Eden Can Wait

Chapter Eight: You Are Not Ready to Understand

I was walking the hallway again, following the driver, who was no longer nameless. Dennis's unhurried pace suited me fine—I could use a minute or two to digest the message Tessier had just delivered to me. Although I had a strong suspicion that digesting it would not be a matter of minutes. Internalizing insanity had never been my strong suit.

"You are immortal." What kind of bullshit was that? Immortal? As in Zeus and Dr. Manhattan kind of immortal? Really?

In my book, immortality simply didn't belong to the realm of possible. It belonged squarely to SciFi movies, fairy tales and comic books. A sentence that included terms research and immortality was simply not something to consider seriously. There was a special term that any self-respecting organization would choose to describe a project related to prolonging human life span. That word was not immortality. It was longevity. Same difference as between quantum physics and perpetual motion. One was real. Another, no matter how appealing it seemed, was pure imagination.

And yet here I was walking down a strangely lit pristine hallway built by people who clearly were absolutely serious about everything they did. They were serious about constructing this building with all its artificial lights and security systems, about finding and interviewing me, about giving me a ton of money and about having a clear multi-year plan for my future. Whoever they were, there were not practical jokers.

Apparently, in all their seriousness, they wanted me to pretend that I was an immortal character. Worse, they wanted me to become an immortal character. Not for long. Just for three years. They were offering me three years of immortality and even paying me for enjoying it. However insane that idea was, it was coming from people who seemed more sane than some of my college friends.

"I am immortal," came up a half-forgotten song. "I have inside me a blood of kings . . ." And an immortal macho swooshed his razor-sharp katana sword trying to chop off another immortal’s head in a nearly forgotten TV show. That's how immortality was supposed to be thought of. Cartoonish. Not serious. Not real.

And then it hit me: no one was suggesting that ESI was taking that whole immortality business any more seriously than I had been. Sure, they had told me to become immortal. But that was just a figure of speech—something that directors and coaches had been relying on for ages. Become Hamlet, be the ball. Tessier and Co. simply wanted my Five to be believable. The question wasn’t what they meant by it. The question was why.

"This is where you're going to eat," said Dennis, interrupting my stream of confused consciousness. Our trip had taken us to the entrance of a large room. I stepped inside, following my taciturn guide.

It was a mid-size cafeteria. Cozy and inviting, it looked every bit like any other cafeteria I had been to, with the only exception: there was nothing resembling a counter or a register. It was clearly a self-serve establishment. And of course, the room had no windows, but I was no longer thinking about that as a novelty.

Several glass refrigerators were fully stocked with packaged food. Walking part their glittering doors, I spotted beverages, sandwiches, fruit and all sorts of snacks. There was something evasively strange about the packages until I realized that none of them, including clear bottles with colorful juices, had any brand labels. It was as if ESI had decided to take away everything that could serve as a reminder of the outside world. A few tables and a dozen chairs completed the picture.

Strange or not, the cafeteria made one thing clear. There was no way they had built it just for me. The place was meant to be used by more than one person. There were others. Moreover, these others were already present in this building—stockpiling that much food for a single person didn’t make any sense.