This short story appeared in the February 2003 issue of Legends Magazine; encouragement from the readership inspired the novel Bread Crumbs in Mobius Space.
Jamie was old. He was just old. He didn't feel old, at least not on the inside. But his body would not let him forget his century plus of living. Drugs, surgery, prosthetics, good genes and a lifetime of athletics had kept him alive all these years, but they could not win against the inevitable decay and decrepitude.
Jamie felt like a 17-year-old trapped in the body of a 117-year-old. He still wanted to play ball like he had as a kid, but except for the cerebral interface with his virtual Gamechamp, the best he could do was watch the young people play. Gamechamp was a poor substitute for reality; you could manipulate the bat, ball, and glove, view the field as you virtually ran the bases, hear the synthesized crowd cheer. But you couldn't smell the grass, you never got out of breath, didn't feel the ache in your muscles, and you couldn't get hurt. Where was the risk, the triumph, the fun? Virtual baseball was a poor substitute for reality.
Where had his life gone? How had it slipped by so fast?
When he was young he had seen a film in which old men chased after pretty young girls. It was funny to see the wrinkled old perverts leer and snicker, and to see the girls flirt and tease and always stay out of their slow clumsy grasps. He saw no tragedy then, only comedy, yet underlying great comedy is great tragedy. Jamie didn't understand then, but he did now.
He vividly remembered his first love; the heat that had built up inside him, the feeling in his palms, his stomach, and especially his loins when he was close to her. All that was gone-no heat, no feeling, no nothing. Remembering only made it worse. He knew now the tragedy of those foolish old men in the film. Young and virile inside, old, hoary and impotent on the outside. Even if some young women would have them, they could do nothing about it but leer. These days there was a Gamechamp for sex as well, but it was too little like a woman and too much like an automatic milking machine.
It's depressing to get old. You see the signs while you are still young, and you make allowances, cover up the evidence with cosmetics, rage, rage against the dying of the light as best you can. Then one day you realize that you are closer to the end than the beginning. You find yourself talking about your infirmities more than anything else. You look back more than you look forward. You remember more than plan.
It's depressing to see all your friends die before you, all those people you shared a common culture, a common history with. You can't reminisce with someone twenty, thirty, fifty years younger than yourself.
Of course he had outlived Clare. She was six years older than he, and didn't have the Southard genes on her side. And while she always had a slim figure, she was never an athlete. Clare was a city girl; the most ghastly thing to her was being more than a few miles from a shopping mall. But she was loyal to the end. Jamie thought of her often, could almost smell the lavender scent she always wore, woke up in the middle of the night hearing her snore, just to remember she'd been gone almost twenty years.
Twenty years. Never mind the years--where had the decades gone? Where had the century gone?
One thing about growing immensely old: you can perfect curmudgeonliness to a high art. Maybe it's endemic of old people that they see each subsequent generation as soft and lazy. "In my day, we had it hard...walked ten miles barefoot in the snow...my neighborhood was so rough that...". But Jamie had seen five generations grow up and grow old, each less capable than the last. The population had not divided, in 50 years of a hot, free economy, into the haves and the have-nots. It bifurcated into the knows and the know-nots. And the scale seemed to be tipping more and more onto the know-not side as populations grew and grew.
As a professor he had seen each brigade of students emerge from public education with less and less critical thinking ability or even rote knowledge. Simple algebra escaped just about everybody. No one had a clue as to the physical world around him. He actually had an adult student ask him "what happens to the Sun when it rains?" It had pushed Jamie toward early retirement.
The arts too had deteriorated. Singing and playing instruments had grown to be too daunting a task for most popular musical "artists", and form and attitude grew dominant over substance. Art music had all but disappeared-the few concerts were hi-fidelity broadcasts of recordings made fifty years or more in the past. Of the 500+ satellite channels, maybe 3 had any intellectual content, the rest being either vapid entertainment or science, art, and history repackaged into 5 or 10 second trifles with accuracy and veracity thrown to the four winds. Films had degenerated into amusement park rides.
Technology and medicine had advanced greatly while other human endeavors had dwindled, primarily because there was money to be made. Some state-sponsored big-science projects had continued, but most progress was made in the consumer arena. The know-nots had the cash, and those few knows who could excel in the Universities went on to push human knowledge wherever there was a market. Remember, the know-nots were still the haves (and their numbers were huge!), and with all their new toys they were occupied and content. Furthermore, the vast elderly population made gerontology a fertile, lucrative field. Yet the impotence of age ultimately could not be denied.
Jamie hated the dependencies. He depended on 22 pills a day, 4 nurses a week, and 3 doctors a month. He needed mechanisms to get out of his chair, to climb the stairs, and to see and to hear. His mind was as sharp as ever-Alzheimer's had been cured while he was still working-but the strong body he had come to depend on had finally let him down. He felt betrayed.
Yes, it's depressing to get old, but Jamie had an ace up his sleeve. One advantage of living longer than most was his ability to accumulate wealth. Since retiring from the University 60 years earlier, Jamie had had little to do but play with his investments, and he had piled up a nice stock portfolio, a dozen condominiums, open land in several states, and some healthy savings. Even the expense of the 22 pills, 4 nurses and 3 doctors couldn't dent his resources. Jamie had an ace, and this ace required considerable "grease" to slide easily down the sleeve.