Submitted for the July 2024 prompt: This Mortal Coil

After four hundred years and a string of poor investments, my ticket was finally up.

 

Homeland officials dragged me by the collar from my undeclared beach house in the Caymans. They didn’t care how much I kicked or screamed or threatened to sue, and why should they? I got the same deal as everybody else: life as eternal as my wallet was deep.

 

I fumbled a text to my accountant — as if he hadn’t spent the past month ghosting me — begging him to deliver me some impossible lifeline. White sand burned my feet as I was marched away from my asylum, leaving the same footprints I did a century ago when I bought the place. They handed me a leaflet explaining my rights now that my credit had run dry: I had none.

 

I couldn’t argue with the logic. Overpopulation was an expensive crisis. It wasn’t reasonable that everyone should get to live forever, using up precious space and resources, especially if they didn’t have the capital to back it up.

 

“But I have the capital,” I tried telling them as they cuffed my wrists and ducked my head into a black SUV. “I just need a little more time, that’s all.”

 

I was placed on an economy flight back home, wedged between my abductors, and seethed into a plastic cup of cheap Pinot Noir. The cabin was full and noisy. Mute screens played a mosaic of bland-looking movies as kids ran unsupervised through the aisles. I couldn’t remember the last time I was surrounded by so many people, with their chewing, nattering, and noxious smells. To my surprise, I didn’t find the chaos irritating. I knew, objectively, that it must have been, but it all felt drowned out, like a recording of a memory.

 

By the time we landed in Detroit, my legs had gone dead and I felt nothing but a vague tiredness. Even the anger had mostly worn off. I spat and jeered with forced outrage at my new government escort as he showed me into an SUV identical to the last. Even he didn’t buy it, giving me a pitiful look. He treated me like I was old and senile.

 

I indulged myself in memories of when I first took the serum; it had felt as though I were invincible, capable of anything. I’d spent my hundredth birthday hiking Snowdon while my peers were spoon-fed mush through their dentures. I’d spent my two hundredth birthday at an Arctic rave, thrown in my honour by some company on my portfolio that I’d forgotten I had a stake in. My three hundredth had been less eventful; I’d spent the night at Monaco’s first deep-sea restaurant for a meal that was more an attempt to woo investors than it was a celebration. By my four-hundredth, I’d stopped counting the years. I had probably wasted the milestone with an unenthused lover and a packet of pills in the backrooms of some Latvian casino.

 

The car stuck below the speed limit as it drove me to my final appointment. This irritated me. Did he think I wanted to make the most of this journey? That I’d prefer a slow execution? I felt I should probably text someone to let them know I’d be dead shortly, but most of my contacts were either uninterested or dead already. I had no family left that weren’t distant relatives now, each many branches down the ancestral tree. I’d stopped bothering to make friends over a century ago — I always ran out of conversation after thirty or so years, and then it always got awkward. I decided to text my accountant again, this time with a slurry of slurs I’d likely be arrested for, if I weren’t already getting the death penalty.

 

We pulled up to a state hospital where I was shackled to a bed and given a pot of coffee. I was served a plate of loaded nachos and apple slices as my last meal — something a much younger me had apparently requested when I first signed the contract. The apple had been sprayed with that stuff that stopped it going brown and caused its flesh to shine in the way real food wouldn’t. I ate one out of obligation and a sense of boredom. It tasted dry, like the apple had gone brown.

 

The phlebotomist held my hand with care as they looked for a place to insert the cannula, as though they could see the aged wrinkles and sags of skin that should exist. It took several attempts to find a good vein. By the time they were finished, my hand felt like a pincushion and my head was numb. I was tired. I’d been tired for a long time now, I realised.

 

Maybe the end wasn’t such a bad thing. I’d done everything I wanted to do; seen everything I wanted to see. Was there any point in sticking it out any longer?

 

I thought about someone buying my house at the auction held in my wake. A young couple, perhaps with kids — or, better yet, a dog. Maybe they would also buy my beach house. I imagined them summering there, having barbecues on the white beaches, laughing and playing board games on the patio that overlooked the crystal sea. They’d enjoy it more than I had. It was time I moved on.

 

A doctor was fitting a drip next to me when the text came through on my phone. It’d been so long since anyone contacted me that I almost didn’t recognise what the buzzing was. The message was from my accountant, writing that one of my larger holdings had been awarded a bailout. He then sent his curt and understandable resignation.

 

I’d already ripped the cannula from my wrist before I finished reading the text. The spurt of blood from my open vein gave me a high I hadn’t felt in decades.

 

I decided, since I had capital, that I could go for a few more years.