by Laurie Penny
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For Magpie
Letter from Holloway Prison, December 5, 2098
Dear Daisy,
We were never really friends, were we? Somehow, though, you’re the person I want to write to most in here. I hope these letters get to you. I’m giving them to Alex, who I am absolutely sure is reading them too, and although they aren’t meant for him, I hope he gets something instructive from them.
Hello, Alex. I hope you’re well. I hope you’re safe. I hope you understand that you are not forgiven. Even after the awful, terrible thing we did. Even after the Time Bomb, and everything that came afterward. I can’t let it go. The anger keeps me sharp. Keeps my brain from turning to paste. It’s that or the crossword, and rage is more reliable. I am sorry about your hands, though.
Anyway. I’ve got a story for you, this time. For both of you, as it happens.
Have you heard the one about the Devil’s bridge?
It’s an old story, and there are lots of different tellings, but it goes something like this.
A carpenter wants to build a bridge across a river. Not just any bridge, but the strongest, sturdiest bridge that has ever been made or thought of, to take him and his wife to the far bank, where there are treasures whose nature is unimportant to the story. Let us assume that he has good reasons for wanting to get there, or thinks he does. Let us assume that his tools and skills are insufficient to the task. Let us assume that he is out of options and ideas.
He sits down on the plain, gray bank he calls home and makes a wish.
Instantly there appears before him a handsome man with savage eyes and shining hair, and his clothes are rich and strange and he blinks less than a person ought to, and the carpenter knows that this is the Devil.
I can build a bridge for you, says the Devil. I can build you a bridge across the wild, wide river, and it will be the greatest bridge ever seen, the strongest, the most magnificent. It will stand for a hundred years, and people from all around will come to walk on it and say: the man who made this must be a fine carpenter indeed. The bridge will draw visitors from seven counties. Boys will take their sweethearts here to propose. You can charge an entry fee. You can open a hot-dog stand. Whatever you want.
I’m not really interested in that, says the carpenter. I just want to get to the other side.
Well, says the Devil, that’s part of the package.
What would it cost me? says the carpenter.
Alright, I don’t have a lot of time left to write. They come in and stop me at guard change.
Meanwhile: consider that time is a weapon.
Before the coming of the Time Bomb, this was true. It was true before men and women of means or special merit could purchase an extra century of youth. It has been true since the invention of the hourglass, the water clock, the wristwatch, the shift-bell, the factory floor. Ever since men could measure time, they have used it to divide each other.
Time is a weapon wielded by the rich, who have excess of it, against the rest, who must trade every breath of it against the promise of another day’s food and shelter. What kind of world have we made, where human beings can live centuries if only they can afford the fix? What kind of creatures have we become?
The Time Bomb. Aerosolized gerontoxin. Currently being deployed around a world in panic by desperate people with nothing to lose and nothing to make but their point. You know you could have stopped it. Alex, I’m talking to you now. You could have stopped it all from happening. Maybe someday soon I’ll tell them how. After all, so much life has been wasted.
So very much life.
* * *
There was a wall. It was taller than it seemed and set back a little from the street, so the ancient trees on the college side provided a well of darker shadow, away from the streetlights.
The wall was old and rough, ancient sandstone filled in with reinforced cement to keep out intruders. The drop on the other side landed you in thick grass. Still, Alex was afraid of the wall. Of the idea of it.
Nina was the first to make the climb. She squatted on top of the wall, an implike thing in the darkness. Then she turned and held out her hand to Alex, beckoning.
“You have to see this,” she said.
Alex started to climb the wall between the worlds. The old stone bit at his hands. Halfway up, he heard Nina make a little sound of disappointment in her throat. He was never fast enough for her.
The approach to Magdalen College was across the deer park.
That was where they were going: through the park, avoiding the dogs and the security lights, into the college, into the ball all sparkling under the starlight.
It was four of them, Nina and Alex, Margo and Fidget, and they were off to rob the rich and feed the poor. An exercise, as Margo put it, as important for the emotional welfare of the autonomous individual as it was for the collective. Margo was a state therapist before she came to Cowley, to bunker down with the rest of the strays and degenerates clinging to the underside of Oxford city. Five years of living off the grid hadn’t cured her of the talk.
At the top of the wall, Alex unfolded himself for an instant, and then he saw it—what Nina had been trying to show him. The old college lit from behind with a hundred moving lights, butter-soft and pink and pretty, a bubble of beauty floating on the skin of time.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“Come on,” said Margo, “get moving, or we’ll be seen.”
Margo was beside him now, the great bulk of her making no sound on the ascent. Alex’s mouth had been dry all night. He licked his teeth and listened to his heart shake the bars of his rib cage. He had promised the others that he was good for this. He wasn’t going to have another anxiety attack and ruin everything.
“As your therapist,” said Margo, gentling her voice, “I should remind you that God hates a coward.”
Alex jumped before she could push him, and hit the grass on the other side of the wall without remembering to bend his knees. His ankles cried out on impact.
Then Nina was next to him, and Margo, all three of them together. Fidget was last, dropping over the wall without a sound, dark on dark in the moonlight. Margo held up a hand for assembly.
“Security’s not going to be tight on this side of the college. Let’s go over the drill if anyone gets caught.”
“We’re the hired entertainment and our passes got lost somewhere,” said Nina, stripping off her coverall. Underneath, she was wearing a series of intricately knotted bedsheets, and the overall effect was somewhere between appropriative and indecent.
Alex liked it.
“Alex,” said Margo, “I want to hear it from you. What are you?”
“I’m a stupid drunk entertainer and I’m not being paid enough for this,” Alex repeated.
“Good. Now, as your therapist, I advise you to run very fast, meet us at the fountain, take nothing except what we came for, and for fuck’s sake, don’t get caught.”
Fireworks bloomed and snickered in the sky over the deer park. Chill f
ingers of light and laughter uncurled from the ancient college. They moved off separately across the dark field to the perimeter.
Alex squinted to make out the deer, but the herd was elsewhere, sheltering from the revelry. The last wild deer in England. Oxford guarded its treasures, flesh and stone both.
Alex kept low, and he had almost made it to the wall when a searchlight swung around, pinning him there.
Alex was an insect frozen against the sandstone.
Alex couldn’t remember who he was supposed to be.
Alex was about to fuck this up for everyone and get them all sent to jail before they’d even got what they came for.
Hands on Alex’s neck, soft, desperate, and a small firm body pinning him against the wall. Fidget. Fidget, kissing him sloppily, fumbling with the buttons on his shirt, both of them caught in the beam of light.
“Play along,” Fidget hissed, and Alex understood. He groaned theatrically as Fidget ran hard hands through his hair and kissed his open mouth. Alex had never kissed another man like this before, and he was too shit-scared to wonder whether he liked it, because if they couldn’t convince whoever was on the other end of that searchlight that they were a couple of drunks who’d left the party to fuck, they were both going to jail.
The searchlight lingered.
Fidget ran a sharp, scoundrel tongue along Alex’s neck. A spike of anger stabbed Alex in the base of his belly, but instead of punching Fidget in his pretty face, he grabbed his head, twisted it up and kissed him again.
The searchlight lingered, trembling.
Fidget fumbled with Alex’s belt buckle.
The searchlight moved on.
Fidget sighed in the merciful darkness. “I thought I was going to have to escalate for a second there.”
“You seemed to be having a good time,” said Alex.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” said Fidget. “The word you’re looking for is ‘thanks.’”
They were almost inside. Just behind the last fence, Magdalen ball was blossoming into being. Behind the fence, airy music from somewhere out of time would be rising over the lacquered heads of five hundred guests in suits and rented ballgowns. Entertainers and waitstaff in themed costumes would be circling with trays of champagne flutes. Chocolates and cocaine would be laid out in intricate lines on silver dishes.
Alex and the others weren’t here for any of that.
They were here for the fix.
* * *
Daisy Craver had come to this party under protest. Her company liked to show her off at events like these, just another expensive decoration in this stage-managed whirl of decadence they were sponsoring. That’s what Daisy was to them—a prestige piece. No different from the biosculptures in the lobby at the lab. She hadn’t done any real work in years.
Instead, she got wheeled out to these things like an angry puppet to pick at ridiculous miniature food and talk to brainless, braying rich kids and their parents, who were all just so grateful for her research. At least, the parents were. The kids probably hated her—sure, they got to be young and healthy for an extra half-century, but Mummy and Daddy got that same half-century to spend the inheritance. Without that, they were having to find other ways to maintain the lifestyles to which they had become accustomed.
“It’ll be good for you.” That’s what Parker had said. Parker was Daisy’s supervisor, although she thought of him as her handler. What he meant was “it’ll be good for us.” The work she had done back in the twenties was essential to the base formula of the fix, and that made her essential to the company. An important resource, they said. Like all the other geniuses who got the life-extension grants.
Daisy didn’t take it as a compliment. She knew what multinationals did with important resources.
Still, she put on the stupid frock with the ruffles that neither suited nor fit her and got in the limo, and now she was hanging around the fountain, eating chocolate-covered marshmallows and trying to avoid the undergraduates in their prom gowns and penguin suits. Parker wanted her to show her face. He never specified that there should be a smile on it.
Daisy hated parties, and this one was particularly hateful, a shaken snow globe of opulence just begging to be dashed on the floor. The theme was “The Fountain of Youth.” It was based on a weird old racist novel where some British explorers went to darkest Africa and discovered a tribe of savages ruled by an immortal queen who was for some reason as white as they were.
The theme had been chosen in honor of the sponsor, Daisy’s own company, TeamThreeHundred, which held the patent for the broadest-spectrum life-extension drugs on the market. The distinctive little blue pills went for two hundred dollars a pop on the black market—less if you could afford the right insurance. One pill a day, every day, was enough to keep your meat fresh for decades and more. There were people who’d started to fix fifty years before who hadn’t counted a single gray hair.
Rich people, mostly, and anyone deemed socially useful enough that their continued existence was worth sponsoring, although that too was up to the manufacturers to decide. Artists, musicians, scientists. Even the occasional writer. Meritocracy in action.
Daisy had never liked parties, though—even when she was young, really young, not just young-looking. Not that she ever got invited to many parties back in school. Not that she had cared. More time to spend on the net, talking to professors three times her age about gene splicing.
Daisy had been born at the turn of this millennium, on the exact day that the completion of the Human Genome Project had been announced to the world. She had seen it in the old stills—the government scientist and the venture capitalist standing on either side of the president at the time, one of the Clintons or one of the Bushes, all their differences buried in public, a new dawn for the future of biotech.
None of these kids necking free cocktails would remember. Even the ones who were already fixing—and Daisy could tell, she could always tell; there was an uncanny smoothness to the skin, a ghastly glisten that made them doll-like. They wouldn’t be old enough to remember a time when money could only buy, at best, the appearance of youth.
The fountain was the centerpiece. The old stone sprinkler with its constipated-looking cherubs had been decked out as the Fountain of Youth, but it was only running cheap champagne, cut with Prosecco.
It was the little dishes around the side that held the real juice. Candy bowls of blue pills. Fashioned like arrows, more precious than diamonds. The fix. Free to those who could afford it, courtesy of our generous sponsors.
Daisy was alone.
These days, she was always alone.
She opened her tablet and called up an old video. Scrubbed from the net now, but she had a copy. Pixelated, seventy years old, but the sound was clear.
A dark stage. A quiet audience of professionals. A single podium, and there she was—a much younger, identical-looking Daisy, giving one of the last unscripted ethics talks she had ever got away with.
“The mold strain Aspergillus aevitas is native to Orkney in the Republic of Scotland. Since its discovery and cultivation by my department, the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, and following development by TeamThreeHundred, this fungus has made the dream of significantly extending not just human life but human youth a reality.
“Thank you. In the course of my research for the company, completed with my coauthor Doctor Saladin Hasan, I was an early recipient of TeamThreeHundred’s extension program. At forty years old, I have the vital statistics of a person less than half my age. With regular treatment, I can expect to live well into the next century without any deterioration in quality of life.”
Applause from the audience, most of whom, Daisy reflected, would be long dead by now, except those with company health plans.
“Thank you. I hope that these extra years of useful work will be as much of an asset to the department and the company that sponsored this groundbreaking research as they will be of personal benefit to me. You’ve heard from people far highe
r up in the company how those who are now receiving the second generation of extension treatments can expect to live some three centuries, barring accidents and acts of God. You still need to look both ways before you cross the road. Ahaha. Yes. That’s the line we’re all using today. How did I do?
“Anyway, it remains to be seen what the effects of this miraculous technology will be on the world our grandchildren inherit—although perhaps I shouldn’t use the word ‘inherit,’ since I fully intend to be around to see it myself.”
More applause from the audience of ghosts.
“Thank you. I’m here today as a technologist, but also as a scholar of the history of science. History shows us that the ramifications of any new technology have as much to do with how we choose to distribute it as they have to do with the technology itself. I am not a politician, nor am I an economist. I am a scientist. But it seems appropriate to hypothesize here that a future where life-extension technology is available only to those who can afford it, or to those whom society considers useful, will look very different to a future where life-extension technology is more broadly available. I’m sorry—
“I’m sorry, something seems to have gone wrong with the sound . . .”
A noise behind Daisy. Parker Tremaine walked heavily across the damp grass, carrying two glasses of champagne. Knowing Parker, it’d be the good stuff.
She darkened her tablet quickly, and the ghost of her younger self disappeared, too late for him to miss. Aside from being the closest she still had to a direct boss, Parker was the one person in the entire company who had been been fixed for as long as she had, back when he was an entrepreneurial prodigy in the early days of T3, in what later became the Free State of California.
They knew each other too well for her to hide things from him.
“Memory lane?” he asked. He still had the lazy West-Coast accent. “Here. I brought us some bubbly. We’re due a chat, you and me.”
“No, thanks.” Daisy patted her hip flask. “Whisky only.”
“Suit yourself. More for me.” Parker downed one glass in a single fizzy swig and tossed it away over the lawn. He was already drunk.