The Ninety-Eight-Year-Old and Her Enhanced Granddaughter Share a Kitchen, Not a Clock

LISBON — In a fourth-floor flat above a bakery, two women make breakfast at the same counter and live in different centuries. Amália is ninety-eight, unenhanced, her body the plain-issue model of a long human life — slower each year, honest about its limits, near the end of a natural arc. Across the counter her granddaughter Rita, thirty-four, augmented, will likely still be sharp and strong and getting stronger when she is Amália's age, and older than that, into decades the older woman cannot imagine and will not see. They share a kitchen, not a clock. "She is teaching me to make her mother's soup because someone should still know it in eighty years," Rita said. "I am teaching her nothing. She has already learned everything a life teaches, twice." There is no bitterness in the flat, only the strange tenderness of a household holding two incompatible futures at one table — one ending soon, in the ordinary way, and one opening onto a horizon the century has just invented. The augmentation debate is fought in legislatures. It is lived, more quietly, over soup.