He clambers out of the pool and wraps a cotton towel around his waist. The sun’s heat dives down through the open blue sky and sweeps across the golden prairie below and sizzles on the oil of his skin and focuses through the beads of water like drops of glass. He reclines onto a lounger and pulls ice from the bucket which he swabs across his head. There’s a cold beer waiting for him in the depths of the bucket which he pops open and drinks from.
As the gentle acidity washes down his gullet the old man thinks about just how old he is. Biological time is somewhere around sixty. Chronological time is over two hundred. Universal time is more than four thousand years. When he started out they had no solid biostasis so he’d age in transit for as long as it took. His first voyage was fifteen years. At near-light speed, relative time back home had advanced twenty eight years in that time. Technology had come along. He never expected to come back but that second journey hardly aged him a year. Metabolic Slowing they called it. After that he took a big stint out to Eclipse. More than a forty year journey. Aged less than three months with the new biostasis cradles they’d cooked up in the time he’d taken on the second journey. And each successive trip he went further, for longer, and aged less. It snowballed. More than four thousand years have passed since he was born. There are people born just twenty years after him which will keep going for twenty thousand years. There are people born after them who could feasibly keep going indefinitely.
The catch is, you can’t stop. Any time spent not in transit is a waste. Just as your time extends exponentially by travel and the ever-advancing technology that enables it, so too does it shrink exponentially as you sit on your ass. But, the old man thinks, in transit, you don’t get to swim. Or sit in the sun. Or drink a beer. No, you don’t do much of anything, except be alive. And what’s the point in that?
Paddy Dobson
9th June 2021