by Drew Magary
At this point, three pirate puppets popped up from the water and dueled with the Ponce de León puppet, who then cut off their heads. I drank to his victory. The Ponce de León puppet made landfall as we kept walking.
Arriving in an exotic new land, which we now call Florida, Ponce de León rewarded his men with newfound riches of gold, sugarcane, delicious citrus fruits, and beautiful Native American women!
One of Ponce de León’s puppet crew then started making out with a buxom female Indian puppet. I should have been offended, but I was too busy being turned on. The Ponce de León puppet soon came upon a giant fountain, which disappeared down into the ground.
Ponce de León’s quest for the elusive mythical fountain proved fruitless, and the legendary explorer died while trying to find it.
The Ponce de León puppet then shouted out, “Nooooo!” and keeled over.
But now Ponce de León’s dream has finally been realized!
The Ponce de León puppet’s corpse was airlifted by his strings across a fake U.S. landscape to a miniature model of the hotel we were standing in.
Here, at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Do all the things Ponce de León always dreamed of doing! Dine alfresco at Fukuku Oh! See Cirque du Soleil in our exclusive new show, Eternia! Or try your hand at Texas hold’em! It’s all here, along with over five hundred board-certified geneticists ready to give you the cure for death! Only at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Eternal life has never been so luxurious! Right, Ponce?
The Ponce de León puppet then sat up, looked at us, and said, “Sí.” We walked out.
“I don’t think that presentation was historically accurate,” Scott said.
“Well, sometimes you have to take dramatic license.”
The rest of the weekend was spent in a drunken fog, each hour as pointlessly hazy as the last. For his cure ceremony, our friend chose the Velvet Dream chair, a throne nine feet high and made of a purple fabric that purported to be velvet but was almost certainly some kind of space-age, sweat-wicking microfiber polymer. It was a practical choice. If you’re going to be stabbed by three giant fire pokers, you’re gonna want to feel as relaxed as humanly possible. Afterward, we visited the Spearmint Rhino IV club. Every girl inside had a long, lucrative career in front of her. I’m not terribly comfortable in these places, which I find reassuring in a way.
Next to the casino floor at the Fountain of Youth is a stadiumsized mall that houses nothing but shops selling cure-related merchandise. You can get your pick of commemorative T-shirts (I’M HOT . . . AND I’M STAYING THAT WAY is a popular choice), steel cookware with a lifetime warranty, go-tox clinics for older postmortals, safes, laser vision correction, and thirty-year tattoos. There are no wedding parlors, and I didn’t see a single bachelor party the entire weekend. Just one cure party after another.
On our last day, there was a bomb threat in our section of the hotel. They evacuated our rooms and made us wait outside, on the Strip. It was the only time during our trip that I was reminded of 7/3/19, and it unnerved me. The manager assured us that they deal with these threats all the time, which only served to worry me more. As we waited on the Strip, I saw a group of men pass by on the opposite side of the street. They stopped, looked at the hotel, whispered some things to one another, and then kept walking. As they did, I saw one of them wave to the building, as if to say goodbye. I ran to alert a nearby officer, who seemed unconcerned. The men turned the corner. One of them saw me talking to the cop and smirked. He held up his hands and gave me the death symbol: a cupped left hand pressed against his straight right hand, forming a crude D.
After that, I didn’t relax until we were on the plane heading back to LaGuardia. The flight was delayed for three hours due to traffic on the runway.
DATE MODIFIED:
11/15/2029, 3:02 P.M.
A Day in the Life of a Terra Troll
After my experience outside the Fountain of Youth, I came across this anonymous blog posting by someone who claimed to work at the resort.
Contrary to what hotel officials say publicly, the FOY has been attacked by trolls on numerous occasions.
These aren’t just simple bomb threats, designed to keep us running around in circles. One troll sneaked into the fountain area, saw a fresh postmortal walking out of her cure ceremony, and threw lye right in her eyes, blinding her. The entire time security personnel were wrangling him and making him eat pavement, he was giggling like a madman.
It’s not the pro-death insurgents we fear while working here. We have tight enough security to make sure guns and bombs are kept out. It’s the trolls that are the big problem. Because they aren’t looking to kill people. They just want to ruin lives. If you stay here, you always have to keep your eyes out for them. Or else, boom! A handful of lye.
—DanBenjaminsACheapskate
I’m glad I read that after I finished my stay, or else I’d have fled from the hotel like a terrified schoolboy. Then there’s this profile of a troll that P. J. Matson wrote last month for New York. I needed to take a shower after reading it.
Under the Terra Troll Bridge
By P. J. Matson
XMN doesn’t like people.
“I mostly keep to myself, because other people are annoying.” He tells me this as we sit together in a burrito shop near his home in San Jose, California. The crowd at the shop is relatively sparse this afternoon, but XMN’s mannerisms indicate that he feels anxious, even a bit claustrophobic. His eyes dart back and forth. He never once looks at our waitress while ordering. He scratches his face constantly, though he doesn’t appear to have any bites or scrapes that would need relief.
“When I found out about the cure being legalized, I was crushed. Because the idea that there would be more people walking around, sucking in air like a bunch of fucking mouth breathers . . . I couldn’t handle the idea. I always subscribed to the theory that hell is other people. Well, here come more other people! I get sick just thinking about it.”
I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.
At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large online subculture of people known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can—on message boards, blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the e-mail account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” the troll boasts. XMN also cites multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey, honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”
But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore it if happens to you for real.”
So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.
Vandalism? “Yes.”
Bomb threats? “Yes.”
Blinding people? “Just once, but I’d like to do more.”
Keying cars? “Yes.”
Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”
Arson? “No
, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”
Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”
I ask XMN why he doesn’t choose to cross the line into full pro-death fanaticism and kill people outright. “I’m not a nutjob. I’m not a terrorist,” he protests. “I’m not going to go around killing people. I just think that if people are going to live in this world, why do they deserve to be happier than me? They should have to go through every day feeling as lousy as I feel. And then, maybe, they’ll stop walking around like they own the place. Maybe they’ll have some respect for other people, like me.”
XMN admits to coming from a broken home. His mother died when he was young, and he says his father physically abused him and sexually abused his sister. Ridiculed at school for his gawky appearance, XMN walled off the people around him and took refuge in the online community on SiPhallus. “They’re people like me. They understand that this whole society thing is a bunch of bullshit.”
But doesn’t he ever crave real contact with people? “Not really. I’m very private. I don’t like being touched. I don’t like it when people are friendly to me. It’s like, ‘Who are you? What the hell do you have to be so sunny about?’ ”
I ask XMN how many other “terra trolls” are now out there, planning to wreak havoc. His eyes twinkle. It’s the first time all day that I’ve seen him express genuine excitement. “There are a lot more of us than people think. And more people are joining every day.” It’s hard to know if he’s telling the truth or simply playing another one of his games. Studies of terra trolling are nonexistent, and laws against it are just now coming into shape. There’s no data for terra troll crimes committed as of yet.
I ask XMN if perhaps this is not the best way to spend one’s time. I ask if it might be a symptom of a much deeper personal problem that he has failed to address. He thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s part of it. Then again, I don’t know if the problems I have can ever be fixed. I don’t know how you go about being reborn into a family that loves you. I think I’m damaged permanently. And if that’s the case, everyone else deserves the same fate.”
He finishes his burrito and tells me a story of the time he broke into a woman’s house and stole her cat. He drove the cat fifty miles south and released it out into the wild. “That way,” he says, “she’ll never know what happened to it. It’s a double whammy.”
I ask XMN why he did it.
“Because it’s funny,” he says. “It’s so funny to me. It makes me laugh.” He does not laugh when he says this.
He leaves the shop early, as I pay the tab. When I walk out to my car, I see a small sticky note attached to my front right tire. I grab it.
“I could have stabbed your tire, but I didn’t,” the note says. “Just this once, I’ll be a nice person.”
DATE MODIFIED:
11/16/2029, 10:19 A.M.
Afternoon Link Roundup
◗ A South African freighter had to be rescued by an American destroyer after it became immobilized in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. (Mail & Gaurdian)
◗ Russia’s population climbs above two hundred million for the first time as its government makes getting the cure mandatory for all military personnel under the age of thirty. (The Times)
◗ Casey Jarrett’s mother speaks out for the first time about watching her son be executed. I think it’s possible to feel sympathy for her while having absolutely no sympathy for her son. (ABC)
◗ The date of the consumer gas ban has been pushed back to March 1, 2037. (FNN)
◗ Leighton Astor was convicted of killing her billionaire father in an attempt to prematurely claim his estate. Her father had a cure age of sixty-two. The night of the murder, one witness heard her screaming, “I WANT WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.” (The New York Times)
◗ New studies show that postmortals are 59 percent more likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver within the next ten years than their true organic counterparts. (DanBlog)
◗ The West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be gone by the end of the decade. (BBC)
◗ The staunchly anti-cure town of Soda Springs, Idaho (home to the Mormon sect known as the Deliverance Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or DLDS), has built a wall around itself and quietly seceded from the United States. Town mayor Thomas Maskin explains why: “The concept of America has outlived its usefulness. Why should we pay 30 percent of our salaries to help keep some crack addict in Detroit on welfare for the next thousand years? Why should we care about people in California? Or Florida? Or New York? Why should we share anything with them? They’re not our people. They’re not our family. They’re as foreign to me as Arabs. They all want to live forever and don’t have the faintest clue how they’re gonna eat a hundred years from now. Well, they’re going to find out soon that their country ain’t gonna help them. They’re gonna find out every man is his own country now.” (The New Yorker)
◗ Annual sales of cigarettes have reached an all-time low. My friend Walsh now accounts for the majority of all Parliaments sold in the United States. (NYist)
◗ The producers of the Saved by the Bell reboot petitioned the governor of California to allow them to administer the cure to the show’s teenage stars, so that their characters wouldn’t have to graduate in the show. The governor denied the request. (Variety)
DATE MODIFIED:
11/17/2029, 4:44 P.M.
“I’ve made a terrible mistake”
That’s my dad talking. He was grumpy all day long on Thanksgiving, even during the football game.
“I never should have gotten the cure,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You know I got laughed at the other day? I was walking to the supermarket and there was a group of kids outside the store. They couldn’t have been more than twelve. And they just sat there and laughed at me, calling me ‘old man’ and all that garbage.”
“So what?” I said. “They’re just kids.”
“Yeah, and they didn’t let me forget it. They were more than happy to let me know that I don’t belong in this world anymore. I feel like I’m stuck outside a ballroom window, watching a great party everyone but me got invited to.”
“I thought you were happy. I thought all your buddies got it.”
“They did. Ted Maxwell got it and then had his face done. They pulled his cheeks damn near behind his ears. He looks like a moron. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten this done. I knew it!” The tightly upholstered armrests of his dining chair had become worn and frayed. He angrily picked at the loose threads.
“Why are you suddenly so upset about this?” I asked.
“Because I did what everyone else was doing instead of doing what I truly wanted to do. It was such a dumb thing, and now I can’t undo it. I’m old, and I’m tired, and I hate waking up to that reality every day.”
“But that’s just life, Dad. That doesn’t change if you don’t get the cure. It gets worse because you keep getting older.”
“And that much closer to your mother. I could have joined her in a better place.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on. That whole thing about being in a better place is a crock. It’s just something to comfort people in the face of dying or in the face of losing someone they love. You don’t need that. You don’t have to worry about trying to cover up your fears anymore.”
He slammed his beer down on the table and grabbed my arm. “Oh, so it’s supposed to comfort me to know there isn’t a better place after this? Is it really supposed to make me feel better to know that your mom has evaporated completely? That she never had a soul? That her love for me died with her? Is that supposed to make me feel all happy inside, John?”
I retreated as fast as I could. Sometimes I’m far too casual in how I speak to my father. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I don’t like the idea of sitting here forever.”
“Then don’t,” I said. “Get up. Get out there.”
“I’ve done that already. Don’t you get it? I spent my entir
e life trying to find the place I liked best. This is that place. I don’t want to leave here and go touring India or anything like that. This is where I’m most comfortable. This is where my life is. But I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. Before all this, I was content. I knew exactly what the plan was. And now . . . now I haven’t got a clue. I’m an old person, John. You know old people hate change. This is a big change. Your mother bought us a new toaster oven twenty years ago, and I still miss the one we had before that. And that was just a goddamn toaster oven! Everything is upside down. I don’t have a job. I don’t have enough money to live here for as long as I please, to buy food and pay property tax. It’ll run out.”