Big Boat by Redfern Jon Barrett
Abdur is content with his life serving the world's immortal elite on a never-ending cruise, until he meets the person at the head of the whole operation.
It's a big boat. From the wide-panel windows of the suite, gazing out upon the unending ocean, you can see just how big. A colossus on an eternal voyage to nowhere. But then the windows seem to thicken, growing opaque. They now show the lost Lagos skyline, and the young man in the bed - a long-famous Hollywood actor - sleepily orders Chennai eggs benedict.
"Excellent, mer," I say, as I scrawl the order onto my electronic notepad.
The woman next to him stirs awake. She wants cornflakes with alpaca milk.
"And to drink?"
They both order coffee: black; ground-grown beans. The man puzzles over a crossword as the woman's face slackens back into sleep, and it isn't long before Khuyag - our unit drinks specialist - enters with the espresso cups, elegantly balanced on a miniature tray which he sets down in one flawless motion.
Neither even glances in Khuyag's direction, but I offer him a subtle nod before Barb enters with the spiced eggs, then Chio with the cornflakes and Miremba with the alpaca milk, each of us in the same crisp white uniform with cobalt trim. I stand and watch proudly - Waitstaff Unit 145-C works like a well-oiled machine, the routine perfected over many years.
The couple notice nothing; she kisses him on the cheek before both start eating, sloppily spilling globules of egg and flecks of roasted corn about the sheets.
"You're welcome," Barb mutters beneath her breath. I give her the subtlest glare possible as Khuyag gently nudges her with his elbow. With breakfast served our role is over, and the five of us leave before the clean-up crew arrives, making our way down to our quarters 143 floors below - deep within the chemical-scented bowels of Big Boat, where there are no windows looking out onto the eternally-rising ocean.
The journey takes an entire forty-five minutes, along wide artificial streets and down spacious elevators. Big Boat - otherwise known as the Gratia Aeterna - is the largest ocean-going vessel ever constructed, and it has to be, with its ageless population. After all, forever is a long time, and the rich need more space than people like us.
"It's just space they fill with junk and loneliness," Barb says, as we enter our cramped, low-ceilinged living space. "It's space they have simply for the sake of having it."
Khuyag, still irritated by her earlier outburst, warns her not to talk like that. "Not if you want to keep this job. Not if you want to keep living here. With us."
"We don't have to be cowards about it," Barb declares, with a defiant flick of her thick dark hair. She settles down onto the narrow, padded bench which serves as our sofa.
She shouldn't press these boundaries. If we lose our jobs then we'll be exiled. Our age treatment will be reversed. Which means, for example, that Khuyag would be delivered to the climate-ravaged shore no longer as a handsome, sultry 20-year-old. No. He would return to the hills of Ulaanbaatar a creaking, aching 85 - the age he was when he first boarded Big Boat.
Chio would be 83. Miremba 79. None of us know how old Barb was when she arrived, while I myself would be returned to 72. But it isn't old age that bothers me; I'd stand to lose so much more than just youth.
Born into a family that, according to the adults, had too many girls already, I'd spent my first year screaming. From then on all my aunties made the same joke: that I had a boy's lungs. The joke wound its way throughout my childhood, and worked whether they wanted to tease:
You scowl like a boy.
Or whether they wanted to chastise:
You're standing like a boy.
And the boundaries between the teasing and the chastising were blurred, so I couldn't tell which was which. Whether, in that moment, they found me amusing or alarming.
You eat like a boy.
But their comments felt like compliments, because I knew, and only I knew, that I was a boy. And I would have held it hidden within till the day I died, but then I saw the employment call, the offer to work on Big Boat. I made a special request alongside the age therapy, and in return they gave me a deep, hefty voice, a new bone structure, a forest of chest hair. It was the liberation I'd longed for, which I could never have afforded back in Narayanganj.
If I were exiled from Big Boat, I'd no longer be Abdur. I would be Ayesha. A dead name. A wrong body. This means I don't encourage Barb or her comments.
"You can always leave," I tease her. "Isn't that the point? You can always go right back to the blessed shore. No one will stop you."
Khuyag grins, and Barb glares, but for now the little mutiny is averted. Order is restored. That's important, you understand, that's my role in our little group. Whenever Chio and Barb shove for sofaspace, or Khuyag hogs the shower cubicle, I keep the peace. I keep things going.
They're family, of a kind. That's how Big Boat works, how it's worked for decades: Your unit is your only real contact. We do not interact with the other employees. So all of our affection, all of our intimacy, goes to one another.
If Khuyag can't sleep, Barb will stroke his hair. If Chio needs relief, Miremba or I will cuddle and caress her. We are parents, lovers, siblings, friends. Everything we need each other to be.
We make our way through the guest levels on our way to the evening shift. Little paper hearts litter the length of New Bleecker Street, a level that's a five-storey tall replica of New York's Greenwich Village. The hearts themselves are hand-cut: On Big Boat most employment is menial, like mixing cocktails or massaging young backs or manually writing wedding invitations, because being ageless means having all the time in the world.
The paper cut-outs dangle from lampposts on silver strings and sway in the simulated breeze, all, of course, in preparation for Eternal Heart Day.
"Did you buy me something special for Eternal Heart Day, Khuyag?" Chio jokes, nudging him in the ribs.
"You're two-timing me, Khuyag?" gasps Miremba, as she jabs the blushing, good-natured man from the other side. "After all we've been through?"
Barb says nothing - indeed, she's strangely quiet for once, staring at shop windows which swirl with gentle suggestions for the post-Valentine's celebration, things like PROVE YOUR AFFECTIONS and EITHER WAY, SHE WON'T FORGET.
It might seem silly, certainly, but the stores pay their fees (not taxes, of course, never taxes) and those fees pay for me, and Khuyag, and Chio and Miremba and Barb, as well as the 29,995 other employees. So I don't mind the little hearts on their glinting strings.
We enter the elevator, which is disguised as the entrance to a New York metro station, and ride it upwards, before making our way down the narrow, dark employee tunnels which surround the immersive dining suites. Each suite has its own micro-resolution walls and holographic projectors designed to simulate anywhere imaginable, and on reaching the staff entrance, we wait, as always, while Chio and Miremba speculate over what the setting will be tonight.
"I bet you it's the tip of a Shanghai skyscraper," Chio wagers.
"Nah, nu-uh," counters Miremba. "I say it'll be some kind of afterlife. Valhalla! All Viking warrior nonsense, with mead and maidens."
Khuyag contradicts them - though his voice is soft and his tone jovial, as if in agreement.
"Afterlives will soon be out of fashion. They've been popular for eight months already. As for Shanghai, it'll be at least another four years before skylines are in again."
No one argues with him; Khuyag reads moods and trends like Big Boat's atmospheric sensors read the weather. Infallibly.
"Imagine if we could get into the immersion systems," comments Barb, "and choose where they eat. A nice twentieth-century landfill, perhaps. Or the Siege of Leningrad."
She chuckles to herself. Once again I wonder why she chose Big Boat in the first place, but then the light above the staff's entrance glows green. That's my cue, so I leave the rest of Waitstaff Unit 145-C and step into the suite.
Now this, I have not seen before.
I am on the threshold, sandwiched between two endless rainbow plains; one above, one below. Both the artificial sky and simulated ground are engaged in an infinite technicolour dance, each a negative mirror of the other, playing at opposite ends of the spectrum. Where the ground flashes red, the sky above churns violet; where the sky blinks yellow the ground swells blue. It is, almost certainly, the most spectacular thing I've ever seen. The air smells sweet and poisonous.
While taking it all in I must have hesitated - alas, my professional decorum detached for a half-second - because the lone person at the table addresses me directly. His accent is German, mixed with a dozen other influences.
"This is a simulation of Mvembe C," he explains, while actually looking at me, directly at me. "A planet which was just discovered by one of us. An ageless person, using their immortality to drift forever across space, dropping relays like breadcrumbs. They've observed 812 unique worlds thus far, and that's all they'll ever do, drift through the unending void, discovering places no one else will ever reach. That no one else would want to reach. It's possibly the most egotistical sacrifice one single human has ever made - with the exception of Jesus Christ - but it makes for a marvellous dining backdrop."
I nod in shock, because the person speaking is even more unexpected than scene which surrounds us; it's Felix Ritter, the Gratia Aeterna's original investor and top executive, the one who made Big Boat happen in the first place. A decade and a half upon the ship, and I have never seen him in the flesh. He's a beautiful twenty-year-old, with clear, inquisitive eyes, smooth skin, and a strawberry-blond beard. But I've seen pictures of him from before, and he was just as handsome when he was sixty.
"What can I get for you, mer?" I ask, the only thing I'm permitted to ask.
"Please," Felix Ritter says, the word drawn out as if he likes the way it tastes. "No mer here. It's as old-fashioned as sir or ma'am - just because it's neutral in gender doesn't mean it's not grotesquely hierarchical, now does it?"
"No, m-" I stop before the offending term slips out, leaving the 'm' drifting untethered.
"I'll have the squid gumbo and a sapodilla schnapps," he orders, and, as is the correct form, I note it down on my small electronic notepad. (The very walls themselves could take his order, of course, but I'm here to provide the human touch. I'm good at that.)
Khuyag enters with the schnapps and places the glass in front of Felix Ritter, swiftly and delicately.
"Thank you," Felix Ritter says, a remark so unexpected Khuyag flinches. Miremba follows close behind with the side salads, and he thanks her too.
Everyone plays their part perfectly, but despite the honour, I can't help but question why we're here serving Felix Ritter, when we're used to serving the lower-tier clientele, solar barons and ancient Hollywood relics. Ritter talks - as Khuyag brings another drink, and another - opining on the wasteful social programmes of the European Federal Union in one moment, moving onto the problems of Nepalese software conglomerates the next.
"In my day, the first time around that is, there was real innovation..."
He interrupts himself and turns to me, cheeks rosy with the schnapps.
"For dessert, I'll have the crème brûlée with genuine vanilla." His grin, already wide enough, widens further. "I hear you have an expert in your unit."
Of all the reasons to have selected us, I would never have guessed that it would be Barb.
"Yes, m-" I cut myself off again. "Right away."
Barb can do practically anything with a blowtorch, a skill she ascribes to several ageless years at an artist's colony somewhere out in the Oklahoma desert. Usually guests want their own image scorched into the brûlée, a task Barb will nimbly accomplish right there at the table.
"Would you like a portrait?" she asks.
"Yes. Only, not mine," he orders. "His."
It takes several moments before I realise he's referring to me, and already Barb's at work with the tiny blowtorch and its little blue flame, burning the soft brown sugar evenly at first, then scorching the outlines of my chin, my cheekbones, my carefully-combed beard. I've never had my portrait painted before, and I cannot help myself; I'm mesmerised as my face reveals itself in fine black strokes.
I'm so lost in Barb's work that I don't even notice that Felix Ritter has been watching me. Not until the image is complete.
"Felix Ritter!" Chio exclaims, once the shift is over, once we're back in our little living space. She pulls our meal trays from the slot in the kitchen and hands them to Miremba, who, without thinking, distributes them across the narrow table.
"It's like meeting a god," Khuyag concurs, seating himself elbow-to-elbow with Barb and myself, unpeeling his tray and revealing the usual five compartments: one each for protein paste, fruit fibre, carb bricks, mineral pudding, and vitamin noodles. He doesn't even glance at the food before shovelling it into his mouth, soft lips sucking at greasy fingers.
"I thought he'd be taller," Miremba muses while thoughtfully chewing on a carb brick. Today they're corn yellow, and as I put one in my mouth it crumbles over my tongue, dry and ever so faintly bitter.
"He was sitting down," Chio responds. "You couldn't tell how tall he is."
"I could tell," says Miremba softly, dreamily gazing at her half-eaten brick.
"Maybe Mirry here has a crush," Khuyag teases, which is, of course, rare for him - he must be in a good mood after our surprise shift. "A crush on the King of Big Boat, no less!"
"But it's not Miremba he flirted with, is it?" Chio says, which means they all look at me, all except Barb, who keeps on eating.
I don't give them what they want. I say nothing, peeling a piece from the ball of fruit fibre and placing it on my tongue. It's mildly acidic and sweet.
"Well?"
"Well," I reply, "what do you need me to say?"
"Abdur's embarrassed," Chio teases. "Hiding behind modesty."
"Perhaps you could give it a try some time," Khuyag quips.
For the rest of the meal they tease and bicker. All except Barb, who eats quickly and quietly, picking at small bites while keeping her gaze down on the table. No one else seems to notice.
I wake, suddenly, as the narrow mattress vibrates beneath my body. The other four are still fast asleep; the wall next to me reads 05:05, which is earlier than expected. Beneath is a location, alongside a single name:
FELIX KARL RITTER
When I was in my old, elderly body, I woke at dawn each day, greeting the sunrise not because I wanted to, but because my ageing biorhythms demanded it of me. The sun rose, and so did I. Now I curse the early hour, and fifteen minutes later I'm speed walking through Hanoi's Quang Ba Flower Market, where the simulated night is offset by bright strings of bulbs illuminating endless rows of colourful tulips, carnations, sunflowers, and peonies; alongside delicate laceflowers, lilacs, lilies, and Chinese lanterns. Above hang the long mauve tendrils of love-lies-bleeding, all carefully grown in Big Boat's hydroponic levels. Even though they're hypoallergenic I still feel my nose tingle as I pass, an instinctive reaction to the phantom pollen.
The paper hearts dangle here too, and the advertisements for Eternal Heart Day are custom-made for the market itself: SAY IT WITH SWEET PEAS and ORCHIDS ARE THE NEW ROSES. The elevator is dressed up as Ngoc Son Temple, with an archway of grey stone and blue-gold murals, all surrounded by high heaps of colourful fruit.
I've been ordered to one of the immersive entertainment suites. What, exactly, does Felix Ritter have planned?
I arrive to find the area lit by buzzing neon lights, a nod to cyberpunk worlds. Felix Ritter waits by one of the solid steel doors. His face is bathed blue one side and orange the other. Next to him is a woman, twenty like the rest of us, her expression a complete and careful neutral.
"You're punctual," Felix says. "I like that. Keeping time shows respect to others."
"It's no problem, mer."
"I told you," Felix Ritter admonishes, "I don't engage in such formalities. I want you to call me Felix."
"Of course. Felix."
This makes him smile, as though it's a pleasure to hear his own name fall from my lips.
"May I?" He holds out his hand, and I stare, perplexed, at the outstretched palm. It's several moments before I realise I'm supposed to take it, which I do; his skin feels cool against mine as I fight the urge to pull away. I'm not used to being touched by anyone but my unit.
"This," he gestures to the woman, "is my lawyer. She's here to make sure you're under no duress. That you're here of your own volition."
The careful lawyer's gaze burrows into me until I verbally confirm: "Yes. Of course. I'm here of my own volition."
"Good," Ritter replies. "Now, what's your favourite place in all the world?"
With my family.
"I don't know," I tell him.
"Well, let me show you mine." He lets go of my hand as the heavy doors silently slide open. "Only, you need to go in first. And take a seat in the far corner."
For fifteen years I've been trained not to hesitate, nor to ask questions. I step through those steel doors, and for a moment everything is solid darkness. Then the lights come on.
The entertainment centre can simulate anywhere. So why am I in a dingy old ice cream parlour? The laminate floor is sticky beneath my soles, and a small board reads ERDBEERE, SCHOKOLADE, VANILLE. A sour-faced old woman stands behind the counter. It's been so long since I saw an ageing face that I stare at her wrinkles and jowls, dumbfounded, for several seconds.
"Hello. Hi," I say, though the simulated woman gives no response. I head over to the far corner, to a table with chocolate ice cream in a clouded glass, and a spoon to each side. I seat myself moments before Felix Ritter walks in. He looks around, then feigns surprise at seeing me.
"Where are we?" I ask.
He laughs, as though I've said something charming and mildly stupid.
"A past life," he says, explaining without explaining. "We all have them, don't we?"
"We do," I concur, and when he keeps staring I add, "Felix," which makes him grin again.
"This is somewhere very special to me - the year is 1984, the city is Magdeburg. A jewel of East Germany's Democratic Republic. I came here as a young man, a hopeful emigrant from West to East, an ideological convert to the glories of real-life Marxism." He laughs again, this time at his younger self. "A naive child, yet to find his place in the world."
He gestures at the gloopy, gelatinous bowl of ice cream - which is real - and my stomach twists. Though I used to eat all sorts back in my past life, here nothing like this is served to staff; for the past fifteen years I've lived off bricks of plant protein. To avoid eating, I ask him a question.
"And this ice cream parlour? What happened to you here?"
"Here I met the woman who would become my wife." His stare is intense, his eyes a cold blue. I hadn't expected him to reply so directly.
"I'm sorry," I say, because I don't know what else to say.
"Don't be." His lips curve into a grin. His gaze doesn't change. "Life is filled with fresh starts, is it not? Here." He takes one of the long-handled spoons, dips it into the ice cream and brings it to my lips. "Guten Appetit," he announces. "Of course I'm showing my true age - almost no one speaks German these days, not even in Germany. It's all euro-English now, though of course France will keep on speaking French until the end of time..."
His voice washes over me. The scent of the sickly dessert curls up my nose, rich and earthy and... something else. I feel nauseous.
"...but you must forgive me, you didn't want to dine while discussing European linguistic evolution." He wiggles the spoon before my lips. "Please."
My belly churns and my mouth fills with thick stringy spit. I can't imagine putting that icy lactation into my mouth, but it's Felix Ritter who's gazing down at me, anticipating me doing exactly that, so before I can stop myself I open my mouth. Without hesitation he thrusts the spoon inside. The phlegmy, mucus-like cream is so cold it burns my tongue, and the chocolate so bitter I almost choke.
A moment passes. The frigid lump oozes down my throat, and still he's looking at me. My stomach tightens as I try to swallow, and I hope for him to look away, but he's still watching when my stomach lurches. Then it happens.
I vomit. I vomit over the ice cream. I vomit over the chipped table and laminate floor. As my guts and throat burn I slur I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, wiping my face with my hands before stumbling out of the simulation suite.
My eyes watering, I pass his blurry lawyer. She raises her finger at me - nail pointed - and it looks like she's going to say something, but I stagger on without stopping, and I keep moving, on, away, until I get to the elevator and the doors close quietly behind me.
The worst has come to pass - soon I'll be on-shored, separated from my family of fifteen years. I'll be 72 years old again, no longer my true self.
When I get home they think I'm sick. Chio guides me to my narrow mattress, Khuyag gently wipes the crusted vomit from the corners of my mouth, and Miremba places a cool flannel to my forehead. I sleep, on and off, disturbed by ice-cold dreams that slip away each time I wake.
That night someone climbs into my bed; I can tell from her breathing that it's Barb. She wraps her arms around me, so I take her hand in mine.
"You're being courted."
Her voice is nearly silent, not even a whisper. Over years of living in cramped quarters we've perfected the art of moving air, of inaudible talking.
"I was being courted."
"Abdur, there are at least a thousand supermodels on board. There are Olympic athletes and chess champions. If he's chosen you, there's a reason for it."
"How do you know these things?" I mouth.
"I've been alive a long time."
"Who hasn't?"
"I mean," she replies, slowly and carefully, "I'm older than all of you. I was ageless before I even boarded this ship."
I'm shocked - why would she choose this life when she was ageless already? But I say nothing. I wait for more of her revelation.
"I got the treatment in the early period, when they were testing it on cancer patients. But I'm not rich, and neither were my friends and family. Everyone I once knew is dead. And I went everywhere I could think of, Abdur, everywhere. For decades. Decades on decades. I had affairs with men and women and everyone in between, but nothing stuck. The poor would age and the rich wanted nothing to do with me. Then I met this old woman. She told me she'd once worked on the biggest boat you ever saw, and on that boat she found companions. People she'd loved."
She presses her face into my back, wet with tears. She squeezes my hand.
"This place was my last resort. This job. I didn't find family again till I arrived here. Now Felix Ritter wants to take you away from us, and there's nothing any of us can do to stop it. There's nothing we can do to keep you."
Again, the mattress vibrates. Again, according to the wall, it's 05:05. And again there's that all-too-familiar name, alongside a quiet and almost imperceptible dread.
But I am not exiled. If I were I'd be informed by the very wall that currently reads FELIX KARL RITTER. Perhaps Barb is right, and his infatuation with me has only been heightened, like one of those broadcast-era 'rom-coms'.
There's no more time to ponder, so instead I quietly rise and retrieve a fresh uniform from the delivery closet. We meet once more at the entertainment centre, alone this time, and Felix seems no less delighted to see me; he doesn't even mention my unfortunate regurgitation. Over the next several summons he takes us on a simulated tour across the late nineteen-eighties and through the nineteen-nineties, regaling me with long, meandering observations as he does so: comments on how much nicer people's manners once were, or how youth used to be geared toward fun. It's all before my time, and I'm lost among the bizarre fashions and stinking, smog-spewing cars. We go to the noisy zoo in Köln, then to his department at the old university. On the next visit he wants to show me the offices of his first software company.
"Not all the details are right," he says, as we stand among furry coffee mugs and bulky beige machines. "But I want to show you my life. What came before. I want you to understand."
When it's over we hover outside the entertainment centre. He hesitates for an instant, wavering between doing and not-doing. Then he leans in as though he's going to kiss me, and instead nudges my cheek with his nose.
I do not flinch.
FELIX KARL RITTER. Those words are now my morning alarm. I've again been summoned to one of the simulated entertainment units, and this time my route takes me down one of the lost streets of Venice, complete with gilded trimmings, chlorinated canals, and eerily aquatic lighting. High-grade perfumes seep from the walls.
But when I reach the unit, it's not Felix Ritter who greets me.
It's his lawyer.
"You made it," she declares. She sounds like she's originally from North America, like Barb. "I'm afraid Mr. Ritter won't be joining us today."
"Should I leave?" I ask.
"Oh, no. You're right where I need you," she replies, eyes narrowed, carefully assessing me. "You know, I never would have guessed you'd be his type."
I nod, politely, because there's no other response I am permitted to give.
"My name is Lorella," she says. "And yours is Abdur. As it should be. Now come along."
I don't know what she means by that, exactly, but she's already motioning for me to follow her into the simulation unit. At first it's pitch dark, like before, but then the lights come on. It's several moments before I realise where I am.
We're in my house. My old house, the one I lived in all my life, the one filled with aunties and laughter and shame. It isn't possible, it can't be possible, but this large living room is the same as that large living room, even including the scorched iron print on the sofa's left arm, and the semi-circular dent in the wall where Auntie NAyesha once threw a mug.
"This is his creation," Lorella says. "Or rather, it's his recreation."
I'm about to ask how, but the truth is I know how; all it would take is a deep trawl through old social archives, photos and videos from a life I'd left behind. The question I want to ask is why, and she must read it in my face because she answers, "I've long given up trying to understand why they do the things they do. Them, I mean. The tech moguls, the financial stars. The elite."
"And that doesn't include you?" I speak without thinking; she strikes me as someone who solely helps themselves, and I'm not sure what, exactly, she stands to gain from this.
Lorella smiles. It looks painful.
"I suppose it does, by hook and by crook. I wasn't born into it, you see. Neither did I manage hedge funds or seize power in a small, politically unstable country. I didn't invent an operating system like Mr. Ritter. For my sins, I was nothing more than a humble family lawyer. If I was going to become ageless then my only choice was to grab the opportunity for myself. So I suppose that's what I did."
She leans over and inspects a framed photograph on the coffee table.
"I first arrived here as a guest, but I could never be one of them. Not really. No matter how much I managed to... secure for myself, there's no amount of money that would last an unlimited lifetime, especially with the fees they charge aboard the Aeterna. So now I work for Mr. Ritter. A family lawyer once again."
"I wasn't aware he had a family," I tell her.
"He doesn't," she replies. "Not any more. Not yet."
"I don't see what this has to do with me."
"Don't say stupid things when you're not a stupid person," Lorella snaps. "Look, some people use their immortality to travel the stars; some spend an eternity serving food to others. Mr. Ritter got his eternal life and the poor fool doesn't know what to do with it. So he wants to start all over again. Wife, kids, everything."
I'm about to ask, again, what this has to do with me, but Lorella has stopped talking. She stares at me with... I don't know what. Pity, fury, a dozen other emotions besides. But still I don't understand, not until a door swings open and a holographic figure walks across the room. The figure sits down and turns on the ancient television. She's wearing a flowing white robe with a print of small red petals. She frowns.
Her aunties always told her not to frown.
"You see?" Lorella says. And I do. I see everything.
I see myself, in another life.
I see Ayesha.
"Old Felix is something of a recluse," Lorella explains. "I'm the only employee that even sees him face-to-face. He simply has no use for most people, and prefers to live with his memories. But sometimes, well, he gets bored. And when he gets bored, he gets nosey. He was browsing your records and fell in love with Ayesha - or at least, he thinks he did."
"Ayesha's dead."
"I'm hardly the one you need to convince," Lorella replies. "In fact, I shouldn't be here at all - after all, I'd rather not be sent back to shore. There are certain... difficulties for me there. Fraud investigations, outstanding arrest warrants, nonsense like that."
It goes without saying, of course; plenty of Big Boat's guests have handcuffs awaiting them back on the sinking shore. Big Boat is a legal grey zone, an untaxable fiction. There's a reason the world has been recreated here.
Ayesha still watches the television. Lorella turns to leave.
"Wait," I grasp her sleeve without thinking, without meaning to. "What's going to happen? What's going to happen to me?"
"I only came here to warn you." She wrenches her arm free.
"Warn me of what?"
She sighs and checks an antique watch before she answers. "He's going to propose. It's a good deal, on the face of it - no more working in the wait unit, no prenup. You can even keep your own surname, he likes to think he's progressive like that. But it isn't Abdur he wants to marry."
My stomach churns.
"And if -"
"On the surface, Felix enjoys being magnanimous. Worldly. Empathic. The boss who's not like the other bosses. Of course, they all like to play that role." I can see from her face that she's no fan of the great Felix Ritter. "He hasn't said it outright, but if you refuse, my money would be on him condemning you to exile. Reversing your treatments - all of them - and sending you back to Narayanganj."
"My unit - my family - they wouldn't let that happen," I tell her.
"Then the same thing will simply happen to them. They'll lose the rest of their lives for some fruitless gesture of protest." She sighs. "Tell me, Abdur, do you really think they'll sacrifice eternal youth for you? And more to the point, would you want them to?"
For a moment I could swear there's grief in her voice, grief and regret. Then she clears her throat. "Now, listen to me. Men like Felix will always exist. Men who live in a world where there's no difference between what they want and what they need - only things they have, and things they don't." Her gaze is pointed.
"That's just the way things are. Unless, of course, you can think of another option."
With that, she walks away, leaving me in a world I'd long left behind.
Alone, I leave the centre and wander in a dazed kind of autopilot, down past the bookstores and brownstones of New Bleecker Street and on through the colourful, noisy market quarter of Marrakesh, where unit staff pose as street vendors hawking a shimmering array of clunky Dior jewellery and gilded Gucci lamps, all 3D-printed in the vast automated factories below. The ads blare messages like WHAT DOES HE WANT MOST? which drift across the fake blue Moroccan sky, but if you close your mind to everything but here, this place, this street, you can believe you're really and truly there, in a place beyond the bounds of Big Boat.
On and on. I'm dead already, which is why I wander like a ghost, because Abdur has no time left, because he had only fifteen short, precious years.
I'm in the elevator. The walls are covered with shifting images of people hawking platinum-flake perfumes and forever-powered watches because WHY SHOULD YOUR BATTERY DIE WHEN YOU WON'T? One of the two-dimensional models whispers GIVE IN TO GREATNESS and I swear it's personal, that somehow it's meant just for me.
My eyes follow the elevator's buttons right to the top. There's nothing to stop me riding it upward, up, up, up, up, right to the very apex of the ship, to the deck that rests beneath an unfamiliar sky. There's nothing to stop me feeling the ship's railing, cool beneath my palms, as the distant water as it churns in vast white whirls way down below, a raging mass of foam in the ship's wake. There's nothing to stop me if I drop.
I think of my unit, of Khuyag and Chio and Miremba and Barb, who have loved and accepted me for so long, who never made me feel like anyone other than myself. Fifteen years of memories together. But the warmth I feel is purely that of anger, a rage which swells through my beloved body because this tiny, happy life is all I have, and Felix Ritter's existence is so hollow he doesn't know what to do with it. All he just wants is a repeat, to start it all over again, right from the moment he...
It's there, while trembling in the elevator that I have the idea - or rather, the embryo of an idea, smooth and formless. But I'll need Lorella.
Back home we make the most of the time we have left. We drag the narrow mattresses from our beds, and place them in the middle of our cramped quarters. We spend our nights together, huddled like kittens, with my head nestled in Khuyag's armpit and Chio's wrist resting against my cheek.
But I do not sleep; I wish to cherish every moment with them. They're my parents, my lovers, my siblings, my friends. They are everything to me.
Ayesha waits in the corner of an old ice cream parlour. This is where Felix wants to meet her for the first time, in this perfect recreation of a distant time and place, with its sticky East German laminate and small board reading ERDBEERE, SCHOKOLADE, VANILLE. The simulated, wrinkled old woman stands behind the counter, noticing nothing.
Ayesha nervously picks at her newly-long hair. She's wearing what Felix told her to wear, a vintage outfit made from real polyester. She anxiously chews on her fingernail.
Her aunties always told her not to chew her nails.
On the table before her is an untouched glass of chocolate ice cream. This is where he wants to meet, to recreate the long-lost moment when he met his first wife, his first love. It's all about him, of course, but in turn he's offering Ayesha everything, an eternal lifetime of time and luxury, something she could never have dreamed of back in Narayanganj. Many have killed for less.
It's then that the parlour door opens. In he walks, as young and fresh as a day 130 years ago. With boyish confidence he walks right up to the hunch-backed old woman and gives his order.
"Erdbeere, Genossin,"
He then swings his gaze across the room, feigning that he's only just noticed the beautiful young girl seated in the corner. His exhilarated swagger carries him over to her, his finger points with easy confidence, and his lips curve to a delighted smile as he asks,
"Excuse me, madam. Might I sit here?"
Ayesha nods, the only thing she's permitted to do. It's then that I step out from behind the counter, from my hiding place beside a simulated elderly woman and her varicose legs. Felix doesn't even notice until I'm right behind him, not until I say his name.
"Felix Ritter."
And when he turns, I place my hairy hands upon his shoulders. His shocked eyes widen as I lean forward, and press my lips to his.
"Goodbye, mer."
Felix Ritter looks confused, and even more so when I grasp his arms and shove him, backwards, with all my might. He topples straight through the holographic table, through the holographic bowl of ice cream, and on through the holographic woman, the one who never existed.
He lands inside a smooth white chamber. Its door shuts with a soft but satisfying click.
"End simulation," Lorella orders. The layers of light which hunched her back and lined her face with wrinkles vanish.
So too the table and ice cream, the light dissipating to reveal the cell manipulation unit. I don't know how Lorella got it in here, but it looks the same as the one I used fifteen years ago: two metres wide and two metres tall. The edges are rounded, and it's the same clinical white.
Wearing a look of small triumph, she paces over and selects EMPLOYEE TERMINATION.
Through the viewing window we watch Felix Ritter's silent screams. We see his hands shake as the fat around his fingers thins, as his skin loosens and hangs in fleshy folds. He gives me a look of betrayal - actual betrayal - as spider-web wrinkles reach out from the corners of his eyes and mouth, as his cheeks swell into jowls and his hair shifts from blond, to mouse-brown, to dull grey. Liver spots dot his skin, one-by-one. His spine hunches.
"Just another employee," Lorella whispers to herself, "returning to the shore."
"What will happen to Big Boat now?" I ask. But Lorella's face shows no expression; she simply trains her gaze on me. Any warmth is gone. Her eyes are cold as authority.
"You shouldn't be here, it's almost time for the dinner shift. Now get back to work."
Inside the chamber, an old man gazes at his bony hands.
Deep within the bowels of the ship, six eternal workers are gathered in a windowless, chemical-scented unit. The screen upon the wall is filled by a handsome young fellow who speaks - his accent tinged with German alongside a dozen other influences - of all the changes soon to bless the Gratia Aeterna.
...new design inspired by a lost era from my youth, an era of spies, intrigue, and adventure. Yes, soon you can all experience the stolen glories of East Germany! Level 40 will be remodelled with original Communist architecture, rows of Plattenbau tenements gazing down upon...
Lorella's certainly playing up to Felix Ritter's past, but it's perhaps a little obvious. Still, who would seriously suspect that the man with strawberry-blond whiskers is actually a ladder-climbing lawyer, while the real thing has been dumped on some distant, ravaged shore? Who would even care? Big Boat isn't exactly a place for authenticity.
With a flick of a wrist the screen is silenced. Because this is an evening to celebrate. Khuyag managed to snag a platinum-lined bottle of champagne, and Miremba six lean, long-stemmed glasses. It's Chio's idea to toast our unit, and Barb insists that we do so somewhere special.
"How about the deck of Big Boat itself?" I suggest. "Under the open sky?"
Cautious glances are shared.
"Sounds perfect," Barb announces, with just a slight quaver to her voice. The others agree, and so we head through the usual places - New Bleecker Street, the Quang Ba Flower Market, the Marrakesh souk - as ads soar for World Gratitude Day, cascading messages like WHO DO YOU NEED TO THANK? and APPRECIATION ISN'T CHEAP. Hushed voices whisper to us as we ride the elevator up, up, up, up, right to the very apex of the ship. They only stop as the doors slide open.
I'm blinded for a moment, the light so strong it scalds my eyes as we step out onto the open deck. The winds feel chilly and chaotic, unlike the pleasant-scented breezes gently wafting through the boat, and I try not to look up; it's been a long time since I was up here, and it feels as though the vast, uncaring sky is ready to swallow me whole.
It's loud.
Behind us roar the mass of twisting wind turbines, while in front we're greeted by the fantastical sight of Big Boat itself: the deck swoops down and away in a long, graceful arc, a sloping field of solar arrays leading down to the airport and helipads, gliders glittering where new arrivals gather and few ever leave. It's all one long unending rush of frantic movement and boisterous activity.
Let's find somewhere quiet, Barb mouths.
We turn and make our way through the forest of turbines, heading toward the ship's stern until we're at the very rear. Then all we can see is the ceaseless sky and ceaseless ocean, each stretching out into forever, waiting for us. The painful sun sinks in an amber flare.
Without a word, Khuyag pops open the bottle of champagne. We watch as the cork sails overboard, down into the distant sea, into the kilometres of froth which trail in the ship's wake - a huge white boomerang stretching into the distance as we undergo our never-ending loops around the world's oceans, never to dock, never to reach a destination. Only to move.
Miremba doles out the long-stemmed glasses, which Khuyag fills with near-expert precision. Only a leader of the unit would ever notice the microscopic tremble of his hand.
Cheers, we each signal, raising our glasses together, flinching as a gull cries overhead. We swap small, careful smiles as Chio nervously eyes the horizon. We sip at the sour, bubbling liquid, and wince with each cold drop of rain. Even Barb is quiet as we endure this celebration, all of us wide-eyed and shivering, watching the champagne as it slowly drains behind glass and waiting for the moment that it's over.
 |
| Image generated with OpenAI |
30 levels. 150 storeys. 300 recreated streets.
One airport. Five hospitals.
100,000 residents.
It's a big boat. From the wide-panel windows of the suite, gazing out upon the unending ocean, you can see just how big. A colossus on an eternal voyage to nowhere. But then the windows seem to thicken, growing opaque. They now show the lost Lagos skyline, and the young man in the bed - a long-famous Hollywood actor - sleepily orders Chennai eggs benedict.
"Excellent, mer," I say, as I scrawl the order onto my electronic notepad.
The woman next to him stirs awake. She wants cornflakes with alpaca milk.
"And to drink?"
They both order coffee: black; ground-grown beans. The man puzzles over a crossword as the woman's face slackens back into sleep, and it isn't long before Khuyag - our unit drinks specialist - enters with the espresso cups, elegantly balanced on a miniature tray which he sets down in one flawless motion.
Neither even glances in Khuyag's direction, but I offer him a subtle nod before Barb enters with the spiced eggs, then Chio with the cornflakes and Miremba with the alpaca milk, each of us in the same crisp white uniform with cobalt trim. I stand and watch proudly - Waitstaff Unit 145-C works like a well-oiled machine, the routine perfected over many years.
The couple notice nothing; she kisses him on the cheek before both start eating, sloppily spilling globules of egg and flecks of roasted corn about the sheets.
"You're welcome," Barb mutters beneath her breath. I give her the subtlest glare possible as Khuyag gently nudges her with his elbow. With breakfast served our role is over, and the five of us leave before the clean-up crew arrives, making our way down to our quarters 143 floors below - deep within the chemical-scented bowels of Big Boat, where there are no windows looking out onto the eternally-rising ocean.
The journey takes an entire forty-five minutes, along wide artificial streets and down spacious elevators. Big Boat - otherwise known as the Gratia Aeterna - is the largest ocean-going vessel ever constructed, and it has to be, with its ageless population. After all, forever is a long time, and the rich need more space than people like us.
"It's just space they fill with junk and loneliness," Barb says, as we enter our cramped, low-ceilinged living space. "It's space they have simply for the sake of having it."
Khuyag, still irritated by her earlier outburst, warns her not to talk like that. "Not if you want to keep this job. Not if you want to keep living here. With us."
"We don't have to be cowards about it," Barb declares, with a defiant flick of her thick dark hair. She settles down onto the narrow, padded bench which serves as our sofa.
She shouldn't press these boundaries. If we lose our jobs then we'll be exiled. Our age treatment will be reversed. Which means, for example, that Khuyag would be delivered to the climate-ravaged shore no longer as a handsome, sultry 20-year-old. No. He would return to the hills of Ulaanbaatar a creaking, aching 85 - the age he was when he first boarded Big Boat.
Chio would be 83. Miremba 79. None of us know how old Barb was when she arrived, while I myself would be returned to 72. But it isn't old age that bothers me; I'd stand to lose so much more than just youth.
Born into a family that, according to the adults, had too many girls already, I'd spent my first year screaming. From then on all my aunties made the same joke: that I had a boy's lungs. The joke wound its way throughout my childhood, and worked whether they wanted to tease:
You scowl like a boy.
Or whether they wanted to chastise:
You're standing like a boy.
And the boundaries between the teasing and the chastising were blurred, so I couldn't tell which was which. Whether, in that moment, they found me amusing or alarming.
You eat like a boy.
But their comments felt like compliments, because I knew, and only I knew, that I was a boy. And I would have held it hidden within till the day I died, but then I saw the employment call, the offer to work on Big Boat. I made a special request alongside the age therapy, and in return they gave me a deep, hefty voice, a new bone structure, a forest of chest hair. It was the liberation I'd longed for, which I could never have afforded back in Narayanganj.
If I were exiled from Big Boat, I'd no longer be Abdur. I would be Ayesha. A dead name. A wrong body. This means I don't encourage Barb or her comments.
"You can always leave," I tease her. "Isn't that the point? You can always go right back to the blessed shore. No one will stop you."
Khuyag grins, and Barb glares, but for now the little mutiny is averted. Order is restored. That's important, you understand, that's my role in our little group. Whenever Chio and Barb shove for sofaspace, or Khuyag hogs the shower cubicle, I keep the peace. I keep things going.
They're family, of a kind. That's how Big Boat works, how it's worked for decades: Your unit is your only real contact. We do not interact with the other employees. So all of our affection, all of our intimacy, goes to one another.
If Khuyag can't sleep, Barb will stroke his hair. If Chio needs relief, Miremba or I will cuddle and caress her. We are parents, lovers, siblings, friends. Everything we need each other to be.
15 boutique bakeries. 50 world-class academies. 581 private member's clubs.
72 tailoring shops. 109 custom pedicurists.
500,000 paper hearts.
We make our way through the guest levels on our way to the evening shift. Little paper hearts litter the length of New Bleecker Street, a level that's a five-storey tall replica of New York's Greenwich Village. The hearts themselves are hand-cut: On Big Boat most employment is menial, like mixing cocktails or massaging young backs or manually writing wedding invitations, because being ageless means having all the time in the world.
The paper cut-outs dangle from lampposts on silver strings and sway in the simulated breeze, all, of course, in preparation for Eternal Heart Day.
"Did you buy me something special for Eternal Heart Day, Khuyag?" Chio jokes, nudging him in the ribs.
"You're two-timing me, Khuyag?" gasps Miremba, as she jabs the blushing, good-natured man from the other side. "After all we've been through?"
Barb says nothing - indeed, she's strangely quiet for once, staring at shop windows which swirl with gentle suggestions for the post-Valentine's celebration, things like PROVE YOUR AFFECTIONS and EITHER WAY, SHE WON'T FORGET.
It might seem silly, certainly, but the stores pay their fees (not taxes, of course, never taxes) and those fees pay for me, and Khuyag, and Chio and Miremba and Barb, as well as the 29,995 other employees. So I don't mind the little hearts on their glinting strings.
We enter the elevator, which is disguised as the entrance to a New York metro station, and ride it upwards, before making our way down the narrow, dark employee tunnels which surround the immersive dining suites. Each suite has its own micro-resolution walls and holographic projectors designed to simulate anywhere imaginable, and on reaching the staff entrance, we wait, as always, while Chio and Miremba speculate over what the setting will be tonight.
"I bet you it's the tip of a Shanghai skyscraper," Chio wagers.
"Nah, nu-uh," counters Miremba. "I say it'll be some kind of afterlife. Valhalla! All Viking warrior nonsense, with mead and maidens."
Khuyag contradicts them - though his voice is soft and his tone jovial, as if in agreement.
"Afterlives will soon be out of fashion. They've been popular for eight months already. As for Shanghai, it'll be at least another four years before skylines are in again."
No one argues with him; Khuyag reads moods and trends like Big Boat's atmospheric sensors read the weather. Infallibly.
"Imagine if we could get into the immersion systems," comments Barb, "and choose where they eat. A nice twentieth-century landfill, perhaps. Or the Siege of Leningrad."
She chuckles to herself. Once again I wonder why she chose Big Boat in the first place, but then the light above the staff's entrance glows green. That's my cue, so I leave the rest of Waitstaff Unit 145-C and step into the suite.
Now this, I have not seen before.
I am on the threshold, sandwiched between two endless rainbow plains; one above, one below. Both the artificial sky and simulated ground are engaged in an infinite technicolour dance, each a negative mirror of the other, playing at opposite ends of the spectrum. Where the ground flashes red, the sky above churns violet; where the sky blinks yellow the ground swells blue. It is, almost certainly, the most spectacular thing I've ever seen. The air smells sweet and poisonous.
While taking it all in I must have hesitated - alas, my professional decorum detached for a half-second - because the lone person at the table addresses me directly. His accent is German, mixed with a dozen other influences.
"This is a simulation of Mvembe C," he explains, while actually looking at me, directly at me. "A planet which was just discovered by one of us. An ageless person, using their immortality to drift forever across space, dropping relays like breadcrumbs. They've observed 812 unique worlds thus far, and that's all they'll ever do, drift through the unending void, discovering places no one else will ever reach. That no one else would want to reach. It's possibly the most egotistical sacrifice one single human has ever made - with the exception of Jesus Christ - but it makes for a marvellous dining backdrop."
I nod in shock, because the person speaking is even more unexpected than scene which surrounds us; it's Felix Ritter, the Gratia Aeterna's original investor and top executive, the one who made Big Boat happen in the first place. A decade and a half upon the ship, and I have never seen him in the flesh. He's a beautiful twenty-year-old, with clear, inquisitive eyes, smooth skin, and a strawberry-blond beard. But I've seen pictures of him from before, and he was just as handsome when he was sixty.
"What can I get for you, mer?" I ask, the only thing I'm permitted to ask.
"Please," Felix Ritter says, the word drawn out as if he likes the way it tastes. "No mer here. It's as old-fashioned as sir or ma'am - just because it's neutral in gender doesn't mean it's not grotesquely hierarchical, now does it?"
"No, m-" I stop before the offending term slips out, leaving the 'm' drifting untethered.
"I'll have the squid gumbo and a sapodilla schnapps," he orders, and, as is the correct form, I note it down on my small electronic notepad. (The very walls themselves could take his order, of course, but I'm here to provide the human touch. I'm good at that.)
Khuyag enters with the schnapps and places the glass in front of Felix Ritter, swiftly and delicately.
"Thank you," Felix Ritter says, a remark so unexpected Khuyag flinches. Miremba follows close behind with the side salads, and he thanks her too.
Everyone plays their part perfectly, but despite the honour, I can't help but question why we're here serving Felix Ritter, when we're used to serving the lower-tier clientele, solar barons and ancient Hollywood relics. Ritter talks - as Khuyag brings another drink, and another - opining on the wasteful social programmes of the European Federal Union in one moment, moving onto the problems of Nepalese software conglomerates the next.
"In my day, the first time around that is, there was real innovation..."
He interrupts himself and turns to me, cheeks rosy with the schnapps.
"For dessert, I'll have the crème brûlée with genuine vanilla." His grin, already wide enough, widens further. "I hear you have an expert in your unit."
Of all the reasons to have selected us, I would never have guessed that it would be Barb.
"Yes, m-" I cut myself off again. "Right away."
Barb can do practically anything with a blowtorch, a skill she ascribes to several ageless years at an artist's colony somewhere out in the Oklahoma desert. Usually guests want their own image scorched into the brûlée, a task Barb will nimbly accomplish right there at the table.
"Would you like a portrait?" she asks.
"Yes. Only, not mine," he orders. "His."
It takes several moments before I realise he's referring to me, and already Barb's at work with the tiny blowtorch and its little blue flame, burning the soft brown sugar evenly at first, then scorching the outlines of my chin, my cheekbones, my carefully-combed beard. I've never had my portrait painted before, and I cannot help myself; I'm mesmerised as my face reveals itself in fine black strokes.
I'm so lost in Barb's work that I don't even notice that Felix Ritter has been watching me. Not until the image is complete.
"Felix Ritter!" Chio exclaims, once the shift is over, once we're back in our little living space. She pulls our meal trays from the slot in the kitchen and hands them to Miremba, who, without thinking, distributes them across the narrow table.
"It's like meeting a god," Khuyag concurs, seating himself elbow-to-elbow with Barb and myself, unpeeling his tray and revealing the usual five compartments: one each for protein paste, fruit fibre, carb bricks, mineral pudding, and vitamin noodles. He doesn't even glance at the food before shovelling it into his mouth, soft lips sucking at greasy fingers.
"I thought he'd be taller," Miremba muses while thoughtfully chewing on a carb brick. Today they're corn yellow, and as I put one in my mouth it crumbles over my tongue, dry and ever so faintly bitter.
"He was sitting down," Chio responds. "You couldn't tell how tall he is."
"I could tell," says Miremba softly, dreamily gazing at her half-eaten brick.
"Maybe Mirry here has a crush," Khuyag teases, which is, of course, rare for him - he must be in a good mood after our surprise shift. "A crush on the King of Big Boat, no less!"
"But it's not Miremba he flirted with, is it?" Chio says, which means they all look at me, all except Barb, who keeps on eating.
I don't give them what they want. I say nothing, peeling a piece from the ball of fruit fibre and placing it on my tongue. It's mildly acidic and sweet.
"Well?"
"Well," I reply, "what do you need me to say?"
"Abdur's embarrassed," Chio teases. "Hiding behind modesty."
"Perhaps you could give it a try some time," Khuyag quips.
For the rest of the meal they tease and bicker. All except Barb, who eats quickly and quietly, picking at small bites while keeping her gaze down on the table. No one else seems to notice.
1000 expert hair stylists. 3000 trained masseurs.
10,000 trained in the erotic arts.
24-hour service.
I wake, suddenly, as the narrow mattress vibrates beneath my body. The other four are still fast asleep; the wall next to me reads 05:05, which is earlier than expected. Beneath is a location, alongside a single name:
FELIX KARL RITTER
When I was in my old, elderly body, I woke at dawn each day, greeting the sunrise not because I wanted to, but because my ageing biorhythms demanded it of me. The sun rose, and so did I. Now I curse the early hour, and fifteen minutes later I'm speed walking through Hanoi's Quang Ba Flower Market, where the simulated night is offset by bright strings of bulbs illuminating endless rows of colourful tulips, carnations, sunflowers, and peonies; alongside delicate laceflowers, lilacs, lilies, and Chinese lanterns. Above hang the long mauve tendrils of love-lies-bleeding, all carefully grown in Big Boat's hydroponic levels. Even though they're hypoallergenic I still feel my nose tingle as I pass, an instinctive reaction to the phantom pollen.
The paper hearts dangle here too, and the advertisements for Eternal Heart Day are custom-made for the market itself: SAY IT WITH SWEET PEAS and ORCHIDS ARE THE NEW ROSES. The elevator is dressed up as Ngoc Son Temple, with an archway of grey stone and blue-gold murals, all surrounded by high heaps of colourful fruit.
I've been ordered to one of the immersive entertainment suites. What, exactly, does Felix Ritter have planned?
I arrive to find the area lit by buzzing neon lights, a nod to cyberpunk worlds. Felix Ritter waits by one of the solid steel doors. His face is bathed blue one side and orange the other. Next to him is a woman, twenty like the rest of us, her expression a complete and careful neutral.
"You're punctual," Felix says. "I like that. Keeping time shows respect to others."
"It's no problem, mer."
"I told you," Felix Ritter admonishes, "I don't engage in such formalities. I want you to call me Felix."
"Of course. Felix."
This makes him smile, as though it's a pleasure to hear his own name fall from my lips.
"May I?" He holds out his hand, and I stare, perplexed, at the outstretched palm. It's several moments before I realise I'm supposed to take it, which I do; his skin feels cool against mine as I fight the urge to pull away. I'm not used to being touched by anyone but my unit.
"This," he gestures to the woman, "is my lawyer. She's here to make sure you're under no duress. That you're here of your own volition."
The careful lawyer's gaze burrows into me until I verbally confirm: "Yes. Of course. I'm here of my own volition."
"Good," Ritter replies. "Now, what's your favourite place in all the world?"
With my family.
"I don't know," I tell him.
"Well, let me show you mine." He lets go of my hand as the heavy doors silently slide open. "Only, you need to go in first. And take a seat in the far corner."
For fifteen years I've been trained not to hesitate, nor to ask questions. I step through those steel doors, and for a moment everything is solid darkness. Then the lights come on.
The entertainment centre can simulate anywhere. So why am I in a dingy old ice cream parlour? The laminate floor is sticky beneath my soles, and a small board reads ERDBEERE, SCHOKOLADE, VANILLE. A sour-faced old woman stands behind the counter. It's been so long since I saw an ageing face that I stare at her wrinkles and jowls, dumbfounded, for several seconds.
"Hello. Hi," I say, though the simulated woman gives no response. I head over to the far corner, to a table with chocolate ice cream in a clouded glass, and a spoon to each side. I seat myself moments before Felix Ritter walks in. He looks around, then feigns surprise at seeing me.
"Where are we?" I ask.
He laughs, as though I've said something charming and mildly stupid.
"A past life," he says, explaining without explaining. "We all have them, don't we?"
"We do," I concur, and when he keeps staring I add, "Felix," which makes him grin again.
"This is somewhere very special to me - the year is 1984, the city is Magdeburg. A jewel of East Germany's Democratic Republic. I came here as a young man, a hopeful emigrant from West to East, an ideological convert to the glories of real-life Marxism." He laughs again, this time at his younger self. "A naive child, yet to find his place in the world."
He gestures at the gloopy, gelatinous bowl of ice cream - which is real - and my stomach twists. Though I used to eat all sorts back in my past life, here nothing like this is served to staff; for the past fifteen years I've lived off bricks of plant protein. To avoid eating, I ask him a question.
"And this ice cream parlour? What happened to you here?"
"Here I met the woman who would become my wife." His stare is intense, his eyes a cold blue. I hadn't expected him to reply so directly.
"I'm sorry," I say, because I don't know what else to say.
"Don't be." His lips curve into a grin. His gaze doesn't change. "Life is filled with fresh starts, is it not? Here." He takes one of the long-handled spoons, dips it into the ice cream and brings it to my lips. "Guten Appetit," he announces. "Of course I'm showing my true age - almost no one speaks German these days, not even in Germany. It's all euro-English now, though of course France will keep on speaking French until the end of time..."
His voice washes over me. The scent of the sickly dessert curls up my nose, rich and earthy and... something else. I feel nauseous.
"...but you must forgive me, you didn't want to dine while discussing European linguistic evolution." He wiggles the spoon before my lips. "Please."
My belly churns and my mouth fills with thick stringy spit. I can't imagine putting that icy lactation into my mouth, but it's Felix Ritter who's gazing down at me, anticipating me doing exactly that, so before I can stop myself I open my mouth. Without hesitation he thrusts the spoon inside. The phlegmy, mucus-like cream is so cold it burns my tongue, and the chocolate so bitter I almost choke.
A moment passes. The frigid lump oozes down my throat, and still he's looking at me. My stomach tightens as I try to swallow, and I hope for him to look away, but he's still watching when my stomach lurches. Then it happens.
I vomit. I vomit over the ice cream. I vomit over the chipped table and laminate floor. As my guts and throat burn I slur I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, wiping my face with my hands before stumbling out of the simulation suite.
My eyes watering, I pass his blurry lawyer. She raises her finger at me - nail pointed - and it looks like she's going to say something, but I stagger on without stopping, and I keep moving, on, away, until I get to the elevator and the doors close quietly behind me.
The worst has come to pass - soon I'll be on-shored, separated from my family of fifteen years. I'll be 72 years old again, no longer my true self.
When I get home they think I'm sick. Chio guides me to my narrow mattress, Khuyag gently wipes the crusted vomit from the corners of my mouth, and Miremba places a cool flannel to my forehead. I sleep, on and off, disturbed by ice-cold dreams that slip away each time I wake.
That night someone climbs into my bed; I can tell from her breathing that it's Barb. She wraps her arms around me, so I take her hand in mine.
"You're being courted."
Her voice is nearly silent, not even a whisper. Over years of living in cramped quarters we've perfected the art of moving air, of inaudible talking.
"I was being courted."
"Abdur, there are at least a thousand supermodels on board. There are Olympic athletes and chess champions. If he's chosen you, there's a reason for it."
"How do you know these things?" I mouth.
"I've been alive a long time."
"Who hasn't?"
"I mean," she replies, slowly and carefully, "I'm older than all of you. I was ageless before I even boarded this ship."
I'm shocked - why would she choose this life when she was ageless already? But I say nothing. I wait for more of her revelation.
"I got the treatment in the early period, when they were testing it on cancer patients. But I'm not rich, and neither were my friends and family. Everyone I once knew is dead. And I went everywhere I could think of, Abdur, everywhere. For decades. Decades on decades. I had affairs with men and women and everyone in between, but nothing stuck. The poor would age and the rich wanted nothing to do with me. Then I met this old woman. She told me she'd once worked on the biggest boat you ever saw, and on that boat she found companions. People she'd loved."
She presses her face into my back, wet with tears. She squeezes my hand.
"This place was my last resort. This job. I didn't find family again till I arrived here. Now Felix Ritter wants to take you away from us, and there's nothing any of us can do to stop it. There's nothing we can do to keep you."
20,000,000 cubic metres of stacked agricultural hydroponics.
Fifty million litres of freshwater.
One Gen XI nuclear reactor.
Again, the mattress vibrates. Again, according to the wall, it's 05:05. And again there's that all-too-familiar name, alongside a quiet and almost imperceptible dread.
But I am not exiled. If I were I'd be informed by the very wall that currently reads FELIX KARL RITTER. Perhaps Barb is right, and his infatuation with me has only been heightened, like one of those broadcast-era 'rom-coms'.
There's no more time to ponder, so instead I quietly rise and retrieve a fresh uniform from the delivery closet. We meet once more at the entertainment centre, alone this time, and Felix seems no less delighted to see me; he doesn't even mention my unfortunate regurgitation. Over the next several summons he takes us on a simulated tour across the late nineteen-eighties and through the nineteen-nineties, regaling me with long, meandering observations as he does so: comments on how much nicer people's manners once were, or how youth used to be geared toward fun. It's all before my time, and I'm lost among the bizarre fashions and stinking, smog-spewing cars. We go to the noisy zoo in Köln, then to his department at the old university. On the next visit he wants to show me the offices of his first software company.
"Not all the details are right," he says, as we stand among furry coffee mugs and bulky beige machines. "But I want to show you my life. What came before. I want you to understand."
When it's over we hover outside the entertainment centre. He hesitates for an instant, wavering between doing and not-doing. Then he leans in as though he's going to kiss me, and instead nudges my cheek with his nose.
I do not flinch.
FELIX KARL RITTER. Those words are now my morning alarm. I've again been summoned to one of the simulated entertainment units, and this time my route takes me down one of the lost streets of Venice, complete with gilded trimmings, chlorinated canals, and eerily aquatic lighting. High-grade perfumes seep from the walls.
But when I reach the unit, it's not Felix Ritter who greets me.
It's his lawyer.
"You made it," she declares. She sounds like she's originally from North America, like Barb. "I'm afraid Mr. Ritter won't be joining us today."
"Should I leave?" I ask.
"Oh, no. You're right where I need you," she replies, eyes narrowed, carefully assessing me. "You know, I never would have guessed you'd be his type."
I nod, politely, because there's no other response I am permitted to give.
"My name is Lorella," she says. "And yours is Abdur. As it should be. Now come along."
I don't know what she means by that, exactly, but she's already motioning for me to follow her into the simulation unit. At first it's pitch dark, like before, but then the lights come on. It's several moments before I realise where I am.
We're in my house. My old house, the one I lived in all my life, the one filled with aunties and laughter and shame. It isn't possible, it can't be possible, but this large living room is the same as that large living room, even including the scorched iron print on the sofa's left arm, and the semi-circular dent in the wall where Auntie NAyesha once threw a mug.
"This is his creation," Lorella says. "Or rather, it's his recreation."
I'm about to ask how, but the truth is I know how; all it would take is a deep trawl through old social archives, photos and videos from a life I'd left behind. The question I want to ask is why, and she must read it in my face because she answers, "I've long given up trying to understand why they do the things they do. Them, I mean. The tech moguls, the financial stars. The elite."
"And that doesn't include you?" I speak without thinking; she strikes me as someone who solely helps themselves, and I'm not sure what, exactly, she stands to gain from this.
Lorella smiles. It looks painful.
"I suppose it does, by hook and by crook. I wasn't born into it, you see. Neither did I manage hedge funds or seize power in a small, politically unstable country. I didn't invent an operating system like Mr. Ritter. For my sins, I was nothing more than a humble family lawyer. If I was going to become ageless then my only choice was to grab the opportunity for myself. So I suppose that's what I did."
She leans over and inspects a framed photograph on the coffee table.
"I first arrived here as a guest, but I could never be one of them. Not really. No matter how much I managed to... secure for myself, there's no amount of money that would last an unlimited lifetime, especially with the fees they charge aboard the Aeterna. So now I work for Mr. Ritter. A family lawyer once again."
"I wasn't aware he had a family," I tell her.
"He doesn't," she replies. "Not any more. Not yet."
"I don't see what this has to do with me."
"Don't say stupid things when you're not a stupid person," Lorella snaps. "Look, some people use their immortality to travel the stars; some spend an eternity serving food to others. Mr. Ritter got his eternal life and the poor fool doesn't know what to do with it. So he wants to start all over again. Wife, kids, everything."
I'm about to ask, again, what this has to do with me, but Lorella has stopped talking. She stares at me with... I don't know what. Pity, fury, a dozen other emotions besides. But still I don't understand, not until a door swings open and a holographic figure walks across the room. The figure sits down and turns on the ancient television. She's wearing a flowing white robe with a print of small red petals. She frowns.
Her aunties always told her not to frown.
"You see?" Lorella says. And I do. I see everything.
I see myself, in another life.
I see Ayesha.
"Old Felix is something of a recluse," Lorella explains. "I'm the only employee that even sees him face-to-face. He simply has no use for most people, and prefers to live with his memories. But sometimes, well, he gets bored. And when he gets bored, he gets nosey. He was browsing your records and fell in love with Ayesha - or at least, he thinks he did."
"Ayesha's dead."
"I'm hardly the one you need to convince," Lorella replies. "In fact, I shouldn't be here at all - after all, I'd rather not be sent back to shore. There are certain... difficulties for me there. Fraud investigations, outstanding arrest warrants, nonsense like that."
It goes without saying, of course; plenty of Big Boat's guests have handcuffs awaiting them back on the sinking shore. Big Boat is a legal grey zone, an untaxable fiction. There's a reason the world has been recreated here.
Ayesha still watches the television. Lorella turns to leave.
"Wait," I grasp her sleeve without thinking, without meaning to. "What's going to happen? What's going to happen to me?"
"I only came here to warn you." She wrenches her arm free.
"Warn me of what?"
She sighs and checks an antique watch before she answers. "He's going to propose. It's a good deal, on the face of it - no more working in the wait unit, no prenup. You can even keep your own surname, he likes to think he's progressive like that. But it isn't Abdur he wants to marry."
My stomach churns.
"And if -"
"On the surface, Felix enjoys being magnanimous. Worldly. Empathic. The boss who's not like the other bosses. Of course, they all like to play that role." I can see from her face that she's no fan of the great Felix Ritter. "He hasn't said it outright, but if you refuse, my money would be on him condemning you to exile. Reversing your treatments - all of them - and sending you back to Narayanganj."
"My unit - my family - they wouldn't let that happen," I tell her.
"Then the same thing will simply happen to them. They'll lose the rest of their lives for some fruitless gesture of protest." She sighs. "Tell me, Abdur, do you really think they'll sacrifice eternal youth for you? And more to the point, would you want them to?"
For a moment I could swear there's grief in her voice, grief and regret. Then she clears her throat. "Now, listen to me. Men like Felix will always exist. Men who live in a world where there's no difference between what they want and what they need - only things they have, and things they don't." Her gaze is pointed.
"That's just the way things are. Unless, of course, you can think of another option."
With that, she walks away, leaving me in a world I'd long left behind.
Alone, I leave the centre and wander in a dazed kind of autopilot, down past the bookstores and brownstones of New Bleecker Street and on through the colourful, noisy market quarter of Marrakesh, where unit staff pose as street vendors hawking a shimmering array of clunky Dior jewellery and gilded Gucci lamps, all 3D-printed in the vast automated factories below. The ads blare messages like WHAT DOES HE WANT MOST? which drift across the fake blue Moroccan sky, but if you close your mind to everything but here, this place, this street, you can believe you're really and truly there, in a place beyond the bounds of Big Boat.
On and on. I'm dead already, which is why I wander like a ghost, because Abdur has no time left, because he had only fifteen short, precious years.
I'm in the elevator. The walls are covered with shifting images of people hawking platinum-flake perfumes and forever-powered watches because WHY SHOULD YOUR BATTERY DIE WHEN YOU WON'T? One of the two-dimensional models whispers GIVE IN TO GREATNESS and I swear it's personal, that somehow it's meant just for me.
My eyes follow the elevator's buttons right to the top. There's nothing to stop me riding it upward, up, up, up, up, right to the very apex of the ship, to the deck that rests beneath an unfamiliar sky. There's nothing to stop me feeling the ship's railing, cool beneath my palms, as the distant water as it churns in vast white whirls way down below, a raging mass of foam in the ship's wake. There's nothing to stop me if I drop.
I think of my unit, of Khuyag and Chio and Miremba and Barb, who have loved and accepted me for so long, who never made me feel like anyone other than myself. Fifteen years of memories together. But the warmth I feel is purely that of anger, a rage which swells through my beloved body because this tiny, happy life is all I have, and Felix Ritter's existence is so hollow he doesn't know what to do with it. All he just wants is a repeat, to start it all over again, right from the moment he...
It's there, while trembling in the elevator that I have the idea - or rather, the embryo of an idea, smooth and formless. But I'll need Lorella.
Back home we make the most of the time we have left. We drag the narrow mattresses from our beds, and place them in the middle of our cramped quarters. We spend our nights together, huddled like kittens, with my head nestled in Khuyag's armpit and Chio's wrist resting against my cheek.
But I do not sleep; I wish to cherish every moment with them. They're my parents, my lovers, my siblings, my friends. They are everything to me.
Five REJUVA-7.77 cell manipulation chambers.
235,000 procedures performed.
Ayesha waits in the corner of an old ice cream parlour. This is where Felix wants to meet her for the first time, in this perfect recreation of a distant time and place, with its sticky East German laminate and small board reading ERDBEERE, SCHOKOLADE, VANILLE. The simulated, wrinkled old woman stands behind the counter, noticing nothing.
Ayesha nervously picks at her newly-long hair. She's wearing what Felix told her to wear, a vintage outfit made from real polyester. She anxiously chews on her fingernail.
Her aunties always told her not to chew her nails.
On the table before her is an untouched glass of chocolate ice cream. This is where he wants to meet, to recreate the long-lost moment when he met his first wife, his first love. It's all about him, of course, but in turn he's offering Ayesha everything, an eternal lifetime of time and luxury, something she could never have dreamed of back in Narayanganj. Many have killed for less.
It's then that the parlour door opens. In he walks, as young and fresh as a day 130 years ago. With boyish confidence he walks right up to the hunch-backed old woman and gives his order.
"Erdbeere, Genossin,"
He then swings his gaze across the room, feigning that he's only just noticed the beautiful young girl seated in the corner. His exhilarated swagger carries him over to her, his finger points with easy confidence, and his lips curve to a delighted smile as he asks,
"Excuse me, madam. Might I sit here?"
Ayesha nods, the only thing she's permitted to do. It's then that I step out from behind the counter, from my hiding place beside a simulated elderly woman and her varicose legs. Felix doesn't even notice until I'm right behind him, not until I say his name.
"Felix Ritter."
And when he turns, I place my hairy hands upon his shoulders. His shocked eyes widen as I lean forward, and press my lips to his.
"Goodbye, mer."
Felix Ritter looks confused, and even more so when I grasp his arms and shove him, backwards, with all my might. He topples straight through the holographic table, through the holographic bowl of ice cream, and on through the holographic woman, the one who never existed.
He lands inside a smooth white chamber. Its door shuts with a soft but satisfying click.
"End simulation," Lorella orders. The layers of light which hunched her back and lined her face with wrinkles vanish.
So too the table and ice cream, the light dissipating to reveal the cell manipulation unit. I don't know how Lorella got it in here, but it looks the same as the one I used fifteen years ago: two metres wide and two metres tall. The edges are rounded, and it's the same clinical white.
Wearing a look of small triumph, she paces over and selects EMPLOYEE TERMINATION.
Through the viewing window we watch Felix Ritter's silent screams. We see his hands shake as the fat around his fingers thins, as his skin loosens and hangs in fleshy folds. He gives me a look of betrayal - actual betrayal - as spider-web wrinkles reach out from the corners of his eyes and mouth, as his cheeks swell into jowls and his hair shifts from blond, to mouse-brown, to dull grey. Liver spots dot his skin, one-by-one. His spine hunches.
"Just another employee," Lorella whispers to herself, "returning to the shore."
"What will happen to Big Boat now?" I ask. But Lorella's face shows no expression; she simply trains her gaze on me. Any warmth is gone. Her eyes are cold as authority.
"You shouldn't be here, it's almost time for the dinner shift. Now get back to work."
Inside the chamber, an old man gazes at his bony hands.
One Big Boat.
Deep within the bowels of the ship, six eternal workers are gathered in a windowless, chemical-scented unit. The screen upon the wall is filled by a handsome young fellow who speaks - his accent tinged with German alongside a dozen other influences - of all the changes soon to bless the Gratia Aeterna.
...new design inspired by a lost era from my youth, an era of spies, intrigue, and adventure. Yes, soon you can all experience the stolen glories of East Germany! Level 40 will be remodelled with original Communist architecture, rows of Plattenbau tenements gazing down upon...
Lorella's certainly playing up to Felix Ritter's past, but it's perhaps a little obvious. Still, who would seriously suspect that the man with strawberry-blond whiskers is actually a ladder-climbing lawyer, while the real thing has been dumped on some distant, ravaged shore? Who would even care? Big Boat isn't exactly a place for authenticity.
With a flick of a wrist the screen is silenced. Because this is an evening to celebrate. Khuyag managed to snag a platinum-lined bottle of champagne, and Miremba six lean, long-stemmed glasses. It's Chio's idea to toast our unit, and Barb insists that we do so somewhere special.
"How about the deck of Big Boat itself?" I suggest. "Under the open sky?"
Cautious glances are shared.
"Sounds perfect," Barb announces, with just a slight quaver to her voice. The others agree, and so we head through the usual places - New Bleecker Street, the Quang Ba Flower Market, the Marrakesh souk - as ads soar for World Gratitude Day, cascading messages like WHO DO YOU NEED TO THANK? and APPRECIATION ISN'T CHEAP. Hushed voices whisper to us as we ride the elevator up, up, up, up, right to the very apex of the ship. They only stop as the doors slide open.
I'm blinded for a moment, the light so strong it scalds my eyes as we step out onto the open deck. The winds feel chilly and chaotic, unlike the pleasant-scented breezes gently wafting through the boat, and I try not to look up; it's been a long time since I was up here, and it feels as though the vast, uncaring sky is ready to swallow me whole.
It's loud.
Behind us roar the mass of twisting wind turbines, while in front we're greeted by the fantastical sight of Big Boat itself: the deck swoops down and away in a long, graceful arc, a sloping field of solar arrays leading down to the airport and helipads, gliders glittering where new arrivals gather and few ever leave. It's all one long unending rush of frantic movement and boisterous activity.
Let's find somewhere quiet, Barb mouths.
We turn and make our way through the forest of turbines, heading toward the ship's stern until we're at the very rear. Then all we can see is the ceaseless sky and ceaseless ocean, each stretching out into forever, waiting for us. The painful sun sinks in an amber flare.
Without a word, Khuyag pops open the bottle of champagne. We watch as the cork sails overboard, down into the distant sea, into the kilometres of froth which trail in the ship's wake - a huge white boomerang stretching into the distance as we undergo our never-ending loops around the world's oceans, never to dock, never to reach a destination. Only to move.
Miremba doles out the long-stemmed glasses, which Khuyag fills with near-expert precision. Only a leader of the unit would ever notice the microscopic tremble of his hand.
Cheers, we each signal, raising our glasses together, flinching as a gull cries overhead. We swap small, careful smiles as Chio nervously eyes the horizon. We sip at the sour, bubbling liquid, and wince with each cold drop of rain. Even Barb is quiet as we endure this celebration, all of us wide-eyed and shivering, watching the champagne as it slowly drains behind glass and waiting for the moment that it's over.
This one took me back to the golden age of New Wave SF. Even down to the locale, "Big Boat," which reminded me a bit of the interstitial, liminal nowhere utopias you'd see in J.G. Ballard or William Burroughs stories. The emphasis on ageing reminded me of John Scalzi's "Old Man's War," along with "Logan's Run," (though this story is nowhere near as campy as the latter!) I felt some sympathy for Ritter, partly because ageing is painful for everyone, partly because I also have a bit of "Ostalgie" for the former East Germany.
ReplyDeleteGood story, regardless.