I really think that after 100 years, or 313, they should give you more time in the dream room, not less, not none. It clarifies your memories; helps you sort through them. After a century, you have a sufficiency of memories.

I used to visit Daniel there, dead now forty-two short years, and Sandra, gone almost fifty. His death was a hammer blow but hers was like a beheading, somehow survived. His was cancer, a few weeks of pain but time to put some things aright. Sandra was taken by the planet, a sudden volcanic eruption in the Northerlies, where she had gone with a number of her students to research, of course, vulcanism.

Oh well. Visiting dead people in VR records just keeps ghosts alive. Maybe it’s best to let them go.

It helps that I’ve been writing a diary for eighty-nine long years, off and on. But somewhere along the line I should have realized that I might live long enough to have a hundredth-birthday entry to write, and worked out something elegiac and wise to insert here. But it’s been a long time since I thought I was wise, as opposed to smart.

What I am now is still a kind of smart, but slow. When you take a long time to come up with an answer, people think it’s grave deliberation. It’s actually molasses of the synapses.

Prime reminded me that I once observed that some people age like wine, becoming complex and mellow; some age like cheese, turning sharp and finally disagreeable. Some just dry out like grass. She asked what I was. I said what I was, was too old to make generalizations like that anymore.

But it did make me think of the last taste of Earth wine I had, the bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 2075 that John saved for Launch Day. Bottled when I was twelve years old, just at its peak twenty-two years later. When did I peak?

As far as the rest of the world, worlds, are concerned, that would have been the second eveloi encounter, which had such interesting consequences. But that wasn’t me, capital Me, trading pain for pain. It was just a shared humanity, perhaps a tinge of womanhood, specifically. Though I’ve always known that if the thing had given John the choice, instead, he would have let go first. He always saw the right thing to do, and did it.

I was never given a chance to ask him about the experience. He died while I was still in a coma.