by Baen Books
Once inside, I yanked off my helmet, then Sievert's. He wasn't breathing and was grayish in color. I started mouth to mouth and pulled the medical box from beneath my couch, then rummaged through it until I found the mask. I attached the hose to the interior oxygen panel, pushed it over his face and started defibrillation.
He didn't wake up but started breathing on his own and I finally relaxed. My face was covered with tears and my only useful hand shook as I fumbled painkillers into my mouth. Only then did I notice the radio squawking in the background and replied.
"Good God, Hartman. Sievert told us you were dead. What's going on up there?"
I considered a white lie, telling them he panicked or had space sickness, but then he might go out with someone else and kill them one day.
"Sievert tried to kill me," I said as clearly and carefully as I could. "He destroyed my transmitter, then pinned me down and tied to steal my oxygen. He's in bad shape now. Unconscious. I barely got him inside, but I did bring him back."
There was a long pause on the other side. Who knew what he told them and what they believed. I was just too hurt and exhausted to give a damn.
"Roger that, Stolid. We are inbound. ETA three hours and fifty minutes."
I was starting to feel a bit dizzy from the pain killers and didn't reply.
"Stolid? Do you copy?"
"Yeah," I finally said. "Hey, do any of you know if Sievert's dad is alive?"
When I mentioned his name, Sievert woke up. He turned his head and focused on me, but his eyes held no emotion. I couldn't tell if the old Sievert was still in there or not.
The crew from the rescue ship finally replied. "Tyco Orbital says yes. His father is still alive. Why?"
"Hartman out," I said and signed off.
We stared at each other for several seconds, then I said "I guess you broke the record. Congratulations."
He turned his head away. I checked his bonds then settled into my seat to sleep while I waited for pickup. Before I closed my eyes, I buckled my harness, per the safety regulations.
The Trouble with Millennials
by Robert Buettner
On February 20, 2152, a Greenline cab shuddered to a stop at the slim beach that still separated Chicago from Lake Michigan. Pete Dial peered out the old egg’s side glass at the crowds sweating beneath the noon sun, then glanced at the time display winking on the cab’s platen.
He was early, which a man who had all the time in the world hardly needed to be. But the next half hour might redeem his life.
The cab’s door creaked up, Pete ducked beneath it, and stood in the hot sand. He exhaled through a smile, and let the lake air, and the strollers, and the bathers, all eddy around him.
Behind him the cab honked and flashed.
Pete spun back to the Greenie, pounded a fist on its plasteel flank. In his haste to leave a passenger compartment that reeked of decades of prior fares, he had neglected to pay while still inside.
Swearing under his breath, he fed bills into the cab’s flickering pay slot until it shut up.
A teenaged Uni pair passing by stopped and stared, dropped jaws displaying sharpened steel teeth.
Pete’s heart skipped. Not because of the teeth. The kids’ generation wore them to annoy its parents’ generation. After watching seven generations of fashion rebels mature into annoyed parents, the cycle now just bored the crap out of him. Most days what surprised him about the last hundred fifty years wasn’t how much changed, but how much didn’t.
Not that boring the crap out of somebody was a bad life strategy. The scattered Millennials like him who still hid within contemporary society survived by blending in.
Pete had chosen a Greenline over other lines’ newer, better-scrubbed cabs because Greenies still had working cash slots. Cash left no record, at least no record linked to an identifiable payor. Which payor might not blend in. But paying cash openly and notoriously, when nobody had for decades, was stupidly conspicuous.
The kids blinked, as quickly bored as kids had always been, and kept walking.
The cab’s door ratcheted back down and Pete stared at his own reflection in its dirty side glass. To the kids, Pete Dial looked thirty-five years old. They had stared not because they had suspected that Pete was a hundred twenty years older than he looked, but because the kids had never seen folding money before.
“Thank you for ch-choosing Greenline.” Showing its age, the worn electric limped back into traffic.
Pete wove through the crowds, his movements as lithe as the old cab’s had been feeble. He ignored office workers wearing singlets, strolling off their lunches; loud gaggles of metal mouthed adolescents, and family units out for a day at the beach and smelling of sunblock.
All Pete knew about why he was here was what had been whispered to him. Which wasn’t much. Another attention magnet that Millennials avoided was communicating on the grid. They passed information from one mouth to one ear, and occasionally by hand-delivered writing.
After two minutes Pete spotted the cues for which he searched. Lime green walking shorts and a mismatched orange visored cap. The man who wore them was about Pete’s own apparent age, with a close trimmed black beard.
Motionless, thin, his brown arms folded, the man stared through dark glasses north across the great lake. Warm wavelets broke along the shore a scant yard from his bare feet.
Pete stopped alongside the man and stared north, too. They stood with their backs to the dispassionate, ubiquitous surveillance optics and audio sensors that peered out from every building and vantage point in the city behind them.
The businesses’ sensors weren’t hunting Millennials. Scarcity had rendered that business cost-ineffective decades earlier. But most people still held with the old Bollyrap lyric, “Cobra and Millennial in your bed? First you kill the Millennial dead.”
The two men stood just close enough to each other that the waves’ murmur masked both the fact and the content of their conversation.
The man said, “You’re early.”
“Not that either of us is in a hurry.” Pete visored a hand over squinted eyes. “When I was a kid, I came down to this lake in February once. Froze my ass off.” Nobody had frozen their ass off alongside Lake Michigan for sixty years.
The man didn’t answer because a silver, bulbous police aerostat drifted across their fields of vision, parallel to the beach and a half mile offshore.
After the gas bag passed the man said, “When I was a kid, people were smart enough to stay indoors in February.” He wriggled his toes in the sand. “You really have a degree in aerospace engineering?”
Pete nodded. Not that it had ever gotten him closer to Mars than flying had. “And I was a Tiltrotor Airframe Mechanic before I got into flight school. I’ve got sixteen hundred hours in the left seat of an Osprey. Why does that matter?”
“Which war?”
“Fourth Afghan. Two tours. One crash. Eight broken bones. You’ve really got a flyable CV-22?”
“I’ve got a CV-22 that the right person could make flyable.”
“Why would a person want to make an aircraft older than you and I are fly?”
The man paused as another aerostat drifted by. This one was an advertising 'stat, but those also looked and listened as much as they showed and told.
Pete pointed at the 'stat as it vanished down the beach. “There’ve turned out to be safer, cheaper ways to fly straight up, straight down, and slow, and fast, besides making one aircraft do all four. The Osprey branch on the aviation evolution tree died a long time ago.”
“Precisely, Mr. Dial. Nobody born this century even knows what a CV-22 was. These days an Osprey’s versatility and anonymity could allow it to fly a cargo under the radar. So to speak.”
“Smuggling?” Pete shook his head. “Not interested.”
The man turned away and walked east along the beach. “Mr. Dial, if you routinely answer employment interview questions with more questions, I’m not surprised you’re between jobs.”
Pete stiffened. He had been between jobs, at least jobs that let him fly, for most of the last century. Flying to Mars had been a kid’s daydream. Just plain flying had been a dream come true. And his life without flying since had been a bad dream from which he couldn’t wake up.
The man shook his head as he walked away. “The job’s not smuggling. At least in the conventional sense. The cargo is me. And the job’s yours, if you want it.”
Pete caught up with the man, touched his elbow. “You trust a stranger you met over The Network to fly you? Just because he says he can?”
The thin man turned and smiled. “Mr. Dial, I have survived the same pogrom that you have by trusting that people act in their own self-interest. It would hardly be in your self-interest to lie your way into the cockpit of an aircraft the press nicknamed Widow Maker, would it?”
They walked a hundred yards side by side as the crowds shrank, until only the breeze and the waves’ ceaseless lap accompanied the two of them.
Pete frowned. “Are we finally at the place where I can ask questions?”
The man glanced around at the empty beach. “Shoot.”
“First, what’s in it for me?”
The man nodded. “Safe room and exceptional board. A generous salary at first. Then, I could say a new life. But Millennials already have all the life we need, don’t we? So let’s say a chance to finally enjoy the life you’ve got.”
“Why bother with an Osprey? This is Chicago. You don’t need to escape. Just leave.”
The man toed a discarded orange rotting in the sand and wrinkled his nose. “Mr. Dial, twenty-three million Chicagoans have tried and failed at that for years.” He smiled at his own joke, then shook his head. “I don’t need help to leave Chicago. I’m just in town shopping.”
Pete peered over his shoulder at downtown’s mix of blocky skyscrapers, older than he was, and taller needles younger than a kid with steel teeth. “On the beach?”
The man pointed, not at North Michigan Avenue’s Miracle Mile but east along the shore at the aged gray rock pile that was the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. “There.”
Pete wrinkled his forehead. “Then where do you want to fly to?”
The man shook his head. “First let’s see whether you can make the ship airworthy. Then we’ll discuss the destination. What else, Mr. Dial?”
“I’d like to know my cargo’s name. You know mine.”
The man extended a bony hand and grinned as Pete shook it. “V.J. Patel.”
Pete cocked an eyebrow. “Has it been a problem? Having the same name as that guy? V.J. Patel The Hindu From Hell?”
“The problem hasn’t been the name.” Patel spread his arms and glanced down at his scrawny frame. “The problem’s been that I am that guy.”
Two days of zig-zag driving and vehicle swaps after Pete and Patel had headed south from Chicago, then turned west, then north, Patel stopped their current vehicle. The dented, dirty, jacked-up selfdriver pickup truck idled in front of a gate locked with an old fashioned padlock. The gate was set in an unending ten-foot tall wire fence that bisected a flat, treeless, brown grassland that had long ago been green. The prairie stretched in all directions to the horizon.
The gate and fence were the first signs of current human habitation they had encountered during the last hour. A faded metal sign on the gate matched the sign on the flank of the livestock trailer they towed: “Dakota Farms-Sexually Reproduced Hogs.”
The trailer actually contained not hogs but four crates of long-mislaid CV-22 Osprey spare parts that the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry had uncovered in an offsite warehouse, then advertised for sale as junk.
Patel stepped down from the truck cab and unlocked the gate, pulled through then relocked the gate behind them, and remounted the truck.
Pete sat gazing at the wide open spaces as dust drifted through the pickup’s open windows and settled atop layers already there. Rabbits hopped silently along the fence line. Crop and herd monitor drones loitered in the sky, as small in the distance as wandering flies. Pete realized that Patel had chosen this inhospitable emptiness to buffer himself from the many people in this world who, after more than a century, still wanted him dead.
In the late 2030s V.J. Patel had become the most famous, and later infamous, geek multibillionaire minted when a handful of biotech startups hit the life extension technology jackpot.
Pete Dial, conversely, had been plucked from a multi-company pool of anonymous test subjects, just an underemployed vet with rent to pay, who became test subject 40 of 40 in Patel Molecular Biology Laboratories outpatient trial number 121.
So far, on this prairie V.J. Patel, multibillionaire-in-hiding, and Pete Dial, anonymous guinea pig, had encountered no people.
Pete thought that was for the best.
Patel leaned in front of the truck’s rearview mirror and adjusted his straw cowboy hat. He thought it made him blend in as just another hog rancher. Assuming the Dakotas were full of brown, skinny ranchers who pronounced “well” “vell.” Then Patel resumed whistling what he thought were country tunes that cowboys sang around their campfires, but were actually the score from Oklahoma.
Pete sighed. A human guinea pig had no business correcting a genius. And long ago an intel spook in Afghanistan had told Pete that a lousy cover was better than no cover at all.
Each time the truck bottomed in a pothole both Pete and the parts crates in the trailer bounced. Millennials shared a common, us-against-the-world bond. But perhaps V.J. Patel, genius billionaire, saw Pete Dial, human guinea pig, not as a comrade but as one more bargain spare part.
Although that wasn’t Patel’s story as Pete recalled it.
The man who made death by aging just another eradicable disease, like smallpox and polio, V.J. Patel was also considered the nicest guy on Earth.
Until the dominos of unanticipated consequence began falling.
Religion bristled at the impending loss of its monopoly on granting immortality. Nations panicked at the prospect of retirees who started collecting government pensions and never stopped, and of populations swollen by new citizens, but no longer shrunken by the deaths of old ones.
The American Association of Embalmers petitioned Congress for money to retrain its members. Average citizens protested that others shouldn’t have all the time in the world if they didn’t. But, when surveyed, average citizens couldn’t think up something to do with an extra half hour if their internet was out.
A senator, who apparently had a unique understanding of the relationship between life extension technology and reincarnation, and of the fact that V.J. Patel was an Indian-surnamed agnostic, pilloried Patel as “The Hindu From Hell.”
It had all been vaguely amusing. Until The Trouble started.
The truck struck a bump and Patel threw back his head and howled, “Ya-hoo!”
Pete stared again at the landscape and remembered when the howling had turned ugly.
A deep-seated resentment had surfaced, born, the psychologists said, of the astronomical expense of life extension procedures, combined with the projection that those procedures would remain beyond the reach of ordinary people until the then-current crop of ordinary people were dead. The right to live forever was falling unequally to the rich, the powerful, and the crooked. Whom ordinary people lumped together as the same thing. Also lumped together was a handful of unrich, unpowerful, uncrooked guinea pigs like Pete Dial.
Inequality, of the rich-get-richer sort, had been around since the first Australopithecus slapped the first gentler sibling away from dinner. The human race had learned to accept it. The psychologists pegged this acceptance of inequality to the certainty among the poor, the weak, and the honest that they and the rich, the powerful, and the crooked all wound up equally dead.
Life extension upended that equality. That in turn upended the general population’s acceptance of a bunch of jerk billionaires who had bought the luck to live for a thousand years. And by indiscriminate extension a
few human guinea pigs who shared the billionaires’ luck.
Outside the pickup dusk had cloaked the prairie when Patel interrupted his fourth rewind of Oklahoma, pointed through the cracked windshield, and sang, “We’re here!”
In the distance ahead lights winked on and twinkled.
Twenty minutes later, “Here” turned out to be an enormous barn, a vast, low ranch house, and a scatter of out buildings that all looked ancient, but weren’t. Precisely the opposite of their owner.
The house was opulent inside, fully auto, and dinner for two waited, hot and remarkably good, on a linen-clothed table in a dining room dominated by a gilt-framed Miro that looked genuine.
After they ate Patel led the way out to the cool evening. On the house’s covered veranda a cognac bottle and two crystal snifters slid from the service port onto a table between two side-by-side wooden rocking chairs. Patel motioned Pete to the left rocker, then poured cognacs.
Pete sniffed, then sipped. “Smooth.”
Patel swirled his, then sipped. “Should be. It’s older than either of us.” They sat, looked out at the stars and listened to crickets chirp. Patel set down his glass, turned his nose up and sniffed again. “Smell that?”
“I don’t smell anything.”
“Precisely. No hogs. Where would a bounty hunter be less likely to look for a vegetarian Hindu Millennial than a pig farm? My cover legend is flawless.”
“Your cover legend is that your house serves cheeseburgers. You’re betting big that people will infer a lot from a little truth.”
Patel shrugged. “Mr. Dial, people infer what they want to be true, even from no truth at all. They only accept reality after it has bitten them in the ass. When The Trouble started I inferred that the angels of mankind’s better nature would protect us.”
“Instead reality bit us in the ass.”
They rocked and sipped.
The hearings at which V.J. Patel had been nicknamed “the Hindu from Hell” had yielded the Millennial Protection Act. Every other nation that mattered had passed similar legislation.