CHAPTER 4 “Anecdote: The Family Party”
Tuesday 3 October 2299
Hoshiko regarded herself in the corroding mirror and clucked with her tongue. She was aging. It seemed as though every month brought another arthritic ache. Her physio age was about 73. Her chrono age was 313 and would be 314 on the sixth, this coming Friday. She opened the cheap metal medicine cabinet behind the mirror and shook two generic aspirin tablets into her palm. As she dispensed a glass of water for swallowing the pills, she again considered whether to investigate the rumors of a clandestine network of Immortals maintaining the banned Methuselah Regimen.
Nonetheless, she was pleased to still be alive and with enough diamonds for food and shelter to live out a natural life. Abraham, on the other hand, died BASE jumping almost 240 years ago. He was 78 chrono and about 42 physio; a tragic loss when it happened but now just another tick, albeit a major tick, on a long, long life-line. When global conflicts morphed into the Dying War, the Inter-Stellar Travel Research Institute complex was torched, and several employees garroted. That is when Hoshiko fled and took the name Shinobu Nagatoshi to avoid arrest as an Immortal.
She quietly mused, as she often did, on her professional life of planning for exoplanet colonization. An actual interstellar expedition always seemed to be another 100 years in the future. Still, she and Abe made considerable progress. After all, they succeeded in sending out interstellar probes to study dozens of exoplanets. A few of the probes would have already completed their fly-by investigations by now and telemetry was presumably on its way back to the solar system. The irony of it all was that the gargantuan radio telescope arrays that could receive the incredibly weak telemetry from the probes had all been destroyed in the Dying War. What a fucking waste.
The doorbell rang, jolting Hoshiko out of her reverie. She closed the door to the medicine cabinet, left the bathroom, crossed the tiny living room with its worn 0ut carpet, and opened the door of her small flat.
“Gail, come in.”
“Hi Shinobu. I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Of course not,” she assured Gail. Hoshiko ushered in her 20-something neighbor from two floors up and shut the door behind her. “It’ll be nice to have some company. I’ll heat some water for tea. Come on into the kitchen with me. I’ve got a few madeleines left.”
The women were soon sipping black tea and catching up on local news.
Gail asked, “¿Have you heard that we’re going to have rolling blackouts again starting tomorrow? It has something to do with another power plant failure.”
“Oh, hardly surprising,” answered Hoshiko.
“But things are getting better. The Generals promised us we’d get telephones soon.”
“¿How is … is Carlos, your husband? ¿Is he getting over his flu bug?”
“It’s Carlton, and I suppose he’s made some progress but he’s still pretty much under the weather. The kids and I all pray at bedtime that he will get healthy again.”
“If he’s lasted this long, he’ll pull through, Gail,” Hoshiko reassured her. “Without vaccines, these influenza outbreaks tend to kill people in the first few days or not at all. I’m sure he feels wretched, though.”
“Shinobu, you know lots about lots of things. ¿Were you a scientist before the war?”
“No,” Hoshiko lied. She had finally earned her Ph.D. in engineering late in the 21st century and had so many honorary doctorates that she stopped counting them. “I graduated in Science Education from Newport Online University and taught High School science online for 27 years before retiring. That doesn’t make me a scientist, but I had to know a lot about the sciences. Here, have another madeleine.”
Maintaining that she only studied and taught “online” made it nearly impossible for the regime to prove otherwise.
“Well the reason I asked is that my daughter, Kathleen, was asking me what those Immortals did to stay alive for hundreds of years; before we got rid of them in the Righteous War, of course. It seems so unnatural that folks lived so long. ¿You probably had to teach about that, didn’t you?”
Hoshiko forced a smile. “Gail. It was un-natural. We normals are the natural ones; we who have our 60 to 100 years of living. Those who could afford the Methuselah treatments stopped the aging process with injections, pills, nanobots, gene insertions, dialysis, and who knows what else.”
“Mercy me. You lost me after ‘pills.’ But go on. I gather you’re talking about medical things.”
“That’s right.”
Hoshiko chided herself for once again forgetting how hopelessly ignorant most people were these days.
“Natural eye lenses & teeth wore out and were replaced by artificial ones. Ears and noses just keep getting bigger so the Immortals had cosmetic surgery several times in a century, when and if they could afford it. Yes, it was indeed unnatural.”
“You make it sound like the Immortals weren’t so much evil as inconvenienced.”
Hoshiko tried to sound neutral. “Certainly some of them did bad things, just as some Normals have done bad things. But I don’t think as a group they were any more evil than Normals.”
“But Immortals killed millions of people all over the world!”
Hoshiko thought to herself, and I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn you should buy.
To Gail she calmly replied, “Not directly, and certainly not by choice, Gail. You see, advances in food production slowed at about the same time there were fewer people dying because of the Methuselah regimen. Many people, especially in poorer areas, continued having large families. The result was overpopulation and periodic megafamines.”
“You’re a good teacher, Shinobu. You make it pretty clear why things got worse.”
“Thank you. And you are right; things got very much worse. The average lifespan of the poor plummeted. Politically active people from poorer nations joined forces and formed the Family Party. Violence increased. It was named the Dying Conflict because a central issue of the FP was that no one should avoid dying, especially if it discouraged the bearing of children. And, to answer your question, Gail, during this time the Immortals were blamed for the hundreds of millions of poor around the world who died of malnourishment, disease, crime, and internecine conflicts. After decades, the Dying Conflict became the Dying War, or as you said, the Righteous War, when several wealthier nations voted the Family Party into power.”
“I’m a member of the FP,” Gail proudly announced. “We put an end to the Immortals and brought peace. We gave the right to every family to have as many children as they want.”
And you have the right to be a dumb-shit, Hoshiko thought to herself.
“¿Another cup of tea, Gail? We’ve finished the madeleines, but I’ve got some crackers and a little plain cheese spread.”
“That would be delightful, Shinobu. ¿May I use your bathroom while the water is heating?”
“It’s right there,” Hoshiko pointed unnecessarily since every apartment in the building had an identical floor plan.
Hoshiko noted that Gail took her sizeable purse with her into the bathroom and heard Gail latch the door and immediately turn on the faucet. Suspicious, Hoshiko activated the sniffer on her cochlear implant. A few seconds later she heard Gail’s voice over a laughably crude carrier signal.
“This is Gail, Sergeant Gail Kailor. I’m pretty certain we’ve got another fugitive Immortal. Rush a Termination Team with a test kit to …”
Her diamonds were already securely packaged in her vagina so Hoshiko simply picked up her purse and walked out of the apartment.