Rita Chang-Eppig

by The Last to Die (html)

  Messages from Clarissa and her friends immediately glutted Lan-Yun’s inbox: When would the Bureau finally acknowledge the dangers posed by the glass woman? How was the Bureau going to take responsibility? The matter was under investigation, Lan-Yun assured them. The happiness of the island’s venerable residents was the Bureau’s top priority, etc. As far as Lan-Yun was concerned, the last to die’s bellyaching could not have come at a worse time. Compiling a list of the couple’s friends from around the time of the guardianship transfer was proving even more difficult than anticipated. What kind of people had people who liked people peopled their lives with back then? Schoolmates, teachers, church leaders. Work colleagues, neighborhood association members, bartenders.

  “This is impossible,” she said to her robot. “I’m never going to find out who they are.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You’re useless!” she yelled, winging at it a purely decorative copy of a book on dinner party etiquette. The tome made a thunk against the robot’s face and then a splat on the floor.

  “Of course, ma’am,” the robot said, proceeding to pick it up.

  A petition from Clarissa and her group arrived next. Lan-Yun trashed it without looking at it. She answered work messages late or not at all—news about the suicide had apparently reached her colleagues (leaked by Clarissa’s ilk, no doubt), who demanded reports she couldn’t run and updates she didn’t have, so many demands, one after another, that Lan-Yun decided she didn’t even care if she got fired. She barely knew or liked any of her coworkers anyway, the normalization of telecommuting long ago having rendered traditional workspaces obsolete. And it wasn’t as if she’d dreamed of becoming a bureaucrat when she was a child. An internship had turned into an entry-level position which had turned into this. On several occasions, she’d sat herself down with career guidance books, determined to discover her calling, but then she’d convinced herself that she had plenty of time to figure everything out.

  Thus preoccupied, Lan-Yun hardly noticed the spate of late-night meetings at Clarissa’s house, the flyers being furtively passed from hand to hand, and the glares between Clarissa and Willow whenever the two women crossed paths. She hardly could have guessed what was coming next.

  * * *

  The protests started a few weeks after. Together, they marched down to the local office of the Bureau of Elder Affairs. “Keep Our Home a Haven,” their signs read. Heated by an uncommonly early spring, zeal, and the press of bodies, they limped on replacement hips or rolled along in motorized chairs, vandalizing the motivational posters that hung everywhere (“Stretch to your fullest potential!” a tree in tree yoga pose exhorted) and batting at drones with their canes. At the prompting of her friends, Clarissa wobbled onto the low stage the Bureau reserved for bingo night.

  “It is bad enough that we have become second-class citizens in our own society, constantly surveilled and micromanaged by the deathless,” Clarissa shouted through the initial quaver in her voice. “Now they are moving in and disrupting the lives we have worked hard to build for ourselves. I have been in communication with other islands worldwide, and they have expressed their solidarity. If we must live like goldfish, then we at least deserve a tank of our own, free from their poisons.”

  The protesters cheered. Then they tried to set an effigy of the glass woman on fire, but the drones, which were not programmed with a sense of humor or the ability to think figuratively, immediately swooped in to put it out.

  Crowds gathered in front of the farmhouse. Somebody threw an artificial leg at a window. The thigh broke through the glass but the calf caught on the windowpane, giving the impression of a disgruntled robot in the course of its great escape. The Bureau of Elder Affairs sent peace officers, who found themselves at a loss what to do with this cadre of octo- and nonagenarians too agitated to be verbally calmed but too brittle to be physically subdued. Yet as Clarissa’s supporters grew in number, so did a counter-contingent comprising individuals like Willow, who had found in the glass woman nothing but a quiet kindness, and others, who had never met the glass woman but who opposed Clarissa on principle because her rhetoric whirled up lees from a time when their own parents or grandparents had been barred from jobs or neighborhoods on the basis of skin color or lifestyle.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mute man struggled to acclimate to all the newfound commotion. One afternoon, after a particularly loud bang woke him from his nap (some protesters had tipped a safety bot, which had been unable to defend itself because Asimov), he began to scream. He screamed so loudly that even the people outside heard and tried to peer in the windows. What finally stopped the screaming was the glass woman, who hurried in from potting hydrangeas in the backyard and knelt in front of him. “Hey, Max, hey, buddy,” she said.

  The mute man was now crying and hyperventilating. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said. “Here, look.” She held up one hand, palm facing him, fingers together. Slowly, he raised his hand and pressed his palm to hers.

  And that was all it took for Lan-Yun to finally recognize the pair. Not the late nights poring through records with her hyperefficient mind, not the many bots she’d programmed to search for information, but this simple little moment. Lan-Yun had seen this gesture before when the mute man had been much younger and the glass woman had been in a different body, photographed by every tabloid and news outlet for being one of the first humans to survive cyberization.

  “Holy shit!” Lan-Yun cried.

  A red light flashed on her robot’s torso: As a courtesy to your neighbors, please be mindful of noise.

  Her apartment suddenly felt too small. Lan-Yun hesitated only a second before deciding to leave for the first time in weeks. She kicked her robot in the leg on her way out.

  Like the few other people walking, she straddled the middle of the road, edging aside only when the occasional driverless vehicle honked. A cleaning bot sluiced the street on schedule, excavating the top stratum of nothing to reveal the nothing underneath. How things had changed since her youth. Once she’d found a silver dollar on the street, a perfect, shining gift, as though the moon had fallen and lain there waiting for her to pocket it near her heart. Yet she knew better than to wax sentimental about the old days. As a teenager with Marfan syndrome, with a body like a cobweb and a deep, primordial pain in her bones, Lan-Yun had tracked the news on cyberization with impatience. Then the first successful cases appeared. It didn’t matter that the procedure wouldn’t receive approval for mass implementation for years to come. In these new beings she saw her future, a concept that, up until their arrival, had felt as speculative as the concept of running, climbing, or dancing.

  There had been only a handful of them, people who somehow survived the earliest procedures and whose neurocybernetic architecture became foundational to future models. In some ways, they came to feel like her spiritual parents, especially after her real parents died. But one by one, over the course of decades, they disappeared. Attempts to ping them timed out.

  She called up the footage again. In the few minutes since she’d taken her eyes off the last to die, a drum circle had formed near the farmhouse. A man in a colorful, slouchy knit cap and a woman with a vaporizing device lolling from her mouth were banging loudly and asynchronously on bongos. Hips and shoulders shimmied; arthritic joints spasmed and popped. Someone who had to be in her eighties whipped her shirt off, her breasts knocking back and forth like a Newton’s cradle.

  Lan-Yun had thought she would spend all of her time dancing after cyberization. Having spent her high school and college years waiting in sticky booths at clubs while her friends leaped and twirled, she’d wanted more than anything to catch up. But by the time she underwent the procedure, she was already in her late 30s, and dancing didn’t seem particularly dignified for a woman of her age and professional stature. On top of that, dance halls had begun closing down, the younger generation seeing no point in making the effort to dress up and wait in line only to be turned away at the door when they could experience
virtually the same thing, virtually. Lan-Yun marveled at the chaos on the island, and a simple, irrefutable conclusion arose.

  It was time for her to go.

  * * *

  She arrived late in the evening and instructed the car to take her directly to the farmhouse. It drove her past artificial meadows engineered to smell natural; a school of seniors swimming through their tai chi moves, and nearby, a group arguing angrily over the position of the boule in a game of pétanque; hospitals where at that precise moment patients were taking their last breaths; ponds choking with koi and lily pads and surrounded by tall railings; a safety bot rolling around with a photograph glued onto its back of one of the last to die spanking a disabled safety robot, possibly the same one (“Show ’em who’s boss,” the caption read); and, finally, the stragglers from the day’s protests, who were moseying home arm in arm, swigging grand cru straight from the bottle, idly pitter-pattering on their drums.

  “Shit, the crats are here,” Matthieu said, seeing the official vehicle pull up. “Something’s about to go down.”

  “You think the Bureau going to kick her out?” his friend asked.

  Matthieu shrugged. “Well, they do hate disorder. Not that any of this is really the glass woman’s fault. Attractors can’t control what they attract, the way black holes can’t choose to consume only moons.”

  “I don’t understand why these protesters can’t just sit down and talk through it like adults,” the friend said. “All this craziness over a single woman.”

  “Come on, you and I have both lived long enough to know that things don’t work that way. Wars are never about the thing being fought over but about the people fighting.” He opened the file on which he’d been keeping track of everyone’s bets. “Now who wants to place a final wager?”

  The front door was already open when Lan-Yun arrived. The peace officers stood aside to let her pass. Several members of Clarissa’s group clamored to be included in the conversation, fearing that the government might make yet another decision without their input, but the officers stood their ground. When Clarissa tried to elbow one of the officers out of the way, Willow intervened, wedging herself between them. Somebody started chanting, “Fight, fight, fight,” and the world’s wobbliest slap fight ensued.

  Lan-Yun found the glass woman sitting at the kitchen counter. “Thanks for seeing me,” she said. “I hope we can come to a compromise that will make everyone happy.”

  “I hope so as well,” the glass woman said. “Max and I have enjoyed this house.”

  “It’s one of the oldest structures on the island. These walls have seen a lot. Maybe as much as you.”

  The glass woman didn’t respond. In the darkened room, she was a ghost with radial veins of light.

  Lan-Yun decided on the direct approach. “I wouldn’t have recognized you if not for Max, and only then because I’d been interested about you and the others in my youth. Why did you come here?”

  “I’ve explained why.”

  “Some people here don’t believe you.”

  The glass woman stood and walked over to a table in the living room, where she picked up a model of the human brain. She held it in her open hand as though it were a snail she had plucked from the trellis.

  “I don’t want to kick you off the island,” Lan-Yun continued, “but you have to understand that I’m under a lot of pressure to fix this. What if we told everyone who you are? Imagine the support you would get. Without the experimentation they did on you, widespread cyberization would not have been possible.”

  “I need to think about this,” the glass woman said, wandering deeper into the living room. Then, the strangest thing happened. All of the lights in the glass woman blinked out at the same time. For a second, Lan-Yun thought for sure that she had disappeared. There was a thunk on the roof that Lan-Yun realized was a drone falling from the sky. After a few seconds, the lights came on again, even ones that had not been there before, more and more until it seemed the glass woman would burn through the fabric of the universe, as if she were engaged in some internal process so immense that even the deathless, with all their knowledge, would never be able to understand.

  The glass woman returned to the kitchen and sat back down. “I was born so long ago that almost everyone I loved is now gone,” she said to Lan-Yun. “Think about how many you have lost. Your grandparents. Your parents. Maybe a few uncles and aunts. But your friends live. So do your siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, and children, if you have any. That is a privilege those of your generation hold. Those younger than you hold even more. What I share with the people on this island is the language of loss. We are flip sides of the same coin. You might say that I am the last to still be alive.”

  “What about the others?” Lan-Yun asked quietly.

  “It takes more than an imperishable body to stay alive. We need more than ourselves and our own ambitions, especially as time drags on. People think I saved Max, but really it’s the other way around. With him I’ve found a tether to this world. Not everyone is so lucky.”

  If we need more than ourselves, Lan-Yun thought, then maybe we’re all doomed without even realizing it. With no need to leave their homes for work or food, many deathless had tucked themselves away like collectible figurines in glass cases. Lan-Yun couldn’t remember the last time someone had made voluntary eye contact with her on the mainland, nor the last time she had seen more than a couple of people together, just sitting and talking, never mind gathered in protest and counterprotest. Occasionally, people still had children, if one could call beings grown in laboratories from cell lines “children,” but usually not until much later in life. No one was in a hurry to live because no one died.

  And yet, for all their freedom and potential, what had neohumanity made of their endlessness? All over the world, there were junkyards where people went to turn themselves off. Sometimes they had loved ones who searched for them; often they did not. Wind and rain ate through their clothing. Wild dogs urinated on their feet.

  Not that she saw the same despair in her own future, necessarily. She’d struggled too hard to stay alive while in her old body to give up life this easily. But as she’d started getting on in years—she was now nearing her seventh decade—she’d felt a kind of emotional flimsiness she found hard to describe, like the bonds between her and the world were dissolving instead of the connective tissue in her body. What would become of her in another three decades? Ten? The scientists created the first generation to live forever, but they never thought to ask how humanity was supposed to fill so much time.

  “So what do we do?” Lan-Yun asked, unsure if she was asking for the glass woman or for herself. Yet even as she said this, she realized she wanted the glass woman to stay on the island. She imagined meeting up with her every now and then like old friends. All of the things the glass woman must have experienced. All of the stories she could tell.