"People. They make an airline." This thought came to Joe as he fumbled with the tab on his Mercy Implant. Pain could be eliminated but how would you know when your body had a message? Wasn't it better to hear the company's human aspect than allow potassium to collect and discharge pointlessly? Joe thought so. He was eighty-five years old, and the reason he came to the airport was love.

"Let me carry your bags," he said to her.

"This airport is new, but somehow old, older than us. A quaint fantasy of environment."

"They found the blueprints in a hard drive."

"They realized the dead man's vision."

"Not without irony."

"Most people travel because they have to."

"We're the rocks."

"Sundials, Stonehenge, the stratified face of an eroding slag heap."

"Do you hear that noise?"

"'Inspiration,' 'tree.'"

"You're the first person I've met who thinks abstraction is the same as perception."

"My father worked as car-man."

"All that time. The road moves. You stay still."

"Chickens, cucumbers, digital satellites...."

"So many kilometers."

"Megameters."

"Gigameters...."

"Let me carry your bags."

They passed through zones of expectation, longing, nostalgia. Joe heard advertisements for beef, Joni Mitchell, labradors, the tango. His father had died a month before the big unveiling.

"How old are you?"

"Less than sixty."

"What messages! I can't imagine them."

"Greeting cards, nanocreams, splendor, iridescence."

"Content without form."

"'A name on every wire.'"

She laughed. He laughed. It was Gerhard Richter's sesquicentennial.

Innovations in democracy had rendered aging obsolete.

At the exhibition clones of history's greatest villains delivered confused speeches about nationhood and degeneracy. The importance of the arts was fostered in developing minds. Joe felt a rush of seratonin as he gazed at a painting he had commissioned of his jeans. There were six trillion shades of blue, he learned, and his legs had known only fifty.

"This can't be why you brought me here," she said.

"I had to make sure the jeans were lost. Left out, by necessity."

"I'm pretty drunk," she replied, "and suddenly very tired." 

"It has nothing to do with proclub."

"Fuck you, Joe."