I’M JUST ANOTHER middle-aged woman who thinks she can write a book.

At almost a hundred twenty, I still have a good hundred years of life left in me. We live longer than the previous generations, you see. It was one of the ways in which our biology was changed at the chromosomal level way back when, or so my father tells me. My grandmother died young—she was only ninety-two—but he says that generation considered ninety-two to have been a long, good life.

I never know what to make of that.

Anyway, we’re doing marvelous things with technology now, my husband and children and I. We’ve revived the internet somewhat, pioneering the mining tools to dig through the archives of the data detritus of the people who went before us. In fact, that’s our family business, investigating people’s histories, their ancestries, things that had been recorded in oftentimes excruciating, tedious, and mind-numbingly boring detail.

The mining of Facebook and Twitter alone have made the fortunes of several of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. The Church was one of our first clients, and we have been its chief (sometimes only) mining company for forty years or so.

People have a need to know where they came from, especially after having spent so many years trying to hide their ancestry that they simply forgot what it was. They want to know the names of those who didn’t survive, what they thought, how they lived, why they mightn’t have lived, if their personalities were somehow indicative of the genetics that doomed them to death.

My husband is the ringleader of this enormous family—and business—we created. One day, he came home from work and said, “Del, I think you should write a book.”

“A book?” I asked. “What about?”

“You. Us. You know, from the beginning of us. The stories the kids beg you for, only not so sanitized. All the gory details. In forty years, I have yet to come across any memoir of that time, much less a good one.”

I thought about that a minute. I didn’t have anything much else to do lately since my daughters had decided I needed a housekeeping staff. I don’t like to travel, you see, and I wouldn’t without my husband anyway, and he’s too in love with his work to leave for long. We are wealthy and I have not had to manage our farm for four decades now.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t remember. It’s to my advantage that I remember—as do my contemporaries.

That was another thing that changed in our biologies: our memories, which are long and detailed. There is no Alzheimer’s, no dementia. My father marvels at that.

He—my dad, that is, Dr. Duncan Kenard—assists the family in the business, contributing his medical knowledge and research here and there, his hypotheses and theories, but for him it’s a hobby. His real love is in treating patients, to study how much more superior the human body became after the change. What we take for granted—robust health, “long” lives, few chromosomal defects—he considers miracles.

“Just tell it from your point of view. That way, it won’t exactly be incomplete, if you know what I mean.”

I did. “That makes me uncomfortable,” I said slowly. “I’d feel funny, putting myself out there like that.”

He gave me a strange look. “You’ve been mining blogs again.”

It’s true. I like to read the old blogs, the ones from the twenty-first century, and I start talking they way they wrote, which my family thinks is hilarious. They were incredibly, ah, “emo,” those generations. Too whiny by half, but their internet culture was alive and well with its own limited vocabulary that was incredibly expressive for a medium that couldn’t convey tone, body language, or facial expressions.

And their obsessions!

Would that we had had that kind of time when our lives fell apart, and especially—

Their obsession with sparkly vampires and dominant billionaires can entertain me for hours. Oh, would that the vampires we had had to deal with had been sparkly and emo, instead of a treacherous government. I would have even taken the dominant billionaire over what we had to go through.

“What you should do,” my husband continued, “is write it like you’re telling someone else’s story.”

I thought about that another minute. “I suppose I could manage that. Sometimes it does seem like it happened to someone else.”

“There you go. And,” he added brightly, “maybe it’ll keep you occupied while you get through menopause.”

I slugged him in the arm, but he laughed.

After a hundred and four years of marriage, I probably ought to be used to his little digs. On the other hand, I’ve been having hot flashes for the last twelve years and things are critical.

I’m losing my libido and fertility, you see, the thing that defined me for so many years—to myself, to my family, to the government, to my church and neighborhood and community—and I can’t wait until the process is over.

Ah, but with a lifespan three times the length of my ancestors’ comes a longer fertility cycle, so Dunc says, which makes a ten-, fifteen-, twenty-year menopause about proportional (and that’s not counting half again the number of years of perimenopause). My best friend is in her seventeenth year and menopause, like the post-catastrophe libido, is a beast.

The source of my husband’s amusement is his gratitude. He hasn’t been able to keep up with me for several decades now. He’s enjoying the slowdown, the relative infrequency, the ever-increasing occasions when we can take our time, when the infrequency makes it special and not, for me, a need akin to breathing.

“What about Lil and Jess?” I asked, wondering what my sisters would think about being equally exposed. Their lives were inextricably bound up in mine. I couldn’t leave them out of the telling of such a tale.

He shrugged. “They’ll get over it.”

Yes, I remember how it was before we changed—we all do, those of us of the First Wave—but it just seems like an extraordinarily vivid dream.

So I’m going to write it that way.