The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  I’d been chosen to preach the political doctrine of the INC because I could express obscure concepts in accessible terms. At least that’s what they’d told me. But I suspected that, as far as INC officials were concerned, it was even better that I happened to be the son of a well-known, martyred politician. The promoters of the conference must have reasoned that my speech would both attract and stimulate the nano-illiterate masses.

  “Before I tell you why nanotech was such a dangerous development,” I began, “let me first explain why it was possible to conceive it at all.

  “Leonardo da Vinci envisioned heavier-than-air flight several centuries before it was ever accomplished. He thought it possible because he knew that birds, bats, and insects are heavier than air. Today no bird or bat can achieve even a remote fraction of the speed, power, or control of our modern machines of the sky.

  “Late twentieth century scientists knew it was possible to build, on a molecular scale, machines with self-replicating, reversible, variable-speed motors a trillionth the size of those found in the children’s toys of those days, because common bacteria already possessed such motors. In fact, those found in bacteria are only slightly larger than today’s crude nanomotors.”

  Even though she’d heard similar statements from me before, Grandmother’s expression seemed to reflect a spontaneous sense of wonder.

  “Nobel laureate Richard Feynman stated—back in 1959, no less—that nanoassemblers were, quote, ‘a development which I think cannot be avoided.’ The greatest genius of mid-twentieth century physics foresaw both the benefits and dangers of molecular technology decades before his peers were even able to conceptualize its inevitability.

  “Well before the new millennium, scientists were manipulating atoms and molecules as individual entities. In the 1980s, gene synthesis machines were already capable of sequencing single molecules, called nucleotides, to create short strands of DNA. In 1996 American scientists learned how to position individual molecules without damage, using flexible carbon nanotubes.

  “It was also obvious to twentieth century scientists that we would someday create intelligences greater than our own. We knew even then that it was physically possible to build computers not just smaller and faster than the human brain, but also considerably more powerful. After all, smaller means faster. A human arm can flap a hundred times per minute, while an insect wing, a thousand times shorter, can flap 100,000 times.

  “Furthermore, electrical energy travels at a million times the speed of human nerve impulses.”

  Grandmother raised a questioning eyebrow. Even educated adults were often unaware of this startling fact, although by 2034 schoolchildren invariably knew it.

  “Indeed we would actually possess the technology, before the turn of the millennium, to simulate the workings of a human mind. We were limited not by abstract knowledge but by the enormous space and funding required to build a slow and commercially unwarranted electronic brain.”

  Grandmother’s eyes came alive. I imagined she was recalling the forward march of computer technology during her own early years. She had never even owned a PC until she’d reached her thirties. Her first machine had been torturously slow, couldn’t respond to speech, and covered most of her desk! Nowadays six-year-old kids were wearing a hundred times more computing power in their belt buckles or their pinkie rings.

  “Remember,” I went on. “Even the smallest silicon chips back then were made from transistors comprising half a trillion atoms apiece. Yet almost every late twentieth century scientist agreed we would have unimolecular transistors by now—and, of course, we do. Most nanoscientists today believe that such transistors, currently maintainable only under sterile laboratory conditions, will be commercially viable within a decade.

  “Already we can build a mechanical computer, as powerful as a turn-of-the-millennium ‘laptop’ but much faster—because it’s so much smaller—in a space slightly larger than a human cell. In twenty years we’ll assemble electronic computers perhaps a thousand times smaller and ten thousand times faster than those of today.

  “We now have nanomotors smaller and mightier than a bacterium’s, constructed atom by atom, molecule by molecule, from ceramics and metals far more durable and predictable than proteins. Don’t forget, nature typically demonstrates only the lower boundaries of the possible.”

  Grandmother smiled, nodding her head, envisioning, perhaps, an eagle trying to race against a mach-seven luxury liner, or someday, a starship.

  “We can already build computerized machines powered by today’s smallest motors, and your smallest capillaries could easily accommodate hundred-lane superhighways of such machines. Yet nanoscience is still an infant; a precocious one, but an infant nonetheless.

  “We should also have realized long ago that self-replicating intelligent machines had the potential to take over, or even destroy, the world—because we ourselves are such machines, and very crudely fashioned as compared to that which physical law allows.

  “Imagine a machine the size of a single human cell, possessing humanlike ability to communicate, but with immensely greater clarity and speed of information processing. And imagine that machine, if you dare, as an entity devoid of comparative experience, philosophy, and objective purpose beyond survival and procreation. Imagine it as a tiny, hyperintelligent tiger shark. Now give that machine the ability to reproduce itself every fifteen minutes. Such a machine, the fabrication of which the laws of physics in no way prohibit, could devour the earth in thirty-six hours, and ten hours later engulf the entire mass of our solar system.

  “Of course, these machines must be designed by humans, or by AIs thankfully at our command, and you’d have to be insane to want to build something destined to destroy you. But it would be a simple matter to make the machines selective; perhaps consuming only your enemies, while sparing yourself and your friends.

  “A nanowar could make us all nostalgic for the nuclear terrorism of the early twenty-first century.

  “Here is the reality check, ladies and gentlemen: With the science that will be available to me fifteen years from now, I could get together with five or six friends and assemble in my basement the very machine I have just described. Three decades from now, there will be tens of millions of individuals with that capability. Only one of those people need go insane for a moment, and poof! The end of humanity. It’s a good thing we have the Software Act and a Truth Machine, isn’t it?

  “I once argued against a world government,” I admitted. “But in the world as it has become, I now see no safe alternative to a well-reasoned central authority, embodying this single root axiom: that no person need fear any other, because the mere intention to murder or subjugate a fellow human being would be impossible to sustain, and murder itself would inevitably become an act of suicide.”

  Grandmother smiled through glistening eyes. Dreaming of her lost son—my lost father—I knew. I returned her smile.

  June 15, 2042

  —Scientists at Eastman Kodak say they have developed an artificial eye and compatible occipital lobe implant which together can enable even congenitally blind persons to achieve nearly normal eyesight. They expect to bring the device to market within four months.—The mayors and city councils of Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, announce plans to unify the two city governments immediately upon installation of World Government, expected to take place in about three years. The two cities have functioned in near unison over the past two decades. Windsor Mayor Gordon Lightfoot III is quoted, “We’ve done much to erase large artificial boundaries; why not small?” The merged city, to be renamed Michigan Shores, will become the world’s 170th largest.

  Alica Banks, a legal historian, and Dr. Virginia Gonzalez, the renowned neuroscientist, sat nervously on an interview couch at the Boston Eugenics Laboratory while the nanomachines spun twenty-eight of Virginia’s eggs into sperm. To get any closer, one woman would have to have climbed onto the other’s lap. Alica had never meant to fall in love with someone of her own gende
r, and indeed until she met Virginia six years before, had always enjoyed a healthy sexual appetite for men. But reproduction was no longer the exclusive province of heterosexuals, and with medical advances offering longer life spans and greater opportunity for experimentation, most vestiges of familial stigma over gay or bisexual lifestyles had been erased. At the age of thirty-four Alica had, for sixty-one months, been comfortably and happily wedded to this fifty-three-year-old woman. Today the couple was about to embark upon an adventure.

  “Boy or girl?” the AI machine asked.

  “We don’t care.”

  “Intelligence?”

  “Highest importance,” Virginia said. Alica nodded.

  “Physical characteristics?”

  “Tall would be nice,” Virginia said.

  “But only if all other considerations are equal,” Alica added, thinking it would be foolish even to give up a one percent loss of intelligence for six inches in height.

  “Any special family traits we should look for?”

  Alica answered. “Virginia’s mother was an Olympic swimmer, and my great-uncle was Gary Franklin Smith, the painter.”

  The AI intoned: “Out of forty-eight pairings with perfect genetic physical and mental health, we have one that is exceptional athletically and artistically, and another that’s off the charts in aesthetic perception, but only of average athletic endowment. Each would be a brown-eyed female; the former would be six feet tall, the latter five-eleven.”

  Virginia and Alica smiled at each other. “We’ll take the second one,” they proclaimed in unison.

  Conveniently, the two women found themselves in the midst of an obstetric technological revolution. Cloning, also known as parthenogenetics, the precursor of same-sex parenthood, had become legal in the United States in July 2034, a decade after the first successful adult human cloning in France. Same-sex parenthood, or homogenetics, had first been offered in the United States in May 2042, and Alica Banks would be among the first one hundred women in the Boston area to try it. (Male couples would require a female surrogate until pods became available in 2045.)

  The Eugenics Laws, to govern selective breeding of humans, had been passed in August 2022. The Democrats had been in power that year, and President Gordon Safer had wisely pushed for unilateral parental control. Granted, had the government been involved in eugenic decision-making, characteristics such as honesty and emotional self-control might have pervaded today’s teenage population at only slight cost to vivacity and physical beauty. Nevertheless, government interference, or even incentives, would have wrought unforeseeable political and social consequences, perhaps even some diminution of the bond of love between parent and child.

  As it turned out, fears of unleashing a billion self-absorbed geniuses upon an ill-prepared world were unfounded. In fact, parents tended toward the selection of more socially valuable qualities for their offspring than they might have chosen for themselves: intellectual honesty, emotional intelligence, and compassion, among others.

  This new generation of humans was the first to be unambiguously smarter, taller, and genetically healthier than its antecedent, proving that even on its worst day, technology is an infinitely more efficient engine of change than natural selection could ever hope to be.

  Most historical texts of the times were already speculating that the Eugenics Laws should probably have been enacted at least five years earlier. More than enough technology had been available in 2017 to justify eugenic manipulation. But the field had still been laboring under the stigma of Josef Mengele’s ghastly experiments. Indeed, the atavistic connection between Hitler and eugenics had delayed its acceptance for several years at great societal cost; yet another insidious echo from the Nazis.

  Alica’s parents, Michael and Joanne Banks, were pleased with their daughter’s match, and supportive of her decision to have a child. “You might wish you’d waited a couple more years,” Joanne had told her, however. “They’ll have pods by early ‘forty-five. Pregnancy can be most unpleasant. Take it from me. I know. But more important, honey, there are inherent risks you simply don’t have to take.”

  Virginia and Alica found the six-hour parenting class easy, almost fun, and their license had been granted immediately after passing the exam, as was customary.

  The early 2040s had witnessed a substantial decline in births, but the advances of 2045 would usher in an American baby boom unprecedented since the decades following World War Two.

  Ectogenesis, the nanotech-based science of artificial wombs, would be the primary force behind both statistical anomalies: decline and boom. Prior to the announced coming of the pods, women had often succumbed to peer pressure and the joy-rush of oxytocin, extolling the glories of in utero gestation and childbirth, reinventing an unavoidable hardship and danger as a thing of beauty. But once most women learned of procreation-without-pregnancy, it was hard to convince them to linger in the pre-ectogenetic desert. Joy with pain or joy without it? Few found the choice difficult.

  Alica was an exception. But even one so resolute could not avoid at least occasional doubts over so brave a decision, especially on March 6, 2043. Although biochemical convenatives would block any actual pain that she chose to intermit, Alica would still hear and taste, see and smell, the wrenching and sudden rupture from her uterus of ten pound, seven ounce Lysa Banks Gonzalez.

  Yet after the birth, even the memories of her doubts would begin to evaporate, as they always had in the analgesic balm of human motherhood, and for many months Alica Banks would feel little else but love, parental anxiety, and pride.

  June 15, 2045

  —The World Health Department approves ICN Pharmaceutical’s new cloning process whereby perfect adult-sized hearts, livers, kidneys, and other organs can be grown from the patient’s own cells in just 32 months. Previously, most organ clonings required six years or longer. ICN Chairman Vaclav Panic says he expects to cut the cycle to under two years by decade’s end.—Union Carbide releases Windowpane, a nuclear waste disposal system expected to revolutionize that field. Windowpane encases debris in a glasslike amalgam of silicon, cadmium, carbon, gadolinium, sodium, mercury, tin, and zirconium, which absorbs 99.9997% of neutron radiation.

  “The human race,” the image on my wallscreen began, “has stumbled and been dragged into accepting the reality of our nature, and now it actually appears we might overcome our genetically programmed propensity for self—”

  Woof!

  Huh? Self-destruction, I guessed. I was trying to listen to former Russian Deputy Prime Minster Boris Malinkov’s inaugural address in Sydney, but that would have been difficult enough without my golden retriever there. Wendy displayed uncanny timing, each bark coinciding with the new World President’s most interesting pronouncements.

  Malinkov continued: “I suspect we have now woven history’s experience into the best form of government we could design. It won’t be perfect, of course. Even democratic governments are careless and occasionally do evil things, but rarely have they been inherently evil. Indeed, democratic leaders are elected by convincing voters they will contribute to the greater good of society. Rather, our foremost adversaries are now laziness, ineptitude, ignorance, and of course—” Yip!

  Secrecy. I contemplated with a mixture of amusement and irony that Malinkov would likely have far less power over information during his coming three-year term than the man had wielded in his previous, pre-World Government post. Although I’d voted for Malinkov with enthusiasm, a single notion now emerged: Thank God for that!

  “Bureaucracies,” our first World President went on, “have always had a vested interest in the clandestine. Bureaucrats, seeking ever-increasing budgets, hid their mistakes. Regulators knew they would endure more censure when their actions caused ten deaths than when their inaction killed hundreds, so they acted accordingly. Special interests purchased access to politicians and bureaucrats, and peddled their agendas, ignoring public welfare. All this was no more evil than human nature itself, yet the result wa
s fiendish.

  “But with objectively rated, scip-tested, freely accessed, open information—an end to all government secrecy—our bureaucracies will be more accountable than any in human history. Make no mistake about it: Without Truth Machine scips, World Government would be neither practical nor desirable. Or even possible.”

  I raised the volume to drown out any future interruptions from Wendy. I was attending the speech from my laboratory, and could easily have activated my auricle-implant receiver and right contact-lens screen, and still used my left eye to proofread the latest neuron repair protocols. I knew I shouldn’t forgo real-time communion with such a momentous historical event. But VR still made me irrationally nervous, and so I continued to use the primitive wallscreens and audio speakers whenever possible. Besides, wasn’t the work even more critical to me?

  “Socrates once warned that the only true evil is ignorance,” he continued.

  And therefore the opposite of evil, I mused, must be wisdom.

  “World Government is the final step in humankind’s race against the evasion of objective reality.”

  I gently stroked the fur of the creature at my feet, the seventy-one pound animal that had been my day-and-night companion for the past decade. It was well past nap time. Wendy was tired, almost asleep.

  “We cannot govern ourselves,” Malinkov continued, “based upon an ideal of human nature. We must deter every human being from intentionally or negligently harming any other, except in self-defense or objectively calculated, government-sanctioned deterrence.

  “What is the World Government’s stand on religion? None, other than universal religious freedom for every individual. What is our position on licensing? None, other than to assure, using scips, that individuals who intend to illegally injure others are denied licenses for transportation, commerce, employment, parenting, weapon ownership, and all other dangerous activities. What is our stand on suicide? Previability birth control? Eugenics? Public health? Education? Building codes? Again none, except to document the integrity of every business and agency providing such services, allowing consumers to intelligently choose their own providers.”