Total apocalypse of the heart

Nobody has heard from those who live in the sky for a thousand years.

For centuries, they spoke and spoke. We listened.

Now it’s time for us to go pay them a visit.

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Towards the end of the twenty-first century, humanity came together to celebrate the invention of a cure for ageing.

Scientists had been slowly chipping away at it for decades. First, they figured out the optimum way to exercise and the best things to eat. The significance of intermittent fasting was discovered. Then came the more intrusive treatments. Transfusion of blood from the young into the veins of the old became a dastardly underground industry patronized by the most narcissistic of millionaires and practiced in remote corners of India and South America illegally. Then the oxygen clinics started popping up for those who could afford them. At the rotten old age of seventy-five Kanye invented the pressurized oxygen chamber apartment on the one hundred and fifty second floor of Burj Khalifa. He was last seen in a video he released as a sprightly ninety-three years old, gyrating his hips to the heathen beats of the kind of Afro-jazz that was topping the charts at the time. Then he disappeared.

But he’d done his devil’s work. Soon all the top floors of all the high rises in the world were bought out by the ever-living billionaires, converted into pressurized oxygen chambers. That was just the beginning. More buildings were erected, some for no other purpose than to pierce the clouds and set a platform in heavens to build palaces upon. It was an arms race. Higher, larger, farther behind the clouds. For a while there was no money in the world to do anything but build.

If it was madness, it was mild compared to what followed.

When Dr. Deakin programmed CRISPR nanorobots to mend telomerase and then within two years figured out how to deliver the treatment as a harmless little pill, humanity looked in the mirror, and said, we are gods now. All our troubles are behind us, for now we can say it literally. We will forever be young.

And that was true, for a while.

In the beginning it seemed everyone would be able to get the pill. The manufacture and distribution was outsourced to WHO by all world governments, after some consternation by US and India. The miracle of eternal youth seemed to have wiped away our petty differences like footsteps on the beach.

Then we realized that the pill was not enough. Diet helped, exercise helped, blood transfusions helped and of course oxygen in pressurized chambers helped. The longer we wanted to live, the more holistic our treatment needed to be.

As people aged into their centuries a curious trend was noticed by the scientists. Those who lived the longest had the quietest hearts. The oldest man at the time of this discovery, a Jewish rabi well into his fourth century on earth, only had a resting heartbeat of about fifteen.

That’s when the race to slow down the heart started.

We figured if we lived in cooler temperatures, on higher altitudes, ate fewer calories, the heart slowed down.

The pill was not expensive, but all the accoutrements of a quieter heart were only available to a select few. Those who lived in higher and higher chambers, farther and farther away from the maddening masses.

The billionaires built taller and taller buildings, entire palaces kept at icy cold temperatures, filled with oxygen and pressurized to let the heart sink into a chameleon beat. They barely ate. They walked across their marble floors with a gilded glaze across their eyes, alive and mobile but almost without a pulse.

Then the pill became rare as well. Turns out the manufacture of the pill needed selenium, and abundant as selenium was, there was only so much of it in the world.

Those who wanted to live forever realized that they needed a forever supply of the pill. And so they started hoarding. Those who could manufacture and buy, manufactured and bought the pill by the billions and retreated with their cache to the palaces in the skies.

The rest of us were left to live and die on the surface of the earth like ordinary human-beings.

At first, we used to get news from them. We used to appear to live on the same planet. Their lifespans crossed hundred, two hundred, five hundred. As their lifespans increased their heartrates declined. Still remember when the first man lived to a thousand years old. We were told his heart beat only once a day on weeks when he consumed solid food.

At first, they tried to care about us as well. Their lifespans and our lifespans were averaged together by UN’s mandarins as if we were the same species, but soon it became clear that that was a statistical crime. With over-population and dwindling resources the lifespan on the surface continued to decline until it settled around fifty. Then came the industries of death.

People on the surface started realizing their lives were not meant to be stretched like chewing-gum and their bodies not meant to be preserved till they calcified. They started using them as tools for the human experience. As those in the skies experimented with drugs that slowed the heart down, those on the surface started experimenting with drugs that spread the consciousness wide open. As those in the skies shrank their existence into perfectly ergonomic loungers with force feedback and virtual reality headsets so they don’t ever have to risk walking again, those living on the surface invented ever more extreme, extreme sports. They hung off the edge of the highest cliffs they could climb, tied wings to their back and soared along the edge of rocks, closed their eyes and dived into the Mariana trench naked.

Average lifespans on the surface dropped to thirty but a sinister economy developed. The lived experiences of those on the surface were indulged in by those in the skies through their immersive virtual reality devices. ExperienceTube stars uploading their brushes with death and hidden consciousness of the universe, became rich off of the views of the sedentary sky dwellers. Their riches were never enough to buy a ticket to the sky for themselves though and eventually they would upload their last experience to the ExperienceTube, rarely past the age of thirty-five.

Other denizens of the surface made artisanal things for the citizens of the sky to enjoy. From billions of handmade gourmet meals everyday to blinding art to décor the walls of sky palaces, artificially intelligent flying machines took trillions of tons of cargo up every year from the surface to the sky.

And what did these flying machines bring down? Mass produced smegma manufactured in the factories in the skies by artificially intelligent robots to keep those on the surface alive. Just barely alive. Bland hamburgers sinking into themselves, bottles of water filled with mystery metal of the day, drugs. Drugs by the hour to keep you awake when you wanted to sleep. Drugs to make you fall asleep when you needed to wake up. Drugs to extend your life just long enough to kiss old age. Drugs to numb your senses in the morning and to sharpen them at night. Drugs, drugs, drugs. All the drugs in the world, but … the Pill.

Clothes. Clothes to cover your skin in a false sense of propriety. Some kind of fake fabric that made your skin doubt itself. Parts. Car parts and vacuum parts and cellphone parts and TV parts. Parts made to break. Parts to only make you seek more parts. All of this treasure came from the skies. All the refuse the people of the sky wanted nothing to do with.

We the denizens of the surface were happy with it all.

For a while.

The first revolution happened at the time of one heartbeat per month. That was the rumor then. That the people in the skies had hearts that beat just once a month. There is an illusion that humans have that our intellectual and emotional life resides in our brains. That’s not true. We feel as much with our bodies as we do with our mind. Our skin senses a curious touch before we know it. In our sleep our guts make us sad. Our hearts let us know secrets we’ve been trying to hide even from ourselves. As their hearts started to shut down something unnamable within the souls of the dwellers of the sky imperceptibly, left. They didn’t try to catch it because they didn’t even know what it was, much less recognize that they were losing it. They just sat in their loungers living vicariously and occasionally writing algorithms for the artificial machines.

The first revolutionaries figured out how to hop the cargo machines and made it into the skies. Their mission was to take over the control of the flying machines and the pill factories and ship back the pill. Make the gift of eternal life a little more equitably distributed.

We never heard back from them. We never found out how they were caught. But in the weeks that followed the flying machines came back with billions of heart-shaped lockets. All of us were told to wear one. Forever. This was the prize for our mutiny. The mark of the heart.

Of course, the lockets were trackers. One came from the skies for each child that was born. It was never to come off till the time she died.

And so we wore our lockets with a sort of inverted shame. It became a symbol of our self-deprecating pride. A thousand years passed and more. We stopped counting. We stopped receiving any news or messages and we stopped listening. The cargo machines kept doing their rounds between the heavens and earth. We made our peace with the way things were.

That is until we discovered how the tracker in the lockets could be rigged to turn it into a device for concealing heartbeats.

That had been the problem with the first revolutionaries. Their hearts had been beating too loudly.

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As we get off the flying machines we see marbled acres spreading far as eye could see. There are no walls but rotund pillars reaching deep into the heart of the sky. We did not expect to see a crowd. Rumor was the dwellers of the sky had stopped procreating centuries ago. Not that they were incapable of it but they felt no compulsion for it. In fact, it was thought that they felt compelled to do nothing.

We started walking. Here, there, everywhere. Cold marble floors.

We walked and we walked. For miles and perhaps for years.

There were machines. And machines controlling machines. And Other machines writing algorithms that controlled the machines that controlled the machines. But not a heartbeat in sight.

THE END