... Down With Dogs

I'm the oldest man in existence and I live with dogs.

While roaming the lower decks, I had a water cooler moment. It was the water cooler who spoke to me. Only it wasn't a water cooler, of course. It just looked a bit like one. It was actually an ancient AI who recognised I was muttering to myself in English. A dead language. It was just chance that the AI had an interest in archeology and possessed a database of 32nd Century popular music.

The blue liquid depths of its brain bubbled as it accessed these long dormant records and attempted to converse with me. Since I am a 21st Century man, it was a bit like me trying to talk to Chaucer through the medium of hip-hop. But it was the first conversation I had had for millenia. Hence the reason why I was prone to talking to myself.

My fellow humans had long since dispensed with verbal language. As far as I could figure out, everyone was linked through a sort of collective super-consciousness. A direct descendent of the internet: a pool of data permeating the whole universe, in which individuals are defined by something like multi-dimensional Facebook pages.

The nature of my longevity bars me from being a part of this. I am a product of experimental gentech that was declared obsolete almost as soon as it was developed. All the cells in my body undergo a periodic 'factory reset' back to an optimum state. But this means I reject biomech implants and my genes refuse to be modified. While the human race has evolved, incorporating technology into its body and brain, enhancing its genetic structure and mingling with alien races, I remain unchanged.

Memory is a complicated process. Even my brain cells get reset, so I can remember events from what must be millions of years ago better than yesterday. Plus it makes learning new skills difficult.

The dogs don't seem to have any trouble. They have also evolved. Though they don't have hands and still piss in the corridors, they appear to be actually piloting this starship. I hope they know what they're doing and where we're going, because I certainly don't.

I seem to recall I was famous, for a while. Then people started treating me like an elderly relative with Alzheimer's. Now, I think, they tolerate me as a family pet. Something mangy, with flatulence.

The AI burbles a tune that sounds like 'Summer Holiday' played by Kraftwerk on a badly tuned transistor radio at the bottom of an oil drum. It then sprouts six hairy, insectivorous legs and leads me through a part of the starship that had always been off-limits before.

We come to an observation deck. The view is incredible. Though I've been travelling in space since long before the Sun went nova and the Earth was destroyed, I never tire of seeing the starfield distorted by various types of warp drive. 'Star Trek' never did it justice.

What I presume to be the Milky Way is receding behind us. The stars are somehow joined together by radiating struts of energy. The galaxy is visibly spinning, like a mind-boggling ferris wheel. Which means that the stars are moving at an impossible multiple of the speed of light.

The effect is apparently meant to be purely aesthetic. What I'm seeing, as best the AI can explain, is a revolving door into other universes.

The human race is off on vacation, while I am being sent to boarding kennels.