The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  “Quite a stunt your friend Toby Fiske pulled off a few weeks ago.” She started the conversation in a light vein, but was also demonstrating that no topic need be off limits; not even subjects that might remind them of the lawsuit. Gary understood. If there was to be a reconciliation, they would have to rediscover their previous openness.

  He beamed. “Yeah, he’s having a ball with it, and his books are selling like crazy. Made all the TV news networks and, as I’m sure you saw at Stop and Shop, the front page of every tabloid. Most legitimate newspapers, too. Filled Expo Stadium that night; must’ve been forty thousand people there.”

  “How was the exhibition?”

  “David Copperfield, it wasn’t. But they managed to pull off a few interesting feats of apparent levitation, deflecting bullets with a force field, that kind of stuff. Then afterward, the troupe of professional magicians Toby was working with showed the mesmerized audience how they’d fooled them. And even then, according to a random survey they conducted afterward, almost half the people there refused to believe it was a scam.”

  “Incredible. So, were the amber pieces fake?”

  “No, it was real amber all right.” Gary chuckled. “Jacques Dubois, actually John Duncan, and Toby bought seven ordinary pieces of amber in a rock shop in Belmont, drilled microscopic holes in them, and filled the centers with an effulgent similar to the chemical in fireflies. They found a New York public relations firm willing to help them, as long as Toby and John agreed not to sell anything or accept money. And a few semi-famous people, including yours truly, volunteered personal anecdotes about the amulets’ magical powers. Toby even managed to get a few well-known scientists to cooperate, not by confirming anything, but simply by refusing to rule out the Amber’s authenticity.”

  “And the scam actually fooled 60 Minutes?” Rebecca asked. “Oh, no, 60 Minutes was in on the hoax from the beginning. John and Toby finally came clean on last week’s show. The segment started out like another piece of their semi-skeptical reportage on the Amber, but four minutes into it they explained the whole setup. It was a classic story about the gullibility of the public and the razzle-dazzle hokum they’ll fall for. I must say, I’m surprised you didn’t watch it.”

  “I’ve had other things on my mind lately,” Rebecca said.

  Gary realized how much he enjoyed telling the story to his sister, but he’d also noticed a melancholy cast to her mood. “You know, I’ve missed you,” he said.

  “Me, too.” Rebecca stared back at him. “Gary, how did it all get so screwed up?”

  “Too much money in that trust, I guess.” Too much greed, he thought. Too much self-serving counsel; not enough understanding. “Hard for some people to resist,” he added, with only a nuance of bitterness.

  “I guess. So sad, isn’t it? We put ourselves through all that grief, and the lawyers end up with the money.”

  “Yeah, and not even esquires Noah and Jan. Which serves them right, I suppose.”

  “What’s so ironic, though, is that when Dad was alive, he was impossible to bamboozle. Biggest skeptic alive; and one of the smartest. But the second he dies, his own lawyer empties his wallet like a common pickpocket.”

  “Except that it was a hundred percent legal, best I can tell. And we helped him do it.”

  “There’s nothing at all left in the Trust, is there?”

  He noticed a plaintive luminescence in her eyes. She was not asking simply to make conversation. Of course! She needed money. “No. It’s all gone.” Gary was a careful man, so he paused several seconds to think before asking, “Why?” the question proof to himself that he still cared for his sister.

  “Well, Katie hasn’t been herself over the last few months.”

  “Katie? Tell me what that means.”

  “It was nothing in particular, no fever or anything, but you know how energetic she always was. And gregarious. But since November she’s become lethargic; sleeping eleven or twelve hours a day; losing weight, too. Which she could hardly afford to do. So finally we took her to one of Max’s partners.”

  “And?”

  Rebecca delivered the grim words without tears: “Katie has cancer of the pancreas. Just like Mom.”

  “Oh my God!” Gary sat back and stared at the wall above his sister’s head. He thought of his mother’s death some twenty years earlier, and what they’d all gone through, he perhaps most of all. And now his beautiful niece Katie had it? A goddamn death sentence! She was only… ? Jesus; twenty years old.

  “How long?” he asked, before recognizing his query’s ambiguity.

  “We’ve only known a few days. The doctors say she probably won’t last the year.”

  He reached over the table, put his hand on hers and waited for the rest of it.

  “Gary, she wants to be frozen with her grandfather.” The words seemed to tumble out of her. “And the thing is—oh, Gary, I wouldn’t blame you if you slapped my face—the thing is, I want it for her, too. I’m not ready to abandon my little girl for dead.”

  October 31, 1999

  —The Department of Public Health releases their latest AIDS statistics, and calls them “encouraging.” The average life expectancy of a North American or European infected with HIV now exceeds 17 years.—California becomes the first state to outlaw “private smoking clubs” that accommodate more than 20 members at a time, closing a loophole that has allowed many large restaurants and even certain small companies to circumvent federal law. Cigarette smoking has been illegal in all public places throughout the USA since H.R. 1712 went into effect on April 10.—Senator Travis Hall (R. CT) challenges the Democratic-controlled Congress to attack the crime problem by “taking power away from manipulative defense lawyers, and putting it back in the hands of victims and potential victims.”—President Clinton signs into law a bill first proposed by Nicholas Negroponte, the Cyber Corps Act, which will allow several hundred thousand young men and women from the United States and other developed nations to spend one to two years each teaching third world children how to become part of the digital world. The program is expected to empower 100 million school-age children at “roughly the cost of nine F-15s.”

  Halloween, before it evolved from the Celtic festival of Sambain, was a far more significant holiday than it has become in modern times. Back then, October 31 was also the eve of the new year, and in Celtic lore, a time to appease the forces that directed the processes of nature. Ghosts of the dead were thought to look in on their earthly residences, and the autumnal festival took on a sinister quality, as a time when malignant spirits emerged. It was also said to be the ideal day to prognosticate future soundness of the body and mind, reversals of fortune, marriages, and death.

  October 31 was about to become the date of one of the most famous suicides in American history; a suicide that all seven persons present hoped would prove reversible.

  Gary had rented a small but comfortable cabin near Rochester, Michigan, a town of 7,500 some twenty-five miles north of Detroit. The location seemed ideal. First of all, it just barely fell within Oakland County, where Dr. Jack Kevorkian had observed or assisted dozens of suicides, and with whose legal machinery Kevorkian and his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, were intimately familiar. Second, the three technicians from the Phoenix would have near perfect conditions under which to prepare the body, once legally dead, for immediate transport just nineteen miles southeast to the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, where it could be perfused, frozen, and moved to Arizona at everyone’s leisure. C.I. was a small, nonprofit facility founded in 1976 by Robert Ettinger, author of The Prospect of Immortality.

  Such planning, and teamwork between competing organizations, was a rare luxury in twentieth century cryonic suspensions. Unfortunately, some of the personnel employed by the half-dozen or so legitimate cryonics facilities had recently become inordinately cutthroat, which had impeded the already-slow incursion of cryonics into general public acceptance. Internet “newsgroups” in particular had become an embarrassment to the cryonics
field, with scientists and medical personnel from various organizations constantly posting “flames” about the techniques and policies of other facilities.

  In truth, the entire field was still so plagued by lack of research funding that virtually all techniques, as well as any criticisms thereof, were merely theoretical. At the time, research into the long term preservation of transplantable organs such as kidneys and livers received hundreds of times the funding granted to similar research on such a uselessly dependent organ as the brain.

  The Phoenix and C.I., while not the closest of allies, were wise enough to recognize the public relations opportunity of inducting the niece of Gary Franklin Smith into their registers. With heightened public awareness would come increased demand, and thus increased funding for research, the holy grail of every cryonics organization.

  For many reasons, not the least of which was to eradicate any doubt of the patient’s intentions, Dr. Kevorkian videotaped the entire event. To avoid potential litigation, the three technicians from the Phoenix waited in their ambulance, aware of but not formally informed as to the goings-on inside the cabin.

  The patient was my aunt, Katherine Franklin Crane. She reclined comfortably on a hospital bed installed the day before her arrival. Katie’s body had withered to seventy-eight pounds, but her face retained a roseate sparkle. The disease had not yet progressed to where pain could no longer be managed by medication, or where the mind was of diminished use. Tonight she displayed a calm optimism bordering on exuberance. All was going according to plan.

  “Now, Katie,” Dr. Kevorkian said, “do you wish to continue your life?”

  “No, not now.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not at all. I don’t want this disease eating into my brain. I’m still lucid and fairly strong now. Within six months, I won’t be.”

  Rebecca read a carefully worded statement: “She wishes to be frozen, just like her grandfather, in hope of being revived decades or even centuries from now, when and if medical science can restore her health. Her father, brother, and I support her decision.”

  My grandfather, George Crane, Sr., holding Katie’s left hand, and twenty-seven-year-old George Jr., my father, standing at her right side, each signaled their agreement. “Yes, that’s right,” George Sr. said, smiling down at his daughter.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” she said, then looked toward Gary and Maxine, “and thanks so much to everyone here. I love you all.”

  Kevorkian scowled faintly, and addressed Katie again in his trademark humorless tone: morbid yet compassionate gentleness. The seventy-two-year-old “obitiatrist” had asked the same questions dozens of times before. “You understand what you’re asking me to do, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to help you end your life?”

  “Absolutely, yes.”

  “You realize that I can set up the equipment, but you will have to trigger the device yourself.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “You know you can stop anytime you wish.”

  “I won’t stop.”

  “But you can stop; you don’t have to go through with it.”

  “I know.”

  “Katie, how did you feel upon learning you had a terminal disease?”

  “Depressed.”

  “I see. And at the time you first decided to contact me, were you still depressed?”

  She considered this for several seconds before answering, “No. Not anymore.”

  “Then what prompted your decision?”

  Now Katie did not hesitate. “Logic,” she said.

  Kevorkian nodded his head several times, then asked the question he’d recently begun asking all of his younger patients: “Have you considered whether you’d be willing to donate any of your organs to help save the lives or eyesight of others?”

  Even though she’d made her decision days ago, Katie pondered the question carefully. “If science can bring me back to life, growing new organs should be a simple problem for them. Since I have cancer, I doubt anyone would want my internal organs other than for research. But the corneas should be fine. Okay, Doctor, take what you want. Just make sure they freeze my brain first.”

  Gary knew that Rebecca and her family were secretly horrified, but also determined to honor Katie’s judgment; they’d kept their thoughts to themselves in deference to her wishes. But he grinned at Katie, his eyes locking onto hers. To him, her decision seemed utterly sensible. Anytime a person under sixty years of age died, he thought, medics should harvest any transplantable organs and just worry about preserving the brain.

  She smiled back.

  “Katie,” Kevorkian asked, “what does it mean when you end your life; when you stop living?”

  “It means I’m dead—unless cryonics works and science can someday repair my body. I know my chances of ever being alive again aren’t so good. But even if I weren’t being frozen, I’d still want to die now. Now, while I can think for myself, and laugh, and easily bear the pain, and return the love of those who love me. I want to die now, tonight.”

  “Some say you’re doing the wrong thing, Katie. What would you tell them?”

  “I’d tell them that it’s my life, my body, my brain, my identity, my pain, and my hope. I know what I want, Dr. Kevorkian. I want to die; to be frozen with my Grampy.”

  Beside the bed, like a crazy basement-dwelling aunt whom nobody discussed, lurked a canister with hose and face mask. Everyone in the room knew it was there, and they all tried not to look at it, as if such conduct might remind them of why they were there or, worse, might make Katie feel rushed. She’d already rehearsed her suicide twice, hours ago, and now it seemed as if she was procrastinating; perhaps trying to keep the “party” going just a little while longer than etiquette might dictate.

  Kevorkian reassured her, “Take as much time as you need, Katie. No one’s in any hurry tonight.”

  “What time is it?” she asked. In truth, she felt weary and yearned to end it right then, but refused to reveal these emotions. Her work was not yet finished.

  Gary looked at his watch and said “seven-thirty” at exactly the moment Jan walked through the door.

  Right on time, Katie thought. Good! She looked at her handsome uncle, and his weathered, angular features seemingly demanding explanation. This was perfect.

  “What are you doing here?” Gary asked abruptly, instantly regretting it.

  “I invited her to come,” Katie said. “I’m sorry; I hope it’s all right.”

  “Of course,” Gary said, not meaning it.

  Jan hugged Rebecca, Max, both Georges, and Katie; then seated herself next to George Jr., who was perched on the right side of the bed. She looked toward Gary.

  Here it comes, he thought, throbbing with rage: the mea culpa that’s supposed to make everything fine again.

  “Look, Gary, I made a terrible mistake,” Jan blurted. “I was dumb and blind and careless. We needed money. Noah seemed so sure it was the right thing to do, and I guess I wanted to believe it, too. But it wasn’t right, what we did. I never should have gone along with that lawsuit. I screwed up, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. The worst thing is that if we’d won, I’d probably be gloating to myself and wallowing in self-righteousness, instead of groveling like I am now.”

  “All true,” Gary said, his heart falling to liquid-nitrogen temperature. She’d blown the Trust, and had cost Toby nearly five years of his life. For nothing. Worst of all, she’d tried to end their Dad’s hope of ever living again. And his own sole hope of ever really knowing his father. Suddenly Gary was reminded of the morning seventeen years ago when Ben Smith had first tried to reconcile with him. An apology did not make up for years of outrage, he’d thought then, just as he thought it now.

  “Gary, I love my husband,” she said, “and I loved Daddy. You know how much I loved him.” The insinuation remained unsaid, but fully understood: a hell of a lot more than you did, big brother! “And maybe when I lost one of them, it
made me need the other even more.”

  She pressed on, seemingly undeterred by his frigid silence. “Maybe I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I’m still your sister. I need you in my life. I’ve always loved you.”

  And he loved her, too, he realized. But so what? How could he ever trust her?

  “Uncle Gary,” Katie interrupted, “I asked her to come because—”

  Suddenly he felt self-centered and thoughtless. “Yes,” he said, tears of shame and love and sadness in his eyes. “Because you’re generous, wise, thoughtful, and… amazing. Here you are, about to end your life, maybe forever, and all you want is to leave us happy; you want what’s best for us.”

  Katie recoiled. “No!” she whispered, and slowly, puffing in pain, pulled herself up until she sat, her eyes glaring defiantly. “When I wake up, I want us all to be together. Because I’m selfish, just like everyone else.”

  Gary found himself stunned by the truth of his niece’s declaration. For nearly a minute he stood rooted, staring at her. Then he finally turned to Jan and opened his arms.

  As soon as his sister rose, Gary hugged her hard. “When I get home,” he said, “I’ll set up a life insurance policy for everyone in our family, with the Phoenix as beneficiary. If I have anything to say about it, we’ll always be together.”

  December 31, 2000

  —Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Americas third richest person, predicts by the mid-21st century a scientific revolution that will cure nearly every disease and initiate an era of universal prosperity. “Within a few decades, we’ll have computers every bit as smart as humans,” Ellison proclaims in a Fortune magazine interview, “and 10,000 times as fast. Problems that would take scientists 10,000 years to crack, they’ll solve in a year!”—Dr. Jack Kevorkian is indicted in two states for abetting nine separate violations of organ-donation statutes. He stands accused of coercing patients whose suicides he has supervised into agreeing to donate their organs to save the lives of others. Several family members of those donor patients rush to defend Kevorkian’s actions.—As midnight tonight, the one-year anniversary of the Y2K Disaster, approaches, the Federal Reserve Board issues its final report on anticipated long-term effects of the worldwide computer glitch. Blaming most current stock market and other economic woes on lawsuits, spiraling information-technology costs for businesses, numerous Asian and European bank failures, and Japan’s recent threat to return its currency to a gold standard, the Fed report predicts that today’s oppressive inflation and interest rates “can be expected to continue unabated, probably for many years.”