Tick, tock. My life, slipping away.
The Monday morning meeting droned on longer than usual, the dance of numbers and charts and simulations in my airscreens unseen and meaningless. CXOs played the Vista as if invoking elder gods, grandiose gestures and oft-repeated formulas and reassuring corpspeak said through fixed smiles with the occasional nervous glance in my direction. I watched the early-morning sun crawl across the polished aluminum surface of our boardroom table, picking out random dust-motes and imperfections with scintillant bursts.
Why don't you just leave?
Because it's not that important.
Liar.
When it was finally over, I forced myself to walk to my office. Slowly. Not hurried. Not anxious. It was an age, an eternity.
Inside, I opaqued the windows. Did a thorough scan for flyeyes and gnatears. Darted a nervous glance at the antique digital clock. Fumbled the crown onto my head with shaking fingers.
For a moment, before the crown found my headwire, I was aware of a heavy thudding noise, like panicked footsteps in an empty stairwell. My heart. Just my heart pounding in my chest.
And then I was there.
Anne was being placed on top of a low hill that overlooked a field of almost surreal and perfect green. Near her plot, they had played with the programming of the grass, and waves of muted rainbow colors passed underfoot, slow and soothing. The people who had attended in corpus were dressed in the bright casuals of southern California--pinks, fuchsias, peaches, bright unnatural eye-searing mauves, chartreuses. A few old-style reporters were still dressed in the traditional black, but the Anne Behpour I knew would have never asked for that. I could feel the heat of the Los Angeles sun in full August glory. I could hear songbirds, the hum of traffic, and, far off, even the voices of children playing.
The priest was grandstanding:
"?fashionable to think that we may live forever. How many of us have parents and grandparents who have been rejuved? How many of us expect to make the same trip soon, and come out with our lives reset to the beginning, the slate wiped clean?
?Anne made that trip. Anne had that same expectation. But all she had accomplished in her life, and all the experience of the finest doctors in the world, could not save her. Some will call it chance or fate. Some will call it the will of God. But the final fact is that we do not always choose. We cannot always plan.
"Look at the origin of the word. Rejuve. Rejuvenation. The process of being taken to a juvenile state again. To become like a child in the eyes of our fellow man. But we are all children in the eyes of God?"
"Mr. Devin?" a man wearing an old-fashioned PRESS card in his hat had appeared in front of me.
Damn.
I had picked the smallest, most heavily cloaked remote that I could find in hopes of not being linked, and it had lasted less than a minute.
Three more reporters popped into view. "Carter Devin!" they cried. Suddenly I was in the midst of a virtual press conference.
"Can I have a few...
... can I ask about Anne...
... Anne Behpour. You were partners... lovers...
... why did you break up...
... how do you feel..."
I tweened myself and jumped to another fly eye, leaving a shadow to answer their questions. But the damage was done. My life story had already been splashed across the net, compared to hers, analyzed and interpolated and repurposed a million times, speculation and facts simmering in the haze of momentary instafame.
How did I feel?
Like a yawning cold cavern at the heart of the world.
I scanned the faces in the crowd. Younger men with that look of passive nonconformity. Women striving valiantly not to look their age. None of them familiar. I wondered if any of them had been her lovers, if any had really been close to her.
How did I feel?
Like the center of a great storm, gathering on the horizon.
The priest paused in his eulogy. He was young, early 20s at most, with the fading blemishes of teen pox still visible on his chin and neck. He scanned the crowd with sudden purpose. His bright blue eyes appeared to land on my remote. The instafame had reached him, too.
"As you probably know," he said. "We have a celebrity in our midst. Hello, Mr. Devin. I welcome you to this service. You and Anna have done much to change our world, even if it is only in our minds. I hope you take something away from this that is more enduring."
I wanted to run the remote through his heart. This is my first funeral, I wanted to shout. How could I ever forget it? I was a millennium baby, like Anne. I was only sixty-five. I was born into a century that was supposed to be the end of the world. Then it was supposed to last forever.
"Cut," I said, and I was back in darkness, alone.
)
