On the other hand, I could continue with my current plan, settle here and post a few ads on dating web sites. Oh, how about this one: “A financially independent new Manhattanite, not yet 40 and never married, is looking for a new romance. Please be local and in your 20s or 30s. If you love winter sports, we will surely hit some serious slopes in Colorado the coming winter!” This island is full of single women anxious to get something going in their personal lives. I am sure some of them would reply to those ads.”
Peter amused himself with such daydreams for some time. Then he went back to reality. He thought that like with so many things in life, only people with certain personality traits would benefit from being immortal. To have a successful and happy endless life, one needed to have boundless communication capabilities as well as some extraordinary mental elasticity. Such an individual would always crave new social interactions and let the old ones recede into the past without a trace. They would enter into a new relationship knowing that it may or may not be permanent for their partner but it would certainly be temporary for them. And after that relationship had ended, perhaps as in his case tragically, they would grief for a while and then turn the page. They would become their old selves again and find another relationship, and the cycle would continue without an end. Peter even imagined some twin brothers who won a competition to become immortal and chose the two paths he daydreamed about. One would for centuries move from university town to university town across the country stalking young beauties there, and another would put down roots in Manhattan and spend the same centuries chasing local skirts. They would meet every 80 years or so and share over beer their latest adventures.
“Unfortunately”, Peter said to himself, “I would not pass the first round of such competition. I am only 115 and already feel full to the brim with life experiences. And I have been influenced by almost everyone I’ve ever met. If I am to go through another “relationship cycle” or two, my next stop would probably be in a hut somewhere deep in the woods of Montana where I would spend my eternal life hunting and fishing and hoping never to see another human being. The immortality befell me, and I am not good at it, just like I wasn’t good in biochemistry.”
~~~
He finally saw an apartment that would work for him. It was a one-bedroom condo with a large main room and a tiny bedroom, in an old building with antiquated plumbing but quiet and on a high floor. He told the realtor he would pay cash and asked to refer him to a real estate attorney. In New York, a sane person would not buy a broom closet without an attorney.
The closing was uneventful. Nobody was surprised that the purchaser was not Peter but some Wyoming company, and no one asked him how he was affiliated with that company. His attorney received a wire transfer from Timeless Ventures and that was sufficient.
Peter rode in his self-driver to his new digs, put the boxes with hard drives in a living room and called the moving company in North Carolina. In several days, the boxes with backup hard drives safely arrived to the door of his building. He himself carried them one by one into his apartment and put them on a closet shelf. When the movers left, he looked at the boxes again and said to himself: “Welcome home honey, you see I didn’t let you down!”.
In several weeks, Timeless Ventures sold both the house and the car it owned. Peter wired the proceeds to Antigua and closed their bank account. The North Carolina chapter of his life was now officially over.
Peter purchased several storage servers and installed into them the hard drives from the boxes in his living room. He also bought a dedicated video rendering computer and two TVs, one for the Front channel and another for the Side channel. The vendor of “Precious Moments” had special video player software that they allowed everyone to download. He installed it and was very impressed. The program scanned his servers and formed a nice timeline with the thumbnails of all his recorded files. He could navigate that timeline directly or search by the date. The player could also be run in the background in a so called Anniversary Mode. The user would enter the number of years that have passed after some event, and the software would automatically play the video files that were recorded that many years ago that day at the same time of day when they were recorded. According to the documentation, a couple on their wedding anniversary could use this mode to watch the videos made at their wedding, and the videos would appear in the right order and at the right time.
Now he was ready to explore the results of his decades-long effort.
He decided to start somewhere in the middle, when she was in her forties. He saw her at her desk, grading somebody’s essay. He saw her after work at the dining room table telling him about her day, and in the morning, rushing to make breakfast before her swim session. He wanted to tell her “Good morning sweetheart, the cereal is in the island”, but realized he would be talking to a TV.
And for the first time, he felt with his entire being, with all the emotional strength he was capable of, that she was truly, completely and forever gone. He thought: “Death is when people who are dear to us stop hearing us and don’t answer when we talk to them”. Tears started streaming from his eyes, and he cried, cried hard, for the first time in a hundred years…
~~~
He now truly felt the terrible burden that his immortality placed on him. He was destined to live among strangers. He could become close only with people he could relate to and whose life he understood. But soon there would be no such people left. He was about to outlive his world and everyone from it.
He needed to think things through. He had a plenty of time for this. His brokerage account in Gibraltar was mostly invested in some long-term bonds and brought him enough income to live on. His apartment now had new windows and plumbing fixtures and felt like home.
He got used to wondering the streets of New York. He felt less alone there. The nine-to-five crowd was dressed differently than in the time of his youth, but it felt like the same people in more modern attire. The restaurants had signs above their doors made from some bright new materials, but they served familiar food. The cars in the streets appeared very futuristic to him, but the gridlock and the honking remained the same. He became an avid concert and museum goer. “God bless the ticket office at Carnegie Hall”, he thought, “They never ask for a picture ID”. The classical music and the past of the museums became his refuge.
His mind continued to be busy. He was just another human being, he wondered, with the same needs and desires that everybody had. But all those common needs and desires are meant to be satisfied only for a limited period of time. Everyone needs a shelter, but what would he do when the building he had just moved into would deteriorate and be demolished? Modern buildings aren’t meant to last for more than a century, and his building already had many decades on it. He would have to find another place to live. Would he get any money as a compensation for his current place, and if so how? What would the price of a similar apartment in that new future age, and how would people go about buying them? Would he be required to provide any documents to identify himself and the source of his income? And what about something even more basic: what if the store he was buying groceries at would transition to some form of electronic payment that would be totally unfamiliar to him? Where would he find a kind person that would be willing to explain him how to make these payments?
He didn’t have answers to these questions. All that he could do was continue to be engaged in the world. He would keep up with all major news. He would subscribe to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and read them every day. He would have to stay social, no matter how difficult that would be. Every new decade of modern life brings something new, some new concepts, technologies, ideas and laws. He would have to learn and master all these novelties. If there ever would be a man that would embody lifetime learning, he would be such a man.
He understood all that. He realized now that to be immortal indeed meant to be forever young, active and innovative. What he was yet to figure out was what w
ould motivate him to be like that. He dreaded to think that he would have to spend eternity worrying about missing the boat here or there.
One morning, he went to see some exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. He didn’t miss any of them, whether they showed ancient Egyptian art or dresses of former first ladies. On the way to the museum, he decided to take a walk through Upper East Side and got off the subway one stop early.
The neighborhood looked as upper crusty as a century or so before when his parents brought him there for reasons he could no longer remember. There were many new high-rises, and it quickly occurred to him that they had been built on the land that used to be occupied by old buildings. “I wonder if in a few decades, the same fate awaits my building”, he thought, “And I don’t think they will let me move into a new high-rise for free”. The weather was beautiful, and he enjoyed his stroll. He was not in a hurry, and rushed locals kept passing by him. He noticed something else that hadn’t changed in his city. Those middle-aged Upper East Side ladies, immaculately dressed and in a full makeup, walking their tiny dogs. Decades flew by, stock market soared and crushed, natural disasters and wars shook up the turbulent world, but these ladies kept walking in their high heels with the dogs running around them on leashes. And just like fashion models, they didn’t age…
After he saw the exhibition, Peter went to Central Park. The skateboarders, joggers and bikers were still there, as were the street musicians and their listeners and all sorts of folks on the benches reading books and enjoying the sunshine. It dawned on him that he was much older than any of these people but soon, just in a few decades, they would all disappear, but he would remain. “Humans are so short-lived”, he thought, “So transient, but even though their personal existence is fleeting, they have learned to create things that are much bigger and more durable than any of them. This city, for example, or the English language. It has been around for longer than a thousand years, and it will likely be around for many thousand years into the future. She dedicated her entire life to it, because she knew that somebody had done so centuries before her, and somebody would do centuries after her.”
Peter found himself next to Bethesda Terrace, crossed the street and began his stroll along the Mall. It was particularly crowded that day. Peter grew tired of having to avoid other park goers and found an empty bench. Something bothered him, something he thought about for a second before he got distracted to decide on where to go next. Then he remembered it. “Yes, I contemplated human transiency and what was going to happen in the future. I actually know full well what will happen. A hundred years from now, I will continue to come to Central Park. The buildings around it will look different than today, but the Mall will still be just like it is now, a tree-lined promenade with benches. When the weather is good, it will be just as crowded as today. And not a single person in that crowd, and not a single soul in the world besides me will remember her. Even the undergrads who may have attended her final Indian class will be dead by that time. Most people get tombstones when they die, and a random passerby can read their names and wonder about them. She didn’t get that, probably because she didn’t want to. The only thing remaining after her in this world outside of my head and my apartment will be a few pieces of information in the university archive. First and last name, date of birth, her position titles and when she held them. She’ll be reduced to a historical record, of the type that nobody cares about. The look of her eyes, her smile, her light steps, her amusing habit to read cross-legged, the beauty of her mind will be completely and forever forgotten.”
Peter started crying again. He cried inconsolably; he must have not cried like this since he was a toddler. For the first time in his long life, he hated mankind, he simply hated it. He was embarrassed that people would notice his tears. He must have been quite a sight, an adult man crying like a child. He got up and went to the side alley that had less people in it. He tried to calm down, but every time his thoughts jumped a century ahead, tears burst from his eyes.
And then, in a moment of epiphany, he understood how he would want to live the rest of his life. Everything became clear to him; all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fell into their proper places.
Peter waited until the next October 16th. In the morning, he launched the player software, set it to the Anniversary Mode and entered the proper number of years.
At the right moment, his beloved appeared on the screen. He watched her as she finally understood his joke and laughed.
Peter let the software run. He watched her coming back to life the next day and the day after that and the day after that. He saw her moving through the years, and she reappeared in his memory the way she was at that stage of her life, and he talked to her, and she answered him, because he knew her so well, and he knew she was alive again. He lived with her through her laughs and through her tears, through her triumphs and her sorrows; he wanted nothing more than to continue to be with her. And when that dark day had arrived when she decided not to return to the hospital, he simply waited for the next October 16th and entered a new number of years into the software. And he was never lonely, and he was never sad, and with a burst of rapturous joy, he always returned, over and over again, to the same young girl, immortal as he was, smiling at him from so many human lifetimes away.
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