The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  “Like Carl Epstein.”

  “Yes, like your friend Carl, and even he never understood how to teach without offending would-be pupils. He had to start teaching philosophy before he understood; now he counsels well. But you had to give him credit even then, because so few knew how to think. Most of us still hadn’t learned to use logic, instead of following the mass hysteria of the times.”

  “Maybe we still haven’t,” Ben said.

  “Maybe not. But I think we’re improving.”

  “Mom…” He hesitated, then plunged ahead. “You suppose you’ll ever want to clone Dad?” Alice must have been anticipating that question from him for years, yet she’d never broached the subject.

  “Not yet,” she answered. “Maybe someday, or maybe never. In a way, I’m still mourning Alice Smith.”

  “But to us, you are Alice Smith.”

  “No, Ben, I’m not. Maybe I’ve replaced her in your heart, and I’m very grateful to be here with you. And I’m thrilled to be alive. But she’ll never know that. Whatever I do here, in this world, has no effect on her. The original Alice Smith is dead, forever without consciousness. Sometimes I feel remorse for that, even though I know full well there’s nothing any of us could ever do to bring her back. I never met her, but I do know her, since I’m much like her. I mourn her death as if she were my twin. After all, I’ve usurped her place in the world. I rarely stop thinking about her.”

  “Maybe cloning Dad would help somehow,” Ben suggested, unabashed by the self-serving potential of his words.

  “Or maybe I’d feel guilt-ridden, seizing her life’s last possession like that. I just don’t know yet. They implanted a lot of knowledge in my brain, but as far as actual experience, I’m only nine years old, much too young to know what I want from life.”

  This was true, Ben knew. An education could be acquired almost instantaneously now, but insight and wisdom required attention; still took time and effort.

  He gazed at this pretty young woman who was both his mother and yet not, and for once the hint of uneasiness he usually suppressed in her presence did not trouble him. The smile he offered her contained only love and respect.

  “To me, you seem wise as the ages,” he said, and meant it.

  February 14, 2096

  —Photographic evidence from the newly deployed Hubble-Sagan-IV telescope gathered in the apogee of its Jupiter/Neptune orbit strongly suggests the massive planet orbiting “solar twin” star 16 Cygni B in the Cygnus tristar system supports wide grassland areas at the poles. The planet, informally named Cochran-A for its co-discoverer, travels an unusual orbit. However, its hyperseasonal conditions (approximately 170°F in summer; minus 140°F in winter) appear minimized in the polar regions, where green-colored areas of significant proportion expand and contract within parameters of established seasonal vegetation effects. WASA AIs rate intricate life forms as a 21.55% probability, the 83rd highest odds of any planet thus far discovered.—Separately, scientists aboard Ceres XII, outside Saturn’s orbit, discover concrete evidence that a “pygmy” black hole crossed the Oort Cloud at the outer extremities of our own solar system sometime in the distant past. Tentatively dubbed Nemesis, the class-2 type-C gravitational singularity appears to track a hugely elliptical orbit around our sun, passing through the Oort Cloud of comets every 60 to 70 million years. Because the singularity is tiny by celestial standards, possibly of terrestrial mass and thus the size of a marble, and is by definition lightless, had it not passed through the Cloud, astronomers would consider its detection even by today’s technologies a miracle of chance.

  Margaret heard another beep emanate from her wristband. She glanced quickly at twelve-year-old Devon MacLane’s elaborate 3-D Valentine’s Day card as it appeared on the smaller of her two deskscreens, then resumed her studies on the larger one. It was flattering, as always, when boys in her school—so many of them—went to such trouble, and she resolved to acknowledge his attention in the nicest way possible without giving him the wrong idea. She did like him as a friend, but kept no room in her heart for more than friendship with any child from her own generation. Even at age eleven, Margaret knew.

  Was it his voice? Or his smile? Or maybe just the way he regarded the world: with logic yet also with optimism. No matter the reason, someday soon enough, she would become Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Smith, just like the Margaret Callahan Smith she’d been cloned from. Only this time it would be forever.

  That afternoon, as she walked from school toward the subway access, Margaret saw Ben waiting for her, holding a bouquet. She ran to hug him.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said. “Cultured orchids. Should last till next Valentine’s Day if you keep ‘em in 3CLd solution. How was school today?”

  “Good.”

  “Get a lot of lovenotes?”

  “Sixty-two,” she answered, “but who’s counting?”

  Ben laughed.

  “I tell them I’m already spoken for, you know.”

  “You have plenty of time to decide about that,” he said, wondering whether it was really such a good idea for Margaret to take herself off the market so young, then shuddering at the very language his mind used to grapple with the issue. Besides, he’d long ago sensed Gary’s discomfort with their mutual expectation of marriage. It was the sort of discomfort that could easily flash into rage.

  Not only that, he was starting to have second thoughts himself.

  An image danced through his mind of Humbert Humbert, the old lecher hanging around the schoolyard with flowers for his Lolita. No! God! It was nothing like that! But maybe such a marriage, even when she’d gained the maturity to make the choice, wasn’t so wise, especially if Gary was against it. No sense adding more strain to their uneasiness.

  “There’s a whole world out there,” he added. “Years left to decide. Keep your options open.” But it felt like he was lying.

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “I’m saving myself.”

  Feeling inexplicably relieved, Ben kissed her cheek. “I won’t hold you to that.”

  Margaret wondered when Ben would really start kissing her, but decided she’d better not suggest it. Not directly, anyway. “Ben,” she said as they boarded the pneumatic commuter car, “tell me about your wife. Why did you love her?”

  “Hard to know. Many different reasons. She was beautiful, of course…”

  “Like me?” Margaret asked, batting her eyelashes.

  Ben laughed. “Just like you. And not only intelligent, but also wise and compassionate and dependable…”

  “Also like me.” This time she batted her eyelashes furiously, and moved her face closer to his.

  But Ben wouldn’t bite. “Yes.”

  “So, how am I different from her?”

  “Well, she grew up in a different time, with different realities and concerns.”

  “So did you.”

  “Sure. Marge and I shared a period of history together. We lived through the Second World War, the nuclear age, the assassination of President Kennedy, the first time men set foot on the moon, and the Needless Extinction—”

  Time! Time! Time! Ben thought. Margaret looked and acted so much like Marge, he sometimes let himself forget there was no shared history. How could they be right for each other without it? What had he been thinking?

  “The Needless Extinction?” Margaret interrupted. “What’s that?”

  “It’s what historians call those last decades from 1975 to 2015, when hardly any of us were suspended even though we knew how to do it.”

  Margaret said nothing, just patted his hand.

  “Nothing sadder. A hundred times worse than any war. Virtually everyone died before reaching a hundred years. And it didn’t have to happen. Absolutely pointless…” He ran out of words but let himself bask in the child’s touch.

  “My history AI calls it the Lemming Generation,” Margaret said.

  “Not a very flattering label for us, but it fits, I guess.”

  “What happened to pe
ople when they died back then?” “Usually we were embalmed and buried in the ground. Or sometimes cremated, burned until there was nothing left but ashes.”

  She shook her head. “Even people whose brains could have been saved. I know it’s true, but it’s so hard to believe. How could it have happened?”

  “It’s complicated,” Ben explained. “For one thing, our natural way, before nanotech, was to be somewhat naive as young adults; by then we felt immortal anyway. And for the first two to four decades of adulthood, we tended to thrive. Experience would more than compensate for our mild losses of mental and physical acuity. Then suddenly the aging process would start to overcome us, and it gradually made our lives less pleasant; made you less able to resist disease, drained your energy.”

  “And shriveled everyone’s skin, too. I’ve seen pictures.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Not to mention what happened to eyesight and hearing, digestion, and joints. Of course it happened so slowly that we barely noticed it was killing us. Nobody liked to think about aging and death, yet almost all of us considered it inevitable. So young people would wait till they were older before they’d worry about it. And old people didn’t have the strength to go against the grain, to fight the hysteria of the times.”

  “What hysteria?”

  “Superstition, I suppose. Nothing else I can think of to call it. Oh, it’s possible some people would’ve been frozen if it were less expensive. But if more had signed up, and if the government had passed laws to make it easier and safer, freezing wouldn’t’ve cost a whole lot more than being buried. Maybe even about the same. The real reason it didn’t happen that way was superstition and inertia. Hear something often enough, you tend to believe it; believe in something long enough, and it becomes reality. The tradition of most religions back then was that the dead must either be buried or cremated for their souls to be reincarnated, or go to heaven.”

  “Heaven? I know that’s a good thing, but what does it mean exactly?”

  “Paradise. An eternal reward for your good deeds in life. Back then, most people believed in resurrection—an afterlife.”

  “You mean somewhere else other than this solar system?”

  “Yes. An altogether different universe.”

  “How would they get there?”

  Ben shrugged. “The theory always was that God had somehow arranged it, magically. It was pure speculation, of course, since no one could ever prove they’d been there. Faith, they called it. But blind faith was more like it, because it was only humans, purporting to act as God’s emissaries, who’d described the nature of this place called heaven.”

  “Why don’t people believe in heaven anymore?”

  Ben groped for a simple way to describe what had happened. “Before the early twenty-first century, afterlife was a useful idea. Anticipation of heaven or paradise or nirvana made the idea of death more bearable, and caused people to be more cooperative with each other. But after the scip was invented, more of us started choosing our own belief systems, since it became more obvious that nobody knew the truth for certain. And around 2035, a couple decades after most people first started to realize they might never die, the AIs calculated that belief in afterlife actually encouraged reckless behavior, even a subtle form of suicide sometimes. I suppose the uncertainty of death panicked certain people; made them think: Why not now?”

  “Weird.”

  “Not really. Everyone becomes unhappy, temporarily unhappy, or scared for various reasons. And if they believed in heaven, they’d tend to care less about sticking it out; waiting until things improved, or struggling to change them.”

  “But it still could be true, couldn’t it? There might be an afterlife, like heaven.”

  “Sure, it’s possible. Afterlife’s a reality about which the living can never know. The point is, there’s no real proof. And worse, you’d have to die to find out. When I was ‘dead,’ if there was an afterlife, I sure don’t remember it.”

  “But we do know we’re living now,” Margaret said, “here on Earth. Today. We absolutely know that!”

  “That we do.”

  “We also know that life is better than death, don’t we?”

  “Of course it is. Without life, the universe has no meaning.”

  “And accidents and suicide are the only reasons people die now. But if you’re careful enough, if you don’t take silly chances, you could live long enough to be around when scientists figure out how to end all death.”

  “Seems possible,” Ben said. “Even likely.”

  “So in today’s world, who cares if there’s an afterlife?” asked Margaret.

  “Precisely!”

  Just then, my image appeared on Ben’s corneal-implant screen. “How soon can you get here?” I asked. “It’s an emergency!”

  He answered through his dental PC: “What do you mean by emergency, Trip? Margaret’s with me.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling like an idiot. “Maybe I’m a little too excited. By all means, take her home.” “Twenty minutes,” he advised.

  The moment Ben stepped into my living quarters, two great, furry, sixty-five-pound balls of dog stood upon hind legs and, pressing paws against his chest, licked widely at either side of his face. Both Wendys were ecstatic to see him, of course. How could they have known?

  I was not so fortunate.

  The unfolding story of our neighborhood singularity, so provocatively named Nemesis, had begun to consume my every thought. All my instincts told me that today’s discovery would radically transform the very paradigm of our new immortalist society. Unless my impromptu calculations were in error, the singularity that had passed through the Oort Cloud of comets, about a light-year distant from us, had already pulled huge clusters away, hurling many toward our sun and its orbiting planets. Every sixty-five million years or so, the Earth had experienced major extinctions, the most recent of which being that of the dinosaurs—roughly sixty-five million years ago. This phenomenon now seemed the most logical explanation for it.

  Of course, after sixty-five million years such a black hole might have gained substantially in mass, loosing perhaps ten times as many renegade comets upon us as last time. But the comets seemed almost a trivial problem. With a century or more to prepare, we could, I was fairly convinced, design a method for detecting and deflecting—or even using nanoreplicators to digest—all of them in time. No, the real problem was the singularity itself, which, according to my AIs, was now heading straight toward the inner solar system and would likely draw several planets, including Earth, catastrophically from their orbits.

  There was simply no way to deflect or devour a black hole, at least no method known to modern science.

  The notion terrified me. Here we’d all but conquered human death, only to discover that our huge new expanses of time might not be so infinite after all.

  I’d called my great-grandfather because I needed the input of someone who had a perspective of glued-to the-television events such as the assassination of a President, the moon landing, the fall of Saigon, the Falkland Islands War, and the like. While my own life span had witnessed hyperaccelerated changes, those life-redefining events, above the personal-tragedy level, had been incremental and almost universally for the better. Suddenly I felt this potential world-shatterer squeezing me like the hand of an angry giant. I hoped Ben could help.

  He listened to my story and summation, and though he said nothing particularly derogatory or dismissive, as we talked Ben’s facial expressions became increasingly skeptical. His was the sort of countenance one might expect to encounter on the face of a modern scientist watching sixteenth century religious scholars debate, in all seriousness, how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

  Ben just didn’t understand.

  “Can’t you see it?” I asked.

  He smiled and offered a nonchalant shrug. Neither his expression nor his gestures held any trace of commiseration. “I understand it’s more real for you than for me,” he said. “Sure, th
e world may be due or even overdue for a cosmic event. But Jesus, Trip, how can you expect me, a man reborn into a world free of want or pain, to dwell on—”

  “Hold it!” On my wallscreen a simulated onslaught of comets had appeared, while the primary-secondary window showed the strained face of an overanimated human announcer. I punched up the volume.

  “…AIs running continuous forecast scenarios have reached a shocking conclusion: The Nemesis Singularity appears to be much more massive than initially thought, and is heading in Earth’s general direction! With a 96.4 percent probability, this planet can expect Nemesis, along with its next swarm of comets, to arrive in the range of 98 to 604 years. The calculations have been substantiated through carbon dating of iridium samples from the comet impacts in the Chad Basin and Antarctica, and comparing their ages to the 64,977,551-year-old Yucatan crater. More definitive calculations should be forthcoming over the next few days.

  “While it is scientifically possible, theoretically, to deflect or destroy a collision-course comet of limited size, there is no assurance of success in such a problematic endeavor. In the face of multiple strikes, chances of such a success become remote indeed. And the singularity itself might prove impossible to defeat.

  “We’ve all seen the spectacular pictures of comet fragments smashing earth-sized holes in Jupiter’s atmosphere in August of 1994. Imagine such an incident…”

  “I told you!” I wasn’t even aware that I was screaming. “I told you, Ben! Maybe it’s all been for nothing! All the advances, all the science, and for what? To be wiped out in less than a hundred years?”