The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller

by Pierre Ouellette

  He lets the puzzle go and retreats to something more entertaining: Autumn West. He brings up the picture he took of the photo in her bedroom, the solitary artifact of her past. He does a modest zoom and pans to the left of her face. A sidewalk lined with one-story businesses stretches down the main street of a thousand towns across the Midwest. She said she was from rural Nebraska and the picture seems to confirm it.

  He pans a little more to the left, almost into the foreground, and comes across the front of an old movie theater from the golden age of cinema. Vertical green neon descends to spell AVALON. Underneath it, an elevated wedge of marquee juts out over the sidewalk. Hand-placed capital letters in lurid red spell out the title of this week’s feature, some movie Lane’s never heard of.

  He opens another window and does a Meternet search of Diebenkorn paintings. A few pages later, he lands on the one that hangs on her wall. One more page and he receives an estimate of its value: twenty-five million dollars.

  He goes back to the painting and stares at it. Twenty-five million dollars. It’s one thing to live in Pinecrest and quite another to be here in your mid-twenties with a major museum piece hanging on your cottage wall.

  An alert issues from the laptop’s audio transducer. The neural circuits in the video bug at Autumn’s are busy bearing witness to something they judge to be significant. A window automatically opens on his display, and he sees her walking down the path. She’s dressed in a stylish pantsuit, not the kind of thing you wear to photograph birds or for a casual trip to the store. The bug’s micromotors pan the lens to the street, where an air hop shuttle pulls up.

  She’s going downtown. But where? He looks over at the stupendously valuable painting and then back to her boarding the shuttle to the air hop terminal.

  He folds the laptop shut and resolves to follow, at least for now.

  ***

  An air hop shuttle drops Lane at the terminal, which sits on flat terrain on the far side of the pond. Two choppers rest on the tarmac in front of a two-story building with a front of tinted glass. Covered walkways extend out to the periphery of the aircraft, with their drooping rotors at rest. The upper story offers a mezzanine view of the lobby below and the tarmac beyond, and Lane has stationed himself here.

  Each craft has a separate exit with a display mounted above. The left exit announces a boarding time in one minute, and to confirm it, a soft whine floats in as the aircraft’s engine fires up. The other exit’s display is dark, and its machine idle.

  From up on the mezzanine, Lane can see down to where Autumn sits in the lobby, along with several other passengers. She gazes serenely at the scene outside. A perfect body at perfect rest. A woman’s voice announces that the flight to downtown will now board, and the display confirms it.

  The passengers rise to board, all except Autumn. She remains unaffected and stationary. The exit door slides open and the passengers file through the lobe field and down the walkway. All except Autumn.

  A few minutes later, the air hop lifts and rotates in the direction of the Trade Ring as it thrusts forward. In the meantime, Autumn sits alone in the lobby.

  Lane watches the aircraft disappear into the distance and looks down at her solitary state of repose. What now? He checks his watch. How much time does he want to put into this highly speculative venture?

  Once again, the soft whine of an engine. The exit display to the right lights up with a single declaration: CHARTER ONLY. Autumn rises. The woman’s voice comes back on and announces the destination: “Mount Tabor charter now boarding.”

  Autumn walks slowly, almost hesitantly, through the lobe scan and down the walkway.

  Lane feels a surge of interest flow through him. He’s uncovered another connection between Pinecrest and Mount Tabor, a completely unexpected one. He finds that the terminal has a business center, with several complimentary office cubicles. He grabs one for privacy and opens his laptop. He considers trying to trace the ownership of the Diebenkorn, but decides it’s hopeless. The inner workings of the art world have long since disappeared from public view, for both political and security reasons.

  That leaves him with Autumn’s bedside photo. He opens it and stares. It has a certain quality found only in pictures from the predigital age, a product of chemicals, dyes, and paper, not photons striking pixels composed of semiconductor materials.

  He focuses on the movie marquee in the background. He pans and zooms and reads the title of the movie spelled out in big, block letters: ROAD TO RIO. He opens a second window and does a search of movies based on the title, and there it is, release date and all. He does some simple arithmetic to derive her age. He subtracts the current year from the release year, and adds twenty-five years to approximate her age in the photo.

  Autumn is at least one hundred years old.

  Astounding. He’s seen her up close. She’s not a product of preservation technology, like most of her neighbors. What’s going on? He needs another data point to corroborate his calculation and returns to the detail in the picture. The storefronts stretching down the sidewalk all have display windows, and each contains a faint reflection of the street at curbside. Several of these reflections contain the images of parked cars. He cuts out one and puts it in its own window, where he runs a series of image-enhancement filters. And there it is, a Chevrolet pickup truck with a rounded hood and a grill of four parallel chrome bars. He does an image search and comes up with the year it was made, which is consistent with his calculations.

  He repeats the process for several other display windows. All the vehicles fall into the same age range. He’s looking at a little town, probably in Nebraska, as it appeared over seventy-five years ago.

  He doesn’t want to believe it. He wants her to be twenty-five. For real. Maybe someone pasted her into the scene. But if so, they did a terrific job matching the lighting, especially with an old film-generated photograph.

  Lane leans back from the laptop and turns to stare out at the empty tarmac. Fantastic as it seems, it would help explain Autumn’s detached, dreamy air, with the touch of melancholy, like an aging immigrant clinging to the Old World. Maybe she doesn’t really live here, at least in her mind. Maybe she lives not only in another place, but another time.

  ***

  Autumn gazes out at the fractured grid of the city below from her window in the air hop. Except for the vague rush of the rotors, the cabin is deserted, the seats empty. She knows the route by heart. They are about ten minutes south of the landing pad at Mount Tabor, where Mr. Arjun Khan will greet her, and they will drive up the hill to the sprawling residence at the top. Arjun will explain to her that Mr. Zed is once again in imminent danger of dying. His heart, it’s always something about his heart.

  She can’t deny him her presence. He’s given her the most unique epilog imaginable, even though the ultimate truth of it seems lost on him. He attended her resurrection and it only seems right that Autumn should attend his death, whenever that might be. There was a time when his demise might have caused her sorrow, but that time is past. Because back then, she adored him, Thomas Zed, her savior, provider, benefactor, and worker of miracles.

  He never seemed old to her, and why would he? After all, she herself was one hundred and one years of age. She can still picture the joy radiating through all his creases and wrinkles when he first looked down on her intubated and supine form. It calmed her and gave her a course to follow through the days of confusion that followed.

  Where am I?

  You’re not in the hospital anymore. You’re at a specialized facility. We pulled you back from the brink. You’re doing very well, even better than we expected.

  But why? I was ready to go. What’s left for me?

  Let me show you.

  Zed brought the mirror up to her flawless face.

  Chapter 15

  The Mustard Sky

  The Bird, thought Arjun. It has to be the Bird. The dark hair, so carefully sculpted. The skin of copper. The leather overcoat. The silk tie knotted in
perfect symmetry.

  Of course. Who else would Harlan Green charge with security for a meeting of this magnitude?

  Arjun Khan and the Bird stand by the stairwell on the fifth level of a ten-story parking structure where the Trade Ring fronts the river. The cool air of late night pervades the space. All is monochrome like the concrete, save for the Bird, who turns to Arjun and says, “Your people swept the place, my people swept the place. Have we got a deal?” he asks.

  “Not quite,” Arjun replies. “We still need a personal cam scan on both parties. It’s all set up. All they have to do is walk through.”

  The Bird looks down the row of deserted parking stalls to where the scanner is set up, with its portal of gray plastic. “Okay, but first I want it tested.”

  “Agreed,” Arjun says. No one on Arjun’s side wants a record of this particular encounter. The same is probably true on the Bird’s side, but you can never be too cautious. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a little case containing a nanocam. “I think this will do.”

  He hands the case to the Bird, who opens it and looks at a capsule only a few millimeters in diameter. “It’s active?” he asks.

  “It’s active.”

  The Bird closes the case and walks out into the parking structure. His footsteps bounce in a hard echo off the walls and floor. He passes through the scanner. The alarm promptly sounds. He hits a switch and it stops. He hits another switch and an arming light comes on once more.

  “Okay, we’re done,” the Bird declares as he walks back. He elevates his arm to raise his coat sleeve and check his watch, a Ming from Chen Ho. “Ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes,” Arjun confirms.

  The two men enter the stairwell. Arjun walks up, the Bird down.

  Arjun opens the metal door to the parking structure’s roof, where the chopper rests on the helipad. The craft is dark, the engine silent, the pilot absent. Arjun scans the skyline as he walks to the machine. No buildings have an easy line of sight. No telephoto lenses are likely to be peering their way.

  Thomas Zed’s face is illuminated by the soft glow of the chopper’s computer display as Arjun opens the door. “We’re ready.”

  “All right, then. Let’s get this done.”

  Green watches in fascination as Zed totters through the security scanner. The old man seems like a grotesque caricature of advanced aging. When they arranged the meeting, he had no way of knowing whether or not Zed had undergone any treatment. Apparently not. It’s all the ancient figure can do to join him at the railing on the edge of the parking structure.

  “Good evening, Mr. Green,” Zed says in a reed-thin voice. “I hope you’re taking good care of Dr. Anslow. He’s a bit misguided, but really quite a decent fellow.”

  “I’m sure he is,” Green agrees. “And also quite brilliant. I could hardly believe what he told me.”

  Zed smiles shrewdly. “It does seem pretty astounding, doesn’t it?”

  “I have to say I’m a little disappointed, though. I thought that you yourself would be proof of concept, and obviously that’s not the case.”

  Zed’s eyes narrow and nearly disappear in the massive wrinkling. “Look at me closely, Mr. Green. Very closely.”

  “I’ve already done that. I never forget a face. An essential tool of my trade.”

  “Good. Because the next time you see this face and hear this voice, you’ll have your proof.”

  “And how long might that be?”

  “Soon. Very soon. So as it turns out, our meeting is well timed. But enough about me. Let’s talk about you, and where you’re going. I have to congratulate you on a brilliant career. You’ve come a long way in a remarkably short time.”

  The pair stares out over the river to the East Side of the city. Random bits of light dot the darkness. The bright ribbons of streetlights that once formed a dazzling grid are gone, victims of declining budgets.

  “I’ve come only as far as history will let me,” Green replies. “The times make the man, not vice versa. If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.”

  “Ah, but it’s not someone else. It’s you. And that’s why I’m here.”

  “Should I be flattered?”

  Zed smiles. “Your life is a matter of public record. Mine is precisely the opposite. You see, I’ve never been a prime mover, like yourself. I’ve always been a facilitator, a mediator, a consolidator. And to be quite honest, I’ve profited handsomely in this role, very much so. But that misses the point.”

  “The point being?”

  “The world needs both of us. We’re both indisputably the best at what we do. You supply the social vision. I supply the economic means to realize it. You might say we’re complementary sides of the same coin. But most important, we need to stay in our respective roles on a more or less permanent basis. The world owes us that, and the world will benefit greatly from it.”

  Green nods. “So where do we go from here?”

  “For now, I think you should retain Dr. Anslow as collateral. Once I’ve demonstrated that the process works and you can derive benefit from it, we’ll talk about other arrangements. As a public figure, you’re a special case. We’ll need to moderate the treatment so you don’t suddenly appear dramatically different. From then on, it will be a matter of periodic applications.”

  “And what about yourself?”

  “Anonymity has its benefits. There’s no reason that I can’t be a young man again.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “And the same to you, Mr. Green.”

  ***

  “I’m still having a hard time with this,” Rachel admits as she and Lane step off the MAX train at the Goose Hollow station. “I mean, you’ve traced this Autumn West to Mount Tabor. Wonderful, but the twenty-something centenarian part is pretty wobbly. Are you sure that the picture by her bed wasn’t doctored? Or maybe she’s just the best work ever out of some big-time rejuve shop.”

  “Don’t think so,” Lane says. “I think she’s something else.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  They enter the Goose Hollow Inn through the rear door. It’s early, so the booths and chairs in the back are empty. They walk on through to the front, where a woman in her middle sixties is pouring a glass of beer for a bearded patron who hunches over an open book at the bar. Wynn Pearson expertly dumps the excess head, tops off the pour, and wheels the beer around to the bar, where the patron grasps it without ever looking up from the text. As she plunges the patron’s smart card into the machine, she whisks back a stray strand of gray hair that escapes her ponytail.

  “Lane!” Her blue eyes brighten as he sits down. “How you been?”

  “Same as always. Cutting class.”

  “You could afford it,” she says. “You had the brains.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that back then?” Lane asks. “I might have buckled down. Might have become a professor.”

  “ ’Fraid not,” she says with a slightly naughty grin. “You were way too hunky for anything like that. Besides, I don’t think biology was exactly your favorite subject—except for the reproductive process.” She looks over to Rachel with appraising yet kind eyes. “So who’s your friend?”

  “This is Rachel. Rachel, Wynn Pearson.”

  “Watch him,” Wynn twinkles at Rachel. “He’s definitely cute, but he’s a lot of trouble.”

  Lane can still remember Wynn in his sophomore biology class at Lincoln, steering their young minds through cell chemistry, taxonomy, and basic genetics. She was a great teacher. They all loved her. “I can still see you with the scalpel and the frog. You were magnificent. Why aren’t you still doing it?”

  “I think we’ve had that conversation, big guy.”

  After the public schools collapsed, her only real option was to take a private teaching job, but she wouldn’t even consider it. As she told Lane more than once: “Goddamned if I’m going to show rich kids how to get even richer.”

&nbs
p; “Well, guess what?” Lane says. “I’m ready to repent. I want to go back to class. And this time, I promise I’ll pay attention.”

  “Aha, Lane the scholar,” she quips. “Truth is, you were always a bit of scholar, especially for such a cute kid. You were curious, and you read all the time—at least when you weren’t raising hell. So what to do you want to know?”

  “How long can people live?”

  “Easy one,” she says playfully. “Exactly as long as they’re supposed to.”

  “Let’s suppose for a moment that we don’t believe in predestination. Then how long?”

  The place is empty except for Lane and the patron immersed in the book, so she leans back against the counter and folds her arms. “The maximum human life span is generally agreed to be about one hundred twenty years—with no time off for good behavior.”

  “And how often does that happen?”

  “I can’t give you an exact number, but it’s probably only one in several hundred million people. It’s rare enough the international media gloms on to those who make it and hauls them out on a slow news day. Besides, from a biological standpoint it doesn’t really matter. In the end, we’re all slaves to the Gompertz curve.”

  “What’s that, Ms. Pearson?” Rachel asks.

  “It’s the rate at which we age. Let me put it this way. Remember when you were a kid?” she asks Lane. “Maybe ten or so?”

  “Yeah, vaguely.”

  “Except for accidents, do you remember anyone in your class at school dying?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s the healthiest time of our lives. We’re past childhood diseases, and the bad grown-up stuff has yet to hit us.”

  “So when does the curve get thrown at us?”

  “Now think back to your high school class. Remember anyone dying?”

  Lane can still see the faces. Two girls and a boy.

  Cancer, or leukemia, something like that. “Yes, I can. Three people.”