The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  “Do you think they’ll really get Final Death?” Gary asked. Like most world citizens, some hidden part of him hoped not. Final Death, in a way, would be like a declaration that brain vitrification had no merit, an intolerable concept.

  Father Steve shrugged.

  Predictably, in the two weeks since Nobine et Cie’s fraud was exposed, acceptance of cryonics had barely diminished. Although Prometheus Inc.’s stock price had lost eighty-three percent of its value, sales of the Protocol itself had fallen by less than ten percent. Some refused even to believe that the French mouse revivification had really been fraudulent—in spite of the defendants’ public confessions that it was. Throughout the world, people had come to depend upon the scientifically assured viability of cryonics. It would be at least as difficult to rectify this misperception as it had been initially to create it.

  Gary considered all of this a fascinating lesson in human psychology. And while he felt less certain of vitrification today than he had two weeks earlier, cryonics remained to him the only rational choice.

  Defense attorney Villard began: “Does cryonics not give you a better chance for life than conflagration, or feeding your body to the worms? My friends, do any of you really believe there’s a better method of brain preservation than the Prometheus Protocol? In 2005, before Drs. Binette and Noire perpetrated their so-called fraud, there were approximately 39,400 suspensions performed worldwide. Almost everyone who died was cremated or buried. Cremated or buried! This year, there will be over thirty million suspensions.

  “Certainly my clients profited from a fraud. So take the money back. All of it! But did they intend harm by their actions? Dr. Binette has proven, through his own ACIP testimony, that his primary purpose in conducting the deception was to help popularize cryonic suspension. I remind you again that in 2006 most perfectly rational human beings were happily incinerating or interring their deceased loved ones. How many of those unfortunate dead will ever be resurrected?

  “Dr. Noire, like Dr. Binette, has voluntarily taken a full series of Truth Machine scips. He admits his motives were mostly financial, but still believes that brain vitrification under the Prometheus Protocol offers the best chance for identity and memory preservation upon revivification.

  “My own view is that someday my clients will be remembered as heroic scoundrels, two men who managed, through duplicitous means, to change for the better the world’s perception of the science of cryonics. Ultimately, their actions will have saved most of an entire human generation…”

  “Amazing,” Father Steve said. “He’s arguing that these crooks are heroes! I admire his creativity.”

  Gary understood that in essence they were both. “But think back to what trials were like before the ACIP Talk about creative! Villard’s argument is downright boring in comparison to most pre-Truth Machine trials.”

  Father Steve laughed.

  “A long time ago Toby and I used to talk about deciphering the laws of nature,” Gary said. “Deciphering, then overcoming them. We’d sit there and try to describe future technologies, each trying to top the other. I don’t think either of us ever came up with anything like the Truth Machine.”

  “It sure changed everything.”

  “Yeah,” Gary agreed, “and this is just the beginning. That device might be our greatest weapon against entropy. It brings simplicity and order to every interaction. Just look at its application here: exposing a scientific fraud that nobody would’ve otherwise discovered.”

  “I know it’s caused sleepless nights for a lot of people in my line of work,” Father Steve deadpanned. Startled, Gary looked at him, then laughed.

  Judge Benat LeCagot announced, “Since there are no fact issues in dispute, prosecution and defense have waived jury participation. Therefore the AI machine will render sentence.” He addressed the defendants: “Please rise.” Binette and Noire almost jumped from their seats, trembling as they awaited the verdict. LeCagot read to the defendants from the screen of his IBM Solomon-4 justice AI:

  “Both defendants will forfeit their entire estates including all future Prometheus royalties, such funds to be used for future cryonics research. They will immediately undergo suspended animation under the Prometheus Protocol. Should the Protocol work, they will someday rejoin the living. If not, may God have mercy on their souls.”

  Gary noticed that Noire appeared considerably more worried than did Binette.

  April 17, 2033

  —A computer designed by a team of Intel engineers scores 97 on a randomly configured human IQ test. Many pundits consider the team likely to win a Nobel science prize.—The American Real Estate Association projects that the present glut of office and retail properties will continue to worsen through the end of 2044, when cyber-commuting and cyber-shopping are expected to peak at 96% and 94% respectively. Currently, almost 20% of shopping and office work is still performed on premises. The AREA predicts further massive conversion of commercial space into residential and indoor farming usage.

  Fazli Azambai shoved the ancient timing pencil into the last of the aged cakes of Sem-tex, and whispered an incantation to himself: “Verily, when Allah seeks the downfall of a culture, He first corrupts it with vanity.”

  The plastique explosive had been passed down to him from his father’s father, a Mujahadeen freedom fighter against the atheist Russian invaders. The fifty-four-year-old Sem-tex had been purchased in dollars supplied by the American government during the Carter administration, and manufactured in Czechoslovakia, a long-defunct former Soviet satellite. Fazli found himself amused by the irony that his homeland’s two greatest enemies had thus helped enable today’s glorious endeavor. Now these fruits of Satan’s wealth would be used, Allah be praised, to help stop the infidel madman, U.S. President David West, from erasing the Czech and Slovak’s chosen borders—along with every other sovereign national border—to create a single World Government. With World Government in force, how could the independent state of Peshwar, with its huge ethnic Afghani majority, fully separate itself from Pakistan, that degenerate nation of westward-leaning sycophants?

  Fazli molded the substance to the last of the carefully selected overhead lighting fixtures, set the final timer, collapsed the folding ladder, and returned it to its storage closet. Then, still wearing his stolen cleaning services uniform, he left the hotel.

  With this act of heroism, his place in Paradise would be assured.

  Within three hours he would abandon his Land Rover AI-Safari near the Hindu Kush Pass in his own Afghanistan, safely out of reach of Pakistani scips and extradition treaties.

  Congressman Wesley Seacrest (D. IA) and I, Trip Crane, now a twenty-seven-year-old MIT Assistant Professor of Nanotechnology, each suppressed an irrational impulse to shout obscenities at our Pakistani driver. Since meeting us at the airport in a driver-operated taxi (neither of us had seen a driver-operated car on public streets in over a decade), the man had already taken two wrong turns, hopelessly ensnaring us in a so-called traffic jam.

  “We’ll never make it in time,” the forty-nine-year-old politician complained. Wes tugged lightly on his blue ponytail. “I s’pose we’ll catch hell for it, too.”

  “At least we sort of cancel each other out, don’t we?” I said, and half chuckled. It was annoying to miss our most important round-table debate of the conference, but there was also something humorous about the whole situation, as if we’d somehow gone back in time to watch people muddle through life without the modern AIs.

  “Yes, I suppose so. But I’d’ve enjoyed debating you again. Interesting that the Formation Council always schedules us to appear sequentially. I was especially looking forward to it. This time you were s’posed to go first.”

  I adjusted my earlobe microchip, absentmindedly coloring my eyeballs and most of my hair an iridescent lime-green. I glanced at my image on the backseat screen, and decided I liked the effect. I still looked decidedly male, but somehow feline, a green tiger, perhaps. “Then I guess I should be thankful w
e’re late.”

  Seacrest caught a quick glimpse, too, and must have mused that even his own generation was not quite so over-the-top. “You’re really opposed to a world government, aren’t you, Trip?”

  “I couldn’t very well lie about my feelings with all those ACIPs pointed at me, now could I?”

  “Guess not. But yours is an unusual position for a nanojock to take. Most of you fellas are running scared as jackrabbits at a dog-cloning center. ‘Course, you guys actually understand what nanotech could do in the wrong hands.”

  “Yes, we do. But don’t you think scips can prevent that?”

  “Truth Machines won’t prevent crimes in places where they aren’t used, and if anyone can flee to jurisdictions where they’ll be immune from punishment, how’ll we stop ‘em? Because with nanotech, we’d damn well better stop ‘em all. Remember, criminals can be resourceful, and very evil.”

  “So can governments,” I said.

  The Hyatt was now fully in view, a maddening ninety car lengths away.

  “Looks like we’ll only be fifteen or twenty minutes late,” I was telling him, just as the first- and second-floor facades of the hotel vanished into a cloud of smoke and flying debris.

  We heard the roar of the explosion a second and a half after we saw it. The force of it snapped our heads back. For a moment the taxi seemed to buckle.

  I leaned forward, trying to see through the smoke and haze. Debris lay everywhere; men and women slowly picked themselves up off the street. I heard screams all around and the piercing, painful blare of locked car horns.

  My first jumbled thoughts were of the people inside the building. The dozens of scientists from all over the world. My mind groped for names; faces swam at me. The loss was catastrophic. The politicians, the diplomats. Jesus! Most with families at home.

  Instantly I thought of my own parents. Rage flared. I’d been barely nine and a half when their plane crashed; then a decade of being nurtured back to some semblance of mental health, first by Uncle Gary, then by my grandmother. And the therapeutic salvation of work, which sustained me until (finally) the trial, only last year.

  Now I pictured the faces of the three cowards who’d masterminded the airliner shoot-down. Seventeen years of living with the act had done a lot to temper their self-righteousness. Each had received a forty-year prison sentence under the Spanish Amnesty Act. With cryonics and nanomedicine, the bastards would probably all live to see the fourth millennium.

  I felt my fist shatter the rear passenger window of the taxi. There was an instant of surprisingly sharp pain, fascinating in its rarity. As I stared at my bloodied hand, it took several seconds to realize that if we’d had a more competent driver today, Wes and I, too, would now be scattered among the smoldering debris.

  October 30, 2033

  —The Tufts School of Dentistry files for patents on a one-hour surgical orthodontic procedure, which when performed on any normal 7-year-old will guarantee a lifetime of perfect tooth alignment.—Only 16 months after Intel created their computer of near-human intelligence, Sun Microsystems demonstrates a system capable of achieving test scores in excess of 180 IQ level. A company spokeswoman calls the advance “just the beginning,” and predicts that Sun will bring a full line of advanced, nonsentient AI products to market within a year.—The FDA approves BioTime’s “Respirocytes,” the first nanotech protocol it has ever allowed on humans. The computerized machines, each of which comprise approximately eighteen billion atoms and which can transport up to nine billion air and nutrient molecules at a time, are somewhat smaller but much more efficient than the red blood cells they were designed to replace.

  The skies remained dark, but stars were disappearing; the air felt calm and refreshingly chilled.

  “You ever going to show me the thing?” Father Steve asked.

  Both partly hoped it would be no time soon. With some goals, the pursuit is more gratifying than the realization. Of course, Gary would create other pictures, but perhaps never another like this. And whatever the public thought of The Dawn of Life, whether they spurned the art and the artist, or embraced both, the culmination of the work would leave an indescribable emptiness within the hearts of these two men.

  “Before too long,” Gary answered solemnly, carefully steering the aluminum skiff through six sonar and microwave-surveillance buoys marking the small-craft lanes of Boston Harbor. “It’s close, I think. And you’ll be the first to see it. But not till it’s ready.”

  Five minutes passed; the sun began to backlight the heavens. The two had already absorbed several dozen sunrises together, and Gary had seen at least a hundred others over the previous six months, from every vantage point imaginable. He still awaited that special convergence of color, light, and refractivity, a limpid impurity and brilliant haze that would define the moment, over three billion years ago, when that which was bare matter had all at once become more than itself.

  The last stars were subsumed by their awaking master, and there it was.

  Gary and Father Steve stood to witness the ascent of an inanimate object that rendered all life possible. The top of the great fireball bubbled from the eastern Atlantic like molten lava, its halo of ardent gold and red and magenta illuminating the wispy clouds and vaporous mists of morning; radiating a brilliant warmth that seemed to energize the billowing, oceanic earth.

  Its sensors having alerted the freighter’s AI that it had veered off course by nearly 150 yards and must correct immediately, a Russian container ship turned ponderously, like an oversized apatosaur plowing through a rain forest. Its 2,300-foot reinforced steel hull sliced through the water, displacing 137 billion gallons, throwing a seven-foot wake that would easily reach the shore several miles away.

  “That was it,” the priest said. “Wasn’t it?”

  Gary nodded, his countenance a mirror of Father Steve’s: achievement, anxious excitement, and regret—all commingled. Although he’d neglected to set his wristband on “Document,” Gary now retained every nuance of today’s sunrise, just as he’d memorized The Dawn of Life itself. Beyond any doubt, each would complete the other. It was almost over, nearly time to let the public submit its verdict.

  “Yes,” he said, “that was the one.”

  They headed back into the bay, each still absorbed in the significance of today’s milestone. Only Father Steve sensed the swell’s approach, and had no time to scream. Therefore Gary was taken completely by surprise when the surge, tall as the men and higher than the boat’s freeboard, reached them.

  Their flimsy skiff was no match for the force of the roller, which slammed into it like a boy kicking an empty Coca-Cola carton. The two men were hurled twenty yards into the merciless ocean, with 1.6 miles of 37 degree Fahrenheit waters separating them from shore. A heavy current sucked them under.

  By triangulating on life-monitor distress signals from the wristband of one of the drowning men, a medevac gyrocopter crew managed to locate them within minutes. Undersea robots deployed from the chopper would raise their bodies from thirty-eight feet below the surface, one hour and fifty-nine minutes later.

  August 12, 2034

  —A series of 28 virtual reality probes lands in Mercury’s twilight zone. Within 16 days, astronomers from the U.S., Russia, India, and China intend to set up interactive environments on Earth to faithfully duplicate the surface conditions of various regions on the innermost planet of our solar system. Later this decade, similar probes, each individually designed to function in its intended non-terrestrial environment, will be sent to Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and each of their moons.—The United States becomes the last nation on Earth to legislate the insertion of routine, permanent contraceptive implants at birth. Before becoming pregnant, couples throughout the world must now pass a basic parenting test, and prove themselves competent, in order to obtain routinely granted procreation licenses and prophylactic overrides for both partners.

  My grandmother, Rebecca Crane, settled into her front-row seat to watch me, her only br
eathing descendant, deliver an address in Los Angeles. Supersonic subways would not emerge for nearly five more years, but travel was already becoming easier. Including transportation to and from airports, getting to the auditorium had consumed barely ninety minutes, and her return to Boston would require only eighty-five. Still, I was touched that she came. Grandmother hated to fly, of course. Too many painful memories.

  Even with the passing of nineteen years, the irreversible loss of my father, her only son, had lost only its daily sting, becoming a duller but chronic discomfort, a cancer in her bones. Aunt Katie’s so-called suicide had been somehow easier for her; at least there had remained the prospect that someday she might return to the world of the living. My father’s death left no such hope. Becoming guardian to me after my parents’ tragedy, and raising me, may have somehow helped, too. I like to think so, anyway.

  Now, at twenty-eight, I would be the next speaker at the Fourteenth Annual International Nanotechnology Conference. My invitation to deliver this keynote address had been unusual; eighty-two percent of INC lecturers this year were over fifty or under twenty. Only the older men and women could recount the genesis and history of nanotech and explore its emerging ethical and scientific disciplines. Youngsters, a solid five to ten years younger than I, were best at explaining how to design the machines, and how to create the redundant systems that precluded unpredictable and often dangerous mutations.

  Grandmother watched vacantly as the aged nanotech pioneer, Dr. Marc Tarkington, concluded his talk, numbing her brain with his narratives of assemblers, disassemblers, and replicators; angstroms, carbyne chains, and memes; quantum mechanics, entropy, and the uncertainty principle. Her eyes were open but appeared unseeing, a condition she never displayed when listening to my public utterances, no matter how dry.

  Was it because she loved me? I wondered. Or simply because I tried to make my lectures seem more conversational?