Uncomfortable she shifted her head towards the ground, and her weight from her left foot to her right, placing her suitcase on the once-white sidewalk. In an effort to stave off the pervading sense of despair her nimble mind leapt from thought to thought as a calmly drowning man might search for a life-preserver. Life is a million meaningless moments haphazardly strung together. How much of it was real? And how much was dreamed up by some sexually-frustrated man working in a by now long repossessed mansion in Hollywood?

The brilliant glare of sunlight turned the taxi’s windshield into a burning vision. It took eight minutes. Eight minutes for the light from a burning ball of fusion to make its way to earth and burn your skin. Years of unprotected exposure to that eight minute old light meant wrinkles.

She got in the cab, noticing her reflection in the bulletproof glass between herself and the cabbie. She turned her face away from the glass, tried to catch a glimpse of herself in her peripheral vision, see herself as a stranger might. But no matter how she squinted or turned her head, regardless of the brevity of her glance, the wrinkles were still there. She was old.

She paid the cabbie, stepped quickly from the dirty back seat, across dirty sidewalk, into decadent lobby. Disoriented by the sudden transition, finding herself in a place so familiar, the people she dealt with in the lobby were interchangeable with the people at the last hotel and the hotel before that. She fell onto the bed and sunk into a heavy uncomfortable sleep.

The pre-dawn neon haze of the city slipped through the window and drew lazy shapes on the ceiling. Her eyes came into focus slowly. She rolled towards the phone. Her joints were stiff. Skipping sleep no longer meant that odd manic energy. Hours of sex still provided a warm afterglow but also meant aches and pains in the morning. She ordered breakfast.

She sighed pulling one tired hand through her tangled hair stirring her vitamin-enriched decaf with the other, knowing the artificial sweetener had instantly bonded with the coffee, but almost enjoying the pointless ritual.

Tennis had put her though college. College had gotten her a good job. A job with computers. Everyone had said the future was computers. Nobody after all made any money writing poetry. But tennis had meant hours in the sun practicing. Hour added to hour of permanent damage to her skin.

Sure they can fix that now. Send tiny robots, made from infinitesimal pieces of the fundamental elements of the universe, into her skin to undo the damage. But what was the point?

She pushed the chair away from the window, away from a landscape littered with buildings and moved towards the shower. No one knew how long molecularly engineered nanotechnology could extend human life. Most of the latest studies suggested around 350 years. But what was the point? Her skin, her insides could crawl with robots too tiny to see, tiny robots replicating themselves with the wastes of her body. They could set up shop inside her brain, monitoring pain levels making sure she understood her body’s needs but never hurt. Tiny robots could infiltrate her mind and body, while specially coded DNA “bombs” written by the best paid doctors and programmers in the world could convince the cells of her body to reweave the tiny telomere chains on the end of her cell’s DNA, making the cells think they were younger. She would feel energetic again. Her backstroke would reassume its former ferocity. If she looked hard enough there was probably someone who could sell her a new sense of purpose.

The water was hot; it ran down her body following paths the world’s smartest most powerful computers still could not predict. What would happen when we conquered the last vestiges of chaos? When we could predict everything in the physical world? She leaned down, pulled the brass chain from the dish next to the faucet. 350 years. She could keep going to work for at least 350 years. Placed the ornate brass stopper in the tub’s drain, water boiled around her feet. In another seventy or so, the computer programs she was writing now would be writing the programs that would build even better tiny robots that would eventually eliminate death altogether and she could spend eternity playing janitor to the computers that kept her alive. Drops of water fell from her arm onto the toilet seat as she leaned out of the tub, her eyes full of water, her fingers searched blindly for the hair-dryer.

The young man stumbled over a discarded room service tray as the lights in the hotel flickered.

hOME