Defiance Date

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. At least I think it wasn’t.

I look around my surroundings. They seem familiar. A small living room in a house that looks like it hosted a bomb or two inside it. Is this place mine? I’ve never owned a house, I don’t think. I suppose I own it now. There’s nobody around to really claim it’s theirs, anyway. This is a luxurious half-a-house with one non-working bathroom that is only five minutes from what used to be restaurants and shopping areas. It has three what-passes-for walls and half a roof. I joked it was an “open air aesthetic” once. It seemed funny. Not sure if I ever got to tell anyone the joke, though.

I’m having trouble remembering what I’m doing here. To be fair, I’m having trouble remembering much of anything anymore. I think I’m....forty-five years old? That’s what the note I’ve left myself says. I mean when it happened, I was forty-five years old. I think I’ve been that age for six hundred years now.

Oh, yes. The reminder notes. Whenever I have issues remembering what’s happening, I am supposed to play this old video of me explaining things to myself. I wondered what was so important I needed to remind myself or why I forgot it in the first place?

I lift my remarkably well-preserved hand (for a six-hundred-forty-five-year-old no less) to the ancient video playing technology and dust off the dirt. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother dusting it off. For who? Or is it “whom”? I can’t remember my grammar as much now or even how to speak sometimes, either. For whom am I hoping to impress by keeping anything around me neat and clean...or is it “who” am I trying to impress? There is hardly anybody left to care anymore. I turn on the machine and I am surprised to see it still works. I see my own face (I think that’s me) staring back and telling me to listen, “as well as you can.” I sit back and pay attention.

The video of me speaks in a mournful tone, “I no longer remember what year it actually is. I believe it’s closer to the year 2800 AD but... not sure if even that is true as of this video... or even when you’re seeing this. I want to make this recording so I can remind myself of how things happened before I forget what actually did occur,” the other me said.

My “younger” doppelganger paused for a moment. Was he trying to remember something or was he thinking of what to say? Then he slowly spoke, “When we were forty-five years old a new medicine was invented. They called it a medicine but it was more of a nightmare of vanity. It was a medically formulated fountain of youth. It would cure us of aging. It promised to eradicate our fears of our unknown future and finally attain man’s endless quest to live beyond their years. It became mandatory that every person get their permanent life when they reached age twenty-one. A lot of us got our foreverhood in a mid-life crisis while the rest of us became forever young. Oh, the parties we had, the new discoveries we found. It was a GREAT time to be alive. We thought we’d all live forever and get to see and do whatever we wanted,” the other man said with a slight smile. “I still vaguely recall how shocked we all were when our one hundredth “Defiance Date” happened.”

The mild amusement he showed was soon replaced with a sad darkness sweeping his face. “We didn’t think about the ramifications of never dying. At first, we were worried about overpopulating the Earth when it was discovered that fewer people than ever were actually dying. Sure, people could still die from mortal wounds of the billions of ways humans have found to die over our existence but it just happened so much less now. Aging was a thing of the past. While the death rate had fallen sharply, our birth rate did not. Finding ways to feed and care for a population that was swelling our planet’s capacity was a hell of our own design. Drastic measures had to be taken and the government of the world decided we’d simply need to stop reproducing. An unusual thing for any species. Any new child would be terminated as per new world law. We just could not take care of ourselves any longer,” the recording said.

The man continued almost as if reading from a textbook, “Since birth rates slowed to a crawl, as per the law, we didn’t see much reason to worry about having kids now since we had all the time in the world to have kids later. After all, we were immortal,” the recording said. “We thought we’d have all of eternity to have children and it wouldn’t be much longer that this overpopulation thing would be a thing of the past,” he said sounding almost emotionless when I was surprised to see a tear roll down his cheek. “It was stupid of us to assume but that’s just it...we were all so stupid.”

“For a while we didn’t know how we were going to solve the overpopulation issue. We humans have never been great at solving the big problems of our species and one of the biggest we’ve ever had was certainly not going to be solved easily. We thought about space travel. Terraforming Mars to make it habitable for people sounded like the best solution. With all the technology and planning we’d need for terraforming Mars now on its way to production, time was the only other thing that we needed and we had plenty of that. The government guaranteed that things were going to be okay again.”

The man looked to the camera, eyes welling up, “But after two hundred years of waiting, we discovered there was a problem. All of our attention focused on survival while we waited for the road to Mars. Producing food became the biggest priority. Trying not to kill each other became an important second. The irony of immortals simply trying to survive was not lost on us.”

I looked down into my hands and was surprised to see I was holding a locket. Was I always holding this? Why can’t I remember where this came from?

An answer to why I couldn’t remember came almost immediately from my reminder video. “It was around then that we were crushed to find that our immortality didn’t come without a price. While our bodies weren’t getting older, our brains were. It was as if sudden chunks of what happened to us were disappearing. Was it a form of Alzheimer’s? A new memory condition? Were we living so long that our brains couldn’t handle any more information like a computer with no more hard drive space? I...I don’t recall anymore,” he said trailing off. “Then we found out the worst part.”

It took him nearly a minute to compose himself again. “We killed ourselves. We just didn’t know it at the time. The human race will come to an end and the clock has nearly run out,” he said very matter-of-factly. “We found out that not only are our brains no longer working right, neither was reproduction. We couldn’t have kids anymore! The age-defying drug had some kind of impact on our ability to breed. Maybe our sperm dried up. Maybe it was that women were only born with so many eggs. Maybe none of it. Maybe all of it. How did we not see that coming? We were so focused on getting off this planet that we forgot to pay attention. Somewhere along the way, however, terraforming Mars was no longer happening.” He took another moment to compose himself almost as if he was weary of explaining this to himself. I suppose he could be tired of this as it didn’t feel like it was the first time he’d had to explain this.

“When we started asking why, nobody could remember as it was a project abandoned long ago. Were the scientists in charge losing their memories, too? Did they stop caring? Our minds had been affected by this new condition so rapidly that nobody could remember why or when it had stopped,” he said as another tear fell down. “A feeling of dread and impending doom crept over all of us and, frankly, we were right to feel it. Like I said, we killed ourselves. It just took a long time to find that out.”

I looked back down to the locket. It was once beautiful and adorned with diamonds and pure gold. Care and love emanated from this heart-shaped jewelry. I noticed a small latch on the side and opened it to find a picture of two people. A gorgeous young woman and a little girl. There was an inscription that read, “2 my love from your 2 loves.” I smiled at that as it was sweet and I felt like I knew them. I DID know them, didn’t I? She...was my wife, perhaps? This girl would be my daughter? If that were true, why couldn’t I remember them?

“The apocalypse didn’t come with a bang. It came with a long, drawn-out whimper,” the man on the screen continued. “Over population wasn’t an issue any longer as more and more people began dying. I think their brains couldn’t remember how to survive. They forgot how to eat. They couldn’t recall to not fall off buildings. They could no longer remember that things could still kill us that wasn’t from age. Wild animals. Car crashes. Weapons. Drowning. It became a daily epidemic,” the man said with a deadened tone.

“...and I’m forgetting to remember who Sarah was. She made me happy for so long but I don’t remember how. I have love in my heart but no memories of who it was for,” he said with his most depressing tone yet.

Which one of them was Sarah? Was that either one of the girls in the locket? WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER?!

“So, this video isn’t so much a reminder to get yourself back on track but rather a memoire or good-bye to me. I don’t know how we’ve lived this long if you’re seeing this. Everyone around us is gone. If you look outside, you can see the Earth is beginning to take itself back. To heal itself. The human race was nothing more than a flash in the pan on this planet. We made a huge impact on it in our short existence and I’m struggling to remember if any of it was even good,” the man said.

My junior image held up the same locket I held and said, “I just hope I never forget who you were, Sarah. My beautiful wife, Sarah, and our daughter Hope. She was the first child born in two hundred years and I have no idea how that happened. The only thing I know is Daddy loves you and hopes you are happy,” the man said as tears streamed down his face and reached to stop the recording.

I wonder who that man on the screen was.