Matilda and Bertie had been bombarded with offers since they’d won the Lottery. But nobody had offered them something impossible.“You can’t make us young again,” said Bertie. “We’re old.”
It was almost cruel, to win all those millions when they only had a few years left to enjoy them. Matilda hated getting old. She’d tried to fight it off for as long as possible, with elaborate exercise routines and costly cosmetics, but it was a losing battle, and everyone knew it.
“Your bodies are old, yes, but we can give you new bodies. Young bodies. Beautiful bodies. A second lifetime to enjoy your good fortune.” Matilda thought youth, real youth – and not the plastic surgery that made some of her friends look so unnatural – was the one thing that money couldn’t buy.
But what this man was selling, a program called Body Transplant, was offering to transplant their brains into young bodies donated to science, at a special price of only $1 million.
“It’s a new program, but the results are very promising,” he said. “Just think about it: no more grey hair, no more wrinkles, no more aching body…”
‘No more imminent death,’ thought Matilda, at least not any time soon. They would be young again and beautiful; well, Bertie had always been beautiful, the most handsome man she’d ever seen. She’d never understood what he saw in her; she was so ordinary, so timid, the type of girl that never attracted much attention. But this was her opportunity to be beautiful, too.
“What happens to our old bodies?” she asked, after choosing her new body, which was eighteen years old, blonde and beautiful.
“Oh, we keep them on ice for a few years, in case your new bodies reject your brains. Don’t worry, it’s just a precaution.”
Matilda couldn’t believe it when she saw herself for the first time. She felt and looked fantastic, and Bertie was as young and handsome as he had been the first time she’d met him.
“I’ve always wanted to live in New York,” she told him a few months later, holding the letter in her hand. It was an offer of a modelling career with a prestigious agency.
“But I thought you liked our quiet life in the countryside, alone with me,” he said.
“I did. But that was then. This is now. Things have changed, Bertie. I’ve changed.” She was no longer the timid girl she’d once been; she was transformed by her beauty, ready to conquer the world. “Things between us have changed.”
“What are you saying? Are you going to go without me?” He looked heartbroken, and Matilda felt her heart break a little, too.
“I think it’s the best thing for both of us. It will give us a fresh start, and then we’ll see …”
Matilda went to New York and was swept up in her new life of beauty and glamour. It wasn’t until her beauty began to diminish, along with her many admirers, that she realized that Bertie was the only man she’d ever loved, that he was the only one that loved her. Not for how she looked but for who she was.
“You have to help me find him,” she told the Body Transplant representative now. “I have to see him again.”
She wasn’t stupid. She knew he would have moved on by now, found a new girl, probably even had children. She hadn’t been able to have children in her first body and had been too vain to have children with her second body, but she hoped they could be friends at least.
“I’m sorry,” said the man, after finding Bertie’s file. “He was our only failure.”
“Failure? What are you saying? His body rejected his brain?”
“No, actually, he rejected his body, asked to be transplanted back into his old body. He said he didn’t want to live a life without you.” Matilda groaned. Poor Bertie. She’d given him up for her youth, and he’d given up his youth for her. It was all so tragic.
“But here,” said the man. “Someone’s written a final address for him, a place called Green Meadows.”
Green Meadows. It sounded like a retirement home. Could he still be alive? He’d be in his nineties now, but it was possible …
It wasn’t a retirement home. It was a cemetery. Bertie had lived another twelve years without her; twelve years they could have been together. As Bertie had known, as it had taken her two lifetimes to discover, a life without love is no life at all.
