Start Reading #3
Last night a message had come through from Luisa Long: I understand you are at the beach house. Your car will be there at nine.
“Have you had me chipped?” Honey once asked Barney.
There was a lot of talk in the media about coercive chipping.
“Do you want to be chipped?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“That’s my old-fashioned girl.” He grinned.
He was chipped, of course, as were all his employees. It was a job requirement. You couldn’t work for a tech company and be afraid of basic tech. River was chipped. Only conspiracy theorists didn’t chip their children. It was about safety.
Honey picks up one of the water bottles and chugs it back, thirstily, as if she’s done a workout.
Taylor gives her a little pleased smile in the rearview mirror. “Enjoy!”
“Thank you.” Honey wipes her mouth.
“There’s a lot of traffic,” says Taylor. “There’s some big event. I’m going to try to get you as close as I can to your destination but . . . I don’t know.”
“Thank you,” says Honey. “It doesn’t matter. If I’m late, I’m late.”
“I think it might be the funeral for that big tech guy who died.”
“Yes,” says Honey. “That’s where I’m going.”
“Really?” Honey sees the exact moment Taylor’s brain circuits make the appropriate connection. “Wait. You’re not . . . you are! You’re Honey Beckett?”
It’s always been like this. She has the kind of celebrity where people can’t name her unless they hear Barney’s name first. Without him she does not exist.
When she hears “Honey Beckett” she doesn’t think of herself.
She thinks of her public persona and all the words that have described her: Barney’s latest acquisition!
The former makeup artist who stole the heart of a multibillionaire!
Barney’s New Babe Flaunts Her Curves in Saint-Tropez.
It’s kid number seven for the tech genius and his latest wife!
She only read the comments once. The vitriol burned like hot oil.
“But . . . it’s your husband’s funeral? Your husband is Barney Beckett?”
“Yes,” says Honey.
People have widely different responses to her husband’s name.
His company has both wiped out entire industries and saved millions of lives through cutting-edge medical technologies.
He’s inspirational. He’s abhorrent. He and Mac have too much power, too much money, and too much influence.
He and Mac are geniuses changing the world for the better.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” says Taylor. She twists around in her seat to look at Honey.
“Thank you,” says Honey. “I think I’m still . . . in shock.”
“Well of course you are!”
But Honey registers a dip in her sincerity. She is probably thinking that if you marry a man more than thirty years older than you, then you should reasonably expect to one day be attending his funeral.
“He only just had his sixtieth birthday,” says Honey.
“So young,” agrees Taylor. She is overdoing it.
“He was in perfect health,” says Honey. She wants to tell the girl that sixty might have been Barney’s chronological age, but his latest epigenetic clock test gave him a biological age of thirty-two!
Only four years older than Honey. He was aiming for a biological age that matched her chronological age. He nearly got there.
“I read that profile of him just recently. The one with the picture of him on the trampoline?”
Barney had been pleased with the profile. She remembers the opening paragraph.
Barney’s personal and professional interest in exploring the new frontiers of longevity science and technology is paying personal dividends.
He has the physique of a man half his age.
When I arrived for our interview, I found Barney on a trampoline, wearing snow skis, practicing jumps in anticipation of his upcoming ski trip to an exclusive French ski resort.
The expression on his face? Pure joy. This is a man who loves his life, and according to him, he’s “only just begun!”
Barney and Mac were obsessed with hacking death.
They took advantage of all the latest cutting-edge cellular rejuvenation techniques.
They rigorously monitored their bodies: daily blood tests, weekly scans, ECGs, body composition analysis.
Mac restricted his diet, but Barney never did.
He was interested in the philosophy of longevity without sacrifice.
He was a hedonist and foodie. He wanted to live forever while still eating and drinking the best the world had to offer.
“It was a heart attack, right?” says Taylor.
“Because of all the cold therapies?” She shivers extravagantly.
“I don’t like the cold.” Everyone knows that Barney liked to take meetings in his cryotherapy machine, and younger staff members came out of meetings hypothermic, brushing away frozen teardrops.
“It was a pulmonary embolism,” says Honey. “It wasn’t caused by the cold therapies. Not like people are saying. That had nothing to do with it.”
Barney died in an ice bath in Spain. It was a private home in the Guadalest Valley.
Barney and Mac were there for an important meeting with a money guy.
Or maybe it was a tech guy, or a science guy.
They were working on something “huge,” “radical,” “life-changing,” but those were the words always used to describe each new “innovation.”
“Do you think it was the stress?” Honey had asked Mac. “About that new project?”
He said no, he didn’t think it was that, but he sounded extremely stressed.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how close I can get you to the cathedral. The road is barricaded.” Taylor glances over her shoulder at Honey’s shoes: simple, classic Prada black pumps.
“How far can you walk in those?”
“A long way.”
Honey looks out the window of the car. Her Uber is caught in a snarl of traffic. She can hear horns tooting. A helicopter overhead. A police siren. The by now familiar sounds of a planned protest.
Honey takes her phone out of her bag and reads the most recent message from Luisa Long:
Tell your driver to stop at the barricade at the end of College Street.
Of course Luisa Long has been tracking her journey this whole time.
“Oh . . . I see, wow,” says Taylor as they approach the barricade and it is magically moved aside and a police officer waves her through.
Another car follows behind and pulls up beside them. A man with an earpiece jumps out and comes to her car door. Honey hasn’t “made her own way” here at all. She’s been followed by her private security detail. “You won’t even know they’re there,” Barney always said.
“Take the mints! My condolences!” cries Taylor as the man with the earpiece opens the door.
“Thank you,” says Honey. She’s about to be photographed. Knees together. Swivel the hips. Dip the head.
“If you get a chance to rate—”
But the door is slammed behind her and the Uber is being waved on and away, gone forever, and Honey weirdly misses her.
Taylor will tell people I drove Honey Beckett to Barney’s funeral.
Honey will have to remember to tip her or she might appear in an article about augmented celebrities who don’t tip.
The cameras flash, but the photographers stand respectfully behind a barrier manned by police officers and don’t shout her name.
As she turns to give them a good shot, Luisa Long materializes in a black sleeveless dress, cold eyes behind rimless glasses, arm circling but not touching Honey, shepherding her along.
“This way. You’re in the front row next to his mother. ”
Soft words flutter around her like moth wings as Luisa Long escorts her up the stairs.
“Honey, I’m so sorry.”
“What a shock.”
“A remarkable man.”
“Extraordinary.”
“A visionary.”
“A genius.”
“River not saluting the casket, then?”
Honey stops.
It’s Barney’s first wife, Rita. She’s wearing a floral black smock and flat shoes.
She’s the same age Honey’s mother would be if she were alive.
Some people say Rita helped Barney and Mac develop their first groundbreaking software, but if it’s true, she never did anything else with her career.
She brought up his three children, never remarried, and lives a quiet life doing behind-the-scenes philanthropic work with her divorce settlement.
Barney described her as “a stridently good person.”
“I didn’t bring him,” says Honey. She meets Rita’s eyes. Her face is stridently naked. Eyes red and watery like a mouse’s eyes. She doesn’t wear makeup. Honey could do so much with that blank canvas.
“Good decision. None of the littler grandchildren are here,” says Rita. “Although they all adored the old bastard.” A crack of grief.
They look at each other for a moment, and Luisa Long coughs.
“We should sit together,” says Honey.
Rita raises sparse eyebrows. “First and last wives together?”
“Why not all four wives together?”
“You know Svetlana and Meredith hate each other,” says Rita, but she’s smiling.
“Please follow the seating plan,” says Luisa Long. “Please . . .” She clears her throat and repeats herself. “Please just follow the seating plan.”
“I think Barney would like it,” says Honey. “To see us all together. Celebrating his life. We’re the mothers of his children.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” says Luisa Long.
“Well, I’d like it,” says Honey.
Honey sits with Barney’s three ex-wives in the front row on the left-hand side of the Gothic sandstone cathedral, awaiting the commencement of his funeral service.
Guests are still arriving, but the pews behind them are already crammed with corporate leaders, government ministers, public servants, tech gurus, breakfast-show hosts, celebrities, and employees.
People speak in low voices. A string quartet plays. It feels like a subdued cocktail party.
The guest of honor is at the front, under lights, in a dark rich mahogany coffin with gold inlays and an intricately carved decorative cornice of the Last Supper. It’s draped in a mound of white roses and lilies.