Future Fiction
Ludwig’s Extension
Ludwig recalls the days before his extension, the day of his extension, and, now, his near immortality.
I often think about the day of my extension. It was all so well coordinated, so flawlessly automated, starting with my arrival at the Senescence Salon, where the intake process began. Once my documents and data — apostilles was the new old term — had been scrutinized, and my retina scans matched, I was instructed to enter a hallway behind a door that wasn’t there before. A tiny fissure materializing on the solid wall, an outline of a door suddenly making itself understood.
I stepped into a long horizontal space of white walls and runner lights. It should have felt claustrophobic, but didn’t. The floor looked level, but I intuited it was rising slightly. There were numerous unmarked doors along the passageway. The lights and a barely perceptible hum gently pointed the way to the room I had been assigned. When a door to my right slid open, the Room-voice interjected, “Come in, Ludwig. You have been assigned to Thymus Chamber forty-two. Please take a seat and make yourself comfortable.”
Of course, it was chamber forty-two. The Room-voice knew I would get the Adams-Hitchhiker’s reference — one way to smooth out the acuteness of my angst.
The chair was similar to a dentist’s, with a small tray on the opposite side. On the tray, a few sterilized instruments were laid out. The Room-voice, its timbre selected for its calming quality, went through a few questions — a Gawandian checklist, really. I picked up the micro-persuasions in her cadence. I had used them often in my work.
One of the items on her checklist was to verify that my vehicle was programmed to return to my base — my home — about 200 kilometers away. She requested that I look into the eye scanner attached to the chair so she could access the transport directly, verifying and locking the route. She added, “No detours today, Ludwig. Just a one-hour ride straight home to recover. The short-term side-effects will be gone by the time you complete the trip.”
Earlier, at the Senescence Salon, during the intake, I signed off that for about a week, I would simply relax. This was called the morph week. Taking it easy was part of my M.O. Ignoring the constant buzzing on my LifeUnit was something I looked forward to, especially knowing my Base-voice would monitor compliance, forwarding details — vitals and psychometric reports — back to the Centre.
When the Room-voice finished her work, she announced, “That completes our review. Thank you, Ludwig.”
After a short pause, she added, “Please relax. Your Restorer will be with you shortly.”
The room sensors must have indicated I was anxious.
When I was singled out for an extension, I was only a few years from becoming a Duster. It was an opportunity of a lifetime, no pun intended. I had been working at the Temptation Diagnostics Lab for eighteen years when the Regent in charge of my unit recommended me. I started at the TDL at a tender age. I was a typical bored third former when I was selected out to the TDL. That apprenticeship assignment, lasting a few years, replaced my fourth through sixth form. Something in my school work hinted at an aptitude for coding — coding persuasion algorithms. They were right. I was good at my work.
The weeks leading up to the extension, I had been anxious. Not about the procedure, but about my family — my siblings, really, for my parents had died by then. There was much consternation among them about my decision to extend. I knew that in a few years my brother, eight years younger, would look older than me. My brother and I had crossed paths infrequently after our mother died. I wondered, then, whether we would meet again.
Of my two older sisters, I sensed how disappointed they were with me. The few chances they had to discuss the extension with me, they didn’t hide their dismay.
“Ludwig, how could you sign up for an extension?” my oldest sister scolded.
“I didn’t sign up. I was selected.”
“That makes it worse. You could have said, ‘no, thanks.’”
The truth is, I didn’t give it much thought. I was selected and went with it. Extensions had become, like so many other things in this hyperconnected world, another divisive political act. Those against extensions — Dusters, derisively — were driven by religion, politics or a preference for the status quo.
My sisters joined forces against me. The two could barely stand each other most of the time. They longed for a simpler world. Everything was moving too fast for them. They favored music recorded by artists dead for decades, some for over a century. They dismissed the spatial audio craze as not real music.
“That we are having this discussion is a bit sad,” is how my oldest sister ended one of our last conversations. I hate when people use ‘a bit sad’ as a replacement for ‘disappointed,’ especially when it reeks of condescension, but I left it alone. I didn’t let on how her comment peeved me.
After my extension, my sisters and I spoke infrequently, and when we did, we rarely reached beyond the banalities of recent events.
None of my siblings are alive anymore, and my hunch about my brother turned out to be correct. We never spoke again.
When the Restorer stepped into Chamber 42, the Room-voice introduced us.
“Ludwig, this is Quinn, your Restorer.”
“Quinn, this is Ludwig. The checklist is complete. You can proceed with the extension.”
Turning back to me, Room-voice announced, “Quinn will take you through the process today. They will follow your case until Certainty.”
Quinn was called a Restorer because they would reset me to a ground state, a technique where my cells were modified with persistent telomeres — adamantine telomeres — without the risk of cancer. That decoupling, devised by a couple of Indonesian scientists, led to a Nobel Prize in the middle of the last century, changing the human race forever. Certainty is the last step when an extension becomes irreversible.
It had taken more than a century to double life expectancy. People at the end of the 20th century assumed living seven, eight, or more decades was normal, especially in wealthy nations. The change had been gradual. No one really noticed except the actuaries. There were no big headlines, “Human Lifespan Doubled.” When adamantine telomeres led to the possibility of, once again, doubling or tripling human life, it changed the world overnight. Most extensions from the last seventy years are still alive, except those in unfortunate tragedies or accidents. Demographers now keep two population counts: eleven billion Dusters and 100 million extensions. The latter are mostly in the employ of the Corporations.
It was Quinn who would get the reports from my Base-voice. Quinn was surly, but they grew on me during the follow up treatments. They were someone who dealt with too many arrogant Dusters at the Thymus Chamber, thinking they had arrived at heaven, not realizing that Quinn was Peter, and not some lowly technician in the extension process. Quinn had the authority to reject an extension, even up through Certainty.
Quinn put on a smock and double gloves, blue first, then black. They placed a blue sleeve around my arm at the elbow. It had a label in white letters that said phlebotomist-assist with a few pigtails to the front. I felt the sleeve squeeze a bit, then pinch slightly. Two of the pigtails immediately filled with blood. From a compartment at the counter, they took out tubes filled with purple and blue liquids. They connected these to the two blood-filled pigtails. They picked up a small syringe from the tray and connected it to a third pigtail, placing the black-gloved thumb on the plunger. Quinn turned to me, “Count to infinity.”
I chuckled, not quietly enough. They insisted, “I’m not kidding. Get started.”
I don’t remember how close I got to infinity, but I smiled when I went past forty-two.
I spent a few more years at the TDL before I was transferred to the Inducement & Seduction Lab. It’s where I’ve been for six decades now. The ISL has the best minds working on lowering barriers of resistance in people. We make people content, rewarding them for spending their money on things they didn’t know they needed, or for risking their money on bets they have to make. I know — my intelligent agents know — what the subject wants before they know it. There are no better salespeople on the planet or more charming croupiers than those of us at the ISL.
Unlike my first job at the TDL, Dusters are not allowed to work at the ISL, and I miss my interactions with them. They were always in a rush. Wednesdays were hump day, and the late Friday afternoon gatherings that they called ‘Attitude Adjustment’ couldn’t arrive soon enough. I felt I was in neutral compared to them. Maybe that’s why I’m at the ISL. The sensors at TDL must have picked up that I was fretting.
Those friendships were a long time ago, before the distrust between us became dreadful. Dusters call us impotent gods, which is true enough. We can’t have children like us. Our offspring have to go through an extension before they age out, although not all offspring are accepted. Those rejects have become the most ardent opponents of the extensions. They were the first ones to appropriate the nickname Dusters, initially a pejorative used by a smug executive of the Corporations.
Being content and being happy are two different things. These are thoughts I’m not supposed to have. They are highly discouraged and, in some cases, prohibited. Nevertheless, I wonder if I have ever made anyone happy the way I remember feeling at family gatherings when I was a kid, everyone smiling in the warmth glow of familial kinship.
I wonder about the grandchildren of my siblings, living among the eleven billion Dusters. Maybe one or two have been extended. It’s possible, but unlikely, given the odds. After I reached the century mark, I started feeling a longing worse than purgatory. A purgatory with no one to erase the mark on my forehead. I feel a yearning for the worries of my family. I want to be part of their worries. I have no worries. I have no aches. I have no ailments. When I read about clandestine experiments to reverse an extension, to jump start cell-aging again, my day brightens knowing progress is being made. If they succeed, I don’t want to be selected. I’m going to be first in line.
