The End Specialist

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That said, they were all quite pretty. Some were knockoff versions of what you can get in the Diamond District, with the fake gold and the giant phony gemstones lining the rims. But there were some cool ones, too. I saw one made of stitched leather with a fake gold inlay. Oxo made a couple of stainless steel ones with comfortable rubber grips—the practical grail, if you will. They also had Goth ones, including a grail that had a curled-up dragon for a stem. If I had a van, I would definitely paint that grail on the side of my van. They had grails made of elaborately carved oak, for the environmentally friendly postmortal. None of them looked all that Jesus-appropriate. But hey, they were still nice grails.

I saw one in a Lucite box. It was made of crystal, with an engraved pattern of infinity symbols. I looked at the clerk behind the glass counter and pointed to the box.

“What’s that one?”

“That’s the DX3490,” he said. “Designed by the Swift himself. It’s the same one he drinks from on tour. You can even send away to have him sign it.” He pointed to a poster on the wall. Sure enough, there was the Swift, wearing a white suit and drinking a purple drank out of the very same grail. Spiffy.

“Do you think I could pull off rocking the same grail as the Swift?”

“Truthfully? No.”

He also showed me a room in the back where you can design your own. They had thick stylebooks you could flip through, like choosing wedding invites. You could pick the pattern, the font, everything. They even had suggested sayings you could have embossed on your grail. You could paint your own clay grail and then have them fire it in a kiln. I saw a couple up on the shelf waiting to be picked up. One said BETTY’S GRAIL. I have no clue why that made me laugh, but I nearly soiled myself when I saw it. They had matching grail-and-bong sets, which I found highly tempting, though God help you if you ever confuse the two at five in the morning.

In the end I chose a simple gold one. I wanted a grail that made me feel like a knight who had just finished a long day’s pillaging. The kind you hold in one hand while you eat a turkey drumstick in the other. The kind where you feel compelled to talk like a town crier while holding it. That’s the kind of grail I wanted, and that’s the kind I ended up getting. Twenty bucks. Not bad for the cup of Christ.

I brought it home, mixed a rum and Coke in it, and gave my usual cheers to Katy. I have to say, the Swift was onto something with this trend. Drinks taste way better when you’re drinking them out of a grail.

Date Modified: 11/7/2029, 8:51PM

Field Trip: The Fountain Of Youth

I hadn’t flown to Las Vegas since they opened Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino last year. I already knew it was the biggest hotel on earth, but I wasn’t prepared for the view from the airplane. There are familiar sights you see as you approach McCarran at night: the Luxor’s Pyramid, New York-New York skyline, the Shanghai, etc. But the Fountain now dwarfs all of them. An old lady on the right side of the plane was the first to spot it. She screamed out in joy when she saw it edging into view through her little porthole.

Everyone spontaneously broke into applause and chugged the contents of their respective grails (three steakheads from Long Island on the plane had DX3490s; I’m relieved I didn’t spring for one). I swear the jet spray shooting up from the center of the oval could have tickled our landing gear if we were flying directly above it. I read that the fountain continually pumps four million gallons of water a minute. Seeing it in person, the estimate now feels low. I assume that when they first turned the fountain on, the guy throwing the switch thrust his hips for maximum effect.

Upon deplaning, we circumvented the cabstand (the line stretched so far they had to move up the security checkpoints for the entire airport) and took the shuttle bus down to the Strip. The last time I was in Vegas, the ride took twenty minutes. This time it took so much longer that I asked the driver if there were multiple conventions going on. There were not.

He dropped us off at the main entrance and we walked into chaos. The hotel has over twelve thousand rooms, and this evening it appeared all of its occupants had decided to hang out in the lobby. We stood in the check-in line in shifts; half of us waited while the other half went to get drinks, and then we switched. When it was my turn to fetch alcohol, I walked out into the main atrium and stared at the fountain, a gigantic edifice of water that defies all reason. It’s as if the hotel is trying to put out a fire on the surface of the moon. Colored lights illuminate the mighty geyser in a painstakingly choreographed arrangement. Surrounding base of the fountain are the cure stations: small platforms with a doctor and a single chair that each soon-to-be postmortal sits in to get their shots. Like in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair has straps and belts to hold you down while you are injected. Unlike in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair is a specifically designed throne. You get to choose the theme for your chair. There’s your basic emperor’s chair (made of gold; it matched my grail!). There’s also the Poseidon: Lord of the Sea chair, which is actually a large, chair-shaped fish tank, with miniature sharks and all kinds of imported marine life swimming under your backside. There’s a Space chair, which is shaped like a giant egg and has two hot girls with big fake tits dressed as green aliens on either side of it. And there’s a Viking chair, which features a giant serpent erupting out from between your legs when you sit in it. Those are the four I remember off the top of my head. There were hundreds of these things, no two alike.

I was in awe. I turned to my friend Scott.

“I almost want to get my shots again.”

“You can do that here,” he said. “They’ll throw you a cure party even if you’ve had it done already. They just shoot you up with something besides the vector.”

“What do they shoot you up with?”

“I don’t know. Gin?”

They’ve perfected the process at the Fountain. You get your blood drawn when you check-in (separate, even longer line for that), then they have the vector ready for you three days later. In between, you presumably lose all your money and then spend the next thousand years trying to make it back. It’s incredible. After getting their shots, all new postmortals jump from the platform into the pool at the base of the fountain. Fully clothed, of course. I looked out to the pool and saw hordes of people frolicking in the water, all in soaking wet dresses, suits and tuxedoes, all drunk beyond comprehension. Baptized into the sweet life.

On the way back to the check-in, I noticed a small exhibit called Ponce de León and The Fountain of Youth. It looked like a pointless waste of time, which intrigued me.

“Hey, let’s go in that.”

Scott wasn’t as enthused. “That? That’s for kiddies.”

“We go in there, we finish our drinks, we get another round and head back to the line without anyone noticing. That line isn’t moving at all.”

“Oh, all right.”

So we went in to the exhibit, which was sparsely crowded due to the late hour and the fact that it was stupid. We walked through a dark corridor for about twenty yards, and then found ourselves in front of an enormous, scrolling diorama. A life-sized puppet of Ponce de León was sitting in an exact replica of King Ferdinand of Spain’s royal court. A voice-over narrated our journey as we watched the puppet hop onto a ship, sailing across a miniaturized version of the Atlantic Ocean (with real wind and water!).

In the year 1513, King Ferdinand of Spain commissioned explorer Juan Ponce de León to sail across the seas and find the fabled fountain of youth. It was a dangerous journey, as Ponce de León and his men battled scurvy, hurricanes, and pirates!

At this point, three pirate puppets popped up from the water and dueled with the Ponce de León puppet, who then cut off their heads. I drank to his victory. The Ponce de León puppet made landfall as we kept walking.

Landing in an exotic new land we now call Florida, Ponce de León rewarded his men with newfound riches of gold, sugar cane, delicious citrus fruits, and beautiful Native American women!

One of Ponce de León’s puppet crew then started making out with a buxom female Indian puppet. I should have been offended, but I was too busy being turned on. The Ponce de León puppet soon came upon a giant fountain, which disappeared down into the ground.

Ponce de León’s quest for the elusive and mythical fountain proved fruitless, and the legendary explorer died while trying to find it.

The Ponce de León puppet then shouted out, “Nooooo!” and keeled over.

But now, Ponce de León’s dream has finally been realized!

The Ponce de León puppet’s corpse was airlifted by his strings across a fake U.S. landscape to a miniature model of the hotel we were standing in.

Here, at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Do all the things Ponce de León always dreamed of doing! Dine al fresco at Fukuku Oh! See Cirque de Soleil in our exclusive new show, Eternia! Or try your hand at Texas Hold ’Em! It’s all here, along with over five hundred board-certified geneticists ready to give you the cure for death! Only at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Eternal life has never been so luxurious! Right, Ponce?

The Ponce de León puppet then sat up, looked at us, and said, “Sí”. We walked out.

“I don’t think that presentation was historically accurate,” Scott said.

“Well, sometimes you have to take dramatic license.”

The rest of the weekend was spent in a drunken fog, each hour as pointlessly hazy as the last. For his cure ceremony, our friend chose the Velvet Dream chair, a throne nine feet high and made of a purple fabric that purported to be velvet but was almost certainly some kind of space-age, sweat-wicking polymer. It was a practical choice. If you’re going to be stabbed by three giant fire pokers, you’re gonna want to feel as relaxed as humanly possible. Afterwards, we visited the Spearmint Rhino IV club. Every girl inside had a long, lucrative career in front of her. I’m not terribly comfortable in these places, which I find reassuring in a way.

Next to the casino floor at Fountain of Youth is a stadium-sized mall that exclusively houses shops selling cure-related merchandise. You can get your pick of commemorative t-shirts (I’M HOT…AND I’M STAYING THAT WAY was a popular choice), steel cookware with lifetime warranties, go-tox clinics for older postmortals, safes, laser vision correction, and thirty-year tattoos. There were no wedding parlors, and I didn’t see a single bachelor party the entire weekend. Just one cure party after another.

On our last day, there was a bomb threat in our section of the hotel. They evacuated our rooms and made us wait outside on the Strip. It was the only time during our trip that I was reminded of 7/3/19, and it unnerved me. The manager assured us they dealt with these threats all the time, which only served to worry me more. As we waited along the Strip, I saw a group of men pass by the hotel on the opposite side of the street. They stopped, looked at the hotel, whispered some things to one another, and then kept walking. As they did, I saw one of them wave to the building, as if saying goodbye. I ran to alert a nearby officer, who seemed unconcerned. The men turned the corner. One of them saw me talking to the cop and smirked. He held up his hands and gave me the death symbol: a cupped left hand pressed against his straight right hand, forming a crude D.

After that, I didn’t relax until we were in the plane heading back to LaGuardia. The flight was delayed for three hours due to traffic on the runway.

Date Modified: 11/15/2029, 3:02PM

A Day In The Life Of A Terra Troll

After my experience outside of the Fountain of Youth, I came across this anonymous blog posting from someone who claimed to work at the resort.

Contrary to what hotel officials say publicly, the FOY has been attacked by trolls on numerous occasions. These aren’t just simple bomb threats, designed to have us running around in circles. One troll sneaked into the fountain area, saw a fresh postmortal walking out of her cure ceremony and threw lye right in her eyes, blinding her. The entire time security personnel was wrangling him and making him eat pavement, he was giggling like a madman.

It’s not the pro-death insurgents we fear while working here. We have tight enough security to make sure guns and bombs are kept out. It’s the trolls that are the big problem. Because they aren’t looking to kill people. They just want to ruin lives. If you stay here, you always have to keep your eyes out for them. Or else, boom! A handful of lye.

—DanBenjaminsACheapskate

I’m glad I read that after I finished my stay, or else I’d have fled from the hotel like a terrified schoolboy. Then there’s this profile of a troll that P.J. Matson wrote last month for New York. I needed to take a shower after reading it.

UNDER THE TERRA TROLL BRIDGE

By P.J. Matson

XMN doesn’t like people.

“I mostly keep to myself, because other people are just annoying.” He tells me this as we sit together in a burrito shop near his home in San Jose, California. The shop has a relatively sparse crowd this afternoon, but XMN’s mannerisms say to the outside observer that he feels anxious, even a bit claustrophobic. His eyes dart back and forth. He never once looks at our waitress while ordering. He scratches his face constantly, though he doesn’t appear to have any bites or scrapes that need relief.

“When I found out about the cure being legalized, I was just crushed. Because the idea that there would be more people walking around, sucking in air like a bunch of fucking mouth breathers… I couldn’t handle the idea. I always subscribed to the theory that hell is other people. Well, here come more other people! I get sick just thinking about it.”

I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.

At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large subculture of people online known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can: on message boards, on blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the email account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after, you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” he boasts. XMN also cited multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”

But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder each day to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore if it happens to you for real.”

So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.

Vandalism? “Yes.”

Bomb threats? “Yes.”

Blindings? “Just one, but I’d like to do more.”

Keying cars? “Yes.”

Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”

Arson? “No, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”

Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”

I ask XMN why he doesn’t choose to cross the line into full pro-death fanaticism and kill people outright. “I’m not a nutjob. I’m not a terrorist,” he protests. “I’m not going to go around killing people. I just think that if people are going to live in this world, why do they deserve to be happier than me? They should have to go through every day feeling as lousy as I feel. And then, maybe, they’ll stop walking around like they own the place. Maybe they’ll have some respect for other people, like me.”

XMN admits to coming from a broken home. His mother died when he was young, and he says his father physically abused him and sexually abused his sister. Ridiculed at school for his gawky appearance, XMN walled off the people around him and took refuge in the online community at SiPhallus. “They’re people like me. They understand that this whole society thing is just a bunch of bullshit.”

But doesn’t he ever crave real contact with people? “Not really. I’m very private. I don’t like being touched. I don’t like it when people are friendly to me. It’s like, ‘Who are you? What the hell do you have to be so sunny about?’”

I ask XMN how many other “terra trolls” are now out there, planning to wreak havoc. His eyes twinkle. It’s the first time all day that I’ve seen him express genuine excitement. “There’s a lot more of us than people think. And more people are joining every day.” It’s hard to know if he’s telling the truth, or simply playing another one of his games. Studies of terra trolling are nonexistent, and laws against it are just now coming into shape. There’s no data for committed terra troll crimes as of yet.

I ask XMN if perhaps this is not the best way to spend one’s time. I ask if it’s perhaps a symptom of a much deeper personal problem that he has failed to address. He thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s part of it. Then again, I don’t know if the problems I have can ever be fixed. I don’t know how you go about being reborn into a family that loves you. I think I’m damaged permanently. And if that’s the case, everyone else deserves the same fate.”

He finishes his burrito and tells me the story of a time he broke into a woman’s house and stole her cat. He drove the cat fifty miles south and released it out into the wild. “That way,” he says, “she’ll never know what happened to it. It’s a double whammy.”

I ask XMN why he did it.

“Because it’s funny,” he says. “It’s so funny to me. It makes me laugh.” He does not laugh when he says this.

He leaves the shop early as I pay the tab. When I walk out to my car, I see a small sticky note attached to my front right tire. I grab it.

“I could have stabbed your tire, but I didn’t,” the note says. “Just this once, I’ll be a nice person.”

Date Modified: 11/16/2029, 10:19AM

Afternoon Link Roundup

• South African freighter had to be rescued by an American destroyer after it became immobilized in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. [Mail + Guardian]

• Russia’s population climbs above two hundred million for the first time ever as its government makes getting the cure mandatory for all military personnel under the age of thirty. [The Times]

• Casey Jarrett’s mother speaks out for the first time about watching her son being executed. I think it’s possible to feel sympathy for her while having absolutely no sympathy for her son. [ABC]

• The date of the consumer gas ban has been pushed back to March 1, 2037. [FNN]

• Leighton Astor was convicted of killing her billionaire father in an attempt to prematurely claim his estate. Her father had a cure age of sixty-two. The night of the murder, one witness heard her screaming, “I WANT WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.” [The New York Times]

• New studies show postmortals are 59 percent more likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver within the next ten years than their true organic counterparts. [DanBlog]

• The West Antarctica Ice Sheet may be gone by the end of the decade. [BBC]

• The staunchly anti-cure town of Soda Springs, Idaho (home to the Mormon sect known as the Deliverance Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or DLDS), has built a wall around itself and quietly seceded from the United States. Town mayor Thomas Maskin explains why: “The concept of America has outlived its usefulness. Why should we pay 30 percent of our salaries to help keep some crack addict in Detroit on welfare for the next thousand years? Why should we care about people in California? Or Florida? Or New York? Why should we share anything with them? They’re not our people. They’re not our family. They’re as foreign to me as Arabs. They all want to live forever and don’t have the faintest clue how they’re gonna eat a hundred years from now. Well, they’re going to find out soon that their country ain’t gonna help them. They’re gonna find out every man is his own country now.” [The New Yorker]

• Annual sales of cigarettes have reached an all-time low. My friend Walsh now accounts for the majority of all Parliaments sold in the US. [NYist]

• The producers of the Saved By The Bell reboot have petitioned the governor of California to allow them to administer the cure to the show’s teenage stars, so that they don’t have to graduate in the show. The governor denied the request. [Variety]

Date Modified: 11/17/2029, 4:44PM

“I’ve Made A Terrible Mistake”

That’s my dad talking. He was grumpy all Thanksgiving Day long, even during the football game.

“I never should have gotten this cure,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You know I got laughed at the other day? I was walking to the supermarket and there was a group of kids outside the store. They couldn’t have been more than twelve. And they just sat there and laughed at me, calling me ‘old man’ and all that garbage.”

“So what?” I said. “They’re just kids.”

“Yeah, and they didn’t let me forget it. They were more than happy to let me know that I don’t belong in this world anymore. I feel like I’m stuck outside a ballroom window, watching a great party everyone but me got invited to.”

“I thought you were happy. I thought all your buddies got it.”

“They did. Ted Maxwell got it and then had his face done. They pulled his cheeks damn near behind his ears. He looks like a moron. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten this done. I knew it!” The tightly upholstered armrest of his dining chair had become worn and frayed. He angrily picked at the loose threads.