Immortal Mistakes

now we're all immortal

Chloe lay the letters on the sheet in front of them, sliding her fingers across paper softened with age, re-reading the words"I love you so very much, my baby" "a thing growing in her brain" "They'll keep watching us and just let us die".

"I want them. I want my family's DNA," Chloe said.

Henry lay beside her, still naked, head propped up with one hand. The other hand was tracing circles on the small of her back and moving down towards the secret they shared. Fire built inside Chloe but she doused it. She pulled his hand off her body and tried to ignore how close he was. His skin. His smell. Salt and sex and Henry. Mistakes and forgiveness. She rolled on her side and kissed him, brushing her lips along his chin and up his jaw to the soft skin under his ear.

"I know you can get anything you want if Octavia's your mother," she said, into his ear.

His chest pressed against her chest. Their legs intertwined. "Everything I want is here."

"You have your family. I want mine too."

"Cloning mortals is illegal. Octavia'll never agree to it."

"Then go over her head."

"The President?"

"He must want this baby as much as she does."

Chloe had never met the President. She had seen him at award ceremonies and in news feeds, reassuring them all that their perfectly balanced world remained in check. That diseases and pests would never come back to haunt them. And she had seen him in Henry's memories. When Octavia took Henry out of class, right before graduation, ported him to the President's office and told him a story, as the President sat in front of Henry with his hands folded on his desk.

Henry was 17 and terrified that he had done something wrong. Every broken rule, every misdemeanour was spooling through his mind. Octavia ushered him into a velvet green armchair and he tried to sink into the soft cloth and become invisible to the glare of the most powerful man in the world.

Octavia sat  down beside Henry in a matching chair. She was the first of the three to speak. "David is President because of me," she said. "Because of you Henry. We're all here because of you."

"If I'm going to tell you the truth. I may as well tell you the whole truth. David was married to another woman. Soon Hee. She was beautiful. She was Korean, like him, and his family wanted him to marry her so he did." She looked at the President as she said this last sentence. He watched her but his expression didn't change. His face was serious. Impassive. The same face that appeared on every government bulletin. Henry thought he saw echoes of himself in that face, the eyebrows, the jaw, but he couldn't be the President's son. The President's son should be special, elite somehow and Henry was ordinary. He had lived in the compound with everyone else until the war was over. Then he was sent to Brisbane with everyone to finish school and now he was here, in a chair, in the President's office, listening to the Minister of Science tell him they were his parents. It was absurd.

"But he didn't love her. Not really. Not enough," Octavia said. She turned a little and looked at Henry now. "He was running for Governor in the State of California, not in this country, in another country called the United States of America. We moved here later, after you immortal babies were born. It was safer. I was a scientist back then with a big grant to study ageing. I found out how to stop it. It was so simple really. Monitor the gene changes that happen as an animal ages and stop them before they cause disease. I did it in mice. Thousands of them. Then I did it to myself. Then I did it to you, while you were in my belly. You were the first, Henry. The first immortal child."

The President unclasped his hands. The movement drew Henry's attention away from Octavia. "I asked Octavia to treat me too," he said. "That way, if there was some terrible side effect down the road, it happened to all of us."

Octavia smiled at Henry. "But there wasn't and now we're all immortal."

Henry's heart beat furiously. He gripped the velvet seat. He expected that any minute they would burst out laughing and tell him this was a joke. They didn't. They both sat there looking at him, waiting for him to say something.

"Why are you telling me? Why now?" 

"Because a child can't be trusted to keep a secret," the President said. "You are no longer a child. We can trust you now. You cannot tell anyone about this. There will be too many questions. People will want to know about their parents."

"Where are their parents?"

"Their parents died. They were mortal," Octavia said.

Henry had never told Chloe about that meeting. Never told her what happened the day he disappeared from class. She remembered him leaving that day, she was almost sure she did, but she didn't remember them ever speaking about it. 

Henry was running his fingers up and down her spine. Their foreheads were touching, so close his face was blurry. "I can ask him," Henry said. "But it's Octavia who knows where the mortal DNA is. We'll still have to go through her."

They stopped talking and let their bodies take over. Chloe had a baby to make after all.