Second Spring

Old stories about immortality sometimes imagine a world too full. Others imagine a world too empty. Once in a while, those old fictional accounts will offer a germ of insight about how the luxury of not facing the debilitating effects of time opens up new vistas -- some of delight, and some of despair.

The truth is, no matter how long lived we might be, there is no such thing as immortality. But for the last century and a half neither has there been such a thing as aging, nor death by senescence. People still perish, but it's because of a handful of diseases that we cannot cure; or, we die from accidents; if nothing else, we slowly fade out of being due to ennui, or boredom, or loneliness. We die because men are containers for thought, as an old friend once put it, and after a couple of hundred years I have begun to wonder if all the thoughts I was meant to think have leaked away, leaving only this parched shell.

But damn. What a handsome shell, resistant to rust, dust, and the ravages of the clock.

Last night I had a dream of the world the way it used to be: Filled with the fear of time passing, filled with regret for lost years, filled with resentment and lust toward those who possessed that one thing everyone else only wanted... namely, those who were still young. I remember how the worm of anxiety fixed on my heart: I was in my thirties, or maybe my forties, and I started to fret about the one-way passage of time. I'll never be young again, I thought, when I was 36, when I was twice as old as I had been at age 18, the year I fell in love with a California beauty and proved myself as a man by winning surfing trophies and...

Well, I knew when I was 36 what I'd done in my youth and what I had not. I couldn't tell you now. All those regrets, like all my thoughts, have long since evaporated, in part because when Second Spring began I had the chance to use my reclaimed youth to fuck and party and pray and stare at the moon with an ink-dripping quill in my hand, trying to write poetry, or at least trying to look like poetry was on my mind. I suppose it was, in a way -- the poetry of the romantic image.

Such dismal ruminations are not my usual indulgence. I go for a glass of whiskey, or a bottle of stout. But after last night's dream, I felt ready for something. By mid morning, it had appeared.

"How long d'you reckon it's been?" asked Stewart. He had started as a tiny black dot in the distance and gradually drawn closer, resolving into himself as I watched from the porch. I observed his progress without impatience or even much curiosity, a glass of lemonade in my hand that dripped condensation onto the wooden boards beneath my chair. I hardly felt the minutes pass, maybe because time never has regained the aura it had in my original youth, a sense of majesty and immanence. These days time just passes, then passes, and passes some more.

So how long had it been since I had seen Stewart last? The year of the Saturn expedition? The year the last of the old nuclear power stations went offline? The year Earth's population dipped back down to a billion and a half? "I guess I last saw you maybe... forty years ago? Fifty?"

Stewart laughed. "Try seventy-two," he said.

"You don't look a day over sixty-nine," I said, though in truth he didn't look a day over twenty-eight. Unless, of course, you knew what to look for: The thin, nearly invisible scars that marked his fingers, from decades-outmoded joint replacement procedures. The slight phosphorescent gleam in his eyes that indicated artificial lenses and retinas, probably together with re-grown rods and cones. His skin had the ever-so-slight waxiness of a sixth-generation artificial epidermis. I wondered if his innards were similarly vintage: Repurposed or re-engineered tissue with the occasional cybernetic organ or, for a few dollars more, transpecies chimeric organs.

I had taken the plunge twelve years earlier into the latest rejuvenation techniques. I still have some silicone in me, and some engineered parts, but those elements grow fewer every year as the half-dozen specially made symbiotes purge and renew me. Rather than make us over into machines, our juventologists had finally realized that they could make use of the mites and prions, and the bacteria and viruses, that had always lived harmoniously with human beings. With some clever engineering and years of practical day-to-day trial and error, they had just about perfected the recipe.

"You thinking clearly these days?" Stewart asked me, now seated and holding his own glass.

"I've had my synapses de-plaqued and de-fuzzed for a long time now."

"Nanotherapy?" he asked.

"Yes, but then engineered neuroprions."

"Those things," he groused, "will fuck you up." We sat in silence for a moment or two. Or an hour.

As I was saying before... Time means something different now. In the first decades after Second Spring, everyone was busier than ever, brimming with youthful energy that they directed according to mature ambitions. Youth was no longer wasted on the young. Then, something happened: Second Spring opened into Second Summer, or, as the juventologists call it, second-level adolescence. Put simply, at around age 120, the human brain does something no one suspected it would do: It goes through a transformation, hormonally and structurally very similar to the upheavals of adolescence.

This is not the result of science: It's something the brain is evidently programmed to do, if only it lives long enough. Something about a cluster of genes on the twenty-first chromosome. Something about meta-expression. Maybe, if you believe in the Bible, this was how Adam and his sons, early humans who lived for centuries, entered true adulthood.

It's amazing how jealousy, addiction, selfishness, aggression, and other short-sighted behavior simply withered away when the Second Spring generation hit... oh... say, 120, 126 years of age. Suddenly, wise elders were exactly that once more, both reliably sage and respected for their judicious and thoughtful opinions. I was in that generation; oh, devoutly we believed in the things we were doing, as we made good use of our newfound wisdom and won the respect of our juniors. Cautiously, quietly, we took over certain things in order to make the world run better. We nudged taste and morals into more sensible shapes, and convinced the kids it had all been their own daring, revolutionary idea to begin with.

What's our world like, now that humanity has literally entered a new phase of maturity? Which old stories from the sci-fi magazines turned out to be true? Well, I'll tell you. Overpopulation hasn't been the problem futurists once foresaw. The world is a comfortably uncrowded place because we don't reproduce much. People still have plenty of sex, but there's no longer a mania for offspring -- that's part of the overall urgency that has dissipated in this post-mortal world. As blind primal drives recede, calculation steps in. It takes more than a village, you see, and a child isn't really past his turbulent formative years until he reaches his 12th or 13th decade. We measure out our efforts at creating each new generation with the requisite lack of haste. We've grown reasoned, and wise. There's time now for deep thoughts, slow thoughts. Rarefied thoughts thin as the ionosphere. Thoughts leaking away...

"What wisdom have you come to share?" I asked my old friend.

"The wisdom of farewell," he said.

And, yes, I understood exactly what he meant, because I have started thinking along the same lines. Maybe it's too much time having passed through my hands, or maybe it's another wisdom granted us by Second Spring, or maybe it's just the tedium of these same four limbs venturing and making, and these same lungs breathing this same air -- but I just feel full enough of days gone by.

I do recall this from my 18th year, together with the California beauty and the surfing trophies: That was the year it hit me that I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it. As sure as free fall and the hard rocky ground rushing up to meet me, there would come an end point -- an end point that really was an end -- like an end to space and time, something inconceivable to a mind hard-wired to ask, in any situation, ask: What next? What now? A lack of place whither to continue, like a failing of time to press onward, is impossible, and --�and disgraceful --

I woke up from a sound sleep cold all over, petrified, with an image in my head of a labyrinth, thoughts of picking my way through the maze and trying to evade dead ends and dangers, but you never know what's around the corner... And when you reach the chewy center, the inner sanctum where there's supposed to be a prize, there IT is instead, where IT has been waiting all along...

And the thing is, it didn't really bother me so much that life, like any story, has an ending. It was the idea that I might die at any time, long before I wanted to... maybe before the story was complete. If I had to reach a finish point, I wanted to get there not when chance might decree it or time simply cease for me, but when I had seen everything through, done what I wanted to do, and was damn good and ready.

Maybe I'm getting there. I really can't even imagine holding on more than maybe another sixty years... eighty at most. I've had three husbands and three wives, and even, in our culture of parsimonious procreation, managed to bring six children into the world. Some day they will be grown, the youngest only forty years from now -- and then what? Who will need me? Because, at this point, I really no longer need myself.

"Well then," Stewart said, his first words since the sun had been a good deal higher in the sky. He set his empty glass on the porch's long hardwood boards and rose to take his leave. "I guess that's all."

Of course it was. What more did he have to say? Excess words, like excesses of every kind, have ceased to interest us.

Us... matured humanity.

His familiar shape receded down the long, straight path becoming a tiny dot. Then, as afternoon turned to twilight, he was gone.

For Mojo.