Life In the Future — Part Seven
By Alex Shvartsman
The short East Asian woman approached Lippert with a tray filled with tiny paper cups containing pills and somewhat larger plastic cups with water. The old man glared at her but made no move to accept the proffered medicine. He said something Peter couldn’t hear.
Peter took a step forward and leaned in, straining to overhear some of the futurist’s wisdom. He needn’t have bothered.
“Get that out of my face!” The old man’s shrill voice grew louder until it drowned out the news program. “I’m wise to your game. Feeding me poison to accelerate my demise. Freeing up resources for more freeloading foreigners like you.”
The nurse bore the brunt of his abuse with practiced indifference. “Come now, Mr. Lippert. The doctor said—”
“The doctor!” Lippert had a coughing fit, droplets of spittle flying from his toothless mouth. He reached for the tube attached to his tank and sucked in some oxygen. As soon as he could breathe again, he continued. “I’ve got socks older than that charlatan. Probably got his degree as a prize at the bottom of some cereal box.”
Lippert went on castigating the nurse. Peter listened, his mouth agape. He had a hard time reconciling the brilliant futurist from the pages of the old magazine with the cartoonish misanthrope before him.
“Is he always like this?” Peter asked the orderly.
“Worst curmudgeon in here. Clint used to be a sweet old guy. Kept to himself and scribbled stories. Maybe the ones you read? But he got mean and cranky after his stroke. Doesn’t write none, either. Spends all his time berating the staff, instead. Shame, that.”
The nurse waited for Lippert to run out of steam. “The doctor said,” she continued as if the old man had never interrupted her, “if you don’t take your medication, the TV gets turned off. Do you want the TV turned off, Mr. Lippert?”
They nurse and her patient stared at each other for maybe ten seconds. “This is elder abuse,” said Lippert as his shaking hand reached for the pills. “I have a mind to pen a strongly-worded complaint to my congressman.” He popped the pills into his mouth and gulped down the water.
“I’m sure Congresswoman Martinez would be delighted to hear from you,” said the nurse as she moved on to the next patient.
Peter didn’t know what exactly to expect from the encounter, but it wasn’t this. Did Lippert’s worldview change due to illness and pain and loneliness, or were his attitudes always there, beneath the surface, and was it only the genteel veneer that had been polished off by the ravages of time? His vision of life in the future outdated, like so many stories from the vintage pulps?
“Help you?” The nurse approached, interrupting Peter’s line of thought.
“This guy is here for Clint,” said the orderly.
“No kiddin’? Are you a relative or something?”
He could’ve been, Peter realized. Lippert had imagined a future filled with technological wonders for people with names like Peter Wilson. There may not have been room in that future for people who looked like Yuriko. And Peter would be damned if he risked letting this guy influence any more of it through quantum entanglement or whatever weird science linked them together.
“No, not a relative.” Peter and Yuriko’s future was bright, if unpredictable, and he realized that he preferred it that way. Peter turned to leave. “Just someone he used to know.”
Alex Shvartsman is a writer, translator, and anthologist from Brooklyn, NY. He’s the author of Kakistocracy (2023), The Middling Affliction (2022), and Eridani’s Crown (2019) fantasy novels. Over 120 of his short stories have appeared in Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, and many other venues. His website is www.alexshvartsman.com.
Copyright © 2025 Alex Shvartsman