Asylum Flight
by Oscar Deadwood
part 1 of 2
The television came on and Ben knew it was time to go. It was another one of those ridiculous talk shows, a male and female host in their late sixties and undoubtedly Enhanced. The show, like all the shows that appeared on Ben’s screen, always managed to be about the Asylum Flight, and today’s guest was a ‘pilot’.
“Where the hell do they find these people,” Ben said to himself as he vainly tried to turn the television off. It was no use, but Ben always tried to turn the set off before leaving his two-room apartment, where he lived alone in a crumbling senior citizen high-rise apartment building on the edge of downtown Royal Oak, Michigan.
He watched the program for a brief moment, but couldn’t hack it for very long. The pilot also seemed to be Enhanced and Ben had no love for the Enhanced, especially since his own son had joined their ranks.
“The great thing about the Flight,” the pilot said in a way Ben found to be condescendingly smug, as if everyone Ben’s age were stupid. Unfortunately, it was almost true; so many of the residents in his building had been brainwashed through their television sets, which were turned on automatically by satellite and kept on for fifteen hours a day. “The great thing is, is that you always wind up with someone you love and with someone who loves you.”
The pilot, a man in his fifties with broad shoulders and a military style hair cut, crossed and uncrossed his legs. “You know,” he continued, his face suddenly anguished, “so many of our passengers have been living alone for so many years, and this world isn’t the friendliest place in the universe, in fact it is quite cruel.”
“You are so right,” the female host said, her face forcefully sorrowful, as if she felt deep pity and compassion for those lonely people who lived alone, people just like Ben. “It is so sad the way some of our seniors spend their last days in this world, I mean, it’s too bad they can’t take the Flight sooner.”
“Well, many try, but the age is still eighty-five. That may change soon for extreme cases of desolation and illness or as the burden on our health care system increases. But for right now, unfortunately, you have to be eighty-five.”
Ben would be eighty-five in a week, and he had no desire to take the Asylum Flight. But it seemed inescapable.
Ben drained his cup of coffee and headed for the library, the only place in Royal Oak and probably the world that was remotely sane and the only place he could leave his age behind. Every morning he would leave his apartment once the television started blaring, and he would leisurely walk across Royal Oak’s small downtown to the library that had changed precious little since his childhood.
The library was the only place where one’s senses weren’t assaulted with corporate logos. The downtown Royal Oak of the twentieth century was like any other Main Street in America. The clothing stores, banks, butcher shops, bakeries, hardware stores and barbershops were all locally owned, but they all disappeared in a corporate onslaught that started decades ago. Ben decided the end came when Starbucks came to town, in 1990-something, changing the Royal Oak landscape forever.
In the thirty years since the close of the twentieth, many of the buildings that Ben had known all of his life had been razed. Gone were the ornate storefronts built in the 1920’s and ’30s, replaced by loft-style apartment blocks of glass and steel, monstrous cubes casting huge shadows over the downtown streets.
Ben would start his trek to the library by taking the elevator to the lobby of his building, where other residents his age would sit open-mouthed, drinking coffee and watching television, watching the same program he would be forced to watch if he remained in his apartment. The programming was inane, tailor-made for those in their eighties, all in an attempt to prepare them for the Flight they would have to take on their eighty-fifth birthday.
But Ben knew better. His mind wasn’t massaged all day and evening long by the flickering images on the television screen. The library kept him sane, it kept his mind active and sharp in his constant search for the truth.
It was summer, and the aerocars hovering in the sky and the older cars cruising on the street shot little wisps of exhaust that hung in the humid and warm Midwestern air. Ben loved the summer, walks to the library in the winter would often be grueling as his body couldn’t take the cold anymore, and no amount of clothing could keep the chill from penetrating to the marrow of his bones.
The scene outside was as mind numbing as the foolish stories on television. Every building was plastered in advertisements, mostly for software for the Enhanced, financial services, soft drinks and casinos. At night, when Ben walked home from the library, it was worse; the sky was lit with holograms — gigantic billboard-like images that littered the sky, blocking the moon and stars from view.
Even the sidewalk had been taken over for advertising. Ben used to love staring at the ground when he walked. Sidewalks had character. He used to study the flaws and indentations in the concrete ever since he was a child and he missed the sight of grass struggling to grow through the cracks.
But recently, the downtown sidewalks had been replaced with a sort of hard plastic walkway. They served as a sort of moving television screen, where scenes would change as one walked and in time with one's pace. Advertisements were shown, tailor made for the individual walking. The whole population had been given neuro-transmitters in 2020, chips inside their brains where memory could easily be accessed.
What one saw on television, and what ads one saw on the sidewalk, were all selected based on the data retrieved from one’s memory.
Today’s ad was particularly pointed. It was an ad for luggage, that special luggage that so many in Ben’s building bought for the Asylum Flight.
The makers of this ad keyed into Ben’s transmitter in a hurry. They knew that Ben was a veteran of the Vietnam War and assumed he was patriotic. Images of suitcases wrapped in the Stars and Stripes flickered in front of Ben, though he desperately tried to ignore them.
“Travel in style for the trip to the other side,” the ad blared from the sidewalk, showing a picture of Ben, flag-waving luggage in hand, getting off an airplane, an airplane that landed on a beach of some tropical sea. In the picture, Ben looked quite tan, healthy, muscular and full of energy, quite different from the way he really felt: old, pale, thin, weak, and frustrated with the insanity of the world, a world run by the Enhanced.
The ad finally did tug on Ben’s emotions though, when, as he walked off the runway, he saw himself being greeted by his wife, his wife who had passed away from cancer just a decade prior.
Ben saw himself being hugged by his wife and then kissing her long and passionately in a way that he hadn’t done since they were in their thirties. His wife looked good too, her figure was fuller than it ever really was, and her face glowed just like Ben’s.
“You bastards,” Ben said to himself, closing his eyes and walking as fast as he could the rest of the way to the library.
The sight of the library around the corner brought Ben blessed relief, but it was premature. A policeman who had been hovering in the air above him descended, blocking Ben’s path.
“What’s the hurry there, pops?” the policeman asked.
Ben hated the police, theirs was the first profession that was forcefully Enhanced and in a very specific way. The computer relays wired in their cerebral cortexes were networked with all the crime computers of the world, they could instantly translate any language and be able to speak it, albeit crudely, and they were wired to let no emotion play into their police work. They weren’t friendly, they weren’t mean and they absolutely never felt empathy for any victim or criminal.
“No hurry,” Ben said sullenly. “Is that illegal now too? An old man trying to run?”
“Of course not Mr. Bosworth,” the policeman accessed his neuro-transmitter and instantly knew Ben’s name. Ben had been stopped quite a bit recently, as his eighty-fifth birthday drew closer. It seemed like the police had become suspicious of him, as if he would try to miss his Flight.
“I just want to make sure you’re okay,” the policeman continued, smiling at Ben in the way a grandparent would talk to a small child. “Do you mind if I see your ID?”
Ben retrieved his wallet and showed him his state issued identification card; his driver’s license had been seized on his eightieth birthday.
The policeman gave a low whistle. “Wow, aren’t we about to be the big birthday boy! Congratulations Mr. Bosworth, you must be very excited.”
Ben shrugged his shoulders and shuffled his feet, staring at the library door with anxiety.
“You know, Mr. Bosworth, those of us at the station have heard about you, the old man who walks to the library everyday. What do you do all day, sitting there in the library?”
“I read, I hide.”
“Hide? From what?”
“My age.”
The policeman nodded, not really understanding Ben’s sarcasm, even with his Enhanced intellect.
“Well, I guess you can go Mr. Bosworth, you go in there and hide.” The word ‘hide’ confused the policeman, there was no hiding anywhere in the world these days, not with neuro-transmitters placed in every American’s brain. “Maybe I’ll be the one to escort you to the runway. Wouldn’t that be something?”
Ben shrugged and walked towards the library as fast as his arthritic knees would allow.
The interior of the library soothed Ben like the effects of a narcotic. The perpetual quiet and the quaint and familiar dusty smell of aging books were a welcome relief from the overwhelming and confusing world outside.
And it was nearly Enhanced-free.
Only the Naturals, people without computer-aided intelligence, still seemed to use the library. The Enhanced had no need for it. Depending on their software and depending on their accesses, one of the Enhanced could be networked with a variety of computers — biotech labs, universities and hospitals — having access to any bit of information that they could possibly need or desire.
And the Enhanced didn’t read for leisure. The programs downloaded into their brains had eliminated some aspects of joy. The Enhanced had no use for music or much appreciation for works of art.
They were, however, avid watchers of their own television programming. Ben had seen shows that would never be shown in his own apartment. He had seen one of their television shows once, at his son’s house. The show seemed silly to Ben, nothing too intellectual, but his son and his Enhanced wife both chuckled at the slapstick nature of the program.
Ben preferred reading, he always had. He had always been able to read for long periods of time without becoming fatigued. And that’s how he had spent each day since his eightieth birthday, ever since he was removed from his little bungalow in Royal Oak’s north end and planted in the crummy little apartment in the bleak and soulless high-rise building he now had to call home.
But it wasn’t really home. Home was still in his memory; home was the place where he raised his son and lived in marital bliss with his wife for so many years. Home was a different world, a world where the elderly weren’t forced to take a flight God-knows-where upon the occasion of their eighty-fifth birthday.
Ben, like all of his neighbors, thought for years that the Asylum Flight really would take them to some sort of paradise, some part of the planet that the government had set aside for the elderly to finish up their dying days.
But his reading in the library gave him clues to the true nature of the Flight.
Ben had always been a fan of history, all periods and from all parts of the world. He had been reading a book, about a month prior, sitting at his usual table in the far corner of the library, practically unobserved by the library staff who viewed Ben as another eccentric old man, one of many who shuffled in and out of the library. It was a book about World War II.
Oddly, there was no mention of the Holocaust.
Copyright © 2006 by Oscar Deadwood
