The Problem With Immortality
Chapter 14
By Gary LM Martin
Chapter 14: The Erotic Pursuit and Capture of Tom Holiday
It only took Judy Ford 200 years to figure out the secret of life.
And Judy was one of the smartest women on the planet. She had an IQ of 172, two points higher than her father, Anson (her mother, Jennifer, always said that IQ tests were for snobs who weren't confident of their own abilities... but when Judy had told Jennifer her own test results, Jennifer made sure to boast to all her family and friends).
Judy could be forgiven for taking so long. Life was complicated. And it didn't come with a ready made instruction manual.
Jennifer always thought of Judy as her "little girl", but Judy, in fact, was almost as old as her parents. In fact, she was exactly 306 years old. That's not exactly the age of a little girl, even one who looked cosmetically 28 years old (just like her mother).
Some women preferred to look younger, 24, 22, or even 18, but Judy had been a psychologist for many years, and knew that that most people didn't prefer to see a therapist who looked 18 years of age, even if she was 306 years old chronologically.
Judy had been married three times. The first was to Tom Holiday, the love of her life. Their marriage had been the longest, for some 82 years. But then they had drifted apart, as people did, and they divorced, and then Judy met the new love of her life, Mike Bentley, and they had gotten married and had 49 blissful years together before they too called it quits, so sick of each other that they weren't willing to stick it out for a marginally record setting fifty years.
And then Judy had married the next and last love of her life, Lars Swenson. That marriage had lasted 12 years, a wholly unremarkable length, even back in the days when people were not immortal.
And after that Judy never took a man as a husband again. She was the first to notice that the length of her marriages got shorter and shorter. She had boyfriends, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, but never longer than a few years at a time, and she always kept it casual.
But she yearned for more.
And not just in her personal life. Her professional life too.
Robots never entirely replaced psychologists; there were many people who still preferred to talk about their problems with an old fashioned flesh and blood. But after being a psychologist for over 120 years, Judy grew tired of it. Peoples' problems all became the same, one big blur to her. When you hear about people's problems, over and over, they tended to fall into the same patterns. And after 120 year those patterns become painfully repetitious.
And so, like many people who enjoyed immortality, Judy became bored, in her personal and professional life. Some people chose to deal with it by simply consuming more entertainment, and eating more. Obesity was rampant in the 28th century.
Others chose to be more direct with their discontentment, getting hooked on Weed, or the Dreamscape, or going the more direct route and submitting themselves for recycling at a Soylent Green Center.
Judy was not one to give up so easily. But it took her a long time to figure out what she wanted to do. She dabbled, trying different kinds of professions, finding brief happiness in some but lasting contentment in none, and basically played around for 150 years. She could have called that time wasted, except, with immortality assured, time was virtually meaningless.
And then, shortly before her 300th birthday, she finally figured out what she wanted to do with her life. It wasn't the result of any particular kind of research, or kind of introspection; it was just from the result of living so long.
She figured it all out.
Psychology was a dying field. Most of the work was handled by robots, and in any event it was quite repetitive.
What interested Judy more was the rapidly shrinking pool of the incurably mentally ill. There had been great advances in brain research and biofarming technologies. Doctors could now identify troublesome thoughts on the cellular level. They also developed technology to grow or regrow healthy brain tissue.
And so Judy, at the tender young age of 299, decided to go back to medical school to become a psychosurgeon and a cranium biofarmer. It would take 12 years of medical school, and residency, and additional training before she was ready, but Judy Ford didn't mind; she had all the time in the world, and this was a brand new, cutting edge field that currently wasn't being done by robots. Not yet, anyway.
Judy threw herself into her studies and found it interesting. But studies alone were not sufficient. She had dalliances with more than one cute medical school student, some of them married or coupled, some of them not. But she craved for more.
Looking back on it, she realized she had had the best times of her life with her first husband, Tom Holiday. They had never had any children--Tom had been too single-minded in the pursuit of his career, engineering, and Judy had thrown herself into her work as a psychologist with a passion, and somehow, the timing was never right to have kids, maybe because they always knew they had eternity in which to procreate. So it never happened.
Much to Judy's regret.
The first 30 years of their marriage, however, had been the happiest years of their life. Tom was witty, Tom was handsome, Tom was great fun to be with.
But then, as with most marriages, familiarity wore down the attraction between them over the decades. By the time they had divorced, by mutual consent, 82 years had passed. Statically, 72% of marriages ended in divorce by the eighth decade, so this was no surprise.
But Judy found that now, nearly 200 years later, she missed Tom.
She thought about him more and more, and spent time looking into what had happened to him. After her, he had remarried twice, just as she did, but neither marriage lasted as long as theirs did. Currently he was cohabiting with a woman named Jeanine who Tom had two grown children with. They had been together, on and off, for more than 60 years.
Perfect. Tom should be tired of her by now.
Judy recognized the mistake she and Tom had made. They thought they could make it through eternity, just the two of them. But the human mind wasn't built to endure sameness, the lack of new stimuli, for decade after decade after decade. In the time before the immortality serum was devised, most marriages lasted forty or fifty years at most, and they had some variety as people aged and changed over time.
Now, no one aged at all, cosmetically, and marriages could last for decades, or hundreds of years, or, theoretically, forever. The human mind wasn't built to endure such sameness for such long periods of time. It needed change. It needed rotation.
That's why Judy decided that this time, she and Tom would keep lovers on the side, from time to time. Not in secret--they would always be honest about that. But they would get a break from each other, a change, something different, which would help keep their relationship from getting stale. Having sex with the same person for a 100 years was a surefire recipe for divorce; but branching out, seeing what else humanity had to offer, and getting some variety in faces, bodies, personalities, and penises and vaginas, could keep a relationship between two people sane.
So Judy hoped.
The only minor issue involved in carrying out Judy's plan was winning Tom back.
She hadn't spoken to him in nearly 200 years, and he was currently living with a woman who was the mother of his two grown children.
The relative morality, or immorality, of stealing Tom away from his girlfriend was barely a consideration for Judy. She was single-minded in her pursuit of happiness; and of all the men she had experienced in her long, 300 years of life, he had been the best, head and shoulders above the rest.
And so she resolved to win him back, regardless of the cost.
********
Tom worked as an engineer in the Dyson Institute, just outside of Pittsburgh. She had private investigators follow him and gather information about his work habits and personal life.
The first thing she studied were the holos of him. Her memories were one thing, but his current appearance could be something else.
She was very relieved to see he Tom looked exactly the same way as he did 200 years ago.
Which wasn't surprising, since he had the same cosmetic age of 25. Tom was a little vain, and always preferred to look on the younger side. Judy was pleased to see that he looked fit and hadn't gotten fat. He had the same sandy brown hair, the same gorgeous hazel eyes, the same manly jaw, even the same smile she fell in love with. She actually gasped and grabbed her titties when she saw the smiling photo of him.
Judy, however, no longer looked as she did 200 years ago.
She looked even better.