The End Specialist. Drew Magary

the entire airport) and took the shuttle bus down to the Strip. The last time I was in Vegas, the ride took twenty minutes. This time it took so much longer that I asked the driver if there were multiple conventions going on. There were not.

      He dropped us off at the main entrance and we walked into chaos. The hotel has over twelve thousand rooms, and this evening it appeared all of its occupants had decided to hang out in the lobby. We stood in the check-in line in shifts; half of us waited while the other half went to get drinks, and then we switched. When it was my turn to fetch alcohol, I walked out into the main atrium and stared at the fountain, a gigantic edifice of water that defies all reason. It’s as if the hotel is trying to put out a fire on the surface of the moon. Colored lights illuminate the mighty geyser in a painstakingly choreographed arrangement. Surrounding base of the fountain are the cure stations: small platforms with a doctor and a single chair that each soon-to-be postmortal sits in to get their shots. Like in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair has straps and belts to hold you down while you are injected. Unlike in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair is a specifically designed throne. You get to choose the theme for your chair. There’s your basic emperor’s chair (made of gold; it matched my grail!). There’s also the Poseidon: Lord of the Sea chair, which is actually a large, chair-shaped fish tank, with miniature sharks and all kinds of imported marine life swimming under your backside. There’s a Space chair, which is shaped like a giant egg and has two hot girls with big fake tits dressed as green aliens on either side of it. And there’s a Viking chair, which features a giant serpent erupting out from between your legs when you sit in it. Those are the four I remember off the top of my head. There were hundreds of these things, no two alike.

      I was in awe. I turned to my friend Scott.

      “I almost want to get my shots again.”

      “You can do that here,” he said. “They’ll throw you a cure party even if you’ve had it done already. They just shoot you up with something besides the vector.”

      “What do they shoot you up with?”

      “I don’t know. Gin?”

      They’ve perfected the process at the Fountain. You get your blood drawn when you check-in (separate, even longer line for that), then they have the vector ready for you three days later. In between, you presumably lose all your money and then spend the next thousand years trying to make it back. It’s incredible. After getting their shots, all new postmortals jump from the platform into the pool at the base of the fountain. Fully clothed, of course. I looked out to the pool and saw hordes of people frolicking in the water, all in soaking wet dresses, suits and tuxedoes, all drunk beyond comprehension. Baptized into the sweet life.

      On the way back to the check-in, I noticed a small exhibit called Ponce de León and The Fountain of Youth. It looked like a pointless waste of time, which intrigued me.

      “Hey, let’s go in that.”

      Scott wasn’t as enthused. “That? That’s for kiddies.”

      “We go in there, we finish our drinks, we get another round and head back to the line without anyone noticing. That line isn’t moving at all.”

      “Oh, all right.”

      So we went in to the exhibit, which was sparsely crowded due to the late hour and the fact that it was stupid. We walked through a dark corridor for about twenty yards, and then found ourselves in front of an enormous, scrolling diorama. A life-sized puppet of Ponce de León was sitting in an exact replica of King Ferdinand of Spain’s royal court. A voice-over narrated our journey as we watched the puppet hop onto a ship, sailing across a miniaturized version of the Atlantic Ocean (with real wind and water!).

      In the year 1513, King Ferdinand of Spain commissioned explorer Juan Ponce de León to sail across the seas and find the fabled fountain of youth. It was a dangerous journey, as Ponce de León and his men battled scurvy, hurricanes, and pirates!

      At this point, three pirate puppets popped up from the water and dueled with the Ponce de León puppet, who then cut off their heads. I drank to his victory. The Ponce de León puppet made landfall as we kept walking.

      Landing in an exotic new land we now call Florida, Ponce de León rewarded his men with newfound riches of gold, sugar cane, delicious citrus fruits, and beautiful Native American women!

      One of Ponce de León’s puppet crew then started making out with a buxom female Indian puppet. I should have been offended, but I was too busy being turned on. The Ponce de León puppet soon came upon a giant fountain, which disappeared down into the ground.

      Ponce de León’s quest for the elusive and mythical fountain proved fruitless, and the legendary explorer died while trying to find it.

      The Ponce de León puppet then shouted out, “Nooooo!” and keeled over.

      But now, Ponce de León’s dream has finally been realized!

      The Ponce de León puppet’s corpse was airlifted by his strings across a fake U.S. landscape to a miniature model of the hotel we were standing in.

      Here, at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Do all the things Ponce de León always dreamed of doing! Dine al fresco at Fukuku Oh! See Cirque de Soleil in our exclusive new show, Eternia! Or try your hand at Texas Hold ’Em! It’s all here, along with over five hundred board-certified geneticists ready to give you the cure for death! Only at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Eternal life has never been so luxurious! Right, Ponce?

      The Ponce de León puppet then sat up, looked at us, and said, “Sí”. We walked out.

      “I don’t think that presentation was historically accurate,” Scott said.

      “Well, sometimes you have to take dramatic license.”

      The rest of the weekend was spent in a drunken fog, each hour as pointlessly hazy as the last. For his cure ceremony, our friend chose the Velvet Dream chair, a throne nine feet high and made of a purple fabric that purported to be velvet but was almost certainly some kind of space-age, sweat-wicking polymer. It was a practical choice. If you’re going to be stabbed by three giant fire pokers, you’re gonna want to feel as relaxed as humanly possible. Afterwards, we visited the Spearmint Rhino IV club. Every girl inside had a long, lucrative career in front of her. I’m not terribly comfortable in these places, which I find reassuring in a way.

      Next to the casino floor at Fountain of Youth is a stadium-sized mall that exclusively houses shops selling cure-related merchandise. You can get your pick of commemorative t-shirts (I’M HOT…AND I’M STAYING THAT WAY was a popular choice), steel cookware with lifetime warranties, go-tox clinics for older postmortals, safes, laser vision correction, and thirty-year tattoos. There were no wedding parlors, and I didn’t see a single bachelor party the entire weekend. Just one cure party after another.

      On our last day, there was a bomb threat in our section of the hotel. They evacuated our rooms and made us wait outside on the Strip. It was the only time during our trip that I was reminded of 7/3/19, and it unnerved me. The manager assured us they dealt with these threats all the time, which only served to worry me more. As we waited along the Strip, I saw a group of men pass by the hotel on the opposite side of the street. They stopped, looked at the hotel, whispered some things to one another, and then kept walking. As they did, I saw one of them wave to the building, as if saying goodbye. I ran to alert a nearby officer, who seemed unconcerned. The men turned the corner. One of them saw me talking to the cop and smirked. He held up his hands and gave me the death symbol: a cupped left hand pressed against his straight right hand, forming a crude D.

      After that, I didn’t relax until we were in the plane heading back to LaGuardia. The flight was delayed for three hours due to traffic on the runway.

      Date Modified: 11/15/2029, 3:02PM

      A Day In The Life Of A Terra Troll

      After my experience outside of the Fountain of Youth, I came across this anonymous blog posting from someone who claimed to work at the resort.

      Contrary to what hotel officials say publicly, the