Story

This is fiction.

Watching the little people milling like ants below his snugly-slippered feet brought the reassuringly delicious combination of pity and scorn. “A certainty in an uncertain world,” mouthed the serial entrepreneur Ken Midas, tucking his signature long grey hair behind his ears as he prepared for his daily trance.

The scurrying, bug-like people below were not like him and never would be. He was the inventor of the revolutionary silent fridge. He alone discovered a novel way to suspend an electric pump in a way which almost completely eliminated vibration, so minimising ambient noise. Those little people had not. Hardly any of them even had the first idea about the way vibrational noise radiates into the environment from poorly suspended pumping devices.

Not only that but he, not they, had for 43 years successfully defended the patent on devices using his revolutionary method. He had beaten every challenger. Not for nothing was it that he was called “the undisputed champion of the world defending his intellectual property” by the Wall Street Journal. None of the little people below, who barely even looked like proper people from the 27th floor, had been described as the undisputed champion of anything, let alone in defending intellectual property. Doing it was really hard, nobody could deny that, not if they knew what they were talking about.

Nobody to the horizon he could see stretching away as he looked over the city skyline could take any of his achievements away from him. Law prohibited it and quite right too. They could not legally take away the billions of dollars, sterling, yuan and yen in bank accounts across the globe, managed by a well-drilled legion of tax accountants. As a second line of defence he had assembled lobbyists, political aids and spokespeople to defend the fundamental principle that every penny should be his and his alone.

 He closed his eyes now, standing, raising his arms to shoulder level palms up, belly breathing, as his life coach Angelo had shown him. He pictured himself as first as a rocket, then blasting off, rising, slowly, accelerating fast, pushing hard through the vibration propagating atmosphere, becoming viscous at this speed, sticky, holding him back. And then into clear, freedom of weightless orbit, beyond the selfish grasp of gravity, floating free, gazing down on his world. This is where Angelo was dead wrong, and his wife, about the need to ground himself, which was why they both had to go. Hanging there, free, alone, and taken into orbit thanks to his massive achievement.

He wavered for a second in the excitement and had to peep through his eyelids to steady himself, before closing them again, rocking his head back. Nobody could threaten the power and satisfaction he had from control of his empire, this army, this treasury of intellect, the backup of billions, together with the recognition and respect that went with it. He had had his ups and downs, for sure, but invention had meant refrigerators–and heat transfer devices in general– had entered a new era, opening massive new commercial opportunities. And with these commercial opportunities had blossomed something little short of a social revolution.

Thanks to him people were no longer afraid to have fridges in more intimate spaces, disrupting their sleep or making an annoying rattling sound while they watched a movie or meditated, like he was now. People now used endless variants of his patented Phrygia device. Some used them even to near-silently cool their bed on hot days. Phrygias were built into the arms of sofas and cars, for cooling drinks and ice creams for a non-stop sensory barrage of chilled food and beverage items.

The industry had found the public unexpectedly receptive to ice-cold smoothies or a protein shake in bed. Midas Research, part of the marketing department, encouraged this habit by commissioning research to show that cold nutrition taken lying down helped reduce anxiety, boost mood and potentially improved cardiac function. It got little traction in the scientific community, but since when did they change anything? Success in the real world comes from telling stories people want to hear, not from getting bogged down in facts and figures. It was no coincidence that the last few James Bonds impressed their conquests by pulling chilled food and beverages from under the bedcovers. That was how you changed the world.

The wall behind the standing, swaying Ken Midas contained a gallery of press cuttings, all neatly preserved behind glass. His eye caught the headlines “Meeting Ken Midas, the king of cool”, “More than a morning smoothie”. The centrepiece of all of them was one from the mid-2020s in bed with one of his early Phrygia fridges.  The photoshoot had coincided with the well-publicised breakdown of his marriage during an unusually spectacular midlife crisis.  His above average looks and far better than average bank account were enough for a half-way done beano of epic proportions. It became a well-worn joke that Ken Midas would sleep with more or less anything including household appliances.*

The refrigeration breakthrough that first made him rich was thirty years ago now but it remained the centrepiece. He never matched it, despite having far greater resources. The EatMan, a pocket toaster and microwave, fell victim to a class action lawsuit brought by those who had suffered pocket fires in which Midas Inc settled for damages of $1.7bn. He had been quoted as saying that the reason for the problems was “not the fault of the device but the fucking idiots using them”, he had said in and interview with the Financial Times. “It’s not the EatMan that’s the problem, but the fact that the people using them are completely stupid,” he said during an interview with Newsweek. The company ultimately had to recall the entire production run of 190,000 EatMans. 

Thoughts of this episode buzzed through his head forcing him to lower his now aching arms, moving back to his large empty desk. The EatMan was the disaster which ultimately brought him to this fabulous office of the President Emeritus. The Midas share price had plummeted and his statements had only compounded the problem. Nothing was clearer than that customers–some singed–were unhappy being called stupid by a man famous for sleeping with a refrigerator. The popular outcry led by those burnt by the EatMan led the board to tell him the only way to save the company, and his fortune, was for him to step aside. 

Midas sank into his high-backed office chair covered in supple white leather all kept at optimum sitting temperature by Phrygia. He pressed a button on the desk, “I am not taking calls,” he said. He lowered himself into his heat controlled supple leather sanctuary to think of a follow up, while picturing all the people beetling aimlessly below him.

“Idiots,” he thought, closing his eyes. ■

*This joke was first told by a little-known stand-up called Brian Murray in the Frog and Fly pub in Luton, but statistics suggest it has since been told by around 54% of the world’s population.

One day a man going to the nest of his goose found there an egg all yellow and glittering, or so he said. When he picked it up it was as heavy as lead and he was going to throw it away, because he thought a trick had been played upon him. But he took it home and soon found to his delight that it was an egg of pure gold. One day he grew greedy; and thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find nothing.

“Oh, brilliant. You killed the fucking goose that looked like it might save us? That’s just brilliant, Colin. Just brilliant. What the fuck are we going to do now?” Helen hissed, perched heavily on a barstool in the kitchen living-room of a fiercely contemporary barn conversion.

On the smoothed hardwood bar in front of her the now-frozen goose seemed to look at Colin through the fogged plastic bag with much the same accusatory expression as breathless, seething Helen. Her pinkish neck extended and chest heavily beneath her large white maternity smock.

“Don’t worry, my dearest,” said Colin, twirling his waxed moustaches on either side and then pinching his beard to a point in the middle, shooting a mischievous look. Despite his bravado he was on edge. He had thoroughly prepared himself for this for this moment, having taken a look at the inner workings of their prize goose. 

“Don’t ‘dearest’ me, Colin. I gave up a cushy job in call centre management to help you with this hair-brained goose venture. We’ve mortgaged ourselves to the hilt and I’m up the duff. And now you’re telling me that you literally killed our businesses one asset stone dead. Tell me, how do I not worry?”

This, Colin realised, was not going to be an easy discussion. Helen, who was normally remarkably even-tempered, had become more irritable as her pregnancy progressed beyond the seventh month.

“Hear me out, my…,” he caught himself before doing it again. “My discovery is not the obstacle it might first appear to be. We have, in fact, made enormous progress in establishing the foundations of the business going forward.” 

“The kind of enormous progress a fisherman makes when they sink their boat or a baker makes when they burn down their bakery?”

 She was taunting him, but he held his nerve.

“No, no. This is where our business differs so fundamentally from such humble activities. Far from destroying value, what I have done is secure our financial future.”

“What? I don’t understand? Let’s look at the facts, shall we? Having blown all our golden eggs on this property we have just two golden eggs left in reserve and now one dead golden-egg-laying goose,” she said, jabbing an accusing finger into the breast of the partially-thawed goose.

“Ah, you are, of course, quite right in the factual details, m…,” he hesitated. “But, taken together with the full market context, the essential research I did on the goose has not been a disaster for the business. It is far from being a disaster. It has in fact revealed the true uniqueness of our golden-egg-producing-goose, while also ensuring us against devaluation of her eggs by decisively limiting their number, so ensuring their rarity. They are now a limited edition. In short, this means we can be certain the value of the eggs is not only maintained over time, but increases.”

“You are talking complete gobbledygook. How can having a dead goose possibly be better than having a live one?”

“Ah, well, that is where it gets really interesting. What we first need to do is to spread our new success story as widely as possible, making the story of this remarkable goose the talk of the and her eggs an unshakable benchmark of value.”

He continued with this babble, twirling his beard and hopping from foot to foot. He could keep it up for as long as it took to wear someone down. It could have been hours or days, but it was in reality two hours twenty-seven minutes and thirty-three seconds. 

He first talked, offering some examples and diagrams on a notepad. He answered her volleys of questions quite effortlessly. Though she did not understand a word, her worries gradually seemed foolish. She was first angry, then suspicious, then exhausted, then hopeful, deeply, deeply hopeful. 

This was the answer. Her breathing was now deep and soothing. She was sure this was the beginning of something, just as she had been sure when she first met him on retreat in the Scottish mountains. She was sure as she had been three weeks after when he had took her in his arms and invited her to be his partner in his goose venture and make babies in this soulless barn.

Gone were the doubts and gnawing anxiety that grew in her when she fell pregnant in that cold, isolated barn miles from anywhere. Gone were the doubts that rose when she found that he was already married. And gone was the stab of worry that took her when the bank account showed that the appetite for goose meat and eggs was not a fraction of what he had said. She felt as happy as when he had persuaded her that one of the geese had started golden eggs, perhaps happier still.

Colin was equally exultant as he looked at her freshly flushed face. More important than convincing Helen was that he had convinced himself. And he had done so fully. The ideas he had created buzzed now round his mind filling him with glee and excitement. This is how it had to be. There was no hope of implementing his ambitious plans for the goose if he did not embrace it himself. How could he expect anyone else to believe him if he showed any doubts himself? His anxieties and doubts had dropped away and he knew he was radiating the overwhelming confidence he felt when life went well for him. The power surged through him like the energy of an inner nuclear fusion.

She had heard from him how the goose’s value and that of the miraculously egg could be maximised and multiplied. Far from being a disaster, the untimely death of the golden goose was a masterstroke. It was not the death of a goose, but the birth of a suite of businesses under the umbrella of GooseTech. 

It signalled the moment when the goose could finally be genetically sequenced. Researchers could then buy the rights to the DNA database to help work out what gene might have been responsible for the appearance of the golden eggs. There were millions of scientists willing to part with a few tens of millions of dollars to unlock the potential of endless gold production. The goose weighed 4kg, and each sample need only be one nanogram, or one billionth of a gram. So potentially there were 4 trillion samples. If they were sold at 1,000 dollars a sample, that would mean sales of $4 quadrillion.

The golden egg itself too would be the root of many times its raw value as scrap gold. It would be legendary and unique. It could be carefully micro-sampled and sold at, say, $12 per dozen atoms to those wishing to work out how the egg came to be. That works out at 4-with-22-zeros-after-dollars, or $4 million quadrillion. Then there was Goosecoin, a crypto meme currency linked to a picture of the goose looking out of its plastic bag, which would quickly build a cult following among individuals who wanted to get in on the action.

Within months of the demise of the goose the venture capital community had invested billions in GooseTech Inc, sensing big profits. They were mesmerised by Colin’s complete confidence, pointed beard and side-to-side hopping. He seemed so ludicrous and the idea so idiotic that it must be pure genius. They invested enough of other people’s money to make GooseTech the first mega-unicorn, that is a private company with a valuation of well over $1,000bn. 

After a year a handful of investigations of the DNA and golden goose egg came up with nothing other than that it was a regular goose. And the gold samples too revealed that it was 22.3 karat gold. This amounted to a total revenue for GooseTech of just shy of $400 dollars, not including postage costs. No matter how much Colin hopped from foot-to-foot and pointed his beard, people wondered openly if there was much sense in doing any more tests. Would another test reveal a different answer? And there was talk of how Colin’s only previous business experience was as an estate agent in Kettering. This business, never wildly successful, had been wound up by order of a magistrate after he was found to have spent tenants’ deposits on a camper van.

It was said to have been the biggest fraud since the last biggest fraud. Colin, who had been syphoning company funds to his own account, went on the run. On a tip-off from Helen he was picked up, clean shaven on route to the Cayman Islands with a suitcase of thousand dollar bills. If found guilty he faces up to 3,466 years behind bars. ■

The black Lincoln drifted down the tree-lined avenue, chrome wheel trims reflecting the low evening sun. Across from me in the back Cindy, my wife of 27 years, sobbed and sniffed. Shafts of dusty sunshine swept across our faces in neat golden oblongs.

I leant over to try to catch her black gloved hand, to comfort her, but she moved it sharply away, preferring the damp ball of tissue on her lap. I leant forward and turned to her, trying to catch her eye from under the veil, but she was too quick and turned away to the window. Her teardrop pearl earring shook. Was it the movement of the car or her shaking? It was probably a bit of both.

Funerals, I hate funerals, particularly my own. I had been to dozens in this lifespan and it seems my own is the worst of the lot. I sighed as I sank back into the tan-coloured seat, cupping me like a baseball glove. I let out a weary sigh and the seat hugged me tighter, letting out a breath of cool, scented air to soothe me. It was good I went for the emotionally intelligent seating. 

I stole a glance in the chauffeur’s rear view mirror and saw Cindy staring straight out of her window. In some ways I was flattered, but it also seemed overly dramatic. It was just one lifespan and I had more than fulfilled my 25-year marriage contract, throwing in more than a decade of extra years purely out of goodwill. Her complaints had no logical or legal grounds whatsoever.

It was proving to be a tense end to an otherwise enjoyable lifespan. My biological age was 65, but a few judicious physical upgrades meant I kept the physique and appearance of a 25-year-old in prime condition. And Cindy could pass for 28, despite having a biological age of 83. It was only her enormous bank of subconscious worldly wisdom that gave the game away about her age. We joked about me being her “toyboy”. We’d learned that word on the couch 30 years ago watching TV shows from the 1980s, when death and ageing were still a thing.

There was still something endlessly fascinating about looking back on the days before universal immortality. Life was so raw back then. It was so binary, you were alive or dead, no middle ground. This rawness seemed to mean that people cared more, about life and for one another. Now people tend to just drift along, not caring so much about each other as they seemed to in the old TV films. Lifespan these days was mostly about finding something to do.

It was 397 years ago now, but everyone alive now had also been around at Year Zero, the start of mandatory gene-renewal. We were no spring chickens at the time. I was 65 and Cindy 83. Can you imagine our relief? It is a shame we could not live with that feeling of thankfulness imprinted on us, so we could enjoy every moment of every lifespan. But that is not the way it worked. The only way to stay fresh is to have our minds wiped at the end of each lifespan. Lifespans had to be kept distinct from one another or chronic fatigue was likely to set in. We are just not able to stay interested forever. 

 So in each lifespan we dropped into, in whatever role we were given, we began as a whole separate new person, with a completely new narrative. It was like being an actor cast in a completely different Netflix series but with absolutely no conscious memory of our previous roles. We were stuck with what we were given. The only thing we can do, other than play along, is call time and schedule an end to our lifespan as I had done.

Cindy was sniffing again. If I had known she was going to take my dying as badly as this I would have been more careful about telling her. It was so, well, “immature”, if I can say that of someone who is 479, if you add her biological age to the age since Year Zero.

There was simply no need for this kind of melodrama. Why get sentimental about any one particular lifespan, especially when it is not your own? It makes no sense. Controlling your lifespan length is a personal choice. That is the way I rationalised Kevin, our grown up son, deciding abruptly to end lifespan three years ago. It was a bitter blow to our self-confidence as parents, but we had to respect his decision. Kevin had a biological age of 52 at Year Zero and he had been through as many lifespans as anyone. So I guessed he had developed lifespan fatigue.

Cindy never really accepted it. And, to be truthful, I never felt as fully connected to this lifespan after. It is as if being made nominally responsible for someone else made me value my own lifespan more. Once that responsibility ended, my own lifespan seemed to lack something. Meaning, I guess.

When a romantic partner chooses to throw in the towel you could marry someone else, or enjoy being single for as long as you want, or you could call it quits yourself. But, reading around told me it was common for people to become very emotional about partners dying. Sometimes they were sad and shocked, sometimes a bit relieved. Maybe this is a flaw in humans even scientific progress will not let us escape?

With people living for as long as they want, funerals are often an alternative to divorce. Rather than go through the aggravation of breaking up with a contracted lifespan-partner people will simply pull the plug on their whole lifespan instead. That way they avoid the awkwardness of being around bumping into an ex partner for years. It is a neat solution all round. This is not the case here. I just needed a change of lifespan scenario, not a way to escape Cindy. In an ideal world she could come with me to the next lifespan, but that is not the way it works.

For my part I had done my best to make the whole announcement of my death as light and breezy as possible. People can tell when someone’s given their notice. There is a different energy around them. And I never believed in letting an issue like this become an elephant in the room. She was bound to notice I was acting differently. If something threatens to become an awkward, unspoken issue, just get it out right away, that’s what I say.

There was no better way to do this, in my experience, than to slip the information into conversation while doing something else. It was a method I had used on several occasions already. I had announced to my business partner that I had bankrupted our company while we were on a rollercoaster. He had shouted and punched me a few times, but that was all. 

And I told Cindy that our son Kevin had registered himself dead while I was crouched under the kitchen counter unblocking the sink. She had gone to stand in the garden for a few hours and did not speak to anyone for a few weeks. I dread to think what would have happened if I had not broken the news so well. Tennis, I had thought. I would tell her I was booked in to expire while we were playing tennis. We first met at the tennis club, so it had a certain symmetry.

 So, a fortnight ago, me and Cindy were at the tennis club about to play our weekly game. They had invented far better games now, but we did it for the deep retro. Maybe we both liked tennis before Year Zero? Deep retro was also the reason I was in my traditional collared white tennis shirt, shorter-than-necessary shorts and headband. Cindy had on her kitschy pink crop-top and tennis skirt and yellow plastic sun visor. 

“I will miss those body parts,” I thought.

“Hey, Cindy, let’s play a game,” I said with all the casual good nature I am known for. I walked back to the service line. I bounced the ball three times and served her a high-kicking one to her forehand. She was not quite ready and sliced it into the net. 

“15-love,” I said, then went back and bounced the ball. There was no time like the present, “I’m going to a funeral in a couple of weeks. It should be fun.”.

“Really?” Cindy said.

I served and Cindy sprinted to retrieve it, taking it on the rise at shoulder height while running full speed, producing a topspin drive down the line.

“Fifteen-all.”

“Whose funeral? Not Ernie?”

“Ernie?… No, no!” I shouted, serving another.

She scramble to retrieve the ball as it landed close inside the baseline, as it spat viscously forward low and fast. She struck it long to the backhand. I sensed her pink outline ready bobbing at the net to take a volley, so I looped a lob. 

“No, it’s not Ernie.”

“Whose then?” she said, while dashing back and making a sliced backhand landing mid-court. It lacked serious power and spin, giving me options. I drew my racket back as if to drive, then chipped a drop shot over the net with heavy backspin.

“It’s mine!” I shouted triumphantly as the ball dropped over the net. She did not move an inch. The ball bounced twice and rolled off. I started walking back to the service line. When I turned round she was standing staring, her mouth wide open. 

“30-15,” I said.

She stopped where she was, silent for maybe a minute. Then she let out a roar and started bashing her racket against the court, before throwing it over the perimeter fence, where it landed on top of a bush and stayed there. She started walking off. This is the kind of closure you get when you refuse to allow an elephant into a room.

“What?” I shouted after her. “What’s wrong, Cindy? Cindy? For God’s sake, Cindy!”

Clearly she could have taken the news better. And her mood did not improve in the weeks after either. None of my many attempts to lighten her spirits had worked. In fact they seemed to have the opposite effect.

This was not what I had in mind. I had pictured a real up-beat send off, with lots of parties, funny speeches telling people how great it was to know me, lots of booze and, in an ideal world, marathon farewell sex with Cindy. But, no, none of that materialised. 

She barely stopped crying all week and was generally morbid and resentful. Most of the time, like now, she would not even look me in the eye, let alone anything else. A scowl would be a step forward.

With all this weeping going on I began to get morbid too and eventually reconciled myself to having a thoroughly miserable farewell. Why do people have to take it so personally? My wish to move on to another life was about me and my feelings about this life and no judgement on anyone else, least of all Cindy. Truthfully she was one thing which made me want to carry on. I told her so.

“I was happy with carrying on,” she said, scowling.

“Everyone wants a change at some point. It’s natural.”

“Not me. Not at this point.”

“You just hadn’t reached that point yet. I’m sorry for that, but that’s just the way it goes.”

I told her how I had begun thinking I might have “multiple lifespan fatigue”, like they wrote about in the news. The idea is that having one lifespan after another with the same brain is no good for people. Eventually we start getting fed up with it despite every attempt to wipe our minds. I felt a weariness right from the start of the lifespan, I said.

“Bollocks,” Cindy said. 

The fact I had kept up my enthusiasm for most of this 30-year stint was nothing short of a miracle I would say

I was just thinking this when I heard Cindy leaning forward and talking to the driver.

“Pull over here on the right, Charlie.”

.We were outside the tennis club and before it stopped Cindy had the door open ready to get out.

“You can’t go like this on the way to my funeral.”

She pulled back her veil, looking me in they eye.

“Yes, I can, John. What you have never seemed to realise is that I’ve got lifespan to live too and that, somehow, it was connected to yours,” she patted the roof, slamming the door shut.

“I…,” I said.

I guess that was all there was to say. It was not ideal to have your wife bail on your funeral, but at least she would not bring down the mood.

 I saw Cindy go through the gate of the tennis club and out of sight. I turned and sat back in my seat, which tightened around me, soothing me with a cooling waft of air. I glanced at my watch. In less than hour this lifespan would be wiped. The engine picked up and the oblongs of golden sunlight drifted across the cabin. ■