The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  I glanced at the terrain screen and caught the Dallas skyline whizzing by. It would be another twenty minutes before I’d reach Los Angeles. Time to burn. Might as well be polite.

  Besides, she was very attractive. I wondered how old she was. Virtually every adult I saw now appeared to be in their early twenties. But common perspectives and levels of maturity continued to serve compatibility, and there was still no way to arrest the cell-death clock. Therefore true age remained an important factor in the mating ritual.

  “You and I are second cousins actually,” the woman on the 3-D screen told me, dashing all fantasies. “Which means we share a set of great-grandparents. Not that either of us knew them, of course, but I think I met your grandmother once. Rebecca Crane, right?”

  Cousins? Oh well. “Yes.”

  “She was—uh, is—my grandma Jan’s sister.” The slip was quite understandable; both matriarchs were now in biostasis, inhabiting that fuzzy tract between “are,” “were,” and “would be.”

  “Sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

  “Alica Banks.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Cousin Alica Banks. And to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

  “Desperation, actually. You’re the only one who can help me. At least I hope you can.”

  “I hope so, too. But how?”

  “My daughter’s about to earn her diploma. Harvard Graduate School of Design…”

  “Congratulations!”

  “Thanks. Sorry to brag; just can’t help it! Lysa graduates in June. She’s already been commissioned to design the lobby mural for BioTime’s new headquarters in Calcutta.”

  “Impressive. Must be those Gary Franklin Smith genes. So what’s the problem?”

  “Her other mother, Virginia. Virginia Gonzalez…”

  “The neuroscientist?” A brilliant woman, I thought—if it was the same Virginia Gonzalez. What an honor it would be to help revive her.

  “Why, yes! We were married. That is, until her skiing accident nine years ago. But I was wondering if maybe, well, I’ve seen all the news reports about nanorepair…”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you fix her injuries, bring her out of biostasis in time for our daughter’s graduation?”

  I closed my eyes. I already had over a dozen revivifications scheduled for April, and thirty-eight more in May. I guessed I could squeeze in another routine reviv, but… “As I recall, she suffered a brain hemorrhage…”

  “Yes, but it was in cold weather, and she was vitrified within six minutes of the accident.”

  “Intriguing.” My mind began to race. Why the hell not? “They begin issuing permits next month. I could look at her chart. But you know, reviving someone from biostasis, well, that’s quite a commitment. So far we’ve only revived volunteer test subjects. We don’t know how easily regular citizens will adjust to—”

  “I’m very familiar with the topic,” Alica interrupted me, “and I’ll do anything to help her. Still, it’s not like she’s been asleep for fifty years. Those death-row prisoners volunteered long before I was born. Half of them had never even heard of AI or nanotech.”

  “True enough. The time frame’s more reasonable—less technological adjustment and all that. But have you really thought it through? She’ll still need reeducation, support, nurturing. Could be a full-time job, maybe for months. We can’t just revive people and expect them to function immediately. This isn’t like flipping a switch.”

  “I understand all that.”

  “You mentioned that she was your spouse, right? Does that mean you two are divorced now?”

  “No, oh no, I meant, she is. But, well…”

  “Yes?”

  “Four years ago, I married someone else. A man.”

  I felt a wave of vertigo. I’d thought myself immunized against future shock. What a strange time we were entering. Had anyone really begun to imagine it? “And have you told your new husband you’re planning to revive your, uh, wife?”

  “Not yet. But I will, as soon as you tell me when.”

  As I studied Virginia Gonzalez’s medical chart on the screen, I couldn’t help admiring Alica Banks, and the undertaking she was about to assume. It might have been akin, I thought, to sending for relatives after immigrating to the United States during the nineteenth century.

  I considered my own family in biostasis, and doubted I was up to the task, at least not now. Both of my parents were permanently lost. I had no brothers or sisters. Aunt Katie, well, I never knew her; she’d been frozen six years before I was born. My great-uncle, Gary Franklin Smith, had been underwater for two hours by the time the medevacs had rescued him. His brain was probably mush. Grandmother’s mind had started to fade at the end, so I decided it might be better to wait until brain-restoration techniques had improved. Or was I rationalizing because I didn’t want to put myself through it then? And my great-grandfather, Benjamin Smith, and great-great-grandmother, Alice Smith, both at the Phoenix, seemed so far removed from my own reality that I’d never even considered reviving them.

  I told myself I was still occupied helping others revive their loved ones; a plate to satisfy any such hunger.

  May 13, 2066

  —Dexinol, a variant of Deximine, Merck’s popular protein-based anesthetic, is approved by the WDA as a hibernation drug. By keeping a supply in their abdominal medicine pumps, people can direct their pharmaceutical AIs to induce sleep for exact, predetermined periods of time. “We expect Dexinol to be especially popular among men whose wives insist upon being accompanied to the ballet,” a company spokesman deadpans.—Renowned Kiev archivist Stanislaw Kravitz discovers records contradicting previous theories about the purported suicide of Martin Bormann. The records confirm that Adolf Hitler’s Dark Angel, disguised as a German Unterschaführer of the Waffen SS, was captured on May 3, 1945, by the withdrawing Russo-Ukranian Fourth Red Brigade. Further photographic evidence sifted by newly alerted AIs conclude a 121-year-old mystery by proving that Bormann died of consumption in the Arctic Gulag on February 17, 1958.—Latest Planetary Economic Bureau figures show that Virtual Reality providers now receive a record 76-percent share of all advertising revenues. Including user fees, VR now constitutes an astonishing 14.1 percent of Gross World Product. “Human attention is by far the most valuable commodity on Earth,” explains J. Walter Thompson Agency CEO James Patterson Jr. “And VR has proven by far the most effective way to get it!”

  The DNA-copying mechanisms in some human cells make less than one misprint every 100 billion nucleotide replications. But by 2066 the disassembler/assemblers were already far more accurate than their human counterparts. Redundant systems checked themselves and each other for defects. Design diversity allowed their on-board and central AIs to examine any borderline cases from multiple perspectives. And the D/A’s proofread their repair work in teams, with each individual D/A at least ten times more accurate than any human replicator. Therefore the odds that the machines would allow even a single error during the DNA overhaul of a human being were under one in fifty billion.

  DNA was the easy part; memory recovery would be another story.

  In February 2066, 171 former death-row prisoners who’d volunteered for biostasis experiments had become the first humans to be revived from cryonic suspension. These subjects had been frozen under perfect postdeath conditions: Their executions had been scheduled.

  The first group of seventy-one prisoners, those whose offenses had been the most egregious, had all been revived as young, perfectly healthy partial amnesiacs.

  The second group of one hundred was more fortunate. All but seven very early, nonvitrified subjects were brought back with fully preserved identity and memories.

  In spite of a halfhearted objection from the WCLU—formerly ACLU—their criminal proclivities were also simultaneously removed.

  Virginia Gonzalez remembered the ski lodge, the crackling faux fire in their chamber, and the ceramic walls made to look like the inside of a log cabi
n: all the comforts of environmental manipulation, all the charm of roughing it. She remembered making love with Alica and thinking that they both seemed to be getting better at it as they aged. Afterward they could hardly wait to get out onto the powder. But maybe she’d been drained from the sex, because next came those bizarre dreams. Had she fallen asleep? She hoped it was still daylight. What if she’d squandered the whole afternoon’s skiing for a nap?

  She opened her eyes and saw Alica, her Alica, but somehow different—younger, maybe? Yes. Definitely younger-looking—and wearing a peculiar smile. The room was white and sterile and small; not at all as she remembered their chamber by the slopes.

  She heard Alica’s words: “Welcome back, my love.”

  “B-Back? From where?”

  “You had an accident. But you’re fine now, better than new. It was a long time ago.”

  “How l-long ago?” Virginia’s entire body shuddered. “Today is May thirteenth.” Alica Banks perched at the side of the recovery clinic pod, stroking the neuroscientist’s now-unwrinkled hand, gazing at her face. “May thirteenth, 2066.”

  Her lover’s prolonged silence warned Alica that this was no time to disclose the existence of a husband whom Virginia had never met, now part of their family.

  Alica had once dreaded telling Caleb that she intended to revive her long-suspended spouse. But they all shared a daughter now, and Virginia would soon learn that Alica and Caleb also had a six-year-old son. Perhaps Virginia would grow to adore Devon as much as Caleb now cherished his stepdaughter, Lysa. Maybe her two spouses would even fall in love with each other. Alica wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that. The sex arrangements might be tricky. Jealousies would surface. Repressing the green-eyed monster would be pointless, especially in the era of the Truth Machine. Of course, unrepressed jealousy was a lot less dangerous than the festering stuff. Furthermore, Alica had no intention of giving up either partner. And if Virginia and Caleb decided to experiment with each other, well, fair was fair.

  “I knew it had to happen sooner or later,” Caleb had said. “It’s not like you didn’t warn me. I just expected the technology to come later instead of sooner, y’know?” But he hadn’t tried to talk her out of it, especially since, with Lysa graduating in June, the timing had been inarguably opportune.

  No one had spoken for nearly half an hour. Alica waited.

  “You look… good,” Virginia finally managed, propping herself up on the pod’s mattress, without even bothering with the voice-activated positioning device. “W-Wonderful, in fact. Y-Younger, too, right?” It was obvious that she remembered nothing of the accident, or the several hours before it. Alica had been warned that that was nearly always how it went: establish composure, then integrate facts.

  Although scientists had known for a long time that short-term memory involved electrical activity and unstable biochemical changes. The brain’s ability to retrieve such memory had been overestimated by previous work. While cryonic suspension could safely preserve all long-term, “static” memory, anything that had occurred in the final hours before an accident, having had no time to harden into molecular information within neurons, would often vanish.

  Alica knew that to a neuroscientist like Virginia, who’d been on ice for nine years and was unaware of this newly discovered phenomenon, such memory loss might be the most disconcerting part of the ordeal.

  “Reflector screen,” Alica ordered to the environmental AI, illuminating the west wall of the cubicle with Virginia’s image. “Yes, and so do you. Look at yourself. You already appear twenty years younger than you did on the day of the accident, and within forty-eight hours you’ll have the body of a twenty-one-year-old woman.”

  “H-How?”

  “Nanorepaired DNA. More perfect than a newborn’s.”

  Virginia stared at herself on the screen, barely believing the image. She still felt shaken and terribly disoriented. But her mishap did seem to have its compensations: When she discounted her psychological pain and focused on the physical, she realized she’d never felt better. For Virginia, this was a miracle contained within a single day. Perhaps the “lost” years, if that was how she chose to regard them, had no meaning. It was almost like awakening on another planet in a “fresh” body.

  The wonder of it! Maybe the wonder of it could help her overlook that the world and the people she loved had gone on with their existence for nearly a decade, without her.

  Besides, it was not her nature to burden others with her own insecurities. “My Lord, it’s incredible!” Now, only the tremble in her voice betrayed any anxiety. “I d-didn’t think they’d have this technology for decades. I fall asleep, and about a hundred years happens, in what? Nine?”

  “Nine years, three months, eight days, fourteen hours, twelve minutes.” Alica kissed her; a soft, sensuous peck on the mouth. “And you’re probably missing an hour or two before that.”

  “Of course! Dynamic memory loss. I always suspected freezing might not preserve that part. Thank God. I’m not going c-crazy. How’d they get to full rejuvenation in just nine years?” Still, she thought: I missed it all.

  “Once the science became viable,” Alica explained, “the field simply exploded. A third of the biologists and medicos and half the AIs on the planet have been working on DNA restoration. Big market for it, obviously.”

  “Guess so. Is everybody younger these d-days?”

  “Just about.”

  “How long does this, uh, effect last? Forever?”

  “No, not yet. But we expect most people to live into their 120s or 130s. Then almost everyone’ll go into biostasis and wait till science can decipher the cellular-death clock. I’ve heard estimates as low as twenty years before that happens.”

  “Incredible. Just a decade ago they were saying it’d take twenty-five years for rejuvenation, and seventy to a hundred to beat cellular d-death.” Virginia studied her own hands, as if the reflector screen might be lying. Astounding!

  “I know. Thank the stars for artificial intelligence. Those little transistor cubes just keep surprising us. Seems like they can figure out just about anything. Now you and I should make it with time to spare. No more biostasis for either one of us. Unless you decide to slalom into another tree…”

  September 30, 2071

  —Human life has been improving steadily for centuries, according to a newly released and validated study by the Dartmouth AI Analysis Institute. Life expectancy, infant mortality, food and resource supply, and general quality of life have been improving worldwide, on average, in a virtually uninterrupted progression since the mid-sixteenth century, in spite of persistent beliefs to the contrary. Increased population has contributed to human advances in most ways through exponentially enhanced intellectual contributions to knowledge, and greater diversity of choice. “It’s what I’ve been saying since the 1980s,” beams famous expert on environmental issues and resource allocation, University of Maryland Professor Julian L. Simon, who was secretly suspended in 1998, and reanimated amidst much fanfare last year. “But the media back then were biased; they understood too well that good news seldom sold newspapers as quickly as gloom-and-doom did.”—Several thousand North American household cockroaches are cloned from DNA in San Antonio, Texas. In three weeks the insects, which were rendered extinct in 2033 by acoustic technology, will be distributed to 877 zoos around the world. Surprisingly, the herpetorium/aquarium on Aries One, Mars, declines to purchase any specimens.

  Carl Epstein groaned. Eschewing devices, he stretched his own wiry frame and tried to motivate himself to climb out of his sleeping environment. It was nearly ten A.M. He could remember very few times back during the twentieth century when he’d ever slept past seven. He was damned grateful to be alive, but even after five years he often felt like a chimp in physics class.

  At first Epstein had noticed that almost everything about human existence was superior in this new world. His health was perfect. No allergies, never a headache or muscle pain, nothing ever itched, ever
ything worked flawlessly, from his hearing and eyesight to his bowels and digestion. He even had his hair back.

  And the AIs had heartened him with speculations that the cellular-death clock might be defeated within a few years, and then there would no longer be death of any kind, except from freak accidents.

  Food tasted better, too, and he could consume as much of it as he desired without gaining unwanted weight. Even the weather was always pleasant. Every spot inhabited by humans seemed clean and cheerful; pleasing to eyes and ears and nostrils.

  Of course he was alone, without family or presuspension friends. But he’d always been alone, so that was not as much a problem for him as for most newly revived, long-term suspendees.

  He’d heard all the stories, of course: pre-2015 suspendees, upon learning of the permanent deaths or subsequent remarriages of loved ones, who immediately, though seldom successfully, attempted to end their own lives. Others who’d tried to find their way in this new world, but gave up too soon, sliding into hopeless VR addiction. Many such addicts sought neuro-pharmacological help, which was becoming more effective, but there remained certain questions of identity preservation.

  When they’d first begun to appear, society regarded “lone long-termers” like Epstein as a curious combination of toddler and ancient. Once the novelty wore off, these wide-eyed, gawking Methuselahs were viewed by most with a sort of indulgent amusement.

  There was sanctuary in similarity, so LLTs tended to congregate. But Carl Epstein avoided his peers as if they might rob him—steal his humanity.

  To Epstein, the AIs were much better company. The marvelous things had facts, knowledge, even ideas and stories, but no opinions; statistical probabilities, but no feelings about them; voice without song. They seemed like a second form of intelligent life: transcendent intelligence. And Carl Epstein loved them, even though they could never love him back.