It was – is – just impossibly beautiful. The smiling sky. The treetops, the countryside. The people. Everything, all of it.

They put me on an airship before I had even risen out of bed. They just moved the whole thing – a hospital bed, its back raised – onto the ship and ascended.

“I’m not Frida Kahlo,” I said.

“We don’t know what you mean, Perry.”

“It’s a joke. I can tell you about her later.”

The craft was something like a Viking longship, but gold, and with no sail. It had been docked, if that’s the word, at a deck that wrapped around the hospital. They loosed its line and the craft lifted. We rose into the air and the breeze washed over us. Over the top of the building, and then as high as the trees, and then higher yet.

All of them with me had long hair that blew around. And they all smiled. These were staff from the hospital, all of whom had the time, apparently, to come out on a ride with me.

We glided over the landscape, ranges of forest interrupted by clearings. Some of the clearings were cut through by streams.

“Why have you brought me out here? Up here?”

“We thought you would like it,” a woman near me said. She was the one who had spoken to me, primarily, since I had awoken. Her voice was so warm; almost better than this sky ride all by itself. She was tall, with wide shoulders. She had gray eyes that I found entrancing. She was stunning. But all of them were.

“You have been through so much, Perry. Perry Doran,” she repeated, apparently wanting to make sure I knew my name if I’d missed it earlier.

“I remember that,” I said. “What you told me. A thousand years.” This last bit was really to myself more than them.

“And your name?” I asked her. “Forgive me, I’ve forgotten if you told me.”

“Of course. There is so much coming at you, we know. My name is Tara.”

“That’s a name from my time. After all these years.”

“It’s a very, very old one,” she said.

We glided just above the treetops. The air alone was unforgettable: cool, dry, crisp, seeming somehow to hold the sunshine.

The quality of the light in the place – up in the sky, but on earth too – was something I had never seen before. The sunshine just seemed to come at me from every angle. The closest thing it reminded me of that I could remember was the air in Guatemala, when I had been at a higher altitude; but this was fresher, somehow.

“Talk to us more,” Tara said. “You’ve been alone for so long.”

“You are all so gorgeous,” I blurted.

It was true. I couldn’t help saying it. Every single person I had seen so far, man or woman, was as handsome as Tara. Perfect rich dark skin on all of them. Their eyes were all colors – brown, blue, brilliant green.

They just smiled at this, and looked back out over the landscape. They may have been on such trips a thousand times, but they still leaned up against the railings, taking it all in one more time.

The ship rousted a cloud of birds. They burst out of a stretch of trees beneath us and then flew up and around. They were brilliant blue, green, and white. There were thousands of them, or tens of thousands. They cried as they drifted around us.

“What species is that?”

“Sky swallows. You would not know them, Perry. Well, now you do.”

They had even improved birds.

“Are you enjoying the ride?”

“Very much.”

“Shall we go a bit faster? And we could climb.”

I nodded. The ship rose, and banked. The stream or river I had seen running through clearings became a ribbon that twisted off toward the horizon. The patches of forest from this height were a calm, dark green. I saw buildings, evidently houses. They were of one and two stories, clean white among the green fields, with rolling red roofs.

I felt intermittent rushes of the air grow colder, but I was still warm there in the bed although I had only a sheet over me.

“Are you heating this ship, somehow? Outdoor heat?”

“We are. It would be chilly at this altitude.”

“How is it that you’re speaking my English? If it’s been a thousand years? It would have changed.”

“We learned. As soon as you came out of the case and spoke, we learned your language.”

“You don’t even have accents. I mean what I would call a foreign accent.”

“You spoke enough words for us to know what to learn,” Tara said.

A man next to her had been listening, and now spoke.

“You know, Perry, we do not speak of accents any longer.”

He looked a little older than Tara, but just as strong. His hair was the same length as hers. It blew around in the high altitude breeze.

“No accents? You all speak alike?”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He shook his head. “No, I mean it went the other direction. We consider each person’s language unique. To speak of a group’s accent is to ignore each individual’s peculiarities. And to speak with anyone is to learn that person’s language.”

The ship now banked slightly again. We started to head back toward the hospital, but in no rush. We cut a lazy, zephyrous arc through the sky.

*

We have a strange visitor? Well, why don’t twenty of us move his bed onto the gold hovership and take him on a sky ride for an hour or two. It was how they lived life, now.

*

I was given an apartment with a wide terraced balcony, and a lovely view; but every dwelling had lovely views. The largest buildings were only five or six stories high, always built in a broad pyramid style, stepped to allow for open areas outside each apartment. The landscapes below were wide fields and green woods stretching back, in my case, to low hills far off.

I learned that agriculture was largely automated, with exceptions of farms run by people who wanted to work the land. The automated farms used giant machines to plant and harvest, while the small farmers tended toward hoes and shovels. Much of the world functioned this way: either with very high tech or virtually no tech at all. Most buildings were constructed by machines – not much different from 3D printing I knew in my first life – but some people baked their own bricks, cut their own roof shakes, and so on. It was all or nothing. Parks were the same way, in a sense; either manicured lawns and trees that looked like old European gardens, or else enormous ranges of wild.

Tara came to see me in my apartment. We walked out onto the terrace.

“Do you like your home, Perry?”

“Of course. Thanks for arranging it for me.”

“Other staff did that.”

“I suppose if I didn’t like it, you’d give me a different one?”

“Of course.”

I talked to myself in a mumble, then:

“It’s like a paradise. It’s paradise.”

“What did you say, Perry?”

“This place. Your time. It’s like a paradise. It is one. If it’s not, it’s close enough that no one from my time would have worried about any differences. Do you have any dark secrets? Anything horrible you need to tell me?”

“You’re joking with me, Perry.”

I nodded.

“But in the stories about the future, in my time, whenever a society was too perfect, there turned out to be something horribly wrong. Maybe people died young. Or there were white cave monsters that attacked – ”

“Morlocks,” she said.

“Yes! That book is still known?”

She nodded. I continued:

“But I don’t see that there’s anything like that going on now. You just have a – paradise, I suppose.”

She shrugged.

“Well, Perry, why shouldn’t we live this way. We finally decided to do so. You know – you could have lived just as well, in your own time. Your people.”

“Not as long as you,” I said. Life spans had increased to three hundred years or more, was one thing I had learned. It had to do with cell manipulation.

“No, but that would have come.”

“And we didn’t have flying ships like yours.”

“I know. But apart from the technology. You had the means to welcome every guest. Our ancestors – you’re one of them – hoarded that power for so long. But after your time, slowly, people finally decided to – ” she shrugged – “live as they deserved. As they were able to. Becoming – ” she stopped again, to search for a word – “magnanimous was a decision. It was just a decision to make. Humans could have done so far earlier than they did. We had the means – I mean our race had the means – for so long.”

*

Jen would have loved it here. That was all I could think about, sometimes when I was alone. Araceli too, of course; but Jen would have appreciated everything more, having seen more. Ara might have taken it for granted that people would look out for one another, and care for the land, but Jen would have been amazed at the differences.

I kept finding myself wanting to show them things. The sky swallows, the mile-long landscaped public lawns, the fish pond in the lobby of my apartment building. And the gold hoverships, of course. Five times, ten times a day I wished they could be there to see what I was seeing. I couldn’t dwell on it, though. It was too much. What had happened to them was not fair, but I had to move on.

*

I continued to be struck by the glow and vigor of the people I met; but eventually everyone, here in the Thirty-First Century, chose to give up life and die. Their cell rejuvenation treatments just didn’t work after a few centuries; and when people stopped them for good, they would very quickly wither and die. And so that’s what they did. A person, say after three hundred and fifty years on earth, would know that that his cells were just too far gone to reboot; and rather than become enfeebled and fade away over years, he would just make the decision to stop healthcare, and would be gone in a matter of weeks or a month. It surprised me that some people didn’t press this, and try to live as long as they possibly could; but they apparently did not, and my hosts seemed confused at the very thought of doing so when I asked about it. Society was clearly different, now. People were different. One explanation for this, I think, was that people who had become so accustomed to living in perfect health for decades and centuries felt sickness and weakness very keenly when it eventually came. No one wanted to live like that; it wasn’t what life was.

I had wondered, in my first life, as an archaeologist, if prehistoric modern humans were completely unlike us. Because nasty, brutish, and short does not come close to really getting across the casual trauma and violence of their lives.

They chopped off the tips of their fingers; we knew – we know – that this occurred across many cultures. Why? Well, no one could be certain. But I don’t know which was worse: the idea that they were losing their fingertips to their enemies when they were tortured, or that they were choosing to cut them off themselves due to group identification behavior or religious rituals. But one way or another, they were cutting off their fingertips.

And they beat the hell out of each other. It may have been ritualistic skull fracturing, or maybe just good old fights. In the Pacific Northwest, in prehistory for a stretch of at least hundreds of years, a majority of skulls we recovered showed healed fracture lines. A majority. Most people were apparently getting their heads cracked at some point in their lives.

And they sacrificed humans; maybe enemies, maybe their friends. Certainly their own children. We found them in mass hillside graves in South America, beneath pyramids in Central America, in bogs in Europe. Stabbed, beaten, strangled, hanged. And in graves, too: apparent servants, spouses, children. In Africa, Asia, Europe, everywhere. Murdered to be accomplices on the trip.

So, had those people from thousands of years before my first life been fundamentally different? Could they really be called modern humans? Yes, we ourselves certainly had our wars in which we killed more humans than had been alive in the entire world at times of our prehistory; and we still inflicted pain on ourselves through tattoos and a hundred different ways; but we were no longer chopping our fingertips off.

Were these behaviors just varying manifestations of common modern human behavior across time, geography, and culture? Were our ancestors’ painful fingertip removals just their version of our painful tattoos? Were their ubiquitous skull fractures just their version of our ice hockey fights? Were the base behaviors the same? Or had we truly changed? Had something permanently changed in our brains when we decided to start dedicating our buildings and temples by carving cornerstones for them, rather than murdering our own children and burying them in the foundations?

I had never known. But now, a thousand years after my first life – people seemed to have changed. Sure, some men and women throughout history, before my time, had volunteered to be sacrificed, whether in a ritual or to save a group; but the vast majority wanted to live as long as possible. One need look no further than me, for proof of that. I couldn’t remember what landed me in the white case, but obviously my culture was one that assumed I would not want to die, even if I was very nearly – apparently – done with my life. But my new neighbors were different. When their time was up, it was up. Humanity, as far as I could see, had experienced a core change.

What will I choose to do, when my time comes? I have three hundred years to think about it.