Luke Alden: Happy Birthday Eternity

My name is Ellis Jackson. I’m 2038 years old. I didn’t meet the love of my life until I turned 578. Her name is Evaline. She has pale skin and collagen injected lips. Like everyone else that lives forever, most of her body is fake.

I love Evaline even though I barely remember why. I just know that I do. I’m relying on the fact that I’ve said it so many times that there must have once been a reason for my love.

But isn’t that how we always go through life? Relying on our words to justify our actions? Whatever happened to justifying our words with our actions?

‘I’m going to die.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I’m going to die.’

‘You mean you’re going to kill yourself?’

‘No, I’m dying.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m going to die.’

‘When?’

‘Within the next fifty years…’

A pause. A breath. A nervous twisting of nervous fingers. This is how the moment goes. This is how my wife tells me that she’s going to die. I’m incapable of processing this information.

‘I’m not sure how I should react to this.’

‘…’

And then it’s silence.

Silence like you see in the movies. The silence you get after a crucial plot point is revealed. The silence that allows the viewing audience to breathe and digest the emotions that they’re being fed.

Again.

A pause. A breath. A nervous twisting of nervous fingers.

Evaline looks into my eyes. She says that I’m the chorus to her verse. Me. Ellis Jackson. A 2038 year old narcissist who still jerks off into the toilet because he can’t get any action from the verse to his chorus.

She’s going to die.

Death is not a part of my reality.

We were supposed to live forever.

We were supposed to coast along, stuck in our ancient routines. Because when natural death stops existing, when the only way that we can die is from the unexpected, from a suicide or from an accident, there’s not a lot that motivates us to stay away from routine.

And so we do this little dance where we have no motivation, where human achievement becomes a thing of the past. We have forever to get things done; why rush?

But now Evaline is going to die.

Now Evaline is going to die and all that I can wonder is what this means for me.

Is a song still a song if there aren’t any verses?

I’m biting my lip. I’m furrowing my brow. I’m trying to wrap my brain around that which does not exist within my already established reality.

So she asks me what we should do.

‘I don’t know. Fix dinner I suppose.’

‘Ok.’

The only constant thread throughout the history of humanity is how we stick to routine. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just how we survive. Like wolves that stay in packs, like bears that sleep all winter, our routines are what keep up safe and warm.

So it’s evening and I’m watching television with Evaline and she’s smiling and laughing along with the beats of the show and everything is happy and normal except for the fact that she’s going to die.

But I still don’t know what that means.

So I laugh along with her.

I hold her hand.

Our fingers tangle.

I rub my thumb on her wedding ring. I was once told that the band is supposed to symbolize infinity.

What did people do before forever?

She looks at me and I can feel her eyes running up my skin. It’s a good feeling.

And this is how our nights go.

Dinner.

TV.

Laughing.

Etc.

We’ve got our routine carefully plotted; an intricate storyline where there’s forgotten meaning to the actions we repeat.

It all makes sense.

I love her.

I love her because I tell myself that I love her.

She rests her head on my shoulder.

It feels heavier than before. It weights me and pushes me until I feel as if I’ll never be able to get up. I’m not even sure if I want to.

And I don’t know how to conceptualize fifty years. It’s a meaningless number. There is no context. The measurement of time through years has essentially been forgotten.

Fifty years.

Death.

Love.

These are the things I never think about.

These are the things that I take for granted.

The only reason I’m still alive is because I don’t know what death is. Only people in third world countries die. Only poor people that can’t afford first world luxuries have to face death.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Here, in my reality, people don’t age, people don’t die, and people don’t get sick.

No one has kids.

No one truly grows.

We’re complacent in the fact that the world has marketed, packaged and sold us on eternal life.

I was born in the second generation of the undead. Born to parents who once knew what death was, born to parents who had felt the presence of death in their lives. Born before the government outlawed children as a means to keep the population under control.

During the initial movement of the undead. When it was just emerging, when genes that stopped the aging process were first being isolated, before the endless chemical peels and face lifts that kept our skin from rotting, some people actually wanted to die. They said that it wasn’t natural to live forever. They said they wanted to pass on to a greater place. To a heaven. To a nirvana. To a new life.

They couldn’t have children because of the new laws.

Without new generations wanting to die, the idea of death eventually just… fizzled

No one dies.

Accidents are rare.

Suicide is even rarer. Most people don’t even remember what suicide is.

And so we go on living.

Because that’s what we know how to do.

We go to our jobs that never end.

We make money to spend on gene therapy and plastic surgery.

Work.

Spend.

Live.

It’s a simple formula. It’s basic math. It’s a testament to humanity’s ability to oversimplify. Without death we don’t fear, without fear we don’t change, without change we simply dig a niche of routine so deeply that we’ll never be able to get out of it. And perhaps that’s how things have always been.

But I wouldn’t know.

You’d think that eternal life would equate to a search for greater meaning.

A need to perfect things simply because we finally had the time.

You’d think we would accumulate knowledge, ideas, experience.

Of course we don’t. Those things may have been novel for the first 200 years, but they got old.

Like a river carving out a path, adventure always gives way to complacency.

And when I was younger, before I’d found my routine, before I’d found a rhythm to base my life around, I’d always assumed that the love of my life would be someone who I would spend eternity caring for, someone that I’d never stop being passionate about. I had assumed that it’d be like in the books I once read. I had assumed that I’d spend years molding every aspect, like the perfect poem, each line painstakingly tended to.

But love isn’t about romance.

The words love and routine, they’re interchangeable in my world.

And so now I’m living this life. Spending my days with Evaline. We wake. We kiss. We leave. We work. We eat. We watch television. We go to bed. It’s natural. Without it we’d be lost.

Right now I’m at work. In the middle of another meeting for another product that’s exactly the same as the last.