The Forever Ones (The Iduna Project) Read online

  The Forever Ones

  By Marjorie DeLuca

  Text Copyright©2013 Marjorie DeLuca

  All Rights Reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality

  Emily Dickinson

  Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he’s dead

  Henry Louis Mencken

  Table of Contents

  What Was Once

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  November 12th 2090

  What Was Once…

  Lynette remembers the old days. She tells her coffee shop story to any of us who’ll listen.

  I’ve heard it at least fifty times. This is how she tells it.

  She’s sitting at a small wooden table by the window. It’s winter – watery grey sky, gritty snow banks, tree branches like skeleton fingers. Across the street is a store that sells bridal dresses – how does she know? Its wall is painted with a mural of a ten-foot bride – brides wore white dresses and veils then - flanked by three smaller bridesmaids dressed in maroon. Everything’s perfect – lamppost standing in the place it should be, airplane sweeping overhead, bicycle chained to a street sign, traffic churning up slush - but her attention is drawn away from the scene outside by a tiny girl in pink and white spotted boots standing by the counter screaming for a Cake pop. I love that part. Cake pop. What is a cake pop? Of course it’s a ball of sweet, white cake covered in pink icing and stuck on the end of a little stick. The child happily clutches her cake pop and sips so hard at her hot chocolate she gets a blob of whipped cream at the end of her nose.

  Just then a small party of girls comes out of the bridal shop. The prettiest girl, a pony-tailed blonde, holds a frothy white dress in a garment bag – while the others crowd round her chatting. Of course they’re the bridal party. What’s a bridal party? No time to explain – here’s the important bit. A really old lady hobbles by. How old? Disgusting old. Black-teeth old. Wrinkled-jowls old. Watery-eyes old. Hairy-chin old. Dribbles-down-her-sweater old. She stops on the sidewalk opposite to watch the girls. That’s when the black Mustang pulls up and the young man gets out. He’s tall and golden looking with black curls. The blonde holds the dress out to him and they kiss. A real passionate, tongue-in-mouth kiss of love. That’s what you did when you were engaged and in love! The old lady watches then takes out a ragged hanky and mops at her crusty old eyes.

  The young people don’t see her. Their happiness makes her invisible to them. After the kiss the man holds the door open and the blonde slides in with her dress. They wave to the bridesmaids and pull away in the car. That’s when the old lady walks out into the street. Deliberately. Shuffles right in front of their car and bounces off the bumper with a big thump. Her old body rolls in front of an oncoming bus. The driver screeches the brakes but the front tires have already clunked over top of her, smashing her frail body. How bad? Bad. Purple guts squashed and splattered onto the street. By then the beautiful couple is out of the car, the man holds onto the blonde and she’s screaming so hard all the traffic stops. The bride dress has fallen out into the slush and their happiness is lost forever. How can you be so sure? I know because the bloody, broken body will be the only certainty in their married lives. It’s like time stopped and then started again at that moment.

  The story always ends there because Lynette is crying so hard the windows on her glass cubicle start to mist over. She still looks beautiful when she cries. Perfect skin, clear blue eyes, and a ponytail the same gold as the band she wears on the third finger of her left hand. We’ve learned to leave her alone until the memory of that moment seventy seven years ago disappears.

  Lynette is one of the original Forevers. Her life is bounded by glass walls in an eight by eight room. Glass tunnels link her to others just like her – hopefuls who crowded in on the first days of the Iduna Project not caring that the procedure was still experimental and though the age reversal was successful in one way, it wiped their immune systems clean and so they sit, styling their hair and perfecting their makeup – untouched by human germs and untouchable like beautiful hothouse orchids.

  I was luckier. They perfected the procedure before they created me.

  Lynette doesn’t seem to care though. “I’ll tell you something, Page,” she says looking me square in the eye because all the others have drifted away before the story’s over, “an eternity of youth and beauty is far better than dreading the final chapter of misery, decay and death.” And then she smiles – plump lips curling back to show two perfect rows of tiny white teeth and I look at the gleaming white walls of our compound and wonder if she’s right.

  1

  I don’t know how old I am. We don’t need to know. But I know I’m at least nineteen. I’ll be nineteen forever.

  My name, Paige, means youthful assistant. All of us Forevers have names that mean young or youthful and we wear a tattoo of two golden apples on our left wrist that shows we belong to IDunaCorp.

  I want to know more. I want to know why I’m here and what’s out there beyond the compound. But they tell us it’s dangerous outside.

  Because everyone wants what we have and they’ll tear us apart to get it.

  The Corporation is named after Iduna, an ancient Norse goddess who tended the tree with the golden apples of eternal youth. The story goes that she picked the apples every day and put them in a basket so the gods and goddesses could drop by, eat them and stay forever young. We’ve got a picture of her in our Food Plaza and in it she’s sitting on some grass. I wonder what real grass smells like? Feels like? Tastes like? I know it’s green and stringy looking but it looks so moist and cool.

  Anyway Iduna’s resting her head on her hand and her her long hair ripples down the side of her body like shiny gold ribbons curling into the grass. She wears a moon pendant and a creamy dress with gold shoulder straps. Chale says he can see her nipples through the sheer fabric but I just look at the alabaster-white hand that clasps a golden apple to her breast and I wonder if those perfect green eyes are really vacant or if they’re lost in deep thought as she sits in that sunlit orchard.

  I’ve never touched a real tree but I’ve seen my parents. The Iduna Corp call them mother donor and father donor. I have holograms of them in my bedroom and a mini-bio about them. Everyone in the compound has their own.

  Every morning when
I wake up I lie in bed and study them – miniature little 3-D figures made of light. Hilda, the woman who donated my egg was a Swedish circus aerialist. She’s dressed in a sparkly body suit with nude mesh tights, pink ballet shoes and her platinum hair is scraped into a tight bun studded with silver jewels. I watch her little routine – hands on hips, feet turned out in ballerina pose, then arms raised up into the sky as she does a perfect flip, lands on her feet and bows – a beaming smile directed to an absent audience. Johnny, on the other hand was an American writer who obliged with the sperm. He has a kind of hunched stance – hands shoved in the pocket of black leather jacket, three earrings in one ear, dreadlocks sprouting in thick waves from his head and a very pouty mouth. His hologram doesn’t do anything much except stand there looking cool and squinting at some long-lost videographer. He does say something though and I’ve listened to it over and over again. In laid back growl he says, “That time ticks on is inescapable.” It sort of makes sense but it’s puzzling, especially since time means nothing to me.

  I’ve tried to enlarge the images as much as I can and study them for every miniscule detail – any clue that could tell me something more about them. Hilda has a little tattoo on her left hand but I’ve used all kinds of magnifying devices and I still can’t make out whether it’s a bird or a butterfly. There’s two letters underneath it that say WJ and I’ve agonized about those. Johnny has a bracelet made of round grey crystals and a coppery coloured ring on his right pinky. I’ve gone over every inch of them – turning them around and around to find something – a scar, a clothing label - anything that tells me who they really are or where they might be now.

  The scientists at IDunaCorp incubated Hilda’s fertilized egg and engineered it with Forever serum and bingo, I - Paige was born – a perfect specimen of immortality with platinum hair, one blue eye and a contortionist’s body (from Hilda), honey coloured skin, one brown eye and a wild imagination (from Johnny). People say I’m very exotic looking but I can’t see it myself. They also say I’m a dreamer – always tuning out into crazy daydreams – even in the middle of a conversation.

  Anyway, I don’t know if Hilda and Johnny are still out there somewhere wondering what happened to the baby they created or they’re long gone but I think about them every morning and most every night too. There are no families here in the compound. We live at the Homeschool until we’re nineteen, looked after by other Forevers who’ve chosen child care as a career.

  What else do I know? I know I live and have always lived in the IDunaCorp compound community but I don’t know where it is in relation to the rest of the big, mysterious world outside and I have no idea what the plans are for the endless future that spreads out ahead of me though I know something about the past - courtesy of Lynette.

  We’re not supposed to talk to Lynette. The CEO says the past’s the past – a dirty, troublesome time that we’d never want any part of, but I take any chance I can to sneak into her glassy prison and grill her with questions.

  I don’t even know what today is. When you’re programmed to live forever, time doesn’t matter any more. Once you come out at nineteen as a Keener you get your own place and it’s totally up to you what you do. Live in the moment – that’s what the CEO says. Enjoy every minute to its fullest. Be what you want to be for a while and when you get sick of it – be something else. Right now I’m a juice mixer at the Rock Bar. Before that I was a teacher in the 5-6 classroom but I ran out of things to teach them so I quit – just kind of sputtered out one morning when we were doing a lesson on sculpting clay dogs. I couldn’t see the point of it and when they all tied ribbons around the doggies’ neck and paraded around the classroom trying to drag them along the floor I burst into tears and the Medi-Techs had to come and take me to the Psych Centre for Readjustment Therapy which basically means scrambling up your memories so they don’t hurt you any more.

  I never went back to the school. Psych services reassigned me to something less stressful. Mixing smoothies made of acai, seaweed, kale, banana and a few other wholesome goodies. I shaved my long platinum hair into a pixie cut, pierced my left ear with three rings like Johnny’s and soon discovered the Rock Bar was a great place – the only place for gossip.

  Today Chale and his buddies are in their musical phase and they’re playing in the Fountain Plaza outside the bar so I put Johnny and Hilda back on the bedside shelf and throw on a sheer white top and some tattered shorts. It’ll be busy there today and I still have to check in at the Med Centre.

  Lynette says the compound is like the places they called malls in the old days. She told me about the giant labyrinths with painted blue-sky ceilings that were attached to big, fancy hotels in a place called Vegas – where she and her husband Sam went for their honeymoon. And each hotel had a theme like our sleeping compounds. Lynette and Sam stayed in the pirate hotel and Sam wore a black eye patch and striped boxers on their wedding night. She giggles and blushes when she tells that part – then she starts crying again.

  I live in Tropikis Centre alongside a whole lot of fake palm trees, fountains, orchids and flocks of robotic parakeets, flamingoes and butterflies.

  Nobody’s around in the hallway when I head towards the elevator – just a few piles of dirty plates and some AcaiBrew bottles from a late night party, but the glass fronted elevator looks down on an already crowded atrium where teachers lead lines of children towards the Palm Playground and the Breakfast Bar. Over in the Coconut Grove the Iduna Cult preachers are setting up their instruments and a small group of Followers with rippling blonde hair and white robes are already swaying in a trance around their plastic apple tree.

  The elevator door whooshes open and the familiar smell hits me – coconut, lime and the watery smell of ozone. Lynette says ozone smells like electric sparks or the air before it rains. What does rain taste like or smell like? What colour is the real sky during a thundershower? I grab a coconut mango protein smoothie and put my head down as I pass the Followers.

  My friend Junius joined the Iduna Cult the week after I quit teaching. We’d both worked with the little kids on a writing project. I was blown away by the weird and crazy fantasies that come out of six-year-old brains. Junius couldn’t get over one story written by a serious little guy named Osman. In it, Osman built a golden flying machine with knife blade propellers that sliced through the compound roof like a corkscrew and launched him out into the desert where he lived in a cave and ruled a kingdom of talking parrots and white dogs.

  “I dream about getting out of here every day, Paige,” Junius would say, fixing those coppery brown eyes on me, “so how is this kid gonna stand it forever when at six years old he’s already fantasizing about escaping?” I guess Junius knew about my breakdown because he came to see me at the Psych Centre. I was lying in a white canopy bed, my mind blank and still like a pool of warm water. Troubles ebbed and flowed in little ripples that tickled the shore but then a powerful mix of sedatives and anti-depressants washed them all away. Junius hovered over me like a vivid dream, his eyes glistening in the semi-darkness and his blond hair falling across one side of his face.

  “You’re like me, Paige. You wonder about who we are and why we’re here.” He spoke in a whisper, his face ebbing in and out of my consciousness, but I heard every word. “I think I’m going crazy too but I’m trying to hold it together because I’ve found out something scary and secret about this place. I want you to come see me when you’re all better and I’ll share it with you.”

  I remember trying to speak to him but when I opened my mouth I couldn’t - it was like one of those dreams where you want to do something but your body is paralyzed and your feet feel like they’re stuck in some kind of sticky mud. All I knew was that tears were squeezing out of the corner of my eyes and I felt a heavy ache across the top of my chest. Then he bent his head down and kissed the side of my cheek. It felt soft and dry and he smelled of coconut. When he pulled away he licked his lips as if he’d tasted my tears. That’s when a Medi-Tech bustled in a
nd kicked him out for disturbing the patients.

  I didn’t see or hear of him again after that until my second day at the Music Bar when I saw the Iduna Cult Chorus filing past my counter and I almost dropped a huge pitcher of kale juice when I saw Junius swaying by with the other Followers, his face fixed in a strange, dead expression like he wasn’t thinking about anything. His hair was longer and wilder and he was dressed in white robes. I thought he looked over at me but then his eyes flicked back towards the Iduna banner at the front of the line.

  Now I don’t know why I’m afraid to face Junius but it’s like we shared something so intense and real and then he just checked out on me without telling me the secret he’d discovered. Also I can’t stand the way those followers spend the whole day listening to the preachers ramble on about the filth and degradation of aging and the glory of celebrating youth, then they end up in a major group love fest – kissing and hugging each other and gazing at their gorgeous young faces in a mirror.