It didn’t hurt that she was pretty. She had an oval face, with cheekbones that called just enough attention to themselves, a small, perfect nose, and her hair was dark, thick, and wavy. He had always been attracted to women like her, for longer than he could remember.
She could have been anywhere from thirty to seventy, at first glance. When she moved it became obvious that she wasn’t a day under a hundred. She had that ageless grace that comes with a lifetime of experience. Some women learned to hide it, to stumble occasionally and reach awkwardly for things so they appeared younger, but she was clearly beyond all that. She was comfortable in her own skin, as was Edward.
He walked up beside her and said softly, “If this had been the original, you’d be in jail by now.”
She gave him an appraising look. He resisted the urge to suck in his stomach. “If this were the original,” she said in a rich, melodic voice, “admission would have cost ten times as much.”
“A very good point,” he conceded. “My name’s Edward.”
“McKenna.”
“Are you fond of Starry Night?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. Who wouldn’t be?” She reached forward again and pushed the glowing Moon as if it were an “on” button for an interactive demo. Edward winced instinctively at her transgression, but when her finger sank up to the first knuckle he realized the reproduction was a hologram.
Apparently it was more than that. McKenna yanked her finger back with a startled “Oh! It shocked me.” She stuck the wounded finger in her mouth.
“Serves you right.”
“Mmmm. There’s nothing wrong with touching a hologram. Shouldn’t be, anyway.”
“Touching art displays is a bad habit to get into. One of these days you’ll actually be standing in front of the original, and you won’t be able to help yourself.”
She made a face. “Bill Gates has the original. Not likely I’ll be invited to his house anytime soon.”
He shrugged. “‘Soon’ is a subjective term these days, isn’t it?”
She gave him the appraising look again. She was about to violate another taboo, he could tell, so he beat her to it. “Closing in on two hundred. And no, I’ve never met him, but I haven’t made it a goal.”
“Me either,” she replied. “Even though I’ve had over a hundred and fifty years myself to do it.”
He laughed. So refreshingly open! He hadn’t met anyone like her in, well, in a very long time. “You’re a child,” he said.
“Hah. Not many people say that.”
“Then they don’t understand longevity, do they?” Edward inclined his head toward the gallery’s cafeteria. “Would you care to share a cup of something with a slightly older child?”
A few minutes later, over steaming mugs of maté, they went through the ritual. He lived right there in San Francisco; she was visiting from Seattle. He did volunteer work for the Red Cross; she worked a paying job assembling aircraft. He wasn’t partnered, and neither was she. Nor were either of them married.
“I don’t think many people over a hundred do marry anymore,” he said. “‘’Til death do us part’ becomes kind of ominous when that could be centuries in the future.”
“I’ve always heard it was religious bigots who killed marriage,” said McKenna. “They wouldn’t let gays or lesbians get married, so states established domestic partnerships instead, but they couldn’t forbid heterosexuals from registering. After word got around that partners could have all the benefits without the religious connotations, only religious people got married.”
“That’s a good theory.” He laughed. “It’s odd that I can’t just say, ‘Yes, that’s how it was.’ I was there, after all. I was married in my thirties. And forties and fifties, too, I think. But anything beyond about fifty years in the past is a blur. It’s like it happened to somebody else.”
She nodded. “It’s that way for me, too. I have flashes of memory from farther back, but nothing really connects. The brain can only hold so much.”
“I thought we’d have augments by now,” he said.
“We do.”
“I meant ones that worked.”
“Right.” She smiled wryly. She’d obviously tried them and found them lacking just as he had. Exterior memory was fine for looking stuff up, but lousy for spontaneous connections. And the memories were such pale imitations of the real thing, it was like being haunted by ghosts. One of the most liberating moments in his life was the time he had taken off his augment and fed its data port two hundred and forty volts straight out of the wall. It had actually caught fire. He remembered that as clearly as if it were yesterday. But then it had only happened thirty or forty years ago.
“So we drift through life at the leading edge of a fifty-year spotlight,” he said. “I have to admit, it has its advantages.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t feel any older than I ever did. Which is to say I feel like I’m about twenty-five. And I don’t get bored, or jaded, or depressed. Not more than usual, anyway.”
She laughed. “We didn’t get wisdom, but we didn’t get ennui, either. Fair trade, I guess.”
“It’s refreshing to talk about it with someone who understands. It’s the elephant in the room most times with people over a hundred. I think we all expect each other to be superhuman, and we’re secretly embarrassed to be simply human.”
“Here’s to simple humanity,” McKenna said. She lifted her mug and took a sip.
They looked at one another with the frank appreciation of people who had already decided to spend more time together, and were imagining where it might lead.
“So you like poking your fingers into art displays,” Edward said. “I know a place just a few blocks from here where you’re actually encouraged to do that.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Or joyously, or howeverly you want to.”
“Let’s go.”
They turned off their shoes and walked down the center of the street, enjoying the grass between their toes. Ad holos fluttered around them like autumn leaves until Edward took his pod from his pocket and entered an opt-out. They drifted reluctantly away to their five-meter legal boundary, but boosted their image brightness to compensate.
“I keep thinking we ought to reintroduce skeet shooting as a sport,” he said.
“Skeet shooting?”
He raised his right hand, made a pistol with thumb and forefinger, and pointed it at a Cokesi ad. “Bang.”
“Weapons are only legal for self-defense,” she said.
“My point exactly.”
“I think you’d have a hard time arguing in court that a soft drink ad threatened your life.”
“Probably so. Alas.” He picked up a pine cone and tossed it at one of the hovering projectors. It dodged and glowed with renewed vigor now that it knew it was being noticed. So Edward ignored it and concentrated on the grass beneath his feet and the rustle of air in the trees.
“Remember ground cars?” he asked.
“A little,” said McKenna. “I remember getting in a wreck once. My father was driving and somebody hit us. I can still hear the sound of metal crumpling.”
“Funny what sticks with you. I still remember my mother baking cookies when I was about ten. That’s fresher than most of my memories between then and now.”
“Do you ever see her anymore?”
“She died before the treatment was invented.”
“Ah. Sorry.” McKenna fell silent. Another taboo violated, and this time one that did actually sting a bit. Edward had lost a lot of friends and family along the line, most through the simple haze of time, but far too many to death. No amount of medical advances could prevent accidents.
They walked a block or so in silence before Edward asked, “So what brought you to San Francisco?”
“I’m going to watch them use one of our sky-cranes to lift a redwood.”
“Lift a redwood?”
“The tree? Hundred meters tall? Big, heavy—”
/> “I know what a redwood is. I had no idea any were scheduled to be cut.”
“Apparently somebody’s got a contract for ten of them. They’re using one of the cranes I helped build to lift them out of the grove.”
“Ten redwoods? At once?” Edward couldn’t remember the last time such a harvest had been done.
“Not at once. The crane can barely lift one.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean—”
“I get it. Yeah, probably all ten within a couple of weeks. However quickly the mill can process the wood. Want to come watch one of the lifts with me?”
“If you don’t mind me carrying a protest sign.”
She looked at him askance. “Why?”
“Ten redwoods at once? That’s insane. They haven’t even begun to recover from the damage we did to them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We shouldn’t cut another redwood for five hundred years.”
McKenna shook her head sadly. “Nobody would wait that long. Not even you. A hundred years from now you could be the guy running the crane.”
“Ouch.” But he had to admit she was right. A hundred years could witness a change from Liberal to Democrat if the right sequence of events triggered it. People lived in the moment.
They reached the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s monument to science and technology. Edward hadn’t been inside the place for a couple of decades, but it didn’t look any different than he remembered. It was big, cavernous, echoey, and full of the coolest stuff on the planet, all of which you could play with as much as you liked. Provided you signed the waiver at the entrance, of course. Edward read it carefully: you essentially admitted that there were dangers inherent in playing with scientific gadgetry, and you agreed that you wouldn’t sue for damages if you lost digits, limbs, or your life while doing so.
Children ran around underfoot, pushing every button they could reach and screaming at the top of their lungs, trying to defeat the antiphase noise cancellers that reduced their voices to tolerable levels. Edward and McKenna waded through them to interactive displays of optical illusions, chemical trickery, electrical wonders, even antigravity.
“That’s what I work with on the lifter line,” said McKenna, pointing at a modular agrav generator in the middle of a roped-off demonstration area. “I install those in the outriggers.”
“Why?” The question came out before he could stop it.
“Because that’s how cars fly?” she said. “But that’s not what you meant. You meant why do I work a production job? Don’t I have investments that I can live off?”
“None of my business,” he said.
“It’s okay. I could get by fine without a job if I wanted to. I got bored. I decided I wanted to work with my hands again.”
He nodded. “I’ve done that periodically. Usually not in a factory setting, but yes. Work can be gratifying.”
“It needs doing, too,” she said. “I figured it was my turn to be productive for a while.”
How productive had Edward been lately? He volunteered at the Red Cross, keeping track of humanitarian aid shipped to countries in need. A piece of software could do his job, and would if he quit. It was just busywork.
Two kids climbed atop the antigravity unit, laughing while another kid punched the button that sent it to the ceiling. Predictably, one of the kids pushed the other off when they were about twenty feet up, and Edward instinctively reached over the rope to break his fall, but the safety field caught the kid in mid-shriek and bounced him up and down like a ball for a moment, just as he and his friends undoubtedly knew it would. The field threw Edward’s hands upward as well, wrenching his shoulders.
“Ow!” he said, wincing. The kids laughed and ran away.
“You okay?” McKenna asked.
He windmilled his arms experimentally. “Nothing broken. But they’ll be sore tonight.”
“Here.” She turned him around and began rubbing his shoulders.
She certainly was forward with strangers, thought Edward, but he wasn’t about to tell her to stop. And as she kneaded his trapezius muscles, he felt a sense of familiarity beyond the immediate physicality of her actions. He’d used to love back rubs when he was in his forties and fifties, before the immortality treatments had brought his body back to its perpetual state of youthful vigor. In the intervening century and a half he’d nearly forgotten how good it felt.
Eyes closed, face tilted down to arch his back, he said, “I’ll give you until next Tuesday to stop that.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said a deep voice in front of him, “but you’ll both have to stop much sooner than that.”
He looked up to see a security ’bot standing before them, its arms held slightly outward and its glistening metal body leaning forward in a no-nonsense threat. Its humanoid face looked stern. McKenna stopped rubbing, but she kept one hand on Edward’s left shoulder.
“Beg your pardon?” Edward said.
“This is a completely inappropriate place for making sexual advances,” the robot said.
“I don’t really think a back rub is a sexual advance,” Edward replied.
“It certainly looks like one, sir,” said the robot. “I’m going to have to ask both of you to leave the building.”
Edward felt himself blush. “You’re kidding.”
“No, sir, I’m not. Please leave now.” The robot took a step forward.
Edward considered his options. There was no beating a robot in a physical struggle. Complaining to the management would tie both him and McKenna up for at least an hour, and probably ruin whatever chance he had of actually making sexual advances with her.
He turned to look at McKenna. She was grinning like one of the kids on the agrav unit. Okay, then.
“Learning all the time,” he said, taking her hand and leading her out of the echoing building. People stared as they left, and when they stepped out into the afternoon sunlight, both he and McKenna burst into laughter.
“Kicked out of the science museum for PDAs!” she said. “My god, that hasn’t happened to me in decades.”
“You mean it has happened to you before?” Edward asked.
“Oh, I’m sure it must have. I was a pretty wild kid.”
He tried to remember his own youth, the first kisses and clumsy gropings in movie theaters and back seats of cars. Even though the details were lost in the mist of time, he was pretty sure he wasn’t “wild” by anybody’s definition. One or two of his children might have been, but he was hardly the one to judge. All fathers thought their children were too wild.
“Well,” he said. “That was certainly an interesting experience. Now what?” The ever-present ad projectors were starting to collect, so he reached for his pod to enter another opt-out.
McKenna took his hands in hers before he could finish and turned him to face her, then leaned forward and upward, her lips pursed for a kiss. “How about an unambiguous sexual advance?”
The advertising screens swooped in as he bent down to meet her lips. They were undoubtedly in reporting mode now, and thousands of people were receiving pings to alert them to a potentially interesting scene. He didn’t care. Nor, apparently, did she.
She had a hotel room. He had a house in Woodside, up on a hill in the south end of the city. They took BART to the terminal closest to his house, Edward pointing out the sights along the way, then walked the last few blocks hand in hand. The eucalyptus trees dotting the street gave the air a wonderfully sweet aroma. McKenna’s mood had mellowed on the train, and they walked quietly, just enjoying each other’s company and the promise of intimacy to come. They ignored the trio of ad projectors that drifted along ahead of them, no doubt recording their walk for any voyeurs who still cared. Edward was surprised they were so interested. A couple of old-timers hooking up was hardly news.
He held his house door for her, then turned and flipped the addies a centuries-old one-finger salute before he stepped inside himself and closed off their prying eyes. He left the windows undimmed. He would
search the web later for any trace of privacy invasion and sue the pants off the ’bots’ owners if any of them violated his personal space.
McKenna took in his living room like a traveler at a shrine, turning once around to see it all: the simple couch and chairs facing the fireplace, bookshelves lining the walls, paintings and holograms taking up the remaining space. When she saw “Starry Night” she smiled and reached for it, grinning mischievously.
“Go ahead,” Edward told her. “It’s a reproduction.”
“Spoilsport.” She turned once more around, then nodded in apparent satisfaction. “You don’t collect stuff,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“You’re not a hoarder. So many people can’t part with things they care about, so their houses become warehouses.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Been there, done that. About a hundred years ago I gave it all away and started over. Now I use the breadbox rule: If anything the size of a breadbox or larger comes into the house, something of equal size has to go.”
She laughed. “I’m bigger than a breadbox. What do you intend to throw out?”
What did she mean by that? Was she hinting that she’d move in with him? He’d never met someone this forward, at least not that he could remember. “How about my equilibrium?” he answered. “It’s halfway out the door anyway.”
She looked at him with a sideways tilt to her head, then smiled and went over to the fireplace mantel. “Ah, family pho—What?” She picked up a framed flat print of Edward and his first wife—Sally? Sara?—and their teenage daughter, Diane. He’d hung onto it as a memento of his distant past, although he hadn’t seen either of them in nearly a century.
“Where did you get this?” McKenna demanded. “More to the point, how did you get this so quickly? Or have you been stalking me?”
He struggled to understand her meaning. Stalking her? He’d just met her this afternoon. Then he realized what she had to be getting at. “Sally?” he asked.
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