The New Isolation

Renée Niemann the veterinarian was as wise and learned as any septuagenarian could be, but she didn’t look any older than she did when she was thirty-five. Telomorphing was available but optional and over half submitted to it. It wouldn’t grow new limbs, but if one were lucky enough to live life intact, one could look forward to a youthful appearance and feel for at least 120 years. Even those at the end of the bell curve, at about 150 years life expectancy, didn’t look any older than sixty or seventy.

Having undergone the process in her early thirties, she continued youthfully in her profession until celebrating her “Rebirth” at what normally would be her retirement. Rebirth was a new folk tradition in which telomorphs received a second birth certificate with great fanfare, similar in importance to a Bar Mitzvah, graduation, or marriage. In observance of this custom, Renée celebrated her Rebirth on her 65th birthday, the official event at which she would announce her new life’s direction.

In her “first life,” as the telomorphs were fond of saying, she had been a prominent veterinarian; she had enjoyed an academic position pioneering telomorphing efforts in mammals, which revolutionized animal husbandry world-wide. For these reasons, she was well known to all biologists, xenobiologists included. It is also why she became an avid fan of the telomorphing process for herself.

At her Rebirth she stood before her friends, loved ones, and colleagues—no doubt, she thought, the same group who could have attended her funeral had she declined telomorphing like her late first husband had and died.

What a stupid, needless death! She promised herself, determinedly, that she wouldn’t allow her thoughts to go there and spoil this day.

Before telomorphing, it was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” After telomorphing, people had the joy of announcing what they would do now that they were grown up. The first half life of a telomorph, a long life in itself, often was shaped by all of the sobering near-misses and what-ifs of the world. In the new way of looking at it, the end of the first half, at age 65, was considered, finally, maturity; the time before, a childhood of preparation.

Certainly there were those whose first half of life was so successful and rewarding that the Rebirth announcement was just that they would continue on as before. And for those whose contributions impacted the world favorably, they were even encouraged to do so with tax credits and corporate perks. No one fancied the idea of an Einstein going into carpentry or a Shakespeare going into sports merchandise wholesaling.

But the majority, financially secure from doing what they had done to get that way, now had wisdom of age and experience and the security of a life that pragmatic finances had created. And conversely, no one would have a problem with a car salesman becoming a Rembrandt.

The socializing, drinking, and eating prepared the attendees for Renée Niemann’s announcement. The new direction.

They were not disappointed. She held up her copy of the bestseller, Martian Diary of Jon Latorella, Part I.

“Mars vigila!” she announced. “To Mars!” followed by a lengthy and starstruck round of applause. She shook the book emphatically. “It’s a bestseller, you know. I plan to figure prominently in Part II!” More clapping. The questions followed, none of which she answered at first.

“Will you do veterinary medicine there?”

“Will you be helping to look for any fossilized animals there?”

“For fossils of actual Martians?”

“I will do more than that,” she answered, then paused in a show biz stunt of coquettish torment. “I’ll do more than that,” she repeated, “I hope to meet them.” But her gleam made it sound like a promise. Applause erupted again.

As is customary with Rebirth tradition, she now read her official statement that discussed her decision. “Dear friends, children, loved ones, and even ex-husbands,” she began, a snickering of the audience catching fire from the spark of her mischievous wink. “Not all ex-husbands,” she confided, and the snickers coalesced into overt laughter, for after the death of her first spouse, her one true love, she became no stranger to carelessly re-marrying. “Some weren’t invited tonight,” she whispered playfully. She smiled through the fourth wall, gazed lovingly at her small audience, and continued.

“There’s more to Mars than a bunch of rust, and there’s more to this,” she pointed to her head, “than a bunch of dust.”

“What about a bunch of lust?” someone wisecracked. She stopped to search the crowd for the culprit, who clearly had gotten away with the playful barb.

“Oh,” she said, fluttering her eyelids, “Yes, lust. Funny you should say that. My next boyfriend is going to be green.”

“Are they really little green men?” asked one of Renée’s grandchildren, seven, one of twin girls.

“God, I hope so,” Renée answered the child directly. Then to the small crowd as a whole, “There’s going to be so many upset science fiction writers if they’re not green, right?”

At five-foot -wo and just over 50 kg., she seemed larger atop the stage from which she spoke, but she hoped thinner with the vertical stripes of her dress. She had already vowed to dump at least four Earth kilos on Mars, transferring four Earth kilos of potential energy she then would release into Martian kinetic energy. She amused herself with the things she chose to worry about while giving a life-event speech.

“Now that I look back on my childhood, it appears that everything I’ve done, studied, learned, performed, and accomplished during my first sixty-five years—all of it has prepared me for the second half of my life.” She swept her eyes around the entire room. “I will of course be bringing all of you with me.”

“Really?” the twin asked again, her sister looking equally invested in the question.

“No, sweetie,” Renée answered, and pointed to her heart. “Just in here.”

“When do you leave?” asked Renée’s daughter, who—having declined telomorphing—looked easily many years older than her mother.

***

Renée thought back to the night of surprises. She had planned her surprise for Jason which would finally prod him undergo telomorphing himself. She would simply announce her fait accompli, that she was already a telomorph.

Surprise!

Surely with her bridges burned he would just do it. Why not?

She had lied to Jason: she underwent telomorphing instead of the going to that spa in Phoenix. Three days later she had the glow of her doubled future instead of the effects of mudpacks and pulsed light rejuvenation.

She had made her move and she thought back on the night of surprises when she would place Jason in check. And she thought back on how he, too, said he had his own surprise for her.

“You go first,” she had demanded. She felt he needed to be first, for she knew her news of having undergone telomorphing would be the final act.

He set up his surprise as best he could, but there hadn’t yet been invented a gentle way to surprise someone with the announcement of one’s advanced pancreatic cancer. Even the cancer cures of the 25th Century couldn’t help him with this after months of denial and self-negligence. The final move, as it was, was his: checkmate.

A lifetime later, Renée laughed into her Martian pillow, but not because it was funny. “You go first,” she had said to him on the night of surprises, and he had done just that: he went first. He was dead within forty-five days.

Although death throes make for a busy time, she and Jason still had time to watch their marriage collapse into acrimony. No one is at their best when pain is intractable or feelings are hurt by being a victim of such irritability. By the time of his death Renée was living apart from him. Although she visited his death vigil from time to time, she never stayed. She was furious about his needless demise. If only he had embraced the concept of telomorphing back when she had first suggested it; before his cancer.

Each visit, there was no kiss hello, and there definitely was no kiss goodbye. She used all her strength to maintain a neutral expression for the Hospice nurses, but inside she churned over the fact that she had no partner. Renée as widow would have her life ahead of her, alone.

And this included the additional whole new telomorphed life ahead of her.

Jason announced his death from cancer via a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. She thought back on the day he had bought the thing—the gun, the cure for cancer.

For protection, he had said.

She hated it. Couldn’t stand it in the house. That such a simple action, squeezing a finger—even a little finger—could have enough of a say to erase a lifetime of memories, actions, discoveries, experiences, and dedication to family! When his pancreatic duct obstructed and the pain became too intense, he resorted to his fallback plan. Using just his finger, he fell back.

Suicide—the most polar opposite there could be to telomorphing.

She was insulted, which was nothing more than misdirected anger and grief for what might have been.

She would remarry twice more, but they were mutually admitted mistakes that ended quickly and had no relevance in her memories. Jason had been the one.

Would Jason have even developed his cancer had he undergone telomorphing in time? Had this sore subject been the last word in whether or not to do it for her daughters? (They hadn’t.) She considered all four of them—herself and Jason and their two children, all who should have been presenting, telomorphed, as if in their thirties at this point.

Instead, she had a dead husband and two old women for children. Her babies! Weird is painful.

Thank you, Jason!

She thought for a moment about one Dr. Christopher Cooke, a colleague who recently had caught her eye. Ultimately, she had decided never to get involved again. That was a first-life’s gambit. Certainly, she wouldn’t consider it with someone else.

And was Chris even what he claimed to be? He was younger but looked older. Was he younger? Was he merely “paused”? The advances in the science of telomorphing offered one the option to merely pause at an age which then could be allowed to wear off, if desired. Renée’s telomorphing, borne of the older technology, was irrevocable, but those who hadn’t telomorphed by Renée’s time now had the luxury of merely pausing their aging from time to time or even to age more slowly, continuously.

Who was anybody, then? No one could be sure of anyone and what they were and what they said they were. The Cultural Psychology Committee had warned that no frame of reference was the new isolation. What was one getting into in any relationship?

Renée felt disheveled and groundless. Telomorphing had cost her her marriage, her fantasy icon of Madonna and Child, and her interrelationship base. Life on borrowed time was a time out of place.

Telomorphing, she thought, had really fucked up everything.

A dust storm picked up and she thought of life and Jason. With his death all that she had wanted had been thrown and scattered aimlessly into the wind like a handful of dust, to which we all return. She laughed at that. Then she cried.

So it was, due to the elective process of telomere lengthening—telomorphing—that an older young woman was speaking to a younger middle-aged woman.

Zoe had declined the procedure, no doubt because of the posthumous influence of Renée’s late first husband, her father. Zoe and her generation had grown up with this branch of medicine, so such an anachronistic tableau of older younger and younger older did not strike her as strange; Renée, on the other hand, always held at bay an uncomfortable feeling along with the creepiness, a feeling which, she was honest enough with herself to admit, had everything to do with her dead husband’s refusal to telomorph with his wife.

Like father, like daughter, the resentment went. Their conversation endured the rude anachronism.

“I’ll be gone for about three years,” Renée explained to Zoe, “when you take into consideration travel time to Mars and back to Earth. In the meantime, I’m hoping to get two years ‘worth of work done.”

“The twins will be over ten by then,” Zoe said, intending to foster regret and succeeding. “Teenagers if you were to get delayed, which always happens when you’re talking about space and other planets. What would Dad have thought about all this?”

“Zoe,” Renée said, “I love my daughters very much, and you know how crazy I am about the twins. But these feelings are not exclusive of my career,” and then with emphasis, “or the other way around.” Renée smiled but it was a fake one that succeeded in eating up a beat.

“Dad—” said Zoe, invoking him again, “you didn’t mention him once in your speech.”

“I did mention my ex-husbands,” Renée argued good naturedly.

“Not your dead one,” Zoe protested. Renée exhaled in resignation.

“Please let’s not do this,” she asked.

“You’ve never forgiven him,” Zoe said.

“Please, Zoe? Let’s not?” Zoe faked a smile herself.

“You’re right,” she told her mother. “Tonight should be all about you.” Renée was uncertain whether this was well-wishing or derision. She kissed Renée on the cheek and then led her twins off hand-in-hand after they received their own Grandma kisses.

Zoe caught up with her own sister, also a proud, resentful non-telomorph, the other half of the routine difficulties Renée had always had with her two daughters. All thanks to her late husband.

She still didn’t miss him, she lied to herself once again. But even going to Mars was not as much distance from him as death had been, and even death had not been enough.