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    The Last Generation to Die
    The Last Generation to Die
    The Last Generation to Die
    Ebook129 pages3 hours

    The Last Generation to Die

    By Carlos Hernandez

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    About this ebook

    Welcome to the future. The future is perfect: we have beaten death, and are doing a pretty good job on aging. So what's fashionable, now that there's no more death and decay? Why, sporting an aging look of course, better known as Granny Chic. Dancing (or thrashing) the night away in The Gerotica, THE club to be seen in. And finally, suing the government for your right to die...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCreative Guy Publishing
    Release dateApr 2, 2010
    ISBN9781894953184
    The Last Generation to Die

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      Book preview

      The Last Generation to Die - Carlos Hernandez

      The Last Generation to Die

      Carlos Hernandez

      Creative Guy Publishing | Vancouver Canada

      The Last Generation to Die

      Carlos Hernandez

      CGP-2015

      ISBN 1894953185

      ISBN 13- 9781894953184

      © 2004 Carlos Hernandez, all rights reserved

      Published in Canada by creative guy publishing at Smashwords

      www.creativeguypublishing.com

      The characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictional. Any similarity with persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      The Last Generation to Die is part of cgp's ebook collection. 

      cover art by Chris Cox ©2004

      Part I

      The premiere conference room of the League of Osiris was as smart as they come, in at least two senses of the word. Buried deep within the cherry-stained table (that was as long as a first down), the leather chairs (each one as expensive as a year at college), and even in the busts of rather predictable geniuses (that looked out with sage eyes and knowing, slight smiles from their insets in the walls), the various sophisticated, sycophantic technologies that made life a little easier eagerly awaited chance to discharge their specialized duties. Sometimes these technologies would emerge from their confines of this traditionally-appointed room, as when monitors would flip up in front of each seat at the table, or when the mouth of the rhinoceros head, mounted at the back of the room, would gape open, and from it the lens of the state-of-the-art projector would poke out, for presentations whose ideas were so advanced that they could only be adequately rendered in four dimensions. Generally speaking, however, the technology remained interred in the tasteful, muted, time-honored elegance of this room. As far as the human eye was concerned, this room had no wires, no jacks, no keyboards, no voice-input microphones  it was just a very nice room with some very nice chairs and one very long table. A former generation might have gathered there for Peregrination Club or Moose Lodge meetings.

      The tremendous wooden doors opened automatically, slowly, and as soon as they had created a large enough aperture, a slow trickle of the League of Osiris's Board of Trustees began pouring into the meeting room. They joked as they walked and clogged the entrance  greeting each other elaborately and histrionically balancing mugs of coffee — but nobody seemed to mind. The mix of gender and ethnicity among the Board looked as if it had been designed by a no-nonsense Affirmative Action Compliance Computer. As the doors laboriously spread open, more Board members came in, and the room became cheerfully chaotic with salutations, since those just entering had to greet the progressively-growing number of Board members already in the room. Everyone looked good, everyone's kids were doing fine, and hey, was everyone losing weight?

      The members hesitantly took to their seats, those closer to the head of the table shaking the hands and clapping the shoulders of the seated members they passed on the way. Therefore, the person who shook more hands and clapped more shoulders than anyone else was the person destined to occupy the head of the table  a man of convincing posture and a truly epic mustache, which he waxed poetically twice a day. To both the outside world and his closest acquaintances, he was known by one name: Dr. Wilest. Only family and lovers got to use 'Richard.'

      Dr. Wilest took his seat at the head of the table, exchanged pleasantries with those nearest him for a few seconds. Then he stood, hands pressed to the tabletop. Conversation dissipated. The last holdout was Dr. Ellen Prabhakaran, who had just discovered that every time she lowered her coffee toward the table, a coaster would flip up to meet her mug; when she retracted it more than a foot, it hid itself once more. This was infinitely diverting to her and those around her  including Dr. Wilest, who laughed along with everyone else. "We just had those put in, Ellen. Do you have any idea how much it costs to varnish this table? It's not like we're made of money here.

      Oh, wait, continued Dr. Wilest, tapping a finger against his temple, "I forgot. We actually are."

      The board laughed, but knew when to politely stop. It was time to begin. Once the room had fallen silent, Dr. Wilest said in the loud, over-annunciated voice people tended to use on voice-activated computers: Rhino. Play File BBCCoverageLaque.nwz.

      The rhinoceros head opened its mouth  in an unsettlingly wide way that no living rhinoceros could mimic  and out came the lens of the SpaceTime Series 21V camera. The lights dimmed themselves. For a few moments, as the board members' eyes adjusted, only inorganic things remained visible in the room: metallic twinkling pinpoints showing through wood trim, the gleaming insectival eyes of microcameras, and, on the Board Members' coffee mugs, crossed, golden flails and crooks: symbols of Osiris. The eyes of the Board had to quickly adjust again as, without preamble, BBCCoverageLaque.nwz played (in four dimensions, of course) just above the center of the table.

      There was no voiceover from a comforting English-accented reporter to guide the action. Somehow Dr. Wilest must have post-productioned all the journalism out of the file, leaving a much more raw product and a lot more room for interpretation. The scene depicted was of the marble steps of a courthouse, a percolating clot of reporters jostling for position at the base of those impressive stairs. (The BBC must have used a state-of-the-art HoverCam, about as intelligent as your low-end Shih Tzu and about as expensive as your black market human pancreas, to get this shot.) After a few seconds all the doors to the courthouse opened simultaneously, and down the steps, like a flow of cascading marbles, came a well-groomed horde of suits and attachés that was obviously prepared to be photographed and filmed by the media. The plaintiffs and the defendants descended at opposite sides of the courthouse steps, but eventually they would have to meet in the middle, since that's where the media podium stood. For their part, the media's behavior was typically unbelievable, intolerable: they yelled, pushed, panicked, and generally seemed on the verge of rioting.

      Pause, said Dr. Wilest. The file paused. He then used a laser pen to mark into the 3-D image the trajectories of where majority of the reporters' camera lenses were aimed. The white lines the laser pen drew proved a little thick for this purpose, as lines commingled and crossed, becoming hard to differentiate from one another. But the point was obvious. This mob of reporters was mostly interested in one person: a short, older, overweight woman, with overpermed curly hair and a suit that, while certainly adequate to the dignity of the courtroom, did little to flatter her, since it made little effort to mold her figure into an hourglass or, at the very least, a test tube. She had a large gnomish nose and wore  of all things  eyeglasses, a 20th-century-librarian style that made her nose look even larger. Her slip showed from under her suit skirt. Her shoes were appropriate, plain, and bad. Her dress shirt had a tremendous white silk bow which, to the younger generation absolutely screamed kitsch, but she wasn't wearing it for any camp value: she wore it because she thought it was pretty. She wore a cameo on the lapel of her suit coat, and even money said it was an actual heirloom. And there was no mistaking that when she smiled, those were her original teeth: obviously still good, obviously still serviceable, but not exactly the kind of smile someone would pay for.

      Dr. Wilest made the wipe gesture with his laser pen, which cleared the scene of the tangle of superimposed white lines. Play, he said, and the rhino complied. The older woman's group reached the podium before the other group of litigants. Based on that act alone some reporters instantly began drafting headlines and screaming their questions at her. But the woman's lawyer  a man, middle-aged but youthful, who bore perhaps a slight resemblance to her, though he was much more stylish and up-to-date in his appearance  took possession of the podium and made it all official. On behalf of my client, and mother, said the lawyer, beaming with practiced pride, I declare victory for all those who would determine their own destinies. Auleria Laque has won the right to die. Not today, God forbid, and not tomorrow, but after she has lived a full and complete life. And when she finally does die, she will die of natural causes. Auleria Laque is now, officially, the freest person in America. Next to him, Auleria smiled a little sheepishly and blinked to regain her eyesight as the media overwhelmed her with flashing lights.

      The file ended. The lights came on. The rhinoceros swallowed the camera. Members of the League, Dr. Wilest began slowly, Auleria Laque has just become our number one priority.

      * * * *

      There were weeks of interviews, debates on Sunday morning InterVision, speeches at universities, and, most exciting of all, celebrity invitations to VIP affairs that Auleria could never have afforded on her normal salary and during which she answered the same question ad nauseam: Why do you want to die? She answered each time the same way, without any impatience or frustration, I don't want to die. I just don't want anyone fooling with my body. I'm just a simple girl. I don't need immortality. By the time she got all of that out, the conversation usually would have moved on and few, if any, heard any part of her last sentence. So she'd smile, and follow the new conversation as best she could, and wait to be shanghaied into a new circle, where the people there would look her up and down and ask her, as if they had invented the question, "Ms. Laque, why in the world do you want to die?"

      For the moment, all of that was behind her now: the news had newsed itself out on her, and now was ferociously tracking the issue of people who cloned and then subsequently married themselves. She had now some semblance of peace returning to her life, and she liked it.

      Her unexpected celebrity had proved to be unexpectedly lucrative, so she took a leave of absence from work for the summer and planned to cook barefoot all morning in her kitchen. She had never been one who could simply stay in her pajamas, though. She had on a white, neatly-pressed button-down shirt, with a collar so crisp it looked as though she had stuffed a boomerang into it, and clean, new-looking dungarees she had rolled a few inches up from her ankles. Her

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