“You know it’s not real, right?” No matter how old he got, Peter's face never got any less impish. If anything the encroaching wrinkles might have added some new layers of mischief and mirth to his visage.
“I know many things aren't real, you'll have to be more specific.” Nadia, in comparison, had a subdued, restrained air about her. Not joyless, but certainly no-nonsense.
“Oh, don't give me that. I'm talking about the Gateway. The Beyond. What else would I mean?”
“Fixated, aren't you?”
Peter reared his head back in mock offense. The wide grin splitting his face betrayed the artificiality of the performance. “Of course I am! Our day is tomorrow, in case you forgot!”
“Oh, I didn't forget. You never gave me a chance,” Nadia replied playfully. “I thought you stopped believing in all that ‘The Beyond is fake’ business decades ago.”
“No, no,” Peter replied with a chuckle. “I just got fed up with wasting my time arguing about it!”
“And now that you have immeasurably less time to spare, you've changed your mind?”
“Yes, actually! I'm running dangerously low on chances to bother my best friend, I've got to make the most of them!”
“Oh, is that it? You know I’m not susceptible to flattery, Peter. Not in the past 30 years, anyway. Besides, we should get moving. Don’t want to be late for our last dinner on earth.”
“You know they’d wait for us if we were. It’s our special day, after all.”
Peter and Nadia had been inseparable for around 90 years, ever since they met as children, 4 years after the day on which they were both born. Closer to 91, now, as they were both only one day away from their 95th birthday. A momentous occasion indeed, as they, like everyone else, were planning on their 95th birthday to enter the Gateway into the Beyond, where they would be ushered into immortality. This was how it had been for as long as anyone living in their community could remember, far longer than that, in fact. Many of the exact details of the process had been lost. Nobody could tell you with authority, for example, where exactly the Beyond was, or by what means immortality was to be bestowed upon arrival, or why exactly people had to wait until age 95 before making the pilgrimage. Nobody had returned from the journey, and nobody much wanted to be the first to make it before their allotted time.
The two made their way out of the lounge they’d been sitting in, Nadia pushing Peter’s wheelchair along. He was always the more impetuous of the two, but when his legs gave out and hers didn’t, she immediately seized on the ammunition with which to return his good natured ribbing. That, however, was 20 years ago, and the joke had worn thin in time.
She wheeled him into the dining room, where their meals were already waiting for them. The treatment one received on the night before their ceremony was the closest anyone got to experiencing royalty, these days. Peter had seized the opportunity for extravagance and ordered salmon and caviar and wine. The only exception was the one staple he couldn’t pass up under any circumstances, least of all today of all days: good, strong coffee, taken black, which he drank before touching anything else. Nadia was more interested in comfort than adventure. She had ordered a simple cheeseburger, american cheese and ketchup and mayo adorning its well-seared patty, and a cream soda.
They had both had a full, busy week of visiting with various old friends and relatives, people who wanted to take their last remaining opportunity to say goodbye. Their respective children, tearfully sending off their remaining parents – Peter and Nadia’s partners had both gone a few years earlier – grandchildren who gave them a final update on the states of the homes they’d built for themselves and their offspring, great grandchildren who were just starting to get their footing in the adult world, even the occasional great-great grandchild who didn’t really understand what was going on, and would only later realize the significance of this time in retrospect, new information recontextualizing hazy memories. It had of course been wonderful to see everyone again, but when you’re 94 years old, almost 95, even wonderful things are deeply, deeply tiring. They whittle away until you’re nothing but threadbare bone. Now was no longer the time for tiring visitation with beloved relatives, it was the time to relax in each other’s company and share a meal.
Each of them deeply enjoyed their requested food while chatting and joking about various anecdotes from their lengthy time together. The time Peter had pilfered half the pantry while he was on kitchen duty, the way Nadia lost all semblance of a sense of humor for most of her senior year of high school, fond memories of friends who had already taken the leap they were preparing for tomorrow. Eventually, inevitably, the conversation turned back toward Peter’s disbelief about what was going to happen the next day. This time it was Nadia who brought it up.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“So what exactly makes you think that it’s all a ruse, anyway?”
“Oh, I’ve been reading some uh… historical documents. Getting context, reframing things,” Peter replied with a wry smile.
“Historical documents, eh? Don’t think I didn’t notice that pregnant pause in the middle of the sentence, mister. Let me guess, you were trawling through the Old Web?”
Peter swallowed a mouthful of wine and then let out a hearty laugh. “Ya got me! You know I can’t stay away from it.”
“Mm-hmm. I also know that it’s so clogged with conflicting stories about every possible topic that you could find ‘evidence’ for damn near any assertion a million monkeys could dream up.”
“Oh, who cares, it’s all in good fun.”
“I’m sure. So what exactly is this ‘context’ you found?”
Peter leans forward, lowering his voice despite the fact no one’s around to hear them, and that even if anyone were, no one’s about to hassle a pair of 94 year olds about what they say at dinner. “Apparently, back in the 20th and 21st centuries, overpopulation was a big problem. They say there were all sorts of plots and schemes to combat it, some out in the open and some clandestine, all cloak and dagger.”
“Now hold on right there Pete, I know that's not true. Every reputable source agrees, there was never a legitimate concern that the earth would be overpopulated, it was a distribution problem.”
“Alright, alright, well they thought it was a big problem, anyway,” Peter admitted with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The point is, they were trying to do something about it!”
“Mm, I'm sure.” A hint of exasperation was starting to make its way into Nadia’s tone. “And what exactly does this have to do with us?”
“Well, they spent an enormous amount of time and effort working on it.” The grin was back on Peter's face now that he'd managed to brush past the dispute and could start spinning his yarn again. “They spent years trying all sorts of different ways to decrease the population without having to do anything too unsavory. There were anti-natalist activist groups, attempts to economically disincentivize having children, all sorts of stuff. But life expectancy just kept rising, especially in the northern hemisphere, and while birth rates were falling, they weren't doing so fast enough to counterbalance it. At least, that was the belief at the time,” he added quickly when Nadia looked like she might be about to interject again. “They weren't seeing the results they were looking for, no matter what they tried. They just couldn't get people to stop reproducing! So what are you gonna do, when you want to decrease population, but people keep wanting to fuck?”
He paused and looked at Nadia expectantly. She stood resolute for a few moments, before rolling her eyes and relenting to his implicit request for audience participation. “I don't know, Peter, what do you do?”
“You attack the problem from the other end!”
“What, you mean kill people?”
“No no no, not against their will anyway. Voluntary euthanasia! It started with some of the biggest voices in the depopulation movement starting to get up there in years, enough that their quality of life started to suffer. Medicine of the time was getting better and better at keeping people alive, but it couldn't keep up in terms of making it comfortable to live that long. Eventually they realized, ‘we're a bunch of very old men and women who aren't really happy anymore and strongly believe there are too many people on the earth. Why are we still holding on to our own lives?’ Of course they didn't all just immediately jump off a bridge, it's not actually that easy to just decide to up and kill yourself. But slowly but surely, they started talking about these things, and then one by one they started making arrangements to be voluntarily euthanized. All the while, they were spreading these ideas to their peers. More and more, people were reaching old age, losing more and more of their daily existence to pain and infirmity, with ideas in their head about how they can best contribute to the world, under such conditions. And many of them looked at their lot in life and said, ‘no thanks, I’d like to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.’ Many of them didn’t feel they had enough to live for anyway, what with the state of elder care in those days.” At this, his face darkened a little, just for a moment. But the smile quickly returned as he moved on. “Even so, they knew it still wasn’t enough. Individual action against what they saw as a systemic problem, and all that. Things stayed like that for quite a while, as much as a hundred years, some say. Technology continued to improve, as it tends to. Their cause began dying out, as quality of life began improving at higher and higher ages and it became harder and harder to convince people that they had little enough to lose for them to feel comfortable throwing their lives away for the sake of addressing this problem. They began looking for other ways of converting people, more effective methods than persuasion.”
Nadia, by this point, was beginning to actually get wrapped up in Peter’s story, as tended to happen whenever she let him talk long enough. There were a good many reasons they’d stayed friends all these years – it wasn’t really enough for them to simply have the same birthday, that was little more than a curiosity – and chief among these was his ability to draw a person in with his impassioned manner of speaking. He was simply fun to be around, and to listen to, even if you were fairly certain he was full of shit. “More effective than persuasion, huh? So what exactly does that look like?” He hadn't needed to prompt her for the question this time.
Peter gave a wide, toothy grin at the question, which doubled as a pause for dramatic effect. “Trickery, of course! What else?”
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