Like a spark in the darkest cavern Aster's mind at once exploded in a myriad color lights of frenetic panic. A deep, hoarse breath was sucked into her lungs at the shock, and as she turned to face the person, Aster was met with the oldest person she had ever laid eyes on. Wrinkles bounded the features of the woman's face, softened and sagged by years of expression.
Aster's tongue felt as though it lodged in her throat, and she could think of nothing else but the instinctual pull of her body attempting to flee the room— but the chatter outside in the hall was growing even louder, and the poor girl seemed to have absolutely no recourse. She froze in fright.
“What's your name, dear?” the old woman asked with a kind voice. She was watching the girl's terrified expression with some alarm, and in order that they didn't just stand there in the doorway, began to motion her over to the large dining table in the center of the room. Aster struggled to obey; her legs felt as though they were cast of stone, but she eventually ended up in one of the chairs, clasping awkwardly at her limbs as though they would float away at any second. The old woman took a seat next to Aster and repeated her question. This time with yet more delicacy.
Aster answered in a quiet mumble, glancing up skittishly. She did not want to stare; partly for her crippling anxiety, and partly for the fact that she couldn't help but marvel at the woman's age. She was one of that rare but steadily growing generation of people who were using technology to shirk off death. Aster's interest had been piqued at the age displayed on the birthday banner, but it was only now that it dawned on Aster that she was speaking with possibly one of the oldest people on the planet.
“It's a pleasure to meet you, Aster. My name is Nancy,” the woman said, smiling warmly at her. Aster did not know how to respond and so met her smile with a stiff and awkward face, almost a grimace, before her eyes trailed back to the floor.
“I take it you're not here for the party?” Nancy chuckled, attempting to lighten the mood.
Aster was rigid, and shook her head timidly.
“Well, it's a public space; I'm the one intruding,” she said, chuckling. “Taking up this whole hall with all of this.”
She gestured to the balloons and streamers crowding the high vault ceilings above. “You know, just between you and me—” she said, leaning closer in confidence, which caused Aster to tense. “These parties are quite the pain. There's not so many of us— really old people around— you know? Who do they expect to attend?”
This self-deprecation amused her, and she let go of a deep chortle in saying it.
“Once you hit one-hundred and fifteen the government just starts throwing these things for you; whether you want it or not.”
She sat silent a second, and Aster had nothing to say. “Does it look like I want it?” she said, gesturing around the empty room.
Aster's eyes followed the broad motion as it brought the scope of empty room into consideration, like a brush making clearer a picture on easel. The sight was oppressively sad; the large dining table was set with cutlery and silverware for dozens of guests, yet the name placards were blank. The party decorations lilted around the room like aimless ghosts, and seemed to suspend the room in a deep, melancholic lull. It appeared nothing the same of the hideaway she cherished.
Despite this sadness, however, it was of considerable relief to Aster that this stranger was leading the way in regards to the conversation, and this entrance on the topic of Nancy's age— something which was of interest to Aster— opened the way for her to begin asking her own, meekly delivered questions.
“Is nobody else coming?” she asked. She shirked at her bluntness, not wanting to come across rude, but knew no other way to inquire that didn't sound worse.
“Oh, good heavens, no. Everyone I know is dead!” she blurted out, laughing.
Aster's stomach spasmed in a hideous ache. This is why I don't talk to people; you fucking idiot!
“Oh, but don't feel bad for me,” Nancy immediately followed, seeing Aster's shock and pity. “These sorts of things are to be expected when you extend your life beyond its natural limit.”
“You've really... extended your life?” Aster asked, regaining herself.
“Yes,” Nancy answered, her smile wavering a little. “I was a big supporter of the idea when it came about; back in the thirties. Naturally, you never think about the consequences. You don't consider what will happen when everyone around you doesn't do the same. Though, truth be told, they were mostly all dead, anyways. I was in my nineties at the time. But the years after everybody; that's what you don't consider.”
Silence filled the room again. Nancy was looking at the floor, but didn't seem as taken with sadness as her speech might signify. She appeared content, and her weary smile was still hung from her round, wrinkled cheeks, like she was in the middle of viewing a fond memory.
Aster tried hard to fathom the things this woman had experienced. The tract of her life seemed so unimaginably vast. She had feared death— and been arguably ready for it— before Aster had even been born. In considering that the vast majority of her life was lived before the revolution, she felt a pang of jealousy. This was a person who knew a dynamic and vibrant world, where she had existed solely on the merit of her worth. This was a person who could through first-hand experience see how much wrong there was in AI supplanting human creativity. This thought excited Aster greatly.
“What do you think about AI?” she asked, speaking louder now that excitement was trumping anxiety.
“AI?” Nancy repeated, watching her with interest.
“Like computers making everything; games, movies, music.”
“Oh, that's far beyond me! I've never really understood them.”
“But, would you agree it's not right that they're better than people at art?”
“Well, of course. I was a musician, dear. I know first-hand what we've lost.”
Aster felt as though someone had wrenched open the blinds in a pitch-black room.
“You were a musician?” she stammered. Her hands were beginning to shake a little from the surprise.
Nancy smiled at her excitement.
“For a time. I was lucky and had some hits, so I managed to have a career which did okay by me. This was coincidentally also the reason how I was even able to afford those treatments...” She looked out at the large expanse of glass, which the bright noon light now poured through. Automated blinds detected the change in the sun's angle and adjusted themselves accordingly.
“You like music?” Nancy continued in response to the girl staring at her with a new awe.
“I love it,” Aster sputtered, not wasting a second. She had so much to say all at once that her mouth could not properly catch up to her brain. “I'm a musician, too.”
Nancy's face showed a sudden brightness. “Are you now?! Well, tell me, what do you play? What kind of music do you write?”
Aster's heart was thrashing. She had never before in her life spoken face to face with someone about music, let alone someone who had been a musician back when people were all that mattered. This woman was one-hundred and twenty; that meant that she was Aster's age back in the sixties— Aster's favorite decade of music.
All that she must have seen; must have done; must have heard, Aster marveled, fully in the throes of wonder now. It was like a plug had been wrenched out of a full tub; a tub filled with all the excitement and thoughts Aster had been piling up for all the years of her life, which was now finally all at once being released.
“I play bass. And I write— uh— well my favorite type of music is probably krautrock, but I like to play inter-determinate jazz and timbrescapes, and—”
Nancy couldn't help but keep that smile on her face.
“It sounds like you might like it even more than I do!” she interjected in the middle of Aster's frenzied babbling.
“What band were you in?” Aster finally managed to ask.
“A number of them in the early sixties, but nothing that amounted to much; my solo career is where I was successful. Perhaps you've heard of me?” she said, screwing up her lips in a bashful expression— Nancy was never one to talk about herself. “The name is Nancy Allen,” she continued, and Aster received these words as though she had seen Santa Claus on Christmas night.
The truth was, however, that not even Santa Claus could hold a candle to that of seeing an actual musician in the flesh. An actual musician— by Aster's definition— not somebody who merely wrote songs and had some measure of musical talent; but a genuine member of that class of deity who inhabited the rock pantheon of yore.
While not a superstar of legendary status in her own right, Nancy Allen was still a significantly influential symbol of sixties feminism; her counterculture protest songs having earned her an indelible spot in the decade's history as a voice heading the crest of change. Aster knowledge of her ended following the Summer of Love, but she still held Nancy's early career as an inspiration all the same.
Aster couldn't really speak. Not only was the shock so intense her mind could barely make sense of it, but the revelation of what had become of her locked Aster in a state of morbid fascination.
“I'll take that as a yes,” Nancy said playfully as Aster stared in disbelief. There seemed something unspeakably sad in the sight of something Aster previously only knew as bright and in the spring of life, alone in this empty room with its sad atmosphere; like a prized flower wilting in a showcase. It had always felt too unfair that people had to watch themselves wilt, and this sight was the greatest of example of it all.
“Do you still make music?” Aster ventured to ask.
Nancy was quick in shaking her head.
“I stopped a long time ago, unfortunately.”
“Why?” Aster followed, her tone growing concerned.
“I lost the feeling. But, I don't want to get into it, this whole affair is depressing as it is. I'm sure you didn't come here to listen to an old lady complain.”
But Aster was resolved.
“What happened?” she asked.
Nancy sighed.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“There comes a certain point in your life where just the act of living takes everything out of you. Especially in my case; I've seen a lot, I've done a lot. I've rubbed shoulders with celebrities, and I've seen most of the world. Once fame and success have given you your share and you're full, all that is left to go on is the passion. I eventually reached a point where all I knew was gone. And I don't just mean that in the sense that all of my relations had passed away, but that the entire sense of society I belonged to had disappeared into the history books.”
Aster's eyes opened with interest, like a child invested in the knight slaying the dragon.
“You see, that's another consequence that you don't consider in prolonging your time on Earth. Until recently; until we could do this, nobody had experienced the feeling of living so long that they saw all the bits and pieces of what made the world, “the world”, die before them. Your entire sense of everything is structured around what makes your world tick. You don't realize it until it's gone, but it's a loneliness unlike any you could conceive. With the exception of maybe a dozen people on the face of planet; you are alone.”
“So why'd you do it?” Aster asked in a whisper, and quickly, wanting the recollection to continue.
“Because death is terrifying!” she said with a guffaw. “A lot of old people like to say that it doesn't scare them, but it used to scare the shit out of me! I didn't like growing old; I didn't like looking it, and I didn't like not being able to do anything without being in pain. The moment that I heard there were computers and technology that could bring back your youth, I was completely about it! That lasted about thirty years or so— me keeping up on the treatments.”
Her expression then grew solemn.
“Jesus, it's already been thirty years?” she remarked, laughing darkly.
Aster wasn't fond of digging herself further into a hole of dejection, and so elected not to respond. But after a minute a question bubbled to mind.
“Why do they throw parties for you if nobody's gonna come?”
Nancy smirked, and let her eyes wander off in thought.
“The government sees it as honorable. They do well to show that their machines can keep people healthy and alive, seemingly forever.”
“Forever?” Aster repeated in astonishment.
“For all eternity. Hard to believe, isn't it? Though, nobody really knows if it's possible; nobody has been alive long enough since they started doing this stuff to really know for sure; the oldest person alive is only one-hundred and thirty five, I think.”
Aster thought that the concept of living forever seemed like one of the worst prospects imaginable. She was only twenty years old, and yet she already felt that each day passed like dragging a stone through the mud. Six more of her present lifetimes— that which Nancy had lived over her— seemed utterly inconceivable.
“It's quite morbid; this celebration of yesterdays that nobody is alive to remember.”
There was growing pit of existential dread forming in Aster's gut, which pushed her to change the subject. “What was playing live like?” she suddenly asked, and in doing so felt a new electric curiosity fill her.
Nancy appreciated the change of topic, and seemed to lighten.
“A very pleasant experience. Some say that the whole point of being a musician is being able to see your fans in the flesh; to connect with them personally. Have you ever seen a live show?” she asked in return.
The question caught Aster off guard, who couldn't but help take it with a painful twinge. “No,” she said quietly. “Not a real one.”
“Not a real one?” Nancy parroted.
“I've been to a hologram performance,” Aster said petulantly. “My dad took me to see the Beatles play their hits when I was a kid, but I've never seen a real flesh and blood band.”
“Jesus,” responded Nancy in horror. “They're using holograms now?”
Aster looked up at her in confusion. “Yeah, they've done that for years now— even before I was born. All the old acts do it.”
This was news to Nancy, who sat with it in silence for a moment.
“The world's just edging us out, huh? See what I said about society moving on? You wake up one day and realize that there isn't a single thing left that you recognize.”
Aster had no response to this; her own mortal agony was so large that she couldn't see a comforting thing to say; because there was no comfort in it.
“Do they look real?” Nancy asked after a short pause.
“Yeah,” Aster mumbled. “You can't really tell that they're not actually there.”
There was some morbid fascination Nancy found in this topic, which she expressed with a theatrical shudder. “It seems like being a person counts for less and less these days,” she said resolutely.
Aster looked up at her with a new vigor.
“Exactly,” she exclaimed suddenly, barely checking herself from a shout. “It feels almost like you should be ashamed for being a person; like it's a matter-of-fact that we're imperfect and that it was only a flaw to be fixed!”
Nancy nodded, allowing Aster a few seconds to catch her quickening breath.
“I don't really have much to say on the topic— computers were over my head when they came out— but it's a tale as old as the hills, unfortunately. The car replaced the cart; the machine replaced the worker; the computer replaced the heart. If I've learned anything from my greed for time it's that all things will be ground down in the end; even the most basic concepts of life.”
Nancy had dropped her smile and given up her hesitance of speaking candidly. This caused Aster's fluttering heartbeat and worry to swell violently.
“But that's fucking bullshit!” she argued, though Nancy was defending nothing. “They— the AI— learned what they know from what we made!
“I agree with you, Aster. I think that nothing can truly replace the human heart, and that your rambunctiousness is proof of that. There's something inside you; a fire, that no machine could ever have. It could never love, or hate, the way that we do.”
“But it makes better things than we do,” she said in a low voice, shuddering in her admission. “It makes better art. A machine is somehow better at expressing our feelings than us! What does that make us if not inferior versions of machines?!” Aster was now just barely below shouting. The tears were welling up, the first breaches of tear drops streaming down her tired, baggy eyes.
“Because you know it's not true. You know that you're human.”
“Well, it doesn't seem to count for anything, anymore,” Aster said bitterly, drawing a ragged breath. “I wish I could just kill myself! I wish I didn't have to be taunted everyday by hopes that disappeared before I was even born!”
Her voice cracked with exasperation, her pitch warbling with tinges of despair.
Nancy looked at her with deep concern.
“Hey, now, you shouldn't be talking like that— You're still young,” she said, attempting to formulate an argument, but drew short.
“Yeah, so I have plenty of time left to suffer!” she exclaimed in a broken voice, throwing herself now fully into sobs. Nancy looked around. Of course, nobody showed any interest in the room or wanted to be involved with an empty party, but it was never a wise idea to draw attention to one's self like this.
“I would do it; I would kill myself if it weren't for these fucking bios!” Aster said with a hateful, trembling murmur. “They lock your muscles up, you know that? If they sense that you're a danger to yourself, they disable you.” Nancy, who had been well into elderly age when such technology became mandatory, did not know.
Aster's voice was drawn out of her small, sobbing body like the cry of a wounded animal.
They'll take her away if they see her like this, Nancy thought.
“How would you like to see my home?” she offered suddenly. Aster was taken so off-guard by this that her sobs ceased at once.
“Your home?” she whispered, visibly confused.
“Yes. I can't spend another minute here. I already feel like a ghost, wandering around.”
A searing sense of embarrassment carried itself over Aster's face, which burned yet more intensely when it reached the sensitive cool of her tear-stained eyes and cheeks. She knew that her breakdown was unsightly and that Nancy was trying politely to remove her from public sight. It was so mortifying she felt as though she would puke; but she felt a deep, chilling emptiness which would not let her be left alone now, and her childlike curiosity in seeing the home of an actual music star somehow still had an ember alight under the wreckage of her grief. With little protest she rose and followed Nancy, leaving the bones of the party behind.
—
Nancy lived high up in the tower, there in the farthest reaches where the penthouses lay. It was here that Aster learned that each floor past one-twenty five was reserved for only two homes; each half of the floor a sprawling mansion for the ultra-wealthy who made their nests far above the city. These two homes were separated by two private corridors, which ran the width of the floor and were bookmarked on each end with a private elevator.
Holy fuck, Aster couldn't help but think as the elevator raced up the building with them, silently. It shot up like a bullet, unburdened with the need to stop for anyone else. They were going to that place Aster had only ever heard mention of, where those who lived lives far beyond the average person dwelt. She wondered what it would look like; she imagined scenes of unbelievable opulence; of so much furniture that a town couldn't find use for it all. As she was finally led into Nancy's home, she found that she was right.
It looked like an art exhibit. Ultra-modern furniture abounded; the forms of couches and other pieces Aster could not recognize undulating like crests of the sea. It was all towered over by a massive vaulted ceiling, kept in a space larger than the recreation center they had just left. She could do nothing but look bug-eyed up at the mural on the ceiling.
Nancy looked apologetic about the excess, and proceeded to give Aster a tour, showing her to one room where she kept relics of her early career. “I apologize, but I have to dig all this out,” she said, rifling through drawers and opening closets. “As you can tell I have no need of displaying any of this.”
Aster could hardly keep herself from outward expressions of delight, the sheer shock of seeing antique musical implements in real life was so intense. It filled her with a religious reverence, a sensation of true submission in the face of something that so totally dwarfed her importance which she had never felt— or ever allowed a concept to hold over her— before. Like a hot blade of glass the sight of such relics cut easily and deeply into Aster's wounded heart, spilling the last remaining vestiges of hope all inside her rib cage and into her lungs, where her strength to draw breath was fading by the minute.
The sights of those joys and the imagined lives they elicited which she would never experience was the most bitter fruit she could have ever attempted to enjoy. It was as if the religions of the world which spoke of reincarnation were right, and that Aster's existence was a cosmos splintered into a million tiny fragments; some remnants of which she was now viewing. They were clues; records of the past when Aster's lot had not been so embittered.
It stung her to very depths of her soul, and the despair was all at once so overwhelming that she believed she would truly kill herself. The email was thing which had finally broken her will.
“Can you wait out in the living room?” Nancy said to her as the tour came to and end. Aster staggered over to a large, real leather couch and fell into a position without much thought. Her thoughts seemed strangely untethered without a future in which to gauge their perspective. They seemed to float about in her mind like little clouds; like aimless little threads to follow into oblivion, because that's now where everything led.
Nancy returned a few minutes later, holding in her hands a polished wooden box. Aster sat up, watching her approach.
“Do you really wish to die?” she asked. Aster was startled. She did wish to die, but the question put her in an ironic mind of self-preservation.
Nancy did not press her lack of answer, and opened the box, which was no bigger than a ring case. A small, obsidian black device shined like a river stone under the bright lights.
A heavy weight depressed Aster chest. At once all the blood left her extremities, and the world around her seemed to disappear, as if it had been water circling a drain. She had never seen it, she knew no description of it, but she understood she was staring at the Eden device.
“Do you wish to die?” Nancy repeated, presenting the box to her. Aster couldn't speak, her heart thrashed so quickly it began to give her physical discomfort. “I don't take this lightly. I'm giving it to you because you seem to wish to live, a lot more than your average person nowadays. You can leave and do nothing; you can leave and report me and have me killed; or you can take this from me— the choice is yours.”
Aster's hand trembled and reached outward. Every single cell in her body seemed to scream in protest; to wish to will her to withdraw. She knew it was over the moment she grabbed it; she knew that she'd be committing a crime of unspeakable treason, but her mind would not listen. She only saw the beautiful gem, nestled in the velvet lining the case's interior, and saw all the hope in the world surmised in it. It triumphed over everything, it towered above good and evil. At last, Aster took it, and held it up, looking it over uneasily. Her cold palm trembled violently as she grappled with the thought of what she was doing.
Without saying anything, Nancy took Aster's hand and directed it towards her temple. “Rest it there,” she said, pushing it up under her bangs.
The world dissolved; it fell away like a picture coiling to the floor, and a blackness unlike Aster had ever known, darker than the darkest night she could ever imagine, filled her view. It was as if the universe had ceased to be, as if her consciousness were now floating around in an absolute vacuum.
And then a bright light came; a huge, colossal shot of brightness split across the blackness' horizon, spewing forth technicolor ribbons which seemed to stain the very ceiling of the world. Her mind felt as if it were going a trillion miles and hour, and she feared very deeply that she would be torn to shreds by whatever was happening, though she couldn't focus on any thought in particular at that moment. It seemed as if every memory of her life flashed before her, as if someone had hit the fast-forward button on existence over and over, and then— at the absolute crescendo, when the universe became one tunneling roar of color— it all stopped.
The chirping of birds came into her ears, and a cold wind brushed against her. Her eyes opened. Before her stood what looked like a town square, surrounded by old-style Bavarian houses. In the middle of this square was a grand fountain, decorated in a Gothic fashion and surrounded by people in cardigans and autumn wear. They were reading books, chatting, and— to Aster's great excitement— even playing guitar. Her heart seized in astonishment. There was a creaking to the left of her, and she looked to see a wooden sign tossing in the wind.
Peppermint Plains Welcomes You, it read.
“What the fuck.”