Tattoo 2082

Like the internal combustion engine, repurposing South Florida seemed like a good idea at the time.

Everybody knew that old folks liked the weather down there, and many of the existing luxury towers with their great ocean views had been built to survive hurricanes and storm surges. They were well suited to rising waters, their AC and electricals strategically installed. Key West had already gone under in 2043 (all but the hilltop cemetery), its submersion followed for many years by apocryphal sightings of web-toed cats. By mid-century, when long stretches of the Florida coast were underwater, investors posed the question: Why not sell that melting real estate to those who wouldn’t need it for long?

And so it was that friends and fellow residents Kyla, Caitlin, Jared, and Drew were playing a game of bridge one morning, girls against boys, in the newly remodeled canteen/solarium at Aventura Assisted-Living Condominiums and Resort (formerly Miami Lifestyle Condos) when an automated laser nurse floated through the room at just below hip level. Using technology developed in the early 21st century for eradicating mosquitoes, one male at a time, the AutoNurse laser-targeted each of the oldsters in turn, dispensed the right dosage of the right drugs, and then floated noiselessly into the breezeway beyond.

Jared fanned his cards with gnarled fingers and remarked, “I hate that robot bitch.”

Drew, a former Rhodes scholar and author of several well-received volumes whose subjects he could sometimes recall, pointed out that the AutoNurse was not, in the strictest sense of the word, a robot.

“Actually,” said Kyla, a former National Science fellow, “it is.”

“Well, it’s certainly not a bitch,” Caitlin put in, laying her cards on the table.

The four of them found it amusing to think that everyone used to play bridge with physical cards of plastic-coated paper—paper, mind you! When Drew’s great-grandson gave him a vintage boxed set of two decks in a molded polystyrene holder, the four amigos (as they sometimes called themselves, Caitlin being a former high school Spanish teacher) had taken to playing cards “in person.” They started playing in the old canteen on the 10th floor, back when the windows had offered a view of red tile roofs and the flashy tops of palm trees. The new canteen/solarium looked out from the 35th floor over nothing but sea and sky. You had to go up to the roof to spot the other residential towers poking up out of the water in an archipelago that stretched north and south as far as the aging eye could see.

Both decks of cards were worn around the edges now and had acquired a greasy feel.

Between tricks they reached for their iBreathe O₂ inhalers. By 2082, atmospheric oxygen levels had dropped around the globe. The obesity problem having been long since solved by the invention of cellulose noodles, Americans now counted units of oxygen expended rather than calories consumed, and oxygen conservation—a marriage of time-motion studies and SCUBA-diving technique—was the fastest-growing field in the 49 states. Jared had made his fortune in it, having gotten in on the ground floor 70-odd years ago with an undergraduate research project to determine which was more oxygen-efficient: the twist-off cap or a hand-held bottle opener. The O₂-measuring protocol that he designed was still in use.

Millennials they used to be called. Images of tiny people holding hands as they jumped from tall buildings were embedded in their collective unconscious. Three out of four of them had helped a grandchild build a tower of blocks and fly a toy airplane into the side of it to knock it down. An odd feeling of relief and expiation—the end of suspense, the emptying of guilt—always came over them as the blocks tumbled down to the sound of the grandchild’s laughter. In April 2010, when the Gulf oil spill began with a blast that became a rupture between all time up to that moment (i.e., time poised, as time...