Boy King
After Bryan Johnson
On waking at four I slip into freezing pacific water. Afterwards, thirty minutes holotropic breathing, gamelan, and transcranial magnetic stimulation at 40 BPM.
Chased with:
10x fish oil pills wrapped in kelp
Sun salute under ultraviolet lamp
50 km run, 8 km swim
I snatch spawning salmon during my natation, stopping on the raft I use to harvest spermidine, mashed in mortar and pestle, spread onto the sashimi, topped with roe.
In my first century the bay glowed like an ember. Antediluvian, I trained my sons in preparation of forever. Our biomarkers were optimal. We shipped virgin olive oil from Greece, grew Maitake in cargo containers, and lined the high walled pantry of our high walled home with amino acids.
Fire was in the boreal, then everywhere. We sailed north to desolation sound, sheltering in weathered homesteads where the crowns of cedar trees remained untorched. Here a submarine new world hid among kelp forests and fields of sea grass. Here I learned to drink brine from the burst bulbs of bull kelp, pickle sea asparagus off Savary, draw mandala on the beaches of Hernando, and harpoon seals along the coasts of Cortes.
After 200 summers my sons wished to go. Nightly I tapped their bloody sap. Now their fluid looked pale and ghastly. Like Saturn I split them into jars, arranged alongside hearts of Kermode bear and mountain lion, kept for some future purpose.
Of the several equilibria I have established around these islands kelp is a keystone species. In my free time I forcefully procreate sea otters to feed on the purple urchins preying on their roots. I would eat them all if my diet allowed it. Meanwhile my cure for sea star wasting syndrome has replenished the sunflower species, a natural predator.
This morning I dig clams, then cross the straight to the Powell River run. The carcasses of salmon lay deep in the forest and I pile them into cairns for fertilizer. My next hundred year project is to amend a glutamine deficiency in Blueprint’s current yam cultivar. The next ten thousand years will be to establish a novel marine ecosystem suited to the warmer, acidic ocean.
My rate of aging has reached an asymptote. I now see deep time in this coast. The eventuality of a tsunami, the Juan de Fuca restless to my south. I may live to see the pacific plate under my feet form new mountain ranges. The world will go on living. All that remains for me is to die.
