Only I don’t think he is.”

Her face became studiedly blank. Guarded. “If it was her—she might’ve had some work done.”

“It wasn’t plastic surgery, Mori. My dad was a goddamn movie star and I was around plastic surgery all my boyhood. My mother was in and out of there like Michael Jackson on a turntable.”

She blinked. “Who’s Michael Jackson?...And what’s a turntable?”

Oh come on, he thought. You’re not that much younger. “It wasn’t surgery, Mori. But even if it was—Why was she—” He broke off, seeing her face harden—realizing he was sounding belligerent, maybe paranoid. She’d be accusing him of abusing cognitive enhancers, next. “Just—could you catch me up on her? Do you know anything about this guy she’s seeing? A young guy, looks kind of like me? I’m just curious, is all.”

“No. I told you. Haven’t seen her in a while.” She looked off into the digital distance. “She came out of retirement. She works for Jensen Genetics. I don’t pretend to understand it—why this sudden interest, Len? You used her to advance your career then you dumped her…”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe she said any such thing about me.”

“I have a theory for you, Len,” Mori said suddenly. Her dark eyes glinted with anger. She made a gesture that created a bubble of privacy around their conversation—a bad sign. “She was more successful than you! So she can get more organ replacement. Which improves her health. Keeps her circulation up—all that. So she looks younger! And that bothers you. Listen—I haven’t seen her in a year myself but if she’s that much improved, she deserves it! She worked for it!”

“You haven’t seen your own mother in a year? Why?”

“I…” That guarded look again. “She’s been on a kind of...working retreat. Special projects for Jensen...”

“Well she’s sitting in an open air café in the town you’re living in, so she must be avoiding you. There’s something strange about all this. Okay. Have a good life, Mori...Billing: I’m out.”

Mori opened her mouth to get the last word—and then dissolved.

Len was sitting at the table, alone. But then he’d been there alone, in a way, the whole time. Like the woman sitting to his left, at the table across the room, smilingly talking to the air—to people no one but her could hear or see.

He took off his headset, looked out the window, and saw Zach walking out of the café, with Anne at his side, both of them conversing with the air, to someone only they could see, as they hurried off down the pedestrian mall.

Len waited a thirty count—and then he followed.

~Click Here~
for part III

ELDER CRUISER: I

© 2012 by John Shirley

art by Shasta Lawton

Leonard Winniver was dying, mostly of old age; Zachary Winniver sat at his hospice bedside.

“We come and we go,” said Len, “and that’s how it is.”

“Sooner or later,” Zach agreed—and then he winced.

Len Winniver gave his grand-nephew a sympathetic smile. He knew it was hard to be a young man sitting patiently with a dying old man, trying to say just the right thing—trying not to be insensitive. Len remembered feeling the same way when he’d visited his dying father, long years ago.

Zach had come out of nowhere. Just walked in, smiling, saying he was Len’s grand-nephew. Hi, I’m Zach. Your Grand nephew? Zach Winniver. This was his second visit—they’d only met the week before. Certainly looked like a close relative. Best to assume that this really was his grand-nephew; that he really was here for the right reasons...Len stretched out a bit more on the smart bed; felt it minutely adjust to support him better. He glanced out the window of the high rise hospice. The Los Angeles monsoons had finally ended, and the sky seemed bright blue, fresh scrubbed.

Across the way was another high rise, for farming—“Vertical Farming.” He’d purposefully arranged to have a hospice room with a view on the spiraling green lushness of the vertical farm, amidst all the other high rises of Westwood. He’d worked in vertical farming for decades, helped to develop it—a lifesaver in the age of climate-change. He’d been an engineer, not a board member; no stock options, no getting wealthy as the business grew. Just a decent salary and retirement, benefits that put him right where he was now. Len’s dad, a moderately successful Hollywood actor, had squandered all the B-list movie-star money, leaving Len nothing much to invest. And here was Len Winniver dying, in his turn.

“This audition has got me nervous,” Zach was saying. “I don’t know why. It’s not like I haven’t had auditions...”

Len caught a movement outside, glimpsed something metallic flashing by, flying between the buildings; controlled by remote guidance, the vehicle’s movement was remarkably precise, completely without wasted motion. “See that?” Len raised a shaking hand, to point out the window. “A flying car. When I was just middle-aged, like thirty-five years ago, we used to kid around, ‘Where’s my flying car, dammit?’ Because when we were kids all the futuristic guys promised us flying cars. And there it finally is, forty or so years behind schedule.”

“Only the super rich and the cops have ‘em,” Zach murmured, glancing out the window. “And a few of those upscale tourist outfits.”

Len took in the young man’s splendid profile, so like Len’s father: The Actor, Barry Winniver. Len’s father, Zach claimed, was one of his heroes—Zach being an aspiring actor.

Does Zach here think I have showbiz connections that’ll help him, because of Dad? Bad call, kid.

“Only the really rich,” Zach repeated, softly.

Maybe he was hinting of an inheritance, with this talk of money—knowing Len had no children of his own. Is that why Zach was here? He could have gotten in touch years ago, and hadn’t.

“More important things—same situation,” Zach sighed. “Only the wealthy. Or you’d have gotten a new heart, new lungs, Uncle Len...”

Len chuckled, though he didn’t really think it was funny. “Big process to grow a heart in a vat, Zach—expensive. If they do it for everyone, the world’ll have triple the nine billion people we’ve got now, in a generation or so. Anyway it’s the brain that matters. Can’t regrow your self-hood, Zach. Can’t regrow all those brain cells. Real youth...real rejuvenation...it’s not happening.” He gestured around the little hospice room, with its beeping monitors—and the auto-nurse, humming softly, waiting in the corner. “My insurance, my retirement—got me this far. But it’s just another comfortable waiting room for...”

He shrugged. Deciding not to say, For death. Realizing he was slipping into obvious self-pity—which quite naturally made young eyes glaze over.

“Anyhow...” Zach turned a focused gaze into the middle distance—meaning he was looking at the treated-air projection that only he could see, where messages, reminders and digital faces reeled by. How could they concentrate on anything? He’d never wanted one of those implants.

“You’d better get to that audition, boy.”

Zach nodded apologetically, and stood up, adjusting his designer shoulder grip—the sleek little carrybag gripped his ribcage like a marsupial. He was a tall straight-backed, vigorous young man in a clingsuit, the fabric showing off his muscles. The dove-gray material showed subtly iridescent highlights when Zach moved. A young man’s garment. Len had managed to have his eyes replaced—the only real organ replacement his insurance covered, except for hip joints—and his eyesight was sharp. Looking at Zach he wondered again, How’d I miss knowing about this kid?

A grand nephew, grandson of his late brother Andy. Yeah there’d been a grandkid—but hadn’t he been seriously ill or something, lost long ago? He wasn’t sure. Len’s brother Andy and his wife Beth had lived in Australia, though—and Andy had held grudges. Like over dad’s money, and Len’s refusing to join the lawsuit—good old Andy had loved lawsuits. So they’d been a long time out of touch.

“Break a leg on that audition, Zach,” Len said, ready for the young man to leave. Len was tired already, and it was not even noon. Zach started for the door—then turned back, his expression oddly serious. “You—weren’t interested in acting, Uncle Len? Not following in your dad’s footsteps?”

Len shook his head. “Not really. My dad was a kind of minor movie star, but...” He shrugged. The motion hurt. No point in getting more joints replaced now, even if he could afford it. “I just didn’t like what it did to him. He had talent—but he was too self involved to really get in touch with it. But you—you’ve got character! Probably you’ll do great. Don’t let the whole thing....well...” Len didn’t want to slag his father, in front of Zach—dad had been Zach’s great grand-uncle, after all.

“Anyway...nap time for the ol’ geezer now. Off with you.”

Zach smiled. That familiar Winniver smile, like starlight through a break in the clouds. “Okay. I’ll be back...let you know how the audition went.”

Zach breezed out, and Len said, “Lay back, bed.”

It sighed, as if weary itself, and reclined, keeping his head up a little just the way he liked. He switched on telenet, the depth-image appearing on the wall across from his bed. It was a music video channel. Michael Costin, Jr, in skintight silver lame, was singing about a mirror in his heart. “MC Junior”—the reclusive child of the famous singer, the late Michael Costin—popping out of obscurity for his debut performance. Pretty girls in edgy costumes capered rhythmically behind him on stage; a song composed by some pop-program called out poignantly to Len’s nervous system. Then the bedside interface panel chimed, and he switched off the telenet sound. “Go ahead, phone,” he said, yawning.

His sister-in-law Beth appeared on the panel—just a photo. A flat image of her, a little younger than now, accompanied her voicemail as she said, “Hi Len, hope you’re feeling better. It’s funny to hear you ask about Zach. You’re talking about my grandson Zach right? Only one I know! My grandson—your grand nephew—died when he was thirteen. Lymphatic cancer. He was misdiagnosed, or they’d have caught it in time, and there was the lawsuit against the doctor and all that misery. Maybe the only reasonable lawsuit Andy ever invested in. I guess Andy wasn’t talking to you then, but I thought he’d sent out a notice to everyone...So this Zach who’s coming to see you—has to be some other Zach. He’s not Andy’s kid—I don’t know who he is. Feel better! ‘Bye!” Her image vanished. I don’t know who he is.

“I don’t either,” Len muttered, closing his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep. Not yet. He touched a tab on his bedside, looked up the original message he’d gotten from Zach, and copied the smiling picture of the young man from it...

Len awoke from a murky dream of his father and his brother, the two of them shouting at him at once, so he couldn’t hear what either was saying. It took him a moment to realize he’d been awakened by a chime from the interface. “Answer,” he said, his voice gravelly, and it projected a live holographic image of Belinda Streeson, from the shoulders up, into the activated air over his bed. She was Chief of CyberSecurity for Vertical Farming Ltd, a middle aged woman with a little cap of silver-black streaked hair, a snub nose and Eurasian eyes. She was married to Elaine Streeson, the company’s CFO. A mobile tattoo shifted through several Japanese-style pastoral scenes down the left side of her face. She gave him a wry smile. “You there, Len?”

“Yeah, I’m just not showing myself. I’m in a hospice bed.”

Belinda frowned. “I heard something about you and toxic bio-persistence...”

“That’s one factor. That and getting old.”

“The TPB is ironic, considering all the work Remington did on pthalate removal, groundwater cleanses, all that stuff...”

Len sighed. “Yeah.” Remington Cleanses International had bought out Vertical Farming with the big profits from their water-cleansing microorganisms. And Remington hadn’t seen fit to give him a real interest in the new company. Another reason he was living off retirement, and nothing else; another reason he was dying at a mere eighty-seven. He should have been good for
a hundred-ten.

She gave him a deadpan look of accusation. “So you’re extorting me, Len, demanding I check out this nephew of yours?”

Len laughed softly. “I just said you owed me, Belinda. Did I not get you the job there? Did I not push for you to be Chief of Security? Did I not introduce you to Elaine, knowing she’d go for you?”

“Okay so I do owe you. And—I checked him out.” She twitched her shoulders apologetically. “His name doesn’t bring up much. There was someone by that name in the place, time, with the relations you give, Perth Australia—and he died.”

“He died—right. But the picture I sent...”

“Legal gray area, my running checks on a message photo. But owed is owed. Your Zach didn’t look like this Australia Zach, not really. Way off. When I do matches for your Zach’s face, you know who I get? You! I mean, when you were young.”

“I already know he looks like I did. But what about passport ID matches, that kinda thing?”

Belinda shook her head. “Couldn’t find a match. But people can alter their face almost like their hair now. You’re supposed to get a special UNicop permit for a face-up, but...you can find people to grow you a new face without the permit.”

“So—you don’t think that’s his real face...”

“It’s a possibility. That’s all I’m saying. He ‘frauding you? We need the cops?”

“Don’t worry about it right now. I just wanted...I was just curious. Anyway—thanks. You get back to work. Stop lazing about, chattering to me.”

“Why, you...” She laughed and broke the connection, her translucent image vanishing like a popped soap bubble.

So. This young man was lying. Wasn’t who he said he was. This was disturbing. Wasn’t it? Shouldn’t it be? But that’s not how it made him feel. It made him feel something else entirely. Excited, stimulated. Interested, for the first time in a long while...

The kid was coming back tomorrow—to use up another half hour of Len’s life talking about mostly nothing...

Why? Who was he? Some hustler after an imaginary inheritance? He could confront him, and simply ask. But “Zach” would have a lie ready.

Maybe Len could find out something the old fashioned way...Why not. He was sure as hell old fashioned.

“Maybe the next audition’ll go better, Zach,” Len said, trying not to show how nervous he was. He shifted restlessly in his bed. First time he really felt like getting out of the bed, for a long while. The kid hadn’t seemed to notice Len was wearing a regular button up shirt, now. He wore his physical therapy sweatpants, under the sheet, and slippers.

“Yeah.” A flicker of misery passed over Zach’s face, instantly suppressed—like a man suffering from chronic stomach problems. “Maybe it will. Not so sure anymore.” He stood up, stretched, adjusted his designer shoulder bag with that familiar motion; it clung to him as he smoothed his hair. Smiling that familiar smile. “Got an appointment with a lady...”

“Wouldn’t want to keep you from that. Do your duty, keep the bloodline going!”

Zach laughed politely. “Doubt it’ll be that productive. See you, Uncle Len.”

Hope not, Len thought, as the young man walked out.

He waited a thirty count, then forced himself to climb out of his bed, and stand. A few seconds more till the vertigo passed, then he hobbled to the Elder Cruiser waiting in the corner. An intelligent wheelchair with flexible skeletal support, waste elimination when needed, the cruiser enclosed Len up to the breastbone, leaving his arms free—a sort of comfortable riding bot.

They were going to be surprised, at the nurse’s station.

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