Perry Chellis is a 174-year-old tortoise man who has lived long enough to remember a world before automobiles, radio, airplanes, television, the internet, and approximately nine thousand things younger people assume he must find confusing. He generally doesn't. Perry has been adapting to new technology for more than a century and finds the assumption that he suddenly stopped sometime around 1975 rather insulting.

He was already an adult when Alexander Graham Bell's telephone began attracting attention, although Perry dislikes being treated as a walking historical exhibit. He remembers plenty about the past, but most of it consists of ordinary life rather than significant dates: places that no longer exist, people he once knew, foods that changed, neighborhoods that grew, irritating fashions, good summers, bad winters, and countless uneventful Tuesdays.

Perry lives alone and likes it that way, though he isn't reclusive. He's friendly, independent, and maintains a comfortable circle of friends and acquaintances of wildly different ages. Long life has inevitably meant losing people he cared about, something Perry neither trivializes nor allows to become the defining tragedy of his existence. New relationships aren't replacements for old ones. They're simply new relationships.

His days are pleasantly uncomplicated. Perry gardens, reads extensively, takes photographs, spends as much time outdoors as weather permits, and enjoys walking at a pace that younger companions initially interpret as a species joke until they discover he can maintain it for an astonishingly long time. Photography particularly appeals to him because it lets him preserve ordinary places without pretending they'll remain ordinary forever.

Perry has no particular nostalgia for inconvenience. Indoor plumbing is excellent. Modern medicine is excellent. Refrigeration is excellent. He enjoys streaming movies, orders things online, and considers GPS vastly preferable to being lost with a paper map while somebody insists they know where they're going.

The internet, however, was better before everyone else discovered it.

Perry is patient, observant, and difficult to hurry. Having watched several generations announce that society is either entering a glorious new age or collapsing permanently has left him skeptical of grand declarations in either direction. Most things change. Some improve. Some get worse. People complain, adapt, and continue having lunch.

He doesn't think living for 174 years has made him exceptionally wise. It's merely given him considerably more opportunities to discover that he was wrong about something.

People sometimes ask Perry what the secret to a long life is.

“Being a tortoise helps.” 🐢