Drew Magary - The Postmortal

Table of Contents

Magary has created a fictional future as wildly entertaining as it is eerily foreboding. The Postmortal is as funny, inventive, and outlandish as anything youll read this year. Or next. Assuming were all still here.

David Goodwillie, author of American Subversive

A darkly comic, totally gonzo, and effectively frightening population-bomb dystopia in the spirit of Logans Run, Soylent Green, and the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad and Stretch

I suppose you could wait for the inevitable Postmortal movie. But then you might miss Magarys rendering, his word play, his singular sense of humor. A book that is, at once bracingly funny andget this, Deadspin Nationunmistakably poignant.

L. Jon Wertheim, coauthor of Scorecasting

A startling leap forward. The Postmortal is dark, funny, and terrifying. This book draws such a vivid, convincing picture of immortality that it, quite literally, made me want to die.

Will Leitch, author of Are We Winning? and God Save the Fan

DREW MAGARY is a writer for Deadspin, NBC, Maxim, and Kissing Suzy Kolber. Hes also written for GQ, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, ESPN, Yahoo!, Comedy Central, Playboy, Penthouse, and various other media outlets. His first book, Men with Balls, was released in 2008. This is his first novel. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children.

You can contact the author at drew@deadspin.com or at twitter.com/drewmagary.

TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN

MASTODON, 2009

In March 2090, a worker for the Department of Containment named Anton Vyrin was conducting a routine sweep of an abandoned collectivist compound in rural Virginia when he stumbled upon an eighth-generation wireless-enabled projected-screening device (WEPS.8) that was still functional after charging. Stored inside the devices hard drive was a digital library containing sixty years worth of text files written by a man who went by the screen name John Farrell.

The text files appear to have been written as posts for a blog or online journal. Its impossible to know which of these files Farrell actually published in a public forum, as all mentions of his name in the cloud as it now exists lead to sites whose servers were destroyed during the Great Correction. There is also no way of corroborating that John Farrell was a licensed end specialist for the United States government for twenty years prior to the Correction. All U.S. Department of Containment servers were destroyed in June 2079.

However, considering the level of painstaking detail and the highly personal nature of the entries, combined with many of the articles and interviews Farrell saved, his writing is itself evidence supporting its veracity. As such, his collected entries must be considered one of the definitive personal records of life in the former United States during the sixty-year period that followed the discovery of the cure for aging. It must also be considered the most important first-person account yet of the end specialization industry that thrived in America in the last part of the century.

Farrell was a remarkably fastidious record keeper. He used the LifeRecorder app to preserve and transcribe virtually every human interaction he had, and he incorporated many portions of those transcripts into his writing. In its entirety, the collection contains thousands of entries and several hundred thousand words, but for the sake of brevity and general readability, they have been edited and abridged into what we believe constitutes an essential narrative, and incontrovertible evidence that the cure for aging must never again be legalized.

NB: The whereabouts of Solara Beck are still unknown.

There are wild postings with that statement all along First Avenue. If youve been in Midtown recently, youve seen them. Theyre simple black-and-white posters. Just type. No fancy fonts or designs in the background. No web address. That one sentence is all they say, over and over again, down and across the hoardings. When I walked by them, they were clean, as if they had been posted the night before. But I noticed, as I got toward the end of the block, that one of them had already been defaced. Not on the lowest rung but the second from the bottom. Someone had used a cheap, blue ballpoint pen to write something underneath the slogan. It was small, but it was unmistakable: EXCEPT FOR ME.

The doctor I saw has an apartment located near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. I got the address from a banker friend. He told me 99 percent of the guys he knows in finance rushed to get the cure the moment it became available on the black market. So if you know a finance guy, its not that hard to get the name of a doctor who can give it to you. Even now, after the arrests, and even after what happened in Oregon. In fact, its much easier than getting weed, at least in my experience. All I needed was an address, a password, and a phone number on a scrap of paper. That was it.

I should have been required to do more to get it, like cross an ocean and fight off a tribe of bloodthirsty headhunters, or answer a series of complex riddles asked by an evil bridge troll, or defeat some really big guy using karate. Something like that. But I didnt need to do much of anything, and I didnt feel at all guilty about it. I still dont. Once I realized that I could get the cure, I instantly wanted it, more than I had ever wanted anything. More than any woman. More than any long-overdue sip of water. Normally, any decision I confront is forced to navigate the seemingly endless bureaucracy of my conscience. Not this one. This impulse was allowed to bypass all that nonsense, to shoot through the gauzy tangle of second thoughts and emerge from me as pristine as when it first originated deep within the recesses of my mind. It was a want. A hunger. A naked compulsion that was bulletproof to logic and reason. No argument could be made against my profound interest in not dying.

The doctors apartment is located in a doorman building, but the doorman wasnt exactly a palace guard. He didnt ask me to sign in. He didnt ask me who I was seeing. Im not even sure he looked up from his racing form. I just walked into the elevator and pushed the button. All too easy.

I got out, walked down the hall, and knocked on the door of the apartment number Id been given. A voice from the other side of the door, and seemingly from the opposite end of the apartment, asked me to identify myself. I said my name and that I was there to pick up Ellas toaster. There is no Ella, and she had not left a toaster at the apartment. I found this part of the process far more exciting than I should have.

I heard the doctor walking over to the door and I watched the knob turn. He didnt quite look the way I thought he would. He was middle-aged but still youthful looking. Tan. Sharp silver hair. He didnt look much older than forty. And more like a banker than a doctor. I expected someone a bit dweebier, with glasses and a lab coat and whatnot. Someone far more careful looking. I think I would have preferred that. He shook my hand without identifying himself and shepherded me through the door.