Story #43 - Forever, Not Guaranteed
How long would you want to live and what would you do to achieve it?
Forever, Not Guaranteed
They were waiting for the woman who’d said she would come.
Noah stood by the window closest to the front door, peering out between drawn blinds onto the sidewalk two floors down. Delivery robots wheeled along in a steady stream, outnumbering the actual pedestrians, though there were several of those currently in view as well. He scanned their faces, willing one of them to be her, but they were all strangers on their way somewhere else.
“How’d you ask her?” Benni’s voice whined in from the other room. She was sitting at her computer, and just from the exact tone of her whine, Noah could tell she was checking the local airspace radar system they had set up on the roof, searching for incoming aircraft and drones that might have hostile intent or just be off course.
“I told you, I asked her right before I hung up, I waited so it’d be the last thing I said, so she’d remember.” Noah pulled his face away from the blinds, intent on going to get a drink of water, but the moment he retreated, he felt a compulsion to check the passing faces one more time to see if one of them was her, and almost of its own accord his face went back against the window, fingers separating two of the blinds to allow him to peer through.
Only one new person had entered their block since he last scanned, but it was a woman, and Noah’s heart began to pound until he saw her face and realized it wasn’t the woman who had said she would come with the item that he hadn’t been thinking of when he met her this morning, but which he now found himself very much wanting and needing and counting on her to bring him.
“But ‘how’ did you say it?” Benny whined again. “What words did you use? What was the implication of your tone? Did you toss it off casually like we only might be interested if we liked what she had, or did you make it clear that we’re ready to buy?”
“How am I supposed to know exactly what was clear and what wasn’t? I said we wanted it, just like that, now get off my back."
Ding! The small bell that Noah had learned to dread rang from their television. It turned itself on, and the familiar, feminine voice of Zili, the workout A.I., called softly through the house.
“It’s time for your exercises! Let’s stay healthy, my A-Mortals!”
“Shut up, Bitch!” Benni screamed through her closed bedroom door.
Noah dragged himself away from the window. Instead of heading directly for the TV, he beelined for Benni’s room; he always had to drag Benny out of his room for the morning set of exercises.
“I can hear your footsteps out there, I’m not going, I’m busy! I’m tracking a rhino-class drone that’s flirting with our airspace and there’s chatter about a loose nuke out of Pakistan.”
“Come on, A-Mortals, let’s get moving!” Zili’s voice maintained the same even, almost floral tone at all times.
“I’ll kill you, you swine!” screamed Benni through the door.
“She can’t hear you, Benni,” said Noah, “just come out and it’ll be over in fifteen minutes!
“This rhino-drone is seven minutes out. If it veers it could hit us! I need to stay here and monitor.”
“If we don’t do the exercises we’ll lose treatment eligibility!” Noah hated arguing through the door, but they did it constantly.
“We have too much to lose to let some idiot hobbyist asleep at the controls take us out now! Did you test the water today?”
Noah twitched as he remembered he hadn’t. It was supposed to be his job, but he had gotten so flustered by the request he’d made of the woman who said she would come that he had forgotten.
“I’ll test after, let’s just get the exercises out of the way.”
“Come on, A-Mortals, you got this!”
“I’ll spit on your grave you squat-thrusting whore!” Benni’s tone was locked in now, and Noah knew she wouldn’t respond to him again until he’d done his job.
He went to the kitchen and drew a glass of filtered tap water. He left it on the counter to settle as he took the test kit out of the refrigerator. The kit was the only thing in there besides cases upon cases of their meal-replacement shakes. He took one of the strips out of the kit bottle and submerged it in the water for a slow count of five, then removed it and started comparing the various test-panel colors to the calibration scales printed on the side of the bottle.
He heard the encouraging lilt of Zily’s voice from the other room, but in his concentration he didn’t hear the exact words, nor those of Benni’s answering insult from the bedroom. A moment later, the intercom beside his head turned on and Benni’s voice came through.
“I’m not liking the look of this rhino-drone vector, it’s now a full three degrees off-course. I told you we need to spring for the ground-to-air system. How’s the water today?”
“Normal levels. Clean as a whistle. We’re green all the way across.” He put the test strip in the garbage and returned the kit to the refrigerator. “Now meet me at the TV, let’s knock out these—“
“I refuse!”
“Zily is an important part of the—“
“She’s a fucking Nazi and I refuse!”
The intercom stayed open, and Noah heard her typing furiously, monitoring the airspace around them. He was about to argue further, but her voice broke through again first.
“Go check and see if she left the package, and I’ll consider appeasing the Nazi.”
He realized that it had been several minutes since he had checked to see if the woman who had said she would come had come yet. His heart pounded because—especially since entering the A-Mortals program—he had become quite superstitious, and so he thought that perhaps his period of inattention had increased the chances that she would come.
He walked back into the hallway and headed for the front door, passing Benni’s closed bedroom door on the way.
“Remember, A-Mortals, exercise is a huge part of immortality!”
“Shut your mouth before I shiv you, you dumb bitch!” The door rattled with the force of her scorn.
As he had become more superstitious, Noah had found it harder and harder to leave their apartment. Benni had refused to leave within a few months of starting the program, so it had fallen to him to do the necessary errands. But as time went on, he found ways to avoid most of them, and as they became less necessary, his anxiety about the dangers of leaving increased. He couldn’t remember exactly the last time he had gone out, but it had now been at least a year.
He got back to the front window, fingered the blinds open, and looked out. His stomach dropped when he saw her, the woman who’d said she’d come, standing on the sidewalk outside his apartment. Her straight brown hair fell to her shoulders, and the lavender blouse she’d been wearing that morning came up high onto her neck, leaving no gap between its collar and the bottom of her mask. She held a box in her hands, relatively flat but wide and long.
The woman reached out and rang their doorbell and the buzzer rang loud inside the apartment. Noah opened the window and yelled “I’m coming” down at her. She released the doorbell and stepped back.
Noah was already turning for the front door. He wanted to run, but he controlled himself.
“Is that her?!” Benni’s yell from the other room was her loudest yet, and it matched the rising crescendo of excitement in his own roaring brain. The woman who’d said she’d come had come. She had brought it.
“Yes!” He yelled back as he fast-walked down the hallway, placing his feet carefully, conscious of the risk of serious injury he was taking on by moving around when this excited.
“Go down and get it!”
“Come on, A-Mortals, it’s not too late to get on board this round!”
“Ride a rocket into the sun you stinky shitlog!”
Noah went again past Benni’s bedroom and into the kitchen, heading for the hallway outside. The intercom clicked on as he went.
“The air quality sensors are on the fritz, I’m not getting consistent readings on mercury, chromium, or any of the chlorides. We’ve got serious exposure risk. I’m going to order some parts. Good luck on the stairs!”
Noah exited the apartment into the carpeted hallway. There was a tricky fold in the fabric halfway down the hall that was easy to trip on, so he stood on the opposite side of the hallway and edged around it in a slow, two-footed shuffle.
There was an elevator, but they had long ago decided it was far too dangerous. Elevators were only responsible for about 30 deaths per year in the US, but given the timescale on which they were now planning to live, regular use of any elevators would over time add up to a significant risk factor.
He came to the stairs, opened the door, and his stomach jumped into his throat as he saw the stairs drop away from him. They seemed so steep, so looming, like an open pit in the floor waiting to swallow him whole.
Noah dropped onto his backside and began sliding down the stairs, one at a time. He still felt silly, but there was no question that it minimized the fall risk. He put his feet down onto a stair, scooted his butt down one, and then moved his feet again, using his arms behind him for additional stability. There were sixty-two stairs between the third floor and the lobby, and he knew from previous attempts that it took him approximately forty-four seconds to slide all the way down. He hoped the women who’d said she would come would wait that long and not assume that he had decided he didn’t want what she’d agreed to bring.
When you could theoretically live forever, it no longer made sense to go outside. Outside was risk. It was drunk drivers and serial killers and exotic diseases. The program itself didn’t advertise this—indeed, all their advertising material conspicuously showed receivers of the treatments outside their homes, enjoying an eternity of skiing and biking and smiling with groups of friends—but when the only thing that was going to kill you was some sort of violent death, studies had shown that you cut well over 99.99999% of your remaining mortality risk in a given hour by staying inside an up-to-code building, staying off ladders, and foregoing small appliances.
Once they were self-confined to their apartment, the other steps had seemed so easy and so natural. They both had good jobs they could do from their computers, so money was not an issue. Top-of-the-line air filters were not too expensive, nor was the radar they had placed on the roof. Their food was entirely meal replacement shakes—another condition of the treatment program. Testing the water, air, and fabrics regularly just made good sense in the context of these other precautions.
Sometimes he thought about the way life used to be, and wondered whether he wished he could go back. He could not go back, not now, not when he’d come so far and his cellular decay numbers were frozen in such a good position, not when his neural replacement rate was above stasis. He could never take that away from himself, never take away the time that represented. His life in the apartment was still worth living, and now there would be so much of it—as long as he didn’t make any mistakes.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, stood in the landing, put on his mask, and exited into the lobby. He saw through the glass lobby doors that the women who’d said she would come was still there, still holding that box. He reached a hand into his pocket and came out with the wad of cash to pay her, exact change that he’d assembled by ordering cash from a bank and then paying cash and receiving change from a variety of delivery people and robots. The woman who’d said she would come had been very specific about cash and exact change. What she’d agreed to bring was not illegal, but she could be blacklisted from the treatments for it, so she wanted no traces left, which suited Noah just fine.
They did not speak. He opened the door, handed her the money, and took the box from her reverently, in two shaking hands. The door closed automatically, and by the time it did both of them were well away, he back into the stairwell and her into the passing flow of the block.
Noah ascended the stairs on his knees. He would move the box as far up as he could reach, then climb up several stairs until the box was even with his knees, then sit on his butt, reach down for the box, and move it up again. In this way it took him closer to four minutes to ascend the two floors back up to his own hallway. He edged once more past the dangerous fold in the carpet, and just over twelve minutes after he began this journey, he arrived back inside the safety of his apartment.
“Come on, A-Mortals, I know you can do it!”
“I’ll find you and gut you like a fucking fish!” Benni’s yelling was not angry anymore, more like a self-soothing behavior to compensate for her refusal to leave what she was doing and go turn off the voice. His return roused her, though, and he heard her footsteps, then her bedroom door opening, until she appeared, pasty-pale and red-eyed, in the kitchen beside him.
“Show me,” she said in awe. Noah reached for the box top. He felt a momentary panic—what if the woman hadn’t brought it after all, what if she’d showed up for an easy buck, knowing that since they weren’t supposed to have this item and were far too afraid to leave their apartment and file a police report, she could take his money and get away clean.
But then he opened the box top and there it was. A thick layer of cream cheese frosting in gleaming, snowfield white, decorated with day-glo orange carrots that had clearly been piped by hand. The cake was sweating from the heat absorbed during its journey, but there wasn’t a fraction of melt to that icing.
Noah and Benni both stared at it, reverent, for a long moment.
“Twelve years, ten months, twenty-nine days since my last baked good,” said Benni, barely breathing as she spoke. “I want to cry.”
She reached a hand out for it. Before he could even think, Noah’s hand shot out and slapped hers away.
“First, the exercise,” he said. “We need it to stay treatment-eligible.”
“We’re not supposed to eat this cake, either,” she replied. Neither of them had taken their eyes off the frosting.
“Yes, but they don’t know we have the cake. They’ll know if we don’t do the exercises.”
“We’re insane to do this. We can’t eat this.”
“You’re right, we can’t. It could ruin everything. What if—“
“What if.”
“One cake a decade won’t kill us.”
“Exercises first.”
“The rhino-drone got back on course. It never actually approached the house.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“Let’s go, A-Mortals, we’re ready to start!”
“Go jump back up your mother, Zili. I hate you.”
Noah had to half-drag Benni away from the glistening cake on the counter towards the TV. They got on their program-issued mats, with the electronic sensors that could detect with unfoolable accuracy exactly which exercises they did and for how long.
“All right, A-Mortals, Let’s Go! Welcome to the best day of your life! Get those feet moving, get those hands going, get that heart going! Remember, life beyond counting is in your grasp! I know that’s gotta feel good, right? It sure does for me!”
END
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please like, comment, or better yet, share with family and friends who love sci fi. Have a great week and I’ll be back next Wednesday with something fun!
I never considered how paranoia-inducing it would be to have the potential to live forever without the guarantee of living forever. Lacking true immortality would be awful. I’m not at all surprise Noah and Benni live the way they do.