Into the Blue

(3,446 words)

1

I’m doing this for you. At least, that’s what I tell myself. I hate flying, but you wanted the full experience.

I stole the Munin memory machine from the lockbox at the nurse’s station, knocked the “Code Blue” button on the wall, and disappeared into the commotion.

I’m risking a lot—my job, a fine, potential jail time if they prosecute it right—and the hormone prep I’ve swallowed will communicate that to you when you receive this memory.

That’s okay. It’ll add to the thrill.

I take a cab downtown to the Inner Harbor, try to breathe deeply to give you all the things we take for granted but you haven’t experienced in years. Baltimore’s furious traffic, salty air blowing warmly off the Chesapeake crowded with gulls, garbage, and arrogant hover-cabs tearing through the lower atmosphere touting fares I’ll never be able to afford. Historic tall ships bob along Pratt Street in the cool shadows of blind skyscrapers.

I cross Gay Street, rubberneck over my shoulder, checking for a tail. Police? Security? Human Resources? I’m not sure which would be worse.

Abuse of hospital resources.

Smuggling medical contraband.

Insurance fraud.

No one is following me, just the dense commuters heading out to a late lunch or early happy hour, but the accusations swirl through my consciousness. I try to push them away. That sort of stress isn’t what you’d be feeling on your way to the leisure district.

I have four hours until the next memory tech arrives. Enough time to fulfill our agreement and get the box back to the nurse’s station. Hopefully.

Ahead, beyond the lonely tower of the Baltimore Trade Center, a banner reads CHESAPEAKE VINTAGE FLIGHTS & EXTREME EXPERIENCES superimposed over an old military bomber.

A young college student presents me with a packet of papers. I sign the waiver, get in line. A hover-car floats on pontoons cheerily in the easy surf. We start boarding a few at a time. My legs are unsteady on the slowly rolling dock, or maybe it’s just nerves.

Flight anxiety is no joke. It’s not just the heights; it’s the loss of control. The total surrender to a stranger’s competence. I’d rather be gripping the throttle while we plunge to a fiery death than helplessly watch the ground speed toward me from a window seat on the wing. I am aware of the irony of this, that I’m about to jump headfirst out of a plane tethered to a stranger, but the line is moving now. I don’t give myself enough time to think. I let the line make the decision for me, clamber into the hover-car, and shut the door.

I’m doing this for you.

2

I met you on a Friday.

I’d just finished up in the Palliative Care Center with my last patient: an old man who thought he was supposed to be a rockstar. His family tried to be cool about it, but they weren’t thrilled about their dad’s memories being altered. They humored him, though, provided photos, medical records, fake tour dates at massive arenas.

Some people write whole novels and watch the movie play out in their heads as their bodies shut down. Take their last rattling breath playing to a crowd of 50,000. Do all the things they’d been too poor or scared or unlucky enough to do in their actual lives, all for the low, low, cost of $30,000—before insurance, of course.

I try not to think about that part. Instead, I focus on the good I can do: giving the gift of fulfilled dreams. Even if they are technically lies.

You were in the rec room on the 147th floor, staring out the window at the Chesapeake. A checkerboard sat untouched next to a glass of thickened orange juice and a scoop of grey-green meat that smelled like onions and lamb. There were tears in your blue eyes. The yellow tag fastened around your wrist marked you as an early-stage dementia patient.

Something about you made me stop. Maybe it was the way you tilted your head to one side as you watched the flight traffic, or how you drummed your fingers in a stuttering rhythm on your wheelchair’s armrest. Always in motion, as if stopping was ceding ground to death.

Or maybe it was just the cut and color of your hair. You reminded me of my grandmother, who cried as a stranger saw her off into the lonely dark. I often wondered what she would have chosen as her last memory, if she’d had the time.

“Hi there,” I said. “I’m Eli.”

“Florence was just leaving,” a voice said from behind me. Your nurse unlocked your wheelchair. “Your oxygen is back in your room.”

“I don’t want to go.” Your voice was feeble, shaky. “I want to watch the boats.” You pointed at the bay, past lanes of hover-cars clogging the atmosphere, to a flotilla of sailboats congregating out past the breakwaters.

“I’ll take her back when she’s finished.” I flashed my hospital badge and checked your wristband. “Room 14721?”

The nurse muttered an affirmative and left to help another patient.

I pulled up a plastic chair. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”

You said nothing. The sailboats bobbed in the choppy water far below.

“Did you sail?” I asked.

“I don’t belong here,” you said, after a moment. “I’m not sick.”

Your breath rattled in your chest. Walking pneumonia, on top of it all.

“Of course not.”

You shook your head. I offered you my hand, and you took it.

We spent the rest of the hour together, talking. I told you about my partner Alan, the medical program I was applying to at Hopkins, the trip to Ireland we took last summer. You told me about how you grew up in Western Pennsylvania on the shores of a small algae-covered lake with a yellow lab. How your ancestors built the railroads, how you married a Navy man.

“Never marry a Navy man, Eli,” you said.

“I’m sure I won’t,” I said, chuckling.

You tried to laugh along with me, but it quickly devolved into wheezing coughs.

“Your badge,” you said when you composed yourself, “it’s blue. I haven’t seen that one yet.”

“You shouldn’t have. I work in palliative care. Memory division.”

“Oh.” The wrinkles deepened around your eyes. “You’re who my children keep telling me about. They have it all planned out—one last Christmas dinner. Did they put you up to this?”

“No,” I said. “You just seemed like you needed a friend.”

“A friend,” you repeated. Silence stretched between us. “How does it work? The machine, I mean?”

“With the right tools, the Munin machine can generate passable imitations of most experiences.”

“Tools?”

“We call them Minute Particulars. Little details that lend credulity to generated experiences,” I explained. “If you wanted to live life as a movie star, we’d commission a graphic designer to fabricate film posters as a reference, have an author or a family member write out a proposed narrative of your life, and maybe even a screenwriter to provide a few sample scripts. Then we match the experiences with the correct neurotransmitters to make it feel tangible.”

You shook your head. “What if I don’t want an imitation?”

“What, then?”

“I want something real. Something I’ve never done. I want the pure, unadulterated experience. I want to live it.”

“Soliciting existent memories is more complicated, not to mention more stressful on the recipient’s body,” I said. “It’s not something any insurance I’ve ever seen would cover. But what would you pick if you could?”

Outside, hover-cars zipped between the skyscrapers that groped the polluted sky. The high-altitude freighters above painted white trails against the blue.

“Freedom,” you said, “To sail off into forever on my own terms.”

Your hands were shaking on the tablecloth, purple veins standing out under bruised skin. A leisure aircraft wailed by, rattled the cheap plates and cutlery on our table, headed out over the sailboats. Two figures plummeted from it, black specks against the sky, until parachutes opened, and they glided out of sight on the gentle breeze.

You raised a crooked finger, pointed to the leisure craft vanishing in the distance. A bright smile cracked your worn face. “Something like that.”

3

The hover-car takes us to an airfield outside the city. We’re each assigned an instructor and a number. I, somehow, end up first in line and get the first pick of the aircraft. According to my instructor, most dives are done via a modified hover-car. There are lines and lines of them, all sleek and shiny in the sunlight. There are other planes too, and, at the end of the line, the ancient B-17 bomber from the logo on the banner downtown.

“That one.”

The old warplane is army green with four engines that go brrrt like gatling guns and leak smoke into the sky. I strap into the navigator’s chair, listen while the pilot chatters over the headset about how his great-great-great-grand-whoever flew this plane during the second World War. The instructor lounges idly at the communication relay.

I hook up to my contraband Munin machine—courtesy of Cigna Specialty Insurance’s finest extortion division—then dig the two-way IV into my arm and don the immersion goggles. They suck on the skin around my eyes. A bit of blood leaks up the medical tubing. I flush it with saline. The memory machine gurgles and whirrs. My blood travels up the tube to a black box attached to my hip where my biometrics are paired with the sensory experience captured by the goggles. I grab a syringe of hormone blanks from the pouch on my waist and plug it into the IV port. We rumble onto the runway.

I wonder how it will feel for you to be embodied in my skin after living in your own for so long. That’s what this is, after all. No generative AI bullshit. No filter between me and you. We will be one flesh, if only temporarily. The thought is both intimate and unpleasant.

The hormone blanks burn at takeoff, reading my body’s endocrine system and recording adrenaline, serotonin, norepinephrine. The plane bumps and jolts in the turbulence. I try not to let my blossoming flight anxiety ruin your new memory. Instead, I pretend to be brave and unstrap my safety belt, grasp the support rail, and ask the pilot if I can sit in the gunner’s seat beneath the plane’s nose.

He grins. “The chin turret? Hell yeah.”

Baltimore drops away too fast through the glass dome. I wish for solid ground, but we’re past the point of return.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, barely felt over the engine vibrations. I dig it out. HARBOR GENERAL HOSPITAL flashes across the screen. I send whoever it is to voicemail, watch as the service’s speech-to-text types out the message:

ELI RIVERA: REPORT TO CHIEF OF MEDICINE BEFORE BEGINNING NEXT SHIFT. UNION REP WILL BE PRESENT.

4

Your youngest son was supposed to visit. After our first meeting in the rec room, we planned the conversation. The advanced directive was clear; the family had agreed upon your last image: a “perfect” holiday dinner from fifty years ago, back when your children were still young and the world was simpler. A nice memory by any metric, but the past feels less rosy when no one visits for months on end. Your pneumonia wasn’t getting worse, but it certainly wasn’t getting better. If we were going to change the directive, it had to be now.

On the day, we waited for him in your room. Your oxygen machine hummed quietly behind the bed. I’d brought you a little plane and plastic parachute army man to match the poster on your wall: Baltimore from 10,000 feet—the image that, we hoped, would be one of your last.

Your son arrived, a walking high-and-tight haircut. Ex-military, or wanted to be. Bootlicker extraordinaire. He breezed into the room in a black suit, black tie, black shoes, black aviators.

“Who are you?” He wasn’t looking at me, but the question was directed to me.

“Eli Rivera,” I said. “I’m—”

“Are they treating you alright, Mom?” Then, before you could answer, “Nurse, we’d like some privacy.”

“Sir,” I said, “Your mother asked me to be here for this meeting. I’m a memory tech from palliative care.”

“Meeting?” Your son looked from me, to you, back to me. “Oh no. Mom, no. Not again. We’ve been over this. The family decided. It’s what everyone wants.”

“It’s what you want, Evan.”

“Eugene,” he corrected you, then turned to me. “She’s not in her right mind. How can she possibly make this decision?”

“She can’t, legally,” I said. “She’s asked me to help her petition for a new memory—a donated memory.”

“Donated?”

“As opposed to generated.”

Eugene took off his sunglasses. “I don’t understand. Mom, don’t you want to spend your last moments with your family?”

“I wish this room had a window,” you said, breath catching, eyes drifting back to the skydiving poster on the wall.

“If you’ll just hear her out, I’m sure it would mean a lot,” I said. “May I speak with you out in the hall?”

Eugene blew out a breath. “Fine.”

“Look,” I said when we made it outside, “this actually isn’t atypical. Many patients change their minds about what they want as death approaches. We don’t usually need the executor to sign off on that.”

“So why are we having this conversation?” He checked his phone.

“Florence wants a donated memory. Typically, they’re much more intense than the generated ones, and more expensive.”

Eugene ran a hand through his hair. “We’ve already paid out through the estate. Anything that’s left over is for us; my mother was very clear about that.”

“I understand. That’s why I’m volunteering to do it for free.”

Eugene just stared at me, then narrowed his eyes. “Why would you possibly do that?”

I didn’t really want to get into it with him, but sometimes vulnerability fosters vulnerability. “My grandmother died last year,” I said. “I couldn’t be there for her. It’s the least I could do to honor her memory.”

“What is it? What memory?”

So much for vulnerability.

“She’s set on skydiving.”

Eugene actually snorted. “Wait, you’re serious? Will that hurt her?”

“There is a risk associated, which is why you have to sign off. It’ll feel real to her. The adrenaline alone could put her in cardiac arrest.”

“That’s assisted suicide.”

“It’s not. She wouldn’t have access to the memory until her last hours anyway. The morphine we administer to keep her airways open will keep her comfortable.”

“I just don’t understand,” Eugene said. He ran his hands through his hair again. His phone buzzed. He dug it out of his pocket and sent it to voicemail. “My mother is a family woman. This—” he gestured through the doorway to the poster on the wall, “—this isn’t who she is. She wants to be with us.”

“But it won’t be you.” The words came out before I could stop them. “It’ll be our A.I.’s best impression of you. If you can’t be bothered to be here on her deathbed, then why should she bother with any version of you?”

That was the wrong thing to say.

“You know what?” Eugene said, “Fuck you, buddy. We’re done. What’s your supervisor’s name? I’m lodging a complaint with him and with the medical board.”

“Sir—”

“I said we’re done.”

I gave him the information, then went on my break. I sat in the rec room, at the table where we first met, breathing hard. I watched the boats. Eventually, I made my way back to your room. Eugene was gone. You had unrolled the army man’s parachute and were throwing it up to the ceiling, weakly, watching him tumble down to your lap. You looked up when I walked in.

“Let’s do it anyway,” you said.

5

“Altitude,” the pilot says over the headset.

“Finally,” the instructor mutters.

I clamber out of the chin turret, follow him to the modified bomb bay: a narrow catwalk terminating at the jump platform. The plane bucks like an unbroken horse. I grab another round of hormone blanks from my pack, feeding them into the IV. Each patch of turbulence sends little jolts down to my toes. I try to control my breathing. Your heart is old, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re about to plunge into the blue.

The instructor clips his harness to mine. The pilot yells something from the cockpit, lost to the thunderous engines.

I think about you, the conversations we’ve had since our first meeting over checkers and pureed meals. How, when the pneumonia progressed to pleural effusion and eventually sepsis, I sat on your hospital bed and held your hand, skin purple and paper thin. I was with you the day they put you on the vent.

You asked, “How did we end up here, Jimmy?”

I don’t know who Jimmy is, and the tears in your eyes made it easy not to ask. It didn’t matter. I could be Jimmy for you.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said.

“We’re going to intubate now,” a doctor said from the doorway. You clutched my hand, hard, surprising me with your strength.

“Will you stay with me?” you asked.

“Pulse is getting tachy,” the nurse said. “Pulse-ox at eighty-one percent.”

“It’s time.” The doctor pulled on a pair of gloves.

“Florence, I’ll stay with you,” I said. “Don’t worry about anything.”

The plane’s engines jolt me out of the reverie. We hit the Chesapeake and land gives way to water. Nerves zap down my spine in giddy bursts. The bay doors whine open, exposing the circle of the world below. The Inner Harbor, Ravens’ stadium, Fort Mckinley. The wind tears at my hair.

“Ready?” The instructor’s breath is hot against my ear.

“Ready.”

Together, we plunge into open air.

* * *

We touch down in a field adjacent to the airport after a parachute ride that feels too short for how high we were. Another hover-car idles nearby. I clamber in, wait for it to fill with divers still shaky with adrenaline. On the way back, the flight is smooth in comparison to the old warplane. I inspect the Munin machine for damage, eject the memory cartridge, and place it in the backpack the skydiving service provides.

The original plan was that I’d wait a day, sneak in before my next shift to give you your memory. Things have changed—my phone, safe in the bag they’d provided, had two more missed calls from the hospital: one from my boss, the other from HR. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out what they want, but I’m not going to make it easy.

Fortunately, my badge still works, for now. I take an express elevator to your floor and reach your room without incident.

Readouts and machines flutter and beep. This morning, you were quiet, still, as you should be in your sedation. I offered to make the call myself to your family and let them know it was time. None of them picked up, save for Eugene’s secretary, who merely told me her boss’s wishes were expressed in the medical directive the hospital had on file.

“Any idea who Jimmy is?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.

Medical noise fills the silence now—the asthmatic cycling of your vent’s whisper valve, the stuttering beeps marking your thready pulse, echoed a moment later from the monitor at the nurse’s station down the hall.

I’m glad I can be here for you. We all should have someone.

“Hey, Florence, it’s Jimmy. I wanted to say that I—” my voice breaks, breath catching in my throat. I tried again, “I wanted to say I love you. I’m sorry for the times I’ve hurt you. Thank you for the times that were good. Please forgive me for the times that were bad.”

I squeeze your hand.

“Okay. Here we go.”

I set up the Munin machine on the plastic table beside your bed, plug the memory cartridge into your IV, and initiate the countdown. A small monitor flickers to life on the wall. Baltimore, the plane, the pilot, the instructor, me, legs shaking as the plane taxis to the runway, fades into view.

Words flash across the screen: <Ready first hormone dose. 5 . . . 4 . . . >

I wait until the appropriate time, press the plunger.

The machines flatline.

And your brain swallows the sky.