Room 42

by D. K. Cassidy

  Room 42

  By

  D.K. Cassidy

  Room 42

  Copyright © 2015 By D.K. Cassidy

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in print, scanned, electronic or audio means or other means without prior written permission of the publisher, Pluvio Press.

  This is a fictional story. The events, names and characters are fictitious, and any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental.

  (Originally published in The Immortality Chronicles 2015, Created by Samuel Peralta, Edited by Carol Davis)

  Editing: Carol Davis http://www.caroldavisauthor.com/a-better-look-editing-services

  Cover Design: Rachel Bostwick http://rachelbostwick.com

  Dedicated to Mark, Aidan & Jared

  At forty-two minutes past midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, on April 15, 2154, The Event happened.

  There was no pulse of light, no explosion, no cause anyone could name. But at that moment, immortality became a reality.

  From that point on, no one aged. Growth ceased. Human cells froze in time.

  The clocks kept running…but time stood still.

  ∞

  Dr. Vivian Toujours opened the door to her lab with an ancient brass key. She wasn’t aware of anyone else using such anachronistic technology, but it gave her pleasure to hear the key scraping in the keyhole. The distinctive click as she turned the lock. She’d replaced the retina reader decades ago by reworking the security system to accept her preferred method of opening the lab door.

  The lights came on automatically as she walked over to the coffee machine. Not a fan of solitude, she’d programmed the machine to respond to the user via voice prompts.

  “Coffee with cream this morning, Keri.”

  The tall silver machine lit up. “Good morning, Vivian. What size do you require?”

  “Large, extra strong. How was your weekend, Keri?”

  “Large, extra strong, with cream. Producing your order. My weekend was uneventful. No new developments to report.”

  I need to add more personality to this machine. Maybe someone in the A.I. Department can give me some advice. Then again, it was just a coffee machine.

  “I’m about to find out if my latest trial is successful. What do you think of that?”

  “I remain ever hopeful for you, Vivian. Your coffee is ready as ordered.”

  Reaching for the floating screen, she swiped her hand in front of the transparent monitor to open her files. Drug trial number 1440 appeared as a beaker icon. Another quirk of hers. She liked using interesting icons instead of the standard ones installed in the software. When she pointed at the beaker and swiped in a clockwise arc, the latest test results appeared.

  “All indications point toward a negative result. Advise further testing on the mortality serum.”

  Feeling defeated, but not admitting it to herself, she opened the file containing her ideas for further testing. There were still two hundred experiments to run, which was a comfort to her. Until she’d gone through each of them, Vivian could pretend to be on the verge of a solution. Immortals had long ago mastered the skill of avoiding reality.

  Sitting at her desk, Vivian swiped through medical journals on her tablet. Although she wanted to be the first to discover a mortality serum, she knew she had to accept that she wasn’t the only scientist working on a cure. Reading the work of her competition helped her gain insights on their methods of solving the problem.

  Dr. Vivian Toujours had been working on a cure for the disaster for eighty-five years. Her focus was to solve the puzzle of non-growth and sterility. She wanted her daughter to have the chance to experience a full life. Tenacity was her mantra. Science, her mentor. Jenna, her raison d’être.

  “Shit,” she muttered in frustration. If she didn’t get some positive results soon, someone else would beat her to it. Then her ass would be out the door.

  ∞

  Jenna Toujours was staring at her favorite game, Picture You, the progressive aging software her mother designed for her seventy-five years ago. Thrilled it still worked, she pulled up an estimate of her appearance at twenty-eight. Then thirty-eight. Then sixty-eight.

  Her changing face fascinated Jenna. She stared at herself at the current pre-Event age of her mother, then her grandmother. She looked like them, but she wasn’t sure if she was happy about that. Tired of the game already, she shut it down.

  She bent down to pet her dog, Tujin, a Model 2442. He licked her fingers. His synthetic fur, curly and golden, felt soft to Jenna. He barked when she stopped scratching his head, and she reached down again to continue scratching. After five minutes, Tujin walked away and settled into his bed.

  Debating whether the comfort feature on Tujin should be set for fewer minutes, Jenna watched her dog settle into sleep mode. She let herself believe this was her treasured pet from before The Event. Thoughts of her current reality were suppressed by years of practice.

  Jenna looked through the thousands of books in her eReader, trying to choose one to fit her mood. The classics, those written before The Event, she’d already memorized. That wasn’t intentional, but after reading something several hundred times it was unavoidable. Books that held her attention before now seemed too childish. Her tastes matured over the years.

  Deleting her childhood books seemed like a good idea. She’d have no children of her own to read to, and her favorite fairy tales would always remain in her memory. Jenna selected the treasures of literature from prior decades and pressed the delete button. But instead of feeling relief, sadness flooded her.

  She turned to the mirror next to her computer, gazing mournfully at the eight-year-old face staring back.

  ∞

  A few months after the clocks stopped, people began to notice there were no births. Not a single one. When they were questioned about this, scientists around the world had no explanation.

  Pundits proclaimed that zero population growth was a good outcome of the mysterious immortality plague. If no one ever died, the Earth would run out of room and resources in just a few generations.

  Ten years after The Event, world leaders stopped trying to figure out what had happened. Theories ranged from an electromagnetic pulse from the sun to a stealth alien attack to germ warfare to an act of God. The only consensus was the need to find a cure.

  Think tanks on every continent raced to be the one to cure the curse of immortality. Of agelessness. There hadn’t been a competition this intense since the space race of the twentieth century. National pride swelled.

  Every country wanted to be the one to create a mortality serum. They wanted to be the first to figure out why aging and growth stopped. Why had the population become sterile?

  If they couldn’t determine the cause of this plague, they wanted to end the side effects. Funding no longer needed for other projects was redirected to research. Leaders around the world could finally agree on something, but no one noticed that.

  The world longed to hear a baby cry.

  ∞

  It was lunch hour and the residents of the Eternal Sunshine Care Facility were watching their favorite soap opera, As the Universe Turns, now in its 115th year of broadcasting. A majority of the elderly living there suffered from some form of dementia, and they enjoyed each episode over and over. The recycled plots droned on, every possible storyline already played out decades ago.

  The familiar music of the soap opera filled the room of rapt viewers. Some spontaneously applauded, others simply stared at the television screen, oblivious. Two of the ladies cackled and mumbled to one another. The staff walked around, arranging the residents into a semicircle around the large screen.

  Attached to each wheelchair was a lidded container with a straw, filled with a sm
oothie of synthesized ingredients, enhanced with bright colors. The meal processors were set to produce based on the day of the week. Purple Promise today. Turquoise Delight tomorrow.

  Mrs. Janice Doggerel possessed a clear mind, but a broken body. Her aide, a bored eternal teenager, told her it was time to join the other residents. Not for the first time, she wished telepathy existed. She didn’t want to join the other residents and desperately desired to convey that message to her aide. When her attendant wheeled her in front of the common room television, she silently screamed.

  Mrs. Doggerel’s daily wish to die went unanswered.

  ∞

  Menial labor had been performed by androids for decades, freeing up time for people to pursue whatever interested them. The typical 4-hour workday allowed for more leisure time than at any other period in history. Instead of causing unrest, this abundance of free time lulled the majority of the population into compliance.

  The unhealthy and the bored chose another path.

  The immortals’ taste in reading changed after The Event. The most popular genre: Utopian. Unlike previous generations who wrote constantly about the end of the world, immortal authors created perfect worlds for their readers to dream about.

  Julia Kingsley’s book had been in the top ten on the New World Chronicle’s Best Sellers List for fifty years. She’d created a world where the citizens chose the age they wanted to be when they became immortal. The residents of this utopia also gave birth to children and chose the dates of their deaths. The names of the towns in this fictional account reflected the state of mind of their citizens: Harmony, Bliss, Paradise, Wonder, and of course, Nirvana.

  Jenna Toujours highlighted her favorite chapters in Our Perfect World, imagining herself at twenty-eight. She wanted to live in Bliss with her husband, two children, and a real dog. Daydreaming about living in the author’s version of Utopia, she didn’t hear the front door open.

  “Hey, Jenna, I’m home!”

  “Hey, Mom, I’m in my bedroom. Wanna come in?”

  Vivian entered the room, immediately distressed to see her daughter re-reading Julia Kingsley’s book, but quickly adjusted her face into a smile.

  “Could you order dinner? I’m too tired to decide what to eat. Anything except eggplant, OK?”

  “Sure, Mom, just a bit. I want to read to the end of this chapter.”

  Vivian sat on her daughter’s bed watching her read, wondering why Jenna felt compelled to lose herself in that world.

  A little while later, Vivian and Jenna sat on the sofa eating hamburgers made from synthetic beef. Standard meal processor fodder. Another side effect of The Event: animals were also sterile. It wasn’t long before meat became unavailable. Anything edible had been hunted to extinction; the rest of the animals died from natural causes. The only natural choices for food were plants.

  Vivian and Jenna weren’t adventurous when it came to eating; they preferred to eat whatever their synthesizer could produce. They’d grown used to the flavor of fake meat. Decades of eating it dulled their taste buds. Everything they ate was synthetic, and Vivian had thought more than once that real food would probably shock their numbed senses.

  “How was work today, Mom?” Jenna continued reading her book while speaking to her mother.

  “I found a cure for immortality and everything will go back to normal.”

  Vivian testing to see if Jenna was paying attention.

  “That’s cool, Mom,” Jenna murmured.

  If I don’t find a cure soon, Jenna will never leave her head. And what if she decides she’s tired of living?

  ∞

  The day before she became immortal, Mrs. Janice Doggerel was being transferred to a hospice center. Hope gone, her disease was in its end stages. Her death was predicted to be imminent. Her only daughter said a tearful goodbye, not sure if her mother could hear her.

  She could.

  Her granddaughter stood in the corner sobbing. Seeing her grandmother look so frail, and knowing she would soon be gone, had broken through the fragile web of optimism Jenna had woven before coming for her final visit. At last she bent down and kissed her grandmother and whispered, “I love you, Nana.”

  Her daughter signed the papers required for her transfer, insisting that the main priority be that the doctors and nurses allow her mother to die without pain. Mrs. Doggerel would continue to be fed and hydrated intravenously. Vivian couldn’t bear the thought of her mother starving to death.

  The hospice nurses counseled the small family, instructing them about the stages of grief. After the nurses left, Vivian and Jenna huddled together, trying to accept the looming death of their sweet mother and grandmother. Uncontrolled tears rolled down the faces of the next two generations of Doggerels, dripping onto their folded hands.

  Janice Doggerel suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as ALS. Unlike history’s most famous sufferer of the disease, Dr. Stephen Hawking, she could not function. She was barely alive, unable to communicate, move, or feel any honest joy. Mrs. Doggerel looked forward to the release of death, but leaving the last remaining members of her family pained her. If she could get better and stay with them, she would, but her life at this point was more than miserable—it was torturous. She felt like a captive in her failing body, unable to do anything other than exist.

  The next day, at forty-two minutes after the hour, her real nightmare began.

  ∞

  Those not willing to live forever decided to take their own lives. Natural deaths no longer existed; no one died of disease or old age, so in order to cease living, an immortal had to cause his or her own death. For years, people killed themselves with guns, by taking sleeping pills, or jumping off a building, a bridge, or a cliff.

  It was all very messy.

  In response to pressure from the public, a new suicide industry quietly arose, catering to people who wanted to experience a beautiful death—or whose families wanted them to. These entrepreneurs advertised one-way vacations to nirvana. The menu for seekers of the ultimate release ranged from a simple room and an injection, to a glorious party ending in a mass suicide. Owners of these businesses were careful not to be the ones to administer the lethal dose.

  Governments around the world gradually realized that there was a need for the population to have a choice after so many years of immortality. Assisted suicide became completely legal worldwide forty-two years after The Event. The only requirement was an interview given by a psychiatrist. Then, with a prescription from a doctor, the patient could gain admittance to a Death House. To prevent too many from taking this path, the number of prescriptions allowed remained limited.

  Gaining admittance to a Death House became a celebration. Families gave farewell parties and sent announcements to their friends. Obtaining a prescription to end this eternal existence was on a par with winning the lottery.

  Each year after the law passed, the prescriptions ran out by the end of January.

  ∞

  After spending the weekend trying to come up with a new experiment, Vivian arrived at her lab feeling defeated. Her current idea didn’t feel promising, but she couldn’t give up. Too many people depended on her. She wanted to find a cure. She needed to find a cure. She had to.

  For the last decade, an awful word kept fighting to escape her subconscious. Vivian expended a lot of energy suppressing it, but today it crept up on her. A word she’d never uttered aloud filled her thoughts.

  Hopeless.

  Now that the unspoken word had escaped, Vivian thought about the Death House, someplace you could check in and never check out.

  On that dismal note, she began working on what she hoped would be the cure with her mantra echoing inside her head: This is it, this is it. Its answer was the terrible word she’d let out: Hopeless.

  Waiting for her computer to analyze her data, Vivian experienced conflicted feelings about the speed of getting results. Testing that used to take weeks was now completed in hours. That would be wonderful if
her results were positive, but for her, it meant failure being thrown in her face every day. It became a lodestone. The weight of her failure dragged her further into a state of depression.

  “Good morning, Keri. Large coffee with cream, please.”

  “Yes, Vivian.”

  “I’m running the new experiment. Think this one is a winner?”

  “I remain ever hopeful for you, Vivian. Your coffee is ready as ordered.”

  Vivian walked over to the coffee machine and shouted. “Do you have any opinions on ANYTHING?”

  “That question does not make sense to me.”

  “Do you care if I ever develop a mortality serum?”

  “I remain ever hopeful for you.”

  Screaming in frustration, Vivian turned off the machine, then returned to her desk, trying to calm down. The result would be ready in thirty minutes. She got up to pace for a while, then settled again at her desk.

  Sipping her coffee, Vivian awaited the inevitable bad news.

  ∞

  Jenna decided to take Tujin for a walk. Pretending he needed to exercise maintained the illusion her pet was real. She passed other dog owners, nodding to them as they walked by. Some of the people walking their dogs complimented Jenna on her pet, and she returned the favor. Everyone helped one another maintain a communal dream.

  Today’s destination was the care home for a visit to her grandmother. She stopped by weekly to hold her nana’s hand and read to her. Under her arm was an eReader loaded with a copy of Our Perfect World. Jenna wanted to read a particular passage to her nana about the town called Bliss. She wondered if her grandmother would be interested in hearing about her dream to live there.

  Rotating books made the visits fresh, staving off boredom for Jenna. She remained hopeful her grandmother wasn’t bored. She never asked, not wanting to know the true answer. Not that it mattered, since her grandmother couldn’t reply. But Jenna remained convinced that the visits helped her grandmother cope with her state of purgatory. She felt helpless without any other way to comfort her.