The Dead

by Jamie K. Wilson

1. Waking

None of us understand the Young Ones. Their perfect teeth show when they smile at us, indulgently, as one once smiled at children. When there were still children, back before I died. The Young Ones are cold. Kind, but cold. It is as if all that made us human has been gengineered out of them.

At the beginning, when I woke up, I was frightened. The first thing my eyes saw, fuzzily, were the gray and sterile walls of the Mortuary. My ears didn’t work at first, nor my tongue, nor could I move at all. Fixed in one place, my vision caught flickers of people moving across my body, flashes of metal. I thought I was dead.

And they call us that. The Dead. Though they think we do not know. It is spoken in whispers, in pitying glances. But we are not foolish, old though we are. And we know they=re right.

I stand on the beach, looking at the magenta ocean and a perfect dawn. Yesterday the ocean was pale blue. Tomorrow it might be golden. The Young Ones change the appearance of the world to suit themselves.

We Dead all live in what once was called Hawaii. The Young Ones fear us a little, I think, or they would not have segregated us. Walt is just up the beach a bit. He=s bitter, won=t speak to any of the rest of us. His friend died permanently while being Awakened. I, too, am alone, but that is more by design. My dog sleeps still; they won=t Awaken animals. So instead of my dog, I drape my jewels around my neck and arms, wrap myself in the white caftan they allowed me, and walk about aimlessly.

The Young Ones go about naked. I asked one why once, and she laughed. "Why cover perfection in yards of cloth? And why kill plants or spill toxic chemicals about to make the cloth?@

She=s right. The Young Ones are all perfect. Their skins are perfectly tanned, dark enough to prevent skin cancer but light enough to create vitamin D and something they call the F factor, a cancer preventative. Their bodies are all lithe and athletic, faces symmetrical, arms and legs proportioned. They do not look alike, as we feared with the beginning of gengineering; rather, they are a multitude of perfect individuals, all as unique as grains of sand or snowflakes. Because any of them can acquire any desired talent, no stars, no uniquely gifted prodigies or geniuses, stand out among them. They gather at times and perform for one another, perfect dances and songs and concerts. Technically, the performances are always masterpieces. The Young Ones are happy.

I, in my white caftan with sand between my toes, my wrinkled face, my sagging breasts, am not. They treat me and the other Dead as if we were a disease.

A dis-ease, something to cause one to not be at ease. Or more precisely to cause one to be disturbed. That is what we are. Toka explained it to me, ticking off the explanation on her computer to mark that I had been oriented to Today.

AMorally, we could not leave you frozen if we could cure what killed you. And we had reached that point.@ She looked at me warily, raising one perfect eyebrow. AYet we do not have the ability to make you one of us. You will still be old. You will still die permanently. You and your friends are a reminder of something we have bred out of the human race, and thus you will be feared. I am sorry, but I hope you are glad to be alive.@ Her golden eyes glittered with moisture as she looked at me, looking the same way Dr. Samuelson had looked when he told me about the cancer. And then she brought me here, to the island.

There were those among the Young Ones who were fascinated with us, our papery skin and gray hair. They come as tourists, beg to touch our dry skin and faces, talk with us for hours and entertain us.

I suspect that these were those who were older, old enough to remember people like us who refused to be gengineered into perpetual youth and virtual immortality. They died out. My friends and I will die out as well. With us, George says, will go all that is good and creative about the human race.

ASuffering is what divides us from the animal, Helen. Those who never truly suffer have never truly lived. How can you write about good and evil if you have never experienced evil?@ George, long ago, had lived in LA and written soap operas.

We all nodded, all of us in our remembered wisdom of a long-ago humanity. Herbert turned away, his mouth tight and bitter between sagging jowls covered in short bristles of beard. He had a wife, a daughter, sons, grandchildren, before he died. His wife died during her Awakening. He cannot find any descendants. He is the last of his family.

Once, he told me, he was a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. His eight-greats grandfather had been a colonel in the North Carolina militia, had fought side by side with Washington. His six-greats grandfather owned a wide plantation along the banks of the Mississippi down near New Orleans, where a thousand slaves labored and died. An uncle had been a United States senator.

AWhat the hell was I thinking? Immortality. Pah.@ He spit in the pink sand, watched the bubbles of his spittle leech away in the indigo water, blending into the synthetic color, the manufactured bacteria eating it away. The bacteria destroyed all imperfectly balanced organic material, and I could not bear the thought of stepping into that water – would I just melt away like Margaret Hamill in The Wizard of Oz?

This world. What they have made this world. It reminds me of a hospital. Sterile and dry, not living yet not quite dead.

I wonder if they plan that for the other worlds they have discussed. Three new Earthlike ones found just last week, and ships already preparing for them. They had a concert to celebrate it last night, Toka swaying in an ancient dance for the men. I remembered that dance. I had danced it once, a Rockette on stage in New York City. A long-gone place, New York. Even the graves of those I had once loved were washed daily in tide that now reached up to what was once New Hampshire.

They left the torch of the Statue of Liberty to rise above the water, a symbol of that which once was and is now submerged. I saw a picture of it once on the vidscreen, when I was going through my day=s choices for a view: a green hand, holding the still-lit flame over the water like a sword, washed from all sides in violet waves. Waiting for someone to take Caliburn from her grip so she can sink below the water forever.

Just the memory of the image made me shiver. I switched it off right away that day, never turned on the vidscreen again. Watched the ocean and the seagulls out my patio doors instead. A vivid cinnamon, that day, and teal the next.

I had sex with Herbert. It was dry and sad. Physically, I am in my sixties. He was about seventy. We felt empty and tired, lonely. And the sand was warm, soft and embracing rather than gritty. It embraced one the way sand should during sex, sliding away instead of crawling into crevices. The sex should have been perfect.

Afterward, he held me close. He had a tattoo of an anchor over his right breast, blue lines submerged beneath curling gray hairs. He told me he got it in World War II, when he ran away and joined the Navy as a boy. “Not like things today. I was big, brawny, a farmer=s son. At fourteen, I was larger than a lot of the older boys who grew up in the Depression, starving from lack of milk and good food. No genetyping, no scanbar, no identification. Just my oath and signature.” His ship had sunk sometime in the middle of the war, and had been discovered just a few days ago by gill-enhanced children, the ones that lived with the dolphins.

There weren’t any wars anymore. They had been bred out of the race. The money and intellect that had once gone into war machines now went toward science, the outreach of the human race toward the stars. We had colonized six worlds already, and were terraforming them to suit ourselves, just as we had terraformed Earth.

There were dolphins in the ocean we looked at that day, leaping and chattering to one another. Long ago, they=d figured out what the dolphins were saying: food, fish, children, love, sex, danger, death. They spoke, but a more primitive language to us than the mountain gorillas of Africa, who these days wore loincloths and carried spears as they held erudite Ameslan conversations with researchers, arguing the philosophy their race had developed. All the dreams we had when I was a child are either realized or broken.

I shifted in Herbert=s arms, and realized he had fallen asleep, his muscles tight around me. His face rested against my still-soft breasts, his cheeks gentle on me. I shifted to sit up, and held his head in my arms. He reminded me of my own son, his face slack and innocent in his repose. Charlie had died in my arms, against my breast. Prostate cancer. He was forty. I died with him, in many ways.

I sat there and let Herbert sleep in my arms. He committed suicide three days later -- cyanide. No one knew where he found it. I was glad for the time we had together. I could, I think, have loved him eventually. But I cannot mourn him, for he was not happy in his Awakening.

Because we were close, because Herbert had no other friends, they let me choose how to dispose of his body. I scattered his ashes into the volcano. He would have liked that, to be returned to a force of nature that even our wise children cannot tame. I imagined that, when the ashes settled on the dark surface, they formed the shape of an anchor before blending with the ash and heat.

2. Assimilation

Because I am one of the Dead, because I am a woman and loved my children, I decided to find my descendants. I have one. Her name is Betha. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

They let me travel there, caftan and all, with Toka. She was bored and did not bother to hide it, listening to music from a stud in one of her pink-shell ears. I do not understand why she is so sullen; she complains constantly on the Island about her boredom, how she wishes she were on the mainland where things happen. But she behaves like a child when she has the opportunity. I curled away from her and stared out the window, watching as the perfectly random clouds parted and drifted to expose a mauve sea.

Air travel is amazing. In an hour we arrived at Columbus, from Hawaii; the children treat this wonder as nothing more than public transportation. All air travel is free. Forget frequent flier miles; you just boarded and went. Nanos do so much of the labor these days, there is very little for humans to do. There were a number of girls on the flight dressed – yes, dressed, for play -- in tight stewardess dresses from the 1960s, and two young men whose faces were Shaped like Jack Kennedy, one naked and the other clothed. The pilot was a robot, as were mechanics, taxi drivers, manufacturers, road crews. Humans only worked if they wanted to.

I watched as one of the stewardesses was dragged, giggling, into the second pseudoKennedy=s lap. They wanted, I suppose, to match the character as well as the face.

“Stupid Barbies.” Toka glared at the girls as if they were a personal affront.

“What harm does it do?”

“I don’t believe you asked that.” Toka pressed her music stud. “Clothes. It’s just perverse. And in public.”

“I wear clothes.”

Toka scowled, then shrugged. “You’re right. But they don’t need those idiotic clothes.”

“I don’t need mine either.”

“Not the same.” Toka bit her lip, realizing she might have offended me. I just smiled.

“No, it’s not. How old are you?”

“Fifty-eight. Too young. I’m bored. They won’t give me anything to do.”

“Except babysit us old corpses.”

Toka gasped. “I would never say that.”

“You don’t have to.” I shivered as I realized this was the first time I’d ever expressed this to one of the Young. “We know what you say about us behind our backs. You stare at us with pity and disgust, and you do what you can for us, and you don’t give a damn about how we really feel about anything.”

“That’s not true!”

“Yes it is.”

Toka looked away. “You know so much about history.”

“About the parts you want to forget. About the part when billions of people starved and people were slaughtered for what they were and when war and death and killing became industrialized.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t ask about the beauty of it. Toka, your freedom and dreams, they come from that time too. You’ve just forgotten your heritage. You can’t realize the good. You only see the bad.”

She clicked on her ear stud again. “It was all about killing. That’s why we call you the Dead. Because nothing but death came from that time.”

I settled back to watch the in-flight movie I’d chosen from the screen before me – Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor. No sense wasting my breath when the girl wasn’t going to listen. No sense trying to explain how struggle and pain makes one appreciate the beauty and joy. These children had never experienced struggle or pain.

Meeting Betha, my granddaughter, was a shock. I had been told she was Chosen to be one of the settlers on a new world, this one all of water and ice, but I did not understand before meeting her what Choice entailed. She growled at me when I first met her. AWhat are you staring at, corpse?@

They had grown gills on her neck, blending them into her slightly-greenish skin. Webbing connected her fingers on over-large hands, and there were extra joints on them. She was entirely without hair, her eyes covered with both eyelids and a nictitating membrane, which she flicked purposely when she saw me staring. Her teeth had elongated into sharp points, making me think of a shark. Most startling of all, her feet were large and spread out, looking very much like a diver=s fins. She waddled over to me, exaggerating her movements. AWell?@

I found my voice. AYou don=t look a thing like either side of your family, girl.@

It was the exact right thing to say. Betha threw back her head and laughed, a booming sound that carried well. I noticed that she had a large lump on her forehead as well, closely resembling the echolocating melon on a dolphin. Well, I thought, why not?

We had dinner together that night. It was fish – not much of a surprise. Toka didn’t eat it – she was in the majority of the Young Ones who ate only vegetarian food, and the smell of cooked meat disgusted her. But I relished it; the fish was good, and it was fascinating to watch my ultimate granddaughter bite into her fish with chisel-sharp teeth.

“What kind of planet are they sending you to?”

She spoke in the growl I’d finally understood was her normal voice around the gills. “Water. Duh.”

“’Duh’?”

“One of your generation’s words, isn’t it? Like cool and hepcat and bling.”

“You’re mixing a few decades, but it’s not important. I meant, you’re going to live completely in the water – it’s all water? And your teeth.”

Betha sighed and put her fish down, her gills twitching slightly. “The world is water, except for the icecaps at the poles. We think there’s also ice sunk deep below, formed by the pressure – the planet may be mostly water all the way through. Oceans are deep. The fish are not dissimilar to the fish of Earth from the Cretaceous period. And we’re expected to hunt with our claws and teeth.” She flexed her wrists, and three-inch-long claws slid from under her nails. A second flex, and they retracted. “Meat’s almost the only thing edible.”

I ignored Toka’s retching sounds. “Why on earth do you want to live in such a place?”

Betha shrugged. “No place for me here.”

“I thought this was a perfect society. A place for everyone.”

She snorted, the puff of air feathering the sparse fur on her shoulders. “Not for me. I’m too adventurous, they say. So it’s space exploration, or a home under the Antarctic, or some other out of the way place for someone of restless blood.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No.” Betha grinned jaggedly. “Not at all. I’m looking forward to it.” Looking at Toka, she deliberately stuffed fish into her mouth. Toka tossed her napkin down and stalked away from the table.

I ignored her. Betha was different from the others today. For the first time, I felt hope. And I let myself think about Carl. Betha’s grandfather. “You’re very like him.”

“Like whom?”

“I’m sorry. Carl. Your grandfather. My husband. You’ve got his spirit.”

Betha cocked her head. “Tell me about him.”

“Oh, my. Where can I start? Carl was Jewish. He came here to America when the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia. I never could pronounce his real last name; he went by Schmidt. My last name now. He had nothing. Only the clothes on his back and a cardboard suitcase.” Betha looked entranced, as far as I could tell. “He left most of his family behind, and the Nazis killed them. He used to cry late into the night for his little sister. Even when he was in his sixties and dying of cancer, he cried for her, and that he couldn’t bring her to America with her.”

“He sounds great.” Betha grinned and picked at her teeth with a fish bone.

“He was. Not like these sterile children here.”

Betha nodded. “I like you.”

Blunt. Like Carl. “I like you, too.”

“Come with me.”

“Beg pardon?”

Betha looked confused, then nodded. “Oh, right. You’re too old. No gengineering for you.”

“None. That’s right.” I was silent. But why couldn’t they gengineer me like Betha? Why not go to a different planet, start over, try to guide the more adventurous children they were clearly sending there? Why not start again?

3. Metamorphosis

When I left, I thought about it. Then I looked into it. It took a year, but at last I found a specialist droid who was willing to attempt my change, the one I chose. And it hurt, hurt like hell, agony I can’t describe with the injections and the loss of hair and the changing structures when they grew out of my back. I watched the whole process as it moved along. And I liked what I saw. It took forever, but on the way the gengineers found a way to at least slow my aging. I was like a permanent old person, but at least my hair grew back. Well, feathers did, or something very like them.

A world of water held little entrancement for me. I preferred the sky.

At last, I could look into the mirror, at my perfect skin, my smooth face, and the feathers that ran down my head and up my wings, the structures my arms had largely became. Though the hands were still there at the ends, my fingers stretched long, webbing in a graceful arc that would help me turn, and a webbing stretched from my palms to my waist. I was long and lean, my body light and my chest heavy with muscles, my body was infested with nanos that busily changed my structure, though not my telomeres – I would still age, and probably faster.

But I was ready. I could leave.

When I met Betha at the space elevator, she gasped, and then laughed out loud as she embraced me, and I wondered at the feel of her finger webbing on my bare back. They would send me to the same planet, the water world, where I would help other winged humans develop a solid foundation for further settlement.

As we embraced, I could even feel her pulsing melon, broadcasting high-frequency sound like radio.

Welcome, it was saying. Welcome.

I boarded the elevator with her, en route to a brave new world.

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