The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  * * *

  Even without cryoprotectants, freezing damage is subtle. Cells do not burst. Occasionally, however, their outer membranes may puncture from the expansion of water, which comprises nine-tenths of their volume. More often, just a tiny percentage of cells are damaged, usually when some molecules are misplaced, and many of these molecules return to their correct positions upon thawing. Indeed, countless living humans, some born as long ago as the late twentieth century, had once been frozen at liquid nitrogen temperature, as embryos.

  But postembryonic mammals are delicate; even a slight disruption of the molecular structures in an infinitesimal percentage of its cells will render the entire organism nonviable. Freezing damage at liquid nitrogen temperature, while narrow in one sense, is vastly more extensive than a mammalian body can withstand or self-repair.

  Until February 2064, no mammal had ever been deep-frozen and then successfully revived, and even now, nearly five months later, there was still no incontrovertible proof that the nongenetic memories of those creatures had survived intact.

  Wendy had been vitrified, which minimized disruption damage but created a new problem: removing the glassy sap cross links holding the molecules in place. That would be the first task of the three trillion disassembler/assembler machines, nearly half a pound of them, deployed through Wendy’s vascular system.

  Dr. Abel Dewar injected the D/A’s through a microscopic perforation in Wendy’s chest. The machines received no help from the frozen bloodstream, yet within seconds spread their way through the dog’s veins, arteries, and capillaries. The cryo-protectant removal was accomplished in 128 minutes.

  The machines returned to their positions, guided by nearly a billion nanocomputers interspersed among them, each a thousand times larger than the D/A’s themselves. (The concoction now weighed eleven ounces.) This army of machines would require sixteen hours to effect repairs, and to thaw and revive Wendy. If nothing went wrong, which was unlikely.

  The first fourteen hours saw no serious emergencies, as expected. Every living cell was static. Such is the beauty of cryonic suspension: It virtually halts every retrogressive biological effect of time’s passage. The thawing would be the difficult part.

  We nine pioneers of nanoscience monitored progress like zealous sports fans; as if by watching intently enough, we might somehow affect the outcome. We sat transfixed, staring at our 3-D screens or hooked to VRs while the D/A s began the tedious process of cell repair, and replacement wherever aging had destroyed entire cells.

  Despite her near perfect vitrification, Wendy’s DNA strands now averaged an error every 640,000 nucleotides, more than sufficient to wreak havoc. Nearly all of this was freezing damage that happened as they’d warmed her up, the remainder being from normal radiation that had occurred over Wendy’s life. But we believed nanomachines could repair it all, and much more efficiently than her body’s natural repair enzymes could ever hope to.

  Using central computers, a perfect DNA map had been constructed during the first few seconds of the process. The D/A s had compared the DNA from eighty randomly selected cells. Even this was overkill. The odds of any identical error occurring in three or more strands out of five would have been virtually zero. But I figured comparing eighty strands was no more time-consuming than comparing five, so what the hell? The actual examination and repair of over two trillion tissue cells, however, would require considerably more time: fourteen monotonous, nerve-racking, and ultimately uneventful hours.

  By ten P.M. the repairs were complete, and Wendy II now possessed all the cellular structures of youth; a three-year-old dog’s unimpaired enzymes, collagen, bone and muscle strength, and immune system. At that moment, she boasted the most perfect DNA of any canine adult on earth. Technically, her age was still nearly thirteen, so the “genetic clock” mechanism in her cells would likely kill her off within nine more years despite the repairs, unless a way to reverse the clock were discovered by then. But if everything went as planned, she would soon have the energy, strength, and resiliency she’d possessed ten years before. If there had been no mistakes. If only we could be sure…

  At 10:27 P.M. the first warning signal beeped.

  “What the heck is that?” Stephanie Van Winkle, Abel’s very attractive assistant, asked him.

  “Damn! Of course,” the medico answered. “Soon as she started thawing, her body would’ve noticed the invaders, and now her immune system’s been activated. Never could’ve predicted such a violent reaction, though…”

  “Jesus! It’s going nuts,” I blurted as I stared at the infrared 109x image on my 3-D visor.

  “T-cells can’t hurt the machines,” Stephanie assured me. “Protein’s a lot softer than iron.”

  “True,” Abel answered, “the machines’ll be fine. But if her immune system exhausts itself, Wendy could die from infection. We’d better do something quick.”

  “Any ideas?” Carlos Platt, the AI engineer, asked.

  “Maybe g16 steroids?” Abel suggested. “A seventeenth- or eighteenth-generation formula might be too human-specific.”

  My adrenaline took over. Within five seconds I’d punched into my module the drug-licensing order to Amgen. It took another twenty-five seconds for the assembler to spin the proper dose, and barely that for Abel to inject the medicine. Two minutes later the first crisis was over, just as a new one began.

  Wendy’s respiration hadn’t resumed when she first started shivering. Suddenly she took a deep, labored breath. Then she sneezed.

  Sneezed?! I’d rarely seen an involuntary sneeze since Merck’s Allergone protocol had been added to commercial drinking water decades earlier.

  “Is it life-threatening?” Abel asked.

  “You mean you don’t know?” Panic must have been obvious in my voice.

  “Might just be a chill,” Stephanie said. Wishful thinking.

  “Damn it, answer me! Is it life-threatening?!” Abel shouted.

  I stared quizzically at the doctor. Of course! He was asking the remote medical AI. But was it on? “Activate Canine HealthFile,” I said, then repeated Abel’s query, “Is it life-threatening?”

  “Not immediately,” the AI intoned, having instantly assimilated the data from the central nanocomputers inside Wendy’s body and determined her prognosis. “The subject can survive approximately six minutes without treatment, but permanent brain damage might occur sooner.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with her?” I shouted.

  “She has a mild sensitivity,” sang the Al’s voice.

  “To what?”

  “All FW32 molecules attached to Ferrite.”

  I tried to stop shaking. My Wendy-girl, three trillion nanomachines spread throughout her body, was, for all practical purposes, allergic to—could you believe this stinking luck?—iron.

  “Damn!” Abel said. “Must be why her rejection mechanism was so violent. Can you spin an antihistamine?”

  I had the assembler programmed before Abel finished asking the question, but genetic engineering had vanquished human allergies decades ago, and the machine had to back-order the protocol from Searle, squandering 253 precious seconds. The doctor measured the dosage and injected Wendy, five minutes and nine seconds after her allergic reaction had begun.

  Shit! Five goddamn minutes.

  My eyes pleaded with Abel. “Well, is she gonna be… okay… or not?”

  “Too soon to tell about her brain, but her nervous system’s a mess.”

  “Can’t the machines repair nerve damage?”

  “Already working on it.”

  I tried to comfort my pet, but Wendy II stared back with vacant, anguished, unrecognizing eyes. She began to hyperventilate, and suddenly let loose with a scream that seemed to emerge from her heart, freezing all of us into postures of shock, until finally she subsided into a pathetic, continuous whimper.

  I yelled to Abel, “Put her under. Now!”

  Abel administered IV anesthetics; seconds later my dog was unconscious. I wondered if
she would ever wake up, and more to the point, wondered if I wanted her to. My poor, sweet girl, I thought. What have I done to you?

  “I guess there probably aren’t too many experiences more painful than having a billion machines repairing every nerve cell in your body,” Stephanie suggested, hugging me. The twenty-eight-year-old technician had worked for me for five years and had never so much as shaken my hand before that moment. “The machines have done their best; we’ve done our best. We’ll just have to wait until she wakes up.”

  The rest of the group gathered around, offering words of reassurance. “Still, she could be okay.”

  “It’s too soon to tell.”

  “You did all you could, Trip.”

  “She really might be fine.”

  “Absolutely,” Abel added. “Tomorrow, ol’ Wendy-girl could be prancing around like none of this ever happened.”

  “You never know,” I answered in a stoic voice. But trembling hands betrayed my thoughts: What had I been thinking? Who the hell did I think I was to risk her life like that?

  3

  THE MILLENNIUM OF HOPE

  I lowered my head, turned away from the others, and absently set my primary AI on manual. A table and keyboard grew from the wall. I typed: WHO AM I? then gazed at the words that had formed on my screen:

  Who are you?

  Or more precisely, what are you?

  You, George Jacob Crane III, are a carbon-based life-form, approximately 90 percent hydrogen and oxygen atoms by weight, a member of the species Homo sapiens.

  But what is your essence? What differentiates you from the billions of other humans with whom you share this planet?

  Imagine it is the turn of the millennium, and I am your 20th-century laptop. There are countless computers identical to me; same hardware, same operating system. Yet unless you could transfer my data, you might not trade me for 100 others, freshly minted in their boxes. The vessel is replaceable, but the information is priceless.

  Now suppose I were smashed with a hammer or dropped from a fourth-story window. My data might well be salvaged.

  But were I to be melted in a vat of acid along with my backup discs, oh woe! You, sir, can be described in similar terms. Should your heart stop beating, doctors might restore you to life, a miracle not possible just 50 years ago. Yet once your brain cells die, 20th century science cannot resuscitate you. During the next century that may change, and it is certain that life and death will continue to be redefined. Even now, before the third millennium, organs are routinely transplanted from one person to another. Personalities are altered with medications. Artificial hearts and kidneys are used routinely. If your species survives long enough, the 20th century’s most feared diseases will become curable. Intelligence, even wisdom, will be artificially enhanced, and emotions fine-tuned. There will be human cloning and eventually a halt to the molecular processes of aging. It is only a matter of time.

  This reality may not yet be evident, but in the future you’ll understand that ordered information, like the digital bits in my computer, comprises all memory, thought, emotion, perception, and consciousness: the totality of that unique essence which is you. Humans might achieve such an immortality through the simple preservation of each brain’s unique information. Everything else about you is replaceable, or someday may be.

  Who are you? Your essence is information about the unique experiences, emotions, and thoughts of your life; perhaps nothing more, and unquestionably nothing less.

  June 29, 2064

  —Never Apart, the world’s third largest teledildonics agency, settles a lawsuit filed against it by two couples whose semblances were mistakenly transposed and projected to the wrong bodysuits, causing each of the four to engage in virtual sex with the wrong partner. A spokesman for the firm says, “It was an isolated incident, which has never happened before and probably never will again. Teledildonics is still the ideal way for separated lovers to ‘keep in touch.’”—Seven hours after a fogging agent cloud of antireplicators successfully consume all of Professor Robert Stephen Kermel’s renegade foraging nanoreplicators in New York City at 1:03 this morning, President Jason Tara lauds the World Nanocrisis Agency’s adroit response to yesterday’s terrifying incident. “The defenders almost always have the advantage,” Tara assures the public at a memorial service for Kermel’s seven irreparable victims. “That’s because, while it takes several minutes for a replicator to reproduce itself, a nanodefender can usually find and consume a replicator in less than a second. As long as the defenders outnumber the replicators, the defenders will win. Fortunately.”—The number of languages spoken in transactional discourse on Earth falls below 1,000 for the first time in recorded history, an 82% drop in just 50 years. Some experts predict that by mid-millennium, English and Mandarin Chinese will be the only languages still in general use.

  None of us had slept. Around midnight we’d brought Wendy II up to my apartment. Now spread out in chairs, the couch, or on the floor, my eight associates had been keeping vigil with me. We were family now, and Wendy was one of our own.

  “Y’know, Trip,” Paul Adler said, “even if Wendy has brain damage, we could freeze her again. There’s a decent chance they’ll be able to bring her back within a decade.”

  “That’s pretty to think, Paul,” I answered, “but it could be more like a century.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked our AI engineer. “Once we’re reviving people en masse, the sciences now advancing in short hops will suddenly take giant leaps. And other technologies are bound to sprout from them.”

  “We can fix brain damage now,” Stephanie volunteered.

  “Not all of it,” I said.

  “Not yet,” she said, “but by the time the nanomachines revive a few dozen undamaged humans, the AIs’ll know everything about our brains. They’ll teach the brain-repair D/A’s to pattern language skills into any brains that’ve lost them. Same goes for sensory interpretation, history, science, aesthetics, math; all the basic, well, software, I guess. We’ll clone new cells to replace those damaged beyond restoration. In ten years, I’d bet just about every person who comes out of biostasis will be smarter than he or she was when frozen, smarter than ever before. The same can be done for Wendy.”

  “But we can never restore lost memories,” I said, “or reconstruct identity. Even if we put her in biostasis and wait till the science matures, we’ll just wind up with a healthy, smart new puppy in Wendy’s body.”

  “Better than nothing,” Stephanie said.

  “Maybe not, at least not as far as she’s concerned. To her, it’ll be as though she went to sleep and never woke up. Without memory, she’ll just be another golden retriever, a new dog composed of Wendy’s atoms. She won’t be Wendy anymore, not for herself, not for me.”

  “Well, don’t give up yet.” Stephanie rubbed my back. It helped. “She’ll be conscious within the hour. And she might be just fine.”

  Some fifty minutes later at 1:47 A.M., Wendy stirred. Her first movements seemed lethargic, but I knew that was normal when coming out of general anesthesia. Then she wagged her tail, bounded from the cart, and leapt into my welcoming arms.

  Yes. Lord, yes! She knew me! At least she still knew me. And for just that instant, it was enough.

  The tiny crowd offered congratulations, an inspiring background of sound I could barely hear.

  But were they premature? How could they know? They couldn’t administer the ultimate, empirical test; only I could do that. And as an undercurrent to my joy, a tide of fear dragged at me.

  “Wendy, I need my remote activator.”

  Wendy stood, scanned the room. At first she appeared confused.

  Oh, God. Please.

  Suddenly she bounded left to uncover the device I’d so carefully hidden, allowing me to dare believe. A moment later it was pressed to my hand.

  “Wendy, I’d love a ginger ale.”

  And sniff-sniff-sniff, pad-pad-pad, in under a minute the glass appeared on a tray in Wendy’s jaw
.

  The crowd cheered; Abel gleefully snatched the ginger ale and poured it over my head. But I didn’t notice or care. I was on the floor with Wendy-girl, weeping.

  And Wendy’s contentment was unsurpassed. She seemed to remember none of the agony she’d endured only hours before, nor to notice that she was younger, sprier, healthier. All she knew was that she’d been a good, good dog, with whom I was well-pleased.

  January 15, 2066

  —Major League Baseball Commissioner Aki Fujiama decrees that all outfield fences be moved to a minimum distance of 485 feet from home plate, citing eugenics as the primary cause. “Over the past six years,” Fujiama explains, “the increase in home runs has created scores best described as laughable.” The commissioner made his final decision shortly after the San Antonio Silver Spurs defeated the Beijing Dragons 44 to 26 in the opening game of their all-night double header.—A recent groundbreaking announcement by Einstein Laboratories is eclipsed by revelations from competing organizations. Yesterday the Bakersfield, California, firm demonstrated a nuclear fusion process that safely and efficiently converts ordinary water into energy, allowing a single gallon to supply the annual power needs of a city the size of Denver. But teams in Bombay and Caracas now claim to have developed similar techniques which do not overlap the Einstein patents. Einstein’s stock, after rising 317% on yesterday’s trading, loses most of its gain by midnight’s close as a result of the previously unanticipated competition.—Teamsters Union President James Hoffa IV threatens to call a general strike of human VR imagineers unless their work week is reduced to 21 hours by the end of February. “We’ve endured brutal 23-hour schedules for almost two years, while other vocations have consistently afforded their workers increased leisure time.” A strike would have far-reaching repercussions across every industry and government branch, but could also backfire against the union by accelerating the cyberization of those jobs.