by S J Hunter
She started sobbing again, almost crooning and rocking back and forth, hugging the tear-stained pillow with her free arm.
“Marcy, what happened here?” Chris asked. His voice was still very calm. Marcy started talking again, at first looking at him, but after the first sentence she began directing everything at Livvy.
“I loved him so much. You know how it is. He said he didn’t want children. He said I was all he needed, and why should we give up 50 years of allotment, 50 years of life, just to have a child, a child that would leave us after 20 years or so and have their own life? He said he just wanted to spend a lifetime with me. He said we’d have our 200th birthdays together. So we didn’t have children. Instead, we saved for the resets, so we could stay young for each other.
“But in the end, he didn’t really care that the resets kept me young. He didn’t want me at all. He wanted someone new. Which made it all a lie. All those years gone, and all the time a lie. And now I’ve shot him, and I can’t reverse that, can I? So stupid.”
Livvy swallowed. “No,” she said, and waited.
“I can’t bring him back and let him go his own way, and I can’t take back all those years with the lie.”
She rocked and hugged the pillow and wept.
“So sorry. What have I done? What have I done?”
“Marcy,” Livvy said gently when the fresh outburst of sobs had quieted a little, “sometimes all we can do is try not to make it any worse. Sometimes… some days, it’s too late to do anything else, but we can still do that. In my experience, if we can just do that, something comes along later that shows us how to go on. Can you do that now? Just let it go and not make it worse?”
“I’ve run out of tears. I feel so ugly and old. You’re beautiful. Are you married?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“But I bet you’ve been in love.”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you haven’t, or you’d know. You must be very young. Here, take this away, before I do something stupid again.” Marcy lifted the gun, holding it with only her thumb and index finger as though she wanted to avoid touching it, and held it out to Livvy. It almost slid from her grip from its own weight. Livvy caught it just in time.
“So stupid. I’m sorry about all this trouble. Chris, thank you for coming,” Marcy said, turning back to Chris for a moment. “And you, young lady, will you walk out with me, please? No one will look at me with you next to me.”
“Sure. Are you ready?”
“Yes. Now. Now,” she said, standing up and starting to move. “I can’t bear this house of lies. And I’ve already caused so much trouble, for so many people.
“We spent our lives just wrapped up in each other, or so I thought, but it was just a lie. We should have had children. That would have been someone new, wouldn’t it?” she looked at Livvy questioningly, but didn’t wait for an answer. To Livvy it was as though Marcy knew that as long as she kept talking, she wouldn’t be crying, or thinking about what was behind them on the sofa.
“Maybe Jack would have been happier with children, even though he didn’t believe it. I should have just gone ahead, and let him see how it would be with a child.” At the door, Marcy looked back, letting her eyes slide passed the sofa until they reached Chris, who was standing very still and watching her.
“Chris, thank you. I’m sorry I bothered you again. So much trouble. Whydid they bring so many people? You helped me before. Jack was so angry, do you remember? I think you even told me to think about leaving, but I didn’t listen. Thank you for trying.
“Thank you, too, dear. If I had had a daughter, I would have wanted her to be just like you. What’s your name? Did you say it already? I’m sorry I forgot. I’ll want to know, later.”
“I’m Olivia. Livvy.”
“That’s lovely. You are perfectly lovely. I’m ready to go out, now. I’m sorry for all the trouble. I know I’ve been such a bother to everyone. Wasted everyone’s time.”
“It’s all right. We understood. Here, we’ll go together,” Livvy said when they got to the door and Marcy hesitated. Livvy crooked her arm and offered it so that Marcy could put a hand on it as though she were an elderly person who needed help to walk, and they left the house together.
*****
Later, in the car when they were back on the glassene and Livvy had had a chance to put some time between herself and all of that pain, she asked Chris about the Pheromone Fiasco and what he had done for Marcy at that time.
“Strange things, pheromones, and you know at that time there was still so much that was poorly understood, even by the experts, although there sure were a lot of molebiol practitioners trying to sell chem-enhancements and riding the wave of fads with their own variations. Some of the so-called pheromone enhancements that women, and a few men, paid good money for did nothing for them except attract insects.”
Livvy choked.
“Yes, well you wouldn’t have laughed at the time, Hutchins.”
“I don’t know. Give me some credit,” Livvy said.
“Anyway, some of them had other unpredictable effects, especially on certain men. Idiosyncratic effects, they’re called. Marcy’s husband seemed to want to hit her whenever she got nervous. The sweat, you see. As you can imagine, it was an escalating situation. She would never press charges. She thought it was all her own fault.”
“She was what? Twenty-one, Twenty-two?” Livvy asked. “A child.”
“About that. A lot of the practitioners who had sold these headaches to the unsuspecting public had scattered like roaches and most of the enhancements were poorly documented, if at all, so they were difficult and expensive to reverse. I tracked down the practitioner who’d given her the enhancement and made sure she got the reversal, at no additional charge, before he went to jail.
“To give the bastard, Marcy’s husband,” Chris added, clarifying which bastard he was talking about at the moment, “… to give him his due, the physical abuse stopped as soon as she got the reversal.”
“The physical abuse,” Livvy said musingly. “She stayed with him all those years.”
“She loved him. And he did stay with her fifty years.”
“He knew her buttons, and she was a willing victim. I give him nothing.
“How did you convince the practitioner to give her the reversal? Did you get him a deal with the DA?” Livvy asked, curious. It seemed pertinent to LLE’s management of these kind of cases.
Chris chose his words with care. “I try to avoid offering deals that dilute the impact of the Laws. It sets a bad precedent. Also, I was still angry when I found him.” He turned to look squarely at Livvy, and said very seriously, “I threatened to break his kneecaps.”
Livvy laughed. “And he believed you? He didn’t realize you’re Enforcement?”
“Oh, he knew. He knew I was LLE,” Chris said, still seriously. Livvy’s laughter slowly faded.
“You’re not kidding, are you?” she asked.
Chris didn’t answer.
“It changed everything, didn’t it?” Livvy asked after a pause. “Even love. I mean, not the enhancements, those are relatively minor. I mean Longevity itself.”
“How could it not? Molebiol beat aging. Gave us eternal youth and biological immortality. The trouble is, they only gave it to those who can afford it. And even if everyone could afford it… humanity needs children around to stay human. How does any sane society reconcile those issues?
“The only reason we’ve made it this far is that we’ve got the Laws that were cobbled together in response to the Riots. Without the Longevity and Enhancement Laws, we’d be in real danger of facing the creation of a master race, all based on power and financial resources.”
“No. No, we wouldn’t,” Livvy said soberly.
“Of course you’re right.” Chris glanced at her and then went back to staring straight ahead. “That is the crux. We had the Riots, but it’s been so much worse everywhere els
e in the world. We’d claw each other apart, like they have elsewhere, until we destroyed ourselves as a civilization. But you’ve considered all this, or as a well-regarded Homicide detective you wouldn’t have jumped into the LLE rabbit hole. This is hardly a career booster for you.”
“Well-regarded?” Livvy said with mild irony. “You know I used family influence to get here.”
“I’ve been a detective a long time.”
They sat in silence for a while. Livvy suspected Chris must be remembering how close they’d come to collapse once already, and how hard Karen had worked to prevent it. He had been in the center of it all. She could only imagine what it had been like.
“Your wife was Karen DeVoe, the bioethicist who consulted on the Laws, wasn’t she?” she asked, watching him.
He continued to stare out the front window at the scenery passing by. After a while, she began to wonder if he was going to answer, or if she needed to apologize for some reason.
Extending as far as she could see on one side of the highway was one of the largest Naturals ghettos in the nation. Block upon block of 20th and 21st century high-rise buildings, interrupted frequently by squares of the reclaimed green spaces with their gardens and playgrounds. There was no physical boundary, but the ghetto was inhabited by families and businesses functioning behind brittle socioeconomic and philosophical barriers. She knew LLE would seldom have to venture into these areas; licensed facilities were non-existent and hotlabs were rare, although sometimes a group of the less law-abiding residents got enterprising enough to highjack a shipment of Longevity supplies and kidnap a practitioner. But the way she saw it, LLE was mainly for them. LLE guarded the promise that the Laws would keep the barriers passable.
“Things were at a crisis,” Chris said, interrupting her thoughts. “None of it was simple. Of course from the beginning there were those who abhorred the whole idea on principle, and others who reveled in the possibilities but understood what it would mean for society. A lot of people who couldn’t afford minimally useful resets still didn’t want to see Longevity totally abandoned, even if we could have put the Genie back into the bottle, because then their children would never have the chance or the choice. The protests built into the Riots, and it took the politicians a while to understand that it wasn’t just about radicals who couldn’t stand the concept of Longevity or the hard-core discontented who couldn’t afford it, but rational people who knew what it would mean if it was unchecked… if no compromise made co-existence possible.
“It got so bad that they even tried to outlaw Longevity for a while, but the Riots didn’t stop, they just changed. Everyone, including the civic leaders in the ghettos, knew the black market pressures would be overwhelming and unrelenting. The politicians finally got that they would need to work with what we had, and come up with some workable compromise. They were terrified. They finally had an issue that they couldn’t just endlessly debate.”
“I’ll bet they still tried, for a while,” Livvy said.
Chris smiled slightly again, at some memory. “They called in all kinds of experts. Karen testified and then spent hours with government officials, congressmen, and newsmen, lobbyists, anyone who asked for her help. Educating, explaining… It was the first time in her experience that they really seemed to listen. Before then, Congress had just rushed approvals through, eager to get the benefits for themselves and their families, thinking they were appeasing everyone who mattered.”
There was another, shorter silence. Livvy thought about what it must have meant to him to come through all that, and come out with the Laws functioning as they were meant to, and Karen. Karen, expecting a baby, as Livvy’s research had revealed. No one welcomed a baby unless they had a tenacious grasp on hope.
“I don’t suppose you’ve had much exposure to any natural families?” Chris asked at last. “I don’t anymore, myself, but that’s partly because of what I’ve been doing for the last fifty-odd years. The stable natural families may know what we do, but they almost never encounter LLE. They’re not all religious fanatics, or too poor to afford the resets. Nor do they all hate us and the choice we’ve made. Most choose to live in there, in some cases because they believe it is the right way to live.” He nodded towards the ghetto.”
“But you can remember, can’t you? I mean, you grew up in one. A natural family. Your parents got old before they died?”
Chris hesitated, but then answered simply. “Old? Yes, I suppose so.”
“Someday, no one will remember what it was like, before Longevity,” Livvy said.
“If you are serious about trying to understand, and you stick around LLE after this week, we can arrange for you to spend some time with a family. Agnew’s family is Natural.”
The car pulled up to face a home slot and they climbed out so that it could drive in and elevate out of the way for the next returning vehicle. Louie didn’t wait for them to open the door, but climbed into the front and out before the door slid shut. At the office, other than an occasional excursion to Livvy’s side to glean some attention, he was showing a strong tendency to stay within inches of Chris’ left hand.
“What do you think will happen to her? Marcy?” Livvy asked.
“It’s no different here in D.C. than on the West Coast.”
“Meaning, I suppose, that it probably all depends on whether she gets some media-savvy attorney,” Livvy said. “For once not a bad thing. That bird already hit the window way too hard.”
“Whatever happens, we can probably assume that it will be nothing she would consider worse than what has happened already,” Chris agreed. “At any rate, it’s a Homicide case, not an LLE case, although we still each have to prepare a report. If it were an LLE case, we’d handle it differently. But you’ll find that out soon enough.”
They’d reached the squad room. There was a short pause in the underlying buzz of voices when they walked in but it didn’t last long. By tomorrow, she figured, they’d have moved on, and she and Louie would attract no more attention than a firefly on the Fourth. Chris reached his desk and, hooking his chair with his leg, pulled it in and sat down.
Livvy had hoped for some elaboration of his last comment, but none came. She remembered he wasn’t a training officer.
He took out a muting recorder and started talking into it, and she searched her desk drawers. Whoever had used the desk before her – and it looked like it had been a while – hadn’t left many useable supplies. There was no recorder, for example. There had to be a supply depot, and she looked around for a logical place to begin exploring the room.
Her nominal partner ignored her. Okay, she was a big girl and she could figure out how LLE “handled it differently” by observation. Like Louie, she supposed. Fair enough. She still had over six days. Plenty of time to get into the routine.
Chp. 4 Another Damn Doctor (Tuesday)
Chris considered reset day a pain in the ass. It took up a half a day, played tricks on his short term memory, and gave him significant philosophical qualms on the issue of whether he was living the life he should be living. He continued to go in as scheduled because he was living half the life – or truthfully far less than half the life – he and Karen had planned together. Resets were a benefit of his job, they allowed him to continue to do his work effectively, and after all, he still valued life and a useful level of fitness. That was the whole point of Longevity. It plainly beat the alternative.
The morning after meeting his new partner, he showed up for his quarterly appointment, and as often in the city employees’ facility in massive City Central, he saw a new doctor – new to him that is – for his scan consultation.
Unlike most physicians, this one had chosen to keep the face of a 21 year-old. Chris, never having met him before, had no idea of his true age except to know that he had to be at least a decade younger than Chris was, even if he was from one of the extremely wealthy families that were the only ones able to afford resets before the explosion of technical achievements in 2040 made them affor
dable for a lot of the upper middle class as well.
“You’re 101 chrono, and what? 33 biol? A pioneer,” the doctor said, slightly surprised.
He had been scanning Chris’ records but at that he looked up and scrutinized Chris more closely, a little like he might examine a lab specimen. “Your BMI and cardiac parameters haven’t changed in the last 6 decades. According to our records, you’ve never had anything but departmental resets,” he glanced inquiringly at Chris, “yet you look a very fit 30-35. How do you feel?”
“Like a 30-35 year old,” Chris said.
“You’ve never had any kind of enhancement? A slight metabolic adjustment? No? That’s a lot of work on your own. Very impressive.” The doctor paused. “Too many people think that resets and enhancements can do it all, even though they must know that enhancements to help increase muscle strength and reflex times are illegal.”
“I’m in LLE,” Chris said.
“Ah, so of course you know. Well, you seem to have a regimen that keeps you fit,” he said, then paused. There was obviously bad news coming.
“Unfortunately, I still need to recommend visits every 2 months from now on.”
“Why?” Chris asked.
“Let me see. To put it in terms you can understand. First of all, it’s a myth that the need for resets increases with a little age – you can reach your allotment without having to adjust your reset interval. Most people, other than nervous types with lots of resources, do just that. So it’s not for the resets.
“It’s always been a tradeoff between senescence – cell aging – and instability. Not to get too technical on you… when we learned how to manipulate telomeres and stem cells and really use engineered RNA and transcription factors with incredible precision and molebiologists started devising catalysts that could speed the processes up without stressing… well, to put it simply, we beat senescence. But when we destroyed the Hayflick Limit, we set ourselves up for an increase in instability.
