Today, like most days, Jamie does nothing. Not that it bothers her in the slightest, the way anyone else might be unsettled by the idea of one of history’s most renowned inventors setting down her touch-rings and holo-stencils, never to pick them up again. No, Jamie languishes in the nothingness of her days, wears it like a garment—her newest and most beloved—lets it mold to her frame like a second skin, until she cannot remember a day when she was not of such a mindset nor such a person— 

That is a lie. She can remember, but simply does not like to dwell on it. Instead, she dwells on the temperature of her morning coffee (83.5 C, to be exact), the springiness of her noodles cooked in boiling water for 659 seconds then shocked in ice water at 3C, and the caress of a summer breeze on her cheeks at 2pm, when the air starts smelling of rain before the thunderstorms roll in at precisely 3:15. Occasionally, she receives messages—memory-projections, recordings, or good old text—from her extended family, from friends, from former investors and patrons trying once again to drag her out of her self-imposed hermitage. No calls, because she has disabled all calls to her holo-chip since last year.

She opens the messages, skimming through their contents the way she skims through the daily news. She answers none of them.

Colony RXi39 to break ground for a new station on the largest of its three moons. Live feed of silver spacecraft arrowing through the dark fills her vision. Jamie wonders how many colony residents will be allowed to set foot onto the finished station, or if it is going to be another gated complex meant only for Tier 1 citizens. Half a thousand declared dead in metropolises along the Mariana Trench following the 8.4 magnitude earthquake early last week. She witnesses caved-in climate domes, their panes patched with emergency makeshift seals, exposed towers crumpling like paper beneath the weight of the ocean, and bodies floating. The projection simulates the taste of salt in her brain, pungent enough to be bitter, and the frigidity of the ocean, raising goosebumps across her skin. Artist Shang Guan Ru Lan, or “Orchid” for short, is officially appointed as the lead designer for the 112th Interstellar Music Gala’s performance holo-set. Jamie smiles. Orchid had liked her once, back when they were still classmates at the same high school, and for a time, Jamie had tried to return the favor. It has been centuries since they last talked.

She turns off the projections and opens her eyes, squinting against the noonday sun. It filters through the climate dome above, falling onto the wood-paneled porch, her bare toes, and the rock garden across from her in gold bars. Except for the gurgling streams and swishing bamboo, the garden is quiet.

Snow, Jamie summons.

On the ground beside her, a napping cat cracks open its eyes. It leaps onto her lap and Jamie rests a hand onto the creature’s head, her pale fingers teasing its ink black fur. The cat purrs, its electric blue eyes squinting into slits.

Yes?

Is today going to be my best day?

Snow nudges her head against Jamie’s palm, curling into an even tighter ball. It is used to the routine. Every day Jamie asks the same question, and every day Snow replies much the same.

Maybe. But maybe it’ll be tomorrow, or maybe it was yesterday. Snow flicks its tail, revealing a dab of white at the very end. It’s going to rain at 3:34pm. The skies will clear quickly and galaxy TAq21 will be especially bright tonight.

Jamie nods, leaning her head back to watch iron clouds unfurl over the horizon.

#

Jamie is a student in university, her back on the bed and her legs propped up on the wall. She holds a soft ball in one hand, bouncing it off the wall and then catching it in rhythmic thunks.

Sitting across the room on the floor is one of her closest friends, also Jamie—something which drew them together when they first met and spawned many an inside joke—though that is just a paperwork name. Rather, this Jamie is known by his given name, Ling Wen. In his lap is a book, its pages yellowed, and as he reads, he underlines his favorite sentences in shaky pencil.

Thump.

The ball jumps off the wall. It lands back in her palm, her wrist hooking backwards and then forward to toss it out again.

Thump.

“Would you want to live forever?” Jamie blurts.

Ling Wen raises a brow. “I thought you were brainstorming your thesis.”

“I am.”

“Of course you are.”

Thump.

“Just answer me.”

Ling Wen leans back, spinning his pencil between thumb and forefinger as he thinks. He knows better than to attempt to follow her train of thought.

“I wouldn’t.”

Thump.

“Why not?”

“I think I’d grow tired of life. Exhausted, maybe even bored.”

Thump.

“Even if your life is perfect?”

Ling Wen shrugs, the movement an odd jerk in one shoulder.

“Even then.”  

Jamie pulls her legs down and sits up, turning to toss the ball over. “Life isn’t boring. You’re boring.”

Ling Wen drops his pencil and catches the softball in one hand, throws it back with a flick of his wrist. “What about you?” he asks. 

Jamie catches the ball. “I wouldn’t mind living forever.” Her words come slow, as if they are being chewed on, tasted for every last hint of meaning before being spit out. “If I had someone with me.”

“Someone?”

Jamie lowers her arm, only to sling it back up and throw the ball.

“Do you like me?”

Ling Wen snatches at the ball. Misses. He watches it bounce across the floor, once, twice, before rolling into a corner. When he peers at Jamie, his hands are still fiddling with the pages of his book.

“Not in that way… I don’t think.”

#

Sometimes, Jamie reads her journal. Its pages are leather-bound—an unseemly luxury in this day and age—and its spine is replete with cracks. A relic. Jamie picks it up from the glass table to her side, admires how her nails, when she presses down hard enough, crease the cover in crescent moons. She opens the journal with both hands, revealing pages only half-filled.

Today, she starts from the beginning, her toes nudging the porch floor so that her chair sways as she reads. She is twenty-eight, and the year is 2300.

We’ve finally found it, a device that can extend the human life span to be near indefinite      while still keeping the individual in their original metabolic state. It is a way to repel death, to keep us safe from the only frontier outside of human exploration. Mark my words, we have found the cure to old age. For better or for worse. Even after all this time, her triumph is still palpable enough to be felt through the journal’s pages.

I told my family, of course, and Father called me an inventor, the paragraph continues. I disagree. To invent is to create, to make something out of nothing. But everything that I do in my work is already there. It already exists, and I just happen to be the one person who discovers it and puts it together. In that way, I am not an inventor, but an explorer.

She skips the next few entries, their lines long and over-wrought with the many fine-grained details—patents, legal technicalities, ethical controversies clashing with personal ambitions, the inevitable tug of war between those of wealth and political power—all of them minute and near insignificant now, though they had seemed so important back then, as if their outcomes could make or break the world as they knew it. Jamie lets out a dry chuckle, stopping on an entry from a couple years later, when she was on the brink of turning thirty.

The public has many names for it, the journal reads, but for me, the device will always be known as “the cure.” It is a system embedded along the human spine through surgical operation when an individual has reached at least twenty-five years of age. Once installed, the person stops aging. It is my life’s work. With it, we can live forever.

Here, the writing breaks off and a few words are crossed out. As I write this, I am in a hospital gown, sitting in bed. My operation for the cure is tomorrow, at dawn. My family is concerned, because of how invasive the procedure is. There is nothing to be worried about, of course. Many have already gone through the surgery before me…

As Jamie reads, her children, one son and one daughter, grow up before her very eyes, their features losing their baby fat, their edges sanded into shape with the passing of each line. They too, take the cure, as do their own children once they have become of age. Her husband, however, does not. His features are chipped away, cracked apart by the years.

He is brave, she wrote in 2367. Braver than all of us. While he has always supported my work, the cure is my one invention he cannot stand behind. He says that humanity is not meant to live forever, that old age is nature’s fail-safe, not a flaw. He’d rather leave us in pain than stay beside us, even if it scares him, because the thought of endless life terrifies him even more. ‘In death, there is meaning in life,’ he says—without a doubt quoting some ancient philosopher who’s long dead himself. He has no idea how it pains me to watch him wither away.

Jamie rests her pointer finger on the concluding sentence, her nail tapping once. He is brave and I hate him for it.

#

“He’s gone,” Jamie says. Outside, rain splatters on glass, blurring the urban landscape into washes of gray.

Beside her stands Ling Wen, now a painter, writer, and renowned literary man. He peers past the rain, trying to discern skyscrapers from clouds from the horizon from the sky.

“Just like he wanted to be.”

Were it anyone else who said such a thing, Jamie would have snapped. But it was Ling Wen who said it, Ling Wen who knew her mind and spirit from the inside out for over half a century now, whose tongue—so unlike the flowery nature of his written words—was adept at slicing to the bone.

“Just like you want to be,” she spits instead.

Outside, the wind picks up, rattling the window panes with a piercing howl, and the rain pounds even harder to match its call. A typhoon is coming.

Ling Wen smiles, as if Jamie had just complimented him. Wished him well.

Glowing text scrolls over his vision, spelling the time. He has a dinner date with his wife in twenty, a meeting with his agent first thing tomorrow, and an auction for his latest painting to attend next week.

“Not yet. Not quite yet.”

#

High above, clouds gather. The air smells of rain. The sky darkens before giving way to a downpour, its shower pattering on leaves and dappling the top of a koi pond. A breeze picks up, whisking beneath the porch roof to flap the journal’s pages.

Jamie skims, skipping decades at a time. She remarries, first to another man, then to a woman. The former ends in divorce, a peaceful drifting apart by mutual consensus; the latter ends with the woman’s untimely death. An air-vehicle crash in the early morning.  The cure makes its carrier immortal, but not invincible.

Five entries later, Jamie has decided to give up on marriage altogether. It is now the year 2500.

Today I visited an ocean natural park in the Western Pacific, a good 2,000 meters beneath the sea. I saw water bluer than the sky, and silver fish swimming in a frenzy, even as they were eaten alive. For them, the urge to live ran thick in their blood, just as it does in ours. Even when life loses meaning over time, we will still cling to it, because it is in our nature to do so. After all, death is the greatest unknown, and whoever would willingly throw themselves into it if they can avoid doing so? There is a space, a few lines left blank, before one more sentence finishes that day’s entry. I know someone who did. Knew him, and now I think I admire him for it.

In 2608, there is another entry that catches Jamie’s eyes, its events having left such a mark on her that even now she can still recall the exact moment she was writing about— the people who had sat beside her, the aroma of the food that had been served, the gold and white porcelain decorating the table.

I was invited to a dinner party last night. The man to my left argued for a finite life, because innumerable days inevitably spelled waste among mankind’s endeavors and restrained the potential of future generations. The woman to my right talked of the meaning in always having a second chance, where one’s lifespan could be fulfilled by having multiple lives.

Funnily enough, both have taken the cure, though their thoughts run in opposite directions. Would it have been too cruel of me to tell the man to commit suicide right then and the woman to go and make more of her life, because she hasn’t done enough to make it worth her years?

Jamie can’t help but smile, tickled by the scathing quality of her own humor. It is perhaps the one thing about her that hasn’t mellowed out, gotten lost, or grown estranged over time.

I did not mention this before, the entry continues, but while designing the cure, I had put in a fail-safe, a self-destruct button, if you will, one that should only be used under extreme extenuating circumstances to shut down the system. Its effects are irreversible. Once shut down, the individual will pass near immediately and painlessly. I didn’t want to write anything about this before, because to put it down on paper is to make it true.

Here, the script grows scribbled, hectic even, and a few phrases are scratched out. Clearly, she hasn’t handwritten anything in a while at this point, and Jamie struggles to read her own words. Wants and needs are two very different things. We are born to want to live, but sometimes it is death, and not everlasting life, that we need.

#

“My wife passed,” Ling Wen chokes out.

Jamie blinks in surprise, startled by the roughness and vulnerability of his voice. It comes from the holo-chip embedded at the base of her skull, the device stimulating the region for auditory reception in her brain to recreate the timber and pitch of Ling Wen’s words. She sits up straighter in her chair and peers around the office, though she knows she is alone. Translucent panels of text and graphs frame her in a semi-circle, and she waves them away without a second thought.

“How?” she replies.

“Her latest expedition… It was an accident. A fatal one. She was in extreme pain, and there was no hope of rescue, not for a few days at least. She had to end it. I—” his voice cracks. “I don’t want to go into the details.”

Despite all his traditionalist tendencies, Ling Wen had found his partner in a space pilot, one who was often gone on missions flying between utter darkness and unknown systems for years at once. Both had taken the cure, however, and in that way, they were free to pursue their own paths without fear of running out of time. While he spent his days writing, making art—always at around the same times of the day and in the same stretch of his studio—she navigated the uncharted.

“It’s fine,” Jamie says. “You don’t have to.” She purses her lips, scrambling for the right words. She had gone through much the same as Ling Wen was going through right now, and yet she couldn’t imagine how he had comforted her back then.

On the other end of the call, there is the sound of Ling Wen blowing his nose, followed by sniffling.

Slowly, Jamie leans back into her chair. “You… you can find a new partner?” 

A long silence, and then finally, right when Jamie thinks that Ling Wen has ended the call— “That’s not how it works, Mimi.”

Jamie closes her eyes. No one has called her that in decades. “I know,” she sighs, “But don’t we wish it was?” 

#

In the distance, there is a flash of lightning. Thunder grumbles. Snow startles from its nap, its ears twitching. Jamie removes a hand from her book, caressing the spot right behind the cat’s ears, where Snow likes it best.

2670. 2735. 2764. 2871. 2878… Jamie reads to the sound of falling water. Her chair creaks, her mug clinks as she drains her coffee and returns it to the glass tabletop.

In the depths of her journal, people are born. Her family grows so large that she can no longer remember them all, doesn’t bother to, as do her expanding crowd of friends and acquaintances. At the same time, childbirth becomes strictly regulated, so that any addition to the population is only ever the result of precise calculation within the scope of the resources and space available. Jamie’s extended family stops expanding, though her network of friends does not. Everyone knows everyone. 

Over the decades, the cure is made accessible to anyone who wants it, regardless of rich or poor. In doing so, the rich live on in wealth forever, while the poor are bound to toil in place. The constant threat of overpopulation drives innovation, or else forces it, and often at the cost of those who can already afford it the least, until finally, humanity breaks free from the bounds of their home planet to traverse stars, solar systems, and galaxies. Science and technology push further than Jamie could have ever imagined, bringing climate domes, life-like droids, self-growing crops, space colonies, metropolises on the ocean floor — all the fictional and fairytale rendered into fact.

People die too, but only rarely. And when they do, it is always a topic treated with caution, pity, and oddly enough, grudging respect, for in a world where everyone is given the cure, death is no longer a matter of life, but a matter of choice.

#

“I think I’m going to leave,” Ling Wen declares the moment he steps out onto the porch. He settles into the rocking chair beside Jamie, dressed in his very best. Fine azure fabric, tailored to fit a frame that has slimmed much in the years since his partner’s death. Pure silk, handwoven in an age when even hand cooked meals are considered a rarity. A heavy-handed flaunting of his fortune.

“Where to?” Jamie replies, handing him an iced coffee. “You just got here.”

Ling Wen takes it, studying the newly-planted bamboo and the ponds of pebbles. He squints at the horizon. Past the very edge of this district—the only demarcation of its borders a glossy veneer from its climate dome—the towering complexes housing Tier 2 and 3 citizens are barely visible, all metal and fiber-concrete and mag fields extending just as far beneath the ground as they reach into the sky. Many spend centuries there, laboring in hopes of one day saving enough wealth to migrate to where he stands now.

He inhales the scent of fresh-cut greenery.

“This life, I mean.”

Jamie pauses mid-sip, setting her cup onto the glass-topped table between them.

“You say that as if you’ll have others.”

Ling Wen shrugs, that same awkward one-shoulder jerk that Jamie has known since their university years. He takes a sip of his coffee, rocking the chair in a slow rhythmic back and forth as he cradles the cup in one palm.

“I’m tired,” he blurts, answering the unspoken question between them.

“So am I.”

Ling Wen ignores her.

“I’ve experienced all that I’d ever want to experience. Seven centuries is a long time.”

“You’re saying you’re bored,” Jamie insists. “But the longer you live, the more you see. What about everything—all the miracles—that we’ve lived through? How can you say you’re tired of it all?”

Ling Wen shakes his head.

“The world changes, but people do not. We create miracles, yes, but we also repeat the same mistakes, the same cruelties.” He sets down his cup with a clack. “I think, I’m tired of us.”

Jamie twists around to stare at him. A series of emotions sweep across her face, each more lurid than the last. Shock, anger, frustration, sorrow… she has no words for them all. For a time, there is only the tinkle of running water in the garden.

 Finally, she leans back into her chair, gingerly.

“Are you tired of me?”

Ling Wen laughs at that.

“No.”

“Then don’t leave.”

“No.”

“Then why are you here? You shouldn’t have come. You shouldn’t have even told me,” she says, her voice razor sharp with something like betrayal.

Ling Wen doesn’t respond to this. 

“When are you leaving?” Jamie concedes instead.

“My best day. Even after all this time, it’d still be nice to end on a high note, you know?” Ling Wen looks over at her with a wry smile, as if they were merely discussing travel plans to some neighboring dome. A quick day-trip, there and back. Nothing more.

“Are you going to leave?” he continues. 

It is Jamie’s turn to fall silent.

“Of course not,” she drawls after a moment, “There’s still so much to see, to explore. I’d hate to miss any second of it.” She turns, meeting Ling Wen’s eyes. “How do you know when your best day is?”

“I don’t,” he grins, as if amused by some inside joke that only he is privy to. In that instant, Jamie would have traded anything to be let in on the punchline, too.

#

When Jamie finally reaches the most recent entry in her journal, the storm has broken and the clouds have parted, baring the sky’s magenta underbelly.

It is 2991, and Ling Wen has just passed. He went willingly and without warning upon—the words say—finally having lived his best day. His last. Her memory of the event is vague, but Jamie recalls that she had laughed. Laughed, then cried.

Lately, the entry continues, I’ve been wondering if, or when, I might do the same. Perhaps it is for very different reasons than his own, perhaps not. Either way, I can’t help but feel like a traitor to myself. A hypocrite. She lifts a finger, pausing on the very last line. No doubt, he is laughing at me even now.

Oddly enough, the idea comforts her, wringing out a bittersweet smile across her lips.

Jamie flips onto a blank page, smoothing it out with both hands, leaving it open as she rests the book on the table. Around her, the quiet is all encompassing, a cocoon.

She listens to the gurgling stream and watches the sun sink, its orange gold leaking out from between bamboo stalks, kissing the water, the rocks, her toes. Listen, she thinks. Beneath her hand, Snow cracks its eyes open, its irises now electric blue against the encroaching evening.

“October 15th, 3019,” Jamie says, her voice rough with disuse. On the table beside her, those exact words surface across the journal’s pages, the letters writing themselves as if penciled in by some invisible hand. 

“I have finally found it,” she continues, “Today is the best day. My best day.” The paper fills with her words.

Snow’s eyes widen, its ears pricking up in alarm.

Jamie opens her mouth slightly, as if to say something more, then stops.

But, the cat thinks, nothing happened today.

Jamie smiles. It is barely noticeable, except for the spark in her eyes. Exactly. Nothing at all. She closes the notebook, then sets a hand on Snow’s back, silently instructing it on what to do: the sentiments to leave behind and distribute with momentous regret, the financial technicalities, the legal aftermath. Last words are hard to say, she finds, because they are assigned so much more weight than they are due.

The cat drops its head back between its paws.

Yes, Jamie, Snow replies. Its tail twitches in agitation. You will be missed.

Jamie nods. She calls up a panel of text into the corner of her vision, its words visible only to her. Their bolded font details the immediate consequences of proceeding onwards, the side effects, the hotlines readily available for personal consultation. She ignores them all, bypassing the layers of interface meant to make any individual second-guess their decision— designs which she herself had requested to be installed as part of the cure.

It is a cure she now rejects. She makes the necessary selections and goes back to staring at the garden. Once, she had created something to push back the sole frontier beyond humanity’s reach, to keep it at arm’s length. Now, she herself will set forth to explore it.

Night comes. The sky is cloudless, stars shine, and Jamie is still. Her head drops back against the top of the rocking chair. In the distance, there is the singsong of sirens, an emergency aircraft drawing near to pick up the body of the most recently deceased.