C:\babyboommorticians\babyboommorticians.txt Thursday, June 06, 2013 8:40 PM Baby Boom Morticians A Novel by T.L. Winslow (C) Copyright 2000. All Rights Reserved. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Preface and Acknowledgements As the year 2000 rolled around America was home to over 80 million graying baby boomers in their 40s and 50s, at the height of their power but obsessed with staying young. Forty years later they were dropping like flies. In the meantime, the Hispanic underclass had swelled to a majority of the population. These two forces collided in the booming funeral business, controlled by a gringo-owned monopoly, but the work done by workers who were overwhelmingly Hispanic. Baby boomers. Born in 1946-1964. The biggest, richest, most spoiled generation in history. They distorted the economy to their needs, all the way to the end. Consequently the funeral industry was energized like the baby product industry, the toy industry, the adolescent industry, the young adult industry, the yuppie industry, the middle age -1- C:\babyboommorticians\babyboommorticians.txt Thursday, June 06, 2013 8:40 PM industry, the senior industry before them. This story is about an incident that occurred during a moon run, where over a hundred thousand cryogenically frozen baby boomer "experiments" were being shipped to Moonstock, a grotesque above-ground cemetery on the dark side of the moon, where, for a price, each hideous experiment would be dolled-up to look young again, and positioned in a hideous eternal re-creation of Woodstock, in a deep permanently shadowed crater, which was artificially lit and put on the Internet. In the perfect vacuum of space the Baby Jane-like experiments awaited reanimation and rejuvenation while listening to a robotic Jimi Hendrix. The morticians were low-paid workers of the great American underclass. By the year 2040 America was over fifty percent Hispanic, and they were beginning to dominate the politics and workforce, but still an underclass. The baby boom morticians were overwhelmingly Hispanic, and employed by a big corporation owned by non-Hispanics. Pay was low, working conditions rough, and the workers lived in a world that was alien from the hideous old gringos they were working to preserve for future life in a world that would be even less gringo than the one they were leaving. Then the accident occurred, in 2040. As the experiments were being transferred from the space hearse to the funeral parlor on the dark moon surface, a crash caused a hundred thousand frozen experiments to break into pieces. The company ordered a coverup, and the experiments had to be reassembled with glue and made up for their assigned cemetery positions, even though the hope of reanimation was lost. Some experiments were misassembled with the wrong parts, and some had to have fake parts added, but the children and families of the experiments would have no way to know, and would keep buying service options. Enter one Lulu Trancia and her husband George, a married couple of lowly workers, the kind nobody writes about. Attempts to blow the whistle on the company lead them into an adventure full of personal danger and a revelation about American politics. -2- C:\babyboommorticians\babyboommorticians.txt Thursday, June 06, 2013 8:40 PM Acknowledgements Thanks to the following for suggestions and help: Gerardo Eduardo Aguirre Edgar W. Swank President, American Cryonics Society http://www.jps.net/cryonics/ Nexus Magazine http://www.altnews.com.au/nexus The population projections are based on "NPG Forum: The Impact of Immigration on United States' Population Size: 1950 to 2050", by Dr. Leon F. Bouvier, November 1998, http://www.npg.org. Thanks to Robert C.W. Ettinger for permission to quote from his book _Prospect of Immortality_ (1962). Chapter 1. * * * The last thing she remembered was a smiling fearless good crime fighting superheroine named Chillbaby Blain that she had been inventing in her dreams for perhaps years, when the dark side of her mind was in charge. She always wore a Mod Squad cap, dressed in open crotch fashions. She was a super Hispanic like Raquel Welch. She kicked gringo's asses. And they liked it. Never ran away. But she had always stopped playing for her when she awoke. The memory was not erased, nor stopped, but overwritten by her waking mind, waiting for the dream break to end. -3- C:\babyboommorticians\babyboommorticians.txt Thursday, June 06, 2013 8:40 PM * * * _If I die, I want to make a young-looking corpse._ _Only the good die young._ _I felt like I could truly give my children more if I had them in my forties rather than my twenties._ _In vitro fertilization. Egg donation._ _Laugh-In._ _Route Sixty-Six._ _The Great Garloo._ _The Howdy-Doody Show._ _The Rifleman._ _Maverick._ _The Lone Ranger._ _I Love Lucy._ Lulu Trancia was watching the eternal living funeral service on the Net absent-mindedly while eating some beans with corn and flour tortillas. Just a pinch of hot pepper. If a gringo were with her, she'd offer them a pinch of hot pepper to watch them sweat and have her little giggle and joke. Gringos. A dying breed. But it was a living. She was in her forties herself, and still wore retro glasses for looks. People told her she looked like Yoko Ono with those glasses. Not too Hispanic. Her voice had only a trace of a Spanish accent. It was sweet and high, and could have been Yoko's. Her husband George was a steady, dependable man. A good solid worker, five days a week. On the weekends though, watch out. He loved his beer. Would go through a case in two days. With her own habit, they went through two. The -4- C:\babyboommorticians\babyboommorticians.txt Thursday, June 06, 2013 8:40 PM shitty apartment they lived in in Denver had two big trash barrels in back, choked to the top with beer cans. If you can call them beer cans. Her whole family had a problem with alcoholism. When the cure to alcohol was discovered by the gringo scientists, they would only pretend to take it, since they needed drunkenness. It wasn't an option in this shitty world. What else was there to live for? They could hold their liquor on working days, like most good Hispanics. Only got totally smashed on off days. An occasional cloned liver transplant and they were fine. Family members that is. George had had one, but her liver was still bitchin'. They had been married since the age of sixteen. George was totally faithful, totally dependable. She kept him happy. He didn't want her to work. It was against his principles. But in this day and age, with the old gringo welfare state on the skids, their combined wages barely paid for the rent, food, and beer. The gringo experiment she was working on was hideous. She could smell the hideous stench on her clothes. The yellow tar-stained teeth were horrible. Ninety years old at least. Their living funeral service was a hot air balloon that was tethered to their hideous experiment forever, playing on the Net. Her lunch over, Lulu wiped her hands on her white apron and then resumed working on the cleanup for her little ole corpsey, a woman. She was still chewing a well-greased corn tortilla, with plenty of lime, and a little coke powder in her nose, which they looked the other way about as long as she used it only when doing the stench work. She soon tuned into some Mexican marimba music to work by, loud enough to drown out the eternal funeral service, which the bosses insisted on for some company reason, perhaps to impress VIP visitors. The gay cries were comforting to her, brought her down to earth. George's parents were from southern Colorado, hers from the state of Jalisco in Mexico. When her father moved from his -5- C:\babyboommorticians\babyboommorticians.txt Thursday, June 06, 2013 8:40 PM family farm to Denver to get a graveyard shift job at a package handling plant, using forged identity papers, in the year 2025, the cops burst into their apartment in the middle of the day, while he was sleeping, on a no-knock warrant, and killed him as he tried to get out of bed. It was a mistake. Wrong apartment. The cops tried to cover it up, but failed, as this was the zillionth such incident, and several legal firms specialized in suing and winning. The award of twenty thousand a year for twenty years went to his wife and ten other kids back in Jalisco. Counting herself and an older sister, Carmen, that made twelve. Six boys and six girls. She got nothing, except his collection of Mexican folk music, which he left in the apartment when he died. They were raised on this music, even if they both went gringo after getting married and got into gringo culture, even old sixties gringo rock. Even if she could hardly speak Spanish, and didn't want to. She was American, not Mexican. Still, the folk music brought her down to earth. Kept her from going crazy thinking of those eyes. Her dad's eyes, there in her apartment, dead. They had to break a lease but they couldn't stay there anymore.