To Live Forever

Chester Copperfield cackled up from his deathbed at the stricken faces of his offspring as his final will and testament was read aloud to the room. There were a surprising number of them, crowded into the small yet opulent room that housed his bed and the number of medical machines that clicked and wheezed about him. Sons and daughters and grandkids, a couple of great grandkids and off in the back of the room even a scattering of his bastards displaying a surprisingly variety of skin tones. It did not matter where they came from or exactly how they were related, because they had all just found out they were inheriting the same thing.

One dollar.

Chester used to boast that he had created his fortune off of one dollar. It was a grand tale, and uplifting vision of business building and self-suffenciey. It was all a lie of course. He had started out in life stealing his grandmother’s life savings by simply using her trust and her ATM card to fund his seedy little enterprises that mainly consisted of conning even more elderly and trusting people out of their life savings. From there more legitimate businesses were built that in turn budded into thriving corporations. Chester Copperfield, at the age of ninety-seven, was worth billions.

Chester’s eye roved up to the lawyer who was standing next to his bed and was carefully folding up the document he had just read from. He, at any rate, was receiving for more than a single dollar. In fact Chester winced internally when he thought about just how much he was paying the man. He did not trust him; trust was an emotion that Chester had never felt. No, he did not trust the man, however he made sure he was well paid. It was necessary. Necessary that he had someone who would fulfill his plans when Chester himself was no longer conscious. Chester liked that term, 'no longer conscious'. It sounded much better than 'dead'.

"And just where is all of your money going then?" exclaimed a red faced little blonde off in one corner.

Chester thought it might be one of his grandkids. He was not sure. He had never liked children, but as he feebly scanned the room about him he realized that in his lifetime he had never taken any great pains to prevent them. It did not matter now anyways. They were unimportant. They had no part in his plan.

Chester cleared his throat and spoke. Even though cancer riddled his body like worms in a rotten apple, his voice had still remained strong. He addressed not just the girl but also the entire room.

"I plan to purchase, with my own money that has been hard earned and belongs only to me, the most precious commodity in the universe. I plan to buy what each of you in this room holds in abundance and yet dawdles away even at this very moment." Chester paused for effect. "I plan to buy time."

Chester was pleased when the room broke into a hubbub of groans, rapid talking, sobbing and dropped jaws. He was also pleased when the lawyer cleared his throat loudly to subdue the noise in the room. Yes, he had paid him well. Chester shuffled a little on his silk pillow before he continued. The drugs that one of the machines next to him had intravenously administered to him were starting to take effect and he began to feel the effort of keeping his eyelids open. He wanted to finish telling his tale before he drifted off into the big sleep.

"Several years ago, when I first began to realize that there was no cure for the ills that ravished my body, I began to plan. I am sure you have all heard of cryogenics, the ability to freeze a human body until such a time comes that technology advances to the point that it can awaken and cure whatever ails it. Although the idea intrigues me, the fact is that I simply do not trust my body in the hands of whatever future generations may be in charge of it. Power is lost and mechanical systems shut down. Wars happen, governments change; religious fanatics and natural disasters all threaten that which I find most precious to me. My body."

The room was silent now, all eyes on him.

"Instead I have decided to give myself a chance. A gamble if you will. My body will indeed be frozen, but instead of trusting it to a slovenly lot such as you, I have instead decided to give the abode of my soul to the heavens. I shall trust my body to the stars. Several years ago I started a fledgling space company with a single intent; to build a rocket capable of launching my preserved body into space. All of my fortune is being poured into this project. Carefully cocooned in my egg of steel and plastic my body will drift through the stars until the end of time. My pod will emit a small homing beacon and, who knows, perhaps one day far in the future your own descendants or perhaps even beings from a place much wiser than earth will stumble across my body and revive it out of curiosity. I feel that, with time on my side, any possibilities may play out. It is an excellent gamble because I have nothing to lose."

This time Chester did not hear the pandemonium that filled the room. The drugs had taken effect and his breathing slowed and then finally tapered out. Consciousness and life fled from his body along with its warmth. His own death, like everything else in his life, had been planned and firmly controlled.

Eons. A dead mind has no perception of its passage. An entire galaxy of stars can be birthed and shine in all their glory and then fade back into the cosmic dust from whence they sprang and a mind void of life will never notice. Nonetheless when Chester first became aware of the beating of his heart and when he carefully opened his eyelids he swore he could feel the weight of the ages drifting off of them like an intangible ash.

He first became aware of the light. It blinded his eyes and for a brief fearful moment he thought that all the religions he had scoffed at during his life were right and that he was about to meet his maker. His eyes then quickly adjusted and he blinked a couple of times. He carefully took a deep breath and when no tortuously wracking coughs overtook him he exhaled with a sigh. He had done it. He was alive.

He held up a hand and gazed at it wondrously. Gone were wrinkles and the liver spots. It was the strong capable hands of a young man in his prime. Gone also was the small scar on his knuckle that he had gotten when he had once slammed his fist into the teeth of a cringing debtor. He flexed his hand and took pleasure in the strength he felt behind it.

Chester than gazed down at himself and took account of his surroundings. He was dressed in a flimsy white smock that was made from some material that felt like paper yet moved like silk. He was slumped in the corner of what appeared to be a large room that was covered in white tile. The floor and the walls and the ceiling all appeared to be made out of squares of ceramic tiles. After a moment he realized he could not tell where the light was coming from. Perhaps the tiles themselves were giving off radiance.

The room was large and almost featureless. A single door was on the far side of the room appeared to be made out of some sort of dull metal and was firmly closed. There was only one other feature of the room, and Chester could not quite figure out what he was looking at. It looked almost like a birdbath, a wide inverted cone that tapered off to a pedestal on the floor. It appeared to be made of the same white substance the tiles were.

Chester rose to his feet pleased that he came up quickly and firmly without any quaking or weakness. He started to walk towards the birdbath-thing when he became aware of a weight on his left ankle. He glanced down and saw with horror that it was a bright silver chain firmly attached to a clamp on his ankle. The chain led to a similar clamp that was bolted to the wall. He frowned and then bent down and gave the chain an experiment tug. It was, as he expected, quite strong.

Why was he chained? Chester pondered over it a moment. Perhaps whoever had revived him simply did not know what to make of him. Perhaps he was chained not only for their safety but his own as well. Somehow, Chester doubted that. He was a practical man and knew that you chained things up for one reason: to keep it from getting away. Chester let the chain drop from his hands and then wandered over to the birdbath-thing. Standing on the very tip of his bare toes, he could just peer over the rim. However, there was nothing to see, the insides simply sloped down into a hole at the bottom. He backed away from the artifact, not trusting it.

"Hello?" He called out. His own voice startled him for a moment next to the quietness of the room, however no response came forth. He tried calling out a few more times and then finally resorted to screaming at the top of his lungs. He tried to go over to the metal door, but the chain would not stretch that far. Finally, frustrated, he sat down and thought.

He had no idea how long he sat there. A few hours or a day, there was no way to tell time. He dozed briefly only to jerk awake at a faint sound. It sounded like footsteps outside the metal door. Large footsteps. Large enough that Chester was already on his feet and backing up when the door whooshed open with surprising speed and the thing came striding inside.

Chester knew immediately that the thing was an alien. No creature of earth had given birth to this monstrosity. The alien was nearly fifteen feet tall and almost as wide. The only thing that it seemed to hold in common with the human frame was a pair of massive stubby legs that tapered up and attached to a giant pair of quivering buttocks. Its skin was motley and gray like an elephants and the top of its body held no torso or head but instead a ring of a half a dozen quivering appendages. It looked, to Chester’s shocked eyes, like a giant walking ass.

The ass-creature held something in one of its appendages and tossed it to Chester’s feet. Chester backed away from it warily, however it appeared to be nothing more that a spongy bit of foam attached to a stick. The creature let out a surprisingly loud blubbery sound that Chester took to be some form of speech. It then lumbered over to the birdbath thing and unceremoniously plopped itself down. After a brief moment an entire orchestra of flatulence sounds came thundering out from under the great beasts hide and the room quickly filled with the foulest stench Chester had ever encountered. His eyes began to water.

It took no great leap of understanding for Chester to realize what was going on. The birdbath thing was in fact an alien toilet. As the creature expelled its bowels it let out a great blubbery sigh. When it finished it clambered off the great extra-terrestrial toilet and then bent forward and began backing up towards Chester. In horror and confusion, Chester himself backed away until he was cringing against the wall. The giant ass-alien's ass came up within a couple of feet of Chester and then stopped. A couple of the appendages that seemed to serve as sensory inputs as well as hands rotated back to peer at Chester. It made another blubbery sound that somehow managed to convey annoyance and one of its appendages snatched up the foam-on-a-stick and tossed it at Chester. Chester gazed horrified at the dripping orifice that faced him and suddenly realized what the creature wanted.

It wanted him to wipe its ass.

With shaky hands Chester picked up the sponge-on-a-stick and warily wiped it around the dripping mess of the creatures ass. The sponge made a sucking noise and seemed to quickly absorb the wet green goo. Once again the alien let out a rumble of pleasure. When Chester had completed the task as well as he could, the alien straightened up and without a further acknowledgement of Chester’s presence, strode out the door.

A few hours later another alien came, a different one as far as Chester could tell from its slightly different shape and coloring. Again the alien relived itself and then bent over for Chester to complete the distasteful task. The second alien wore something that looked like a belt with odd metal instruments hanging form it. Before this alien left, it tossed a small pebble at Chester, which he frightfully shield away from. It was not until a number of aliens and discarded pebbles later that Chester’s rumbling stomach informed him the pebbles were actually some sort of food. They were dry and tasteless but seemed to cease his hunger as well as slake his thirst.

And so Chester lived his life. He had little concept of time in the stark and unchanging environment of the room he was chained to, but as his beard and nails grew he knew that at first months and then years went by. Every few hours an alien would wander in to do his business and it came to the point where Chester would eagerly take to his task in hopes of receiving a food pebble. They were his only pleasure in life. Sometimes he thought he would go mad. Sometimes he prayed that he would go mad if it would only break the monotonous of his existence. But madness never came.

Chester sometimes heard sounds outside of his room when the door opened. He could not tell if it was machinery or music. Sometimes Chester wondered if he was in the bowels of some sort of alien factory and the beings coming to relive themselves were workers. Other times, as he fitfully tried to doze on the hard tiles of his corner of the room, he imagined that there was some sort of alien nightclub beyond the door and he was hearing the sounds of a raunchous party.

One day, or evening, or night, an alien came in to relive itself. Chester slouched next to the alien as it loudly farted and squelched out it last meal. The stench no longer bothered Chester. He was beyond smelling it, beyond caring. However, something of the crafty old Chester Copperfield still lived within for when he looked up at the utensils hanging from the alien belt he realized one of them looked like it would fit perfectly into the bolts that held his chain to the wall.

He suddenly found himself acting before he had even thought off a plan. When the alien bent over to receive it’s cleaning, Chester rammed his sponge-on-a-stick as hard as he could into the great alien anus. Bellowing in outrage the alien straightened up and began hopping around the room, its appendages twisting madly as they tried and failed to reach the stick that had been shoved up its ass. Before the alien had even realized what had happened Chester snatched the tool off from the great belt and rushed over to the shackle on the wall. He let out a whoop of glee when he found that all he had to do was touch the utensil to the shackle and the bolts undid themselves and the chain fell to the floor.

Chester did not wait a single moment, and bolted towards the door. He feared the door would not work for him, but when he came close it whooshed open for him as neatly as it did the alien. Chester ran out the door and felt a faint draft of air and a dulling of the outraged aliens roar as the door shut behind him.

He found himself in a long hallway that was dimmer than his room had been and he blinked a moment as his eyes adjusted. Stretching down the hallway was a long line of doors. Quivering with excitement and fear, Chester trotted down the hall and chose a door at random. He stepped in front of it and the door whooshed open accommodatingly.

Chester faced a room that looked identical to the one he had been in. It held the same glowing tiles, the same great pedestal of an alien commode. It was not the commode that drew his eyes however; instead he stared at wonder at the human being chained to the far corner. He had not seen another human being since he had died and he felt a sudden quivering relief that he was not alone, that another person had been just beyond his door all these decades. Chester hobbled over to him, excitedly babbling some nonsense of a greeting. As he got close Chester saw the other human staring at him with a set of wide eyes. A set of familiar eyes.

Chester Copperfield stared in horror at himself.

The other Chester looked younger. His beard had barely grown and his hair was not as wild. The other Chester had started screaming and backing away when a pair of outraged looking aliens burst into the room and grabbed the runaway Chester. He started to laugh madly as they dragged him out and back down the hall as each door they passed whooshed to reveal another chained Chester next to an alien toilet, each in varying stages of age.

Chester’s last screaming words just before the aliens shoved him head first down the alien commode was "I did it! I beat death! I beat time! I am going to live forever! Forever!"