The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  Ben exploded into laughter.

  It was awful. My great-grandfather didn’t comprehend; didn’t even seem to want to comprehend the nature of the problem. He only laughed and laughed, tears quickly streaming down his cheeks.

  “Have you gone crazy?” I demanded. “Is everyone from yesterworld nuts?” Maybe there was something fundamentally wrong with our revivtech. Maybe people came back missing some component we’d never properly understood. “What the hell are you laughing at?”

  One of the Wendys was at my feet now, her hackles raised, her rump bunched against my shins. I knew if I didn’t calm down, there was a very real chance she might bite Ben, so I decided to humor him. “Ben, I think this has been a bigger shock than you’re ready to admit to yourself. Having come back not all that long ago, the prospect of environmental catastrophe is just too much for you. Let me get you a sedative.”

  He raised his head, looked at my face with an expression that almost seemed like one of relief, then burst into laughter again. It wasn’t until both Wendys actually growled that he stopped.

  “Look,” he finally said through tittering hiccups, “I’m sorry, Trip. I really may not be the right person to talk to you about this. Even if I knew for an absolute fact that this planet would be destroyed in a hundred years—and I think nothing of the sort—I might not be as upset as you are now. I can see your perspective, sort of, but I think you’ll do better talking to Gary. He knows more about this stuff than I do. Mind if I call him?”

  “Go ahead,” I said, thinking, What difference would another yesterworlder make? Still, a few minutes ago I’d assumed theirs was the perspective I wanted. Perhaps from the right yesterworlder, it still was.

  When Gary arrived, the old guys looked at each other warily. I knew there had been, probably still was, a major rift between them, although at the time I had no idea what. Another component exemplified our strange new age: By the most objective standard, Ben’s son was older than he was; had thirteen years more experience in the world than his dad.

  “Trip’s got a problem,” Ben said. “I thought you could help.”

  The strain on my great-uncle’s face vanished when great-grandfather told him that. Gary said to him: “Oh… so this isn’t about you.”

  I didn’t much care for the way Gary had said you; I looked into Ben’s face, finding a hurt grimace. I intervened: “So, uh, thank you for coming over.”

  “No problem, Trip. What’s on your mind?” When he looked at me instead of his father, there was only kindness in Gary’s eyes.

  “Ben says you have a big-picture understanding of cosmology. I guess you know about Nemesis… and the coming disaster.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been having a hard time tearing myself away from the viewscreens.”

  I felt better already. Gary would understand. “You know what it means, then?” I asked. “Here we’ve achieved near-immortality, only to find out there’s a swarm of comets coming and that there are almost certainly uncountable baby black holes swallowing up the universe. It steals the meaning out of everything!”

  Gary began to smile. At first I thought he was about to let loose with some horsecrap bromides about how I was being a pessimist. I looked at Ben, but he didn’t return my gaze. He had locked-on, fascinated eyes only for his son. Then, damn, if Gary didn’t explode into laughter.

  I wanted to kick him. “What are you gonna do? Tell me this isn’t real? That it doesn’t affect me? That I shouldn’t worry about something so far away?”

  “Nope.”

  “Wrong.”

  I couldn’t tell which had said what. “Then why is it so funny?”

  “It’s not funny, exactly,” Ben said, though I could see from his face that he was searching his head for a real explanation. “More of an exhilarating release, like that moment when you first figure out the solution to a puzzle you’ve been struggling over.”

  “Exactly!” Gary took a forward step, then not so lightly cuffed my shoulder. My Wendys didn’t even growl. The traitors. “Trip, you gotta understand, when Dad and I were young—and that’s what matters from our standpoint—we grew up knowing that everyone would die. No exceptions. Then we wake up to all this.”

  “To what?” I demanded. “You don’t think this is better than what you had before?”

  “Of course it is, but I knew there was something missing, too. And today’s discovery helped clarify it in my mind.”

  “Maybe you’d better explain.”

  Gary’s face reflected the patient love of a parent, which I suppose in some ways he still was to me. “Trip, you’re worried about a catastrophe that might or might not happen, that humankind might or might not know how to prevent, but will certainly figure out how to mitigate, one to six hundred years from now. What troubles you today would have seemed absurd to us. Kinda the same thing as a guy in 2000, terrified of being late with a mortgage payment, might seem to a feudal serf in eighteenth century Russia. You get the idea?”

  Grudgingly, I did, so I nodded. But understanding the analogy did nothing to address the problem. “It still means immortality may be unattainable. And missing a mortgage payment isn’t quite the same thing as having all life on Earth obliterated.”

  Gary didn’t even hesitate. “No, it’s not,” he admitted. “And I’ll tell you something. Given enough time, if we don’t do anything about it, I think the Earth will eventually be hit by a giant comet or an asteroid, or maybe even ripped out of its orbit by the tidal influence of a black hole.”

  “But so what?” Ben said.

  “Yeah. So what?” Gary continued. “We will do something about it. We have at least a hundred years of life; at least a hundred years to get ready for this thing, whatever it is, even if it means the end for some of us. And if we beat this problem, as I’m sure we will, more problems will come. In life, there can be no permanent security Trip, no ultimate safety except in here.” He touched my forehead. “Cults, druggies, and mass media addicts are all symptoms of empty lives, of fear that there’s no ultimate meaning. We had them when I grew up, and we still have them today. So let me tell you something, Trip: Security isn’t the goal. Striving for it is. Having something to struggle for keeps us motivated. And it’s only in the action and passion that we find the joy.”

  That was the first time I’d ever wished I’d been born sooner, and the first time I really understood what a treasure our yesterworlders were. We who had seemingly rid ourselves of death now had too much, and it had come too fast. How could we have known?

  I spread my hands so Gary could appreciate his sobering effect on his grand-nephew. “I suppose the machines, the AIs, given all the time we have, will devise a way to save us.”

  Gary gave me a funny look. Ben slapped his hand against his forehead. Wendy II chuffed.

  “What?” I demanded. It was crazy, completely disconcerting. Here, I was the acknowledged scientist, yet it seemed every other mammal in the room was looking at me as if I were a three-year-old who’d just wet his pants.

  “Trip,” Ben said, his tone kind but indulgent, almost patronizing, “that’s what’s wrong with your whole overview on this.”

  Gary nodded his head avidly.

  Ben went on: “Whether the problem winds up a tempest in a teacup or Armageddon from the sky, the strategic solution will result from intuition and imagination, properties of human emotion. Properties no machine has.”

  “Yes,” Gary said. Now the way he was looking at his father made me feel good, like they were allies not only of the mind but the spirit. “Machines, artificial intelligences, may offer priceless tactical advice, but they won’t know how to feel about it.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? It’s a scientific problem.” No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I felt like a moron. Had my emotional response been scientific? Were we forgetting so much of our basic nature so quickly?

  Ben stood, then walked to stand directly in front of my body-sculpt chair. Worse, Wendy II padded over and hunkered aga
inst his leg. I guess dogs have an instinct for who the rightful pack leader is.

  Shaking his head slowly while a strangely grandpalike smile spread over his face, he began a speech I’ll remember all my life. A hundred years, a million, a billion, or until the universe goes cold, I will never forget.

  “We could implant intelligent machines in physical bodies like ours, or some other higher life-form’s. Hell, before you know it, we’ll be advanced enough to create a whole new species superior to ourselves. Sure, we could do that, but why would we? Then we’d have created a hyperintelligent competitive species. Such an act would be insane; would have a wholly unpredictable outcome. It would be as mad as a full-scale nuclear exchange in the 1980s, so I don’t expect it, even in light of today’s crisis.

  “Therefore what we have are various machine enhancements to our own bodies and minds, plus artificial intelligence—without emotions. I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you that your emotions are manifest in your body’s physical response to your five senses, in concert with the reasoning capacity of your brain. Loud music can make you cry if you’re an infant, or give you joy if you’re an adult listening to Mozart…”

  No, Ben hadn’t needed to explain it, but I somehow understood things better because he had.

  “Now we’re faced with something unknown and to some degree unknowable, so our initial reaction is fear. How could it be otherwise? Right now, you find the fear paralyzing. But not for long, I predict. In fact, it’s that very fear that will save us.”

  I sat there, thinking I’d understood. I almost rushed to him then. Almost told him how wonderful he was. I’m glad I waited.

  “A husband and wife walk into a home furnishings show,” he mused. “We’ll say the year is 2010, because it’s a transitional time all of us can relate to, whether we lived it firsthand or not.

  “Anyway, our couple presents their ticket stubs at the door. As they stroll inside the hall, someone marks the back of one of their hands with a small red dot, so they can gain readmittance without having to pay a second time.

  “Husband and wife had a tiny spat that morning, so there’s a little wall of distance between them. Nothing serious, but it’s there. They stroll about for a little, then hubby spies a concession stand. Tells the wife he’s thirsty. They buy two cups of cola and sit down at tables provided for snackers. On their table is a vase of faux flowers, pretty but bland. Hubby’s still feeling bad about the morning’s tiff and wants to make the cloud go away. After all, he started it by whining that he didn’t want to go to the show in the first place. But he also can’t quite bring himself to admit all that.

  “He looks at the red dot on his hand, then smiles. Says to wifey: ‘They can find us now.’ ‘Who?’ she asks. ‘The Bosnian secret agents,’ he replies; points to the dot. ‘There’s a homing device in the ink.’ Wifey’s expression doesn’t change, but she bends to one of the plastic flowers, whispering into it: ‘He’s on to us, Marvik.’ Both break into laughter, then reaching out, they find one another’s fingers.”

  I looked at Gary; he was smiling. So was I, ear-to-ear, but didn’t understand why. I only knew I suddenly felt better, and glad to be a member of the human race. Still, I wondered, What was his point?

  “Trip, could a machine have written that without human programming?” Ben asked.

  “No,” I allowed, replaying Ben’s story in my head: action, sensation, emotion, humor, a goal, and success; all interwoven into a simple object-lesson on the nature of the human thinking process. “Any pure machine, no matter its computational or inductive-reasoning capacity, would have no frame of reference for it.”

  “Exactly,” Ben said. “Because, unlike humans, machines don’t care what others think of them… or about anything else for that matter. The answers—and the desire to seek those answers—will come from our uniquely human combination of physical emotion and objective reasoning capacity, and our physical need to survive. Hell, even our tendency to disagree with each other at times, and our occasional bouts of irrationality,” he laughed, “might be indispensable to the creativity of civilization.

  “We might construct great orbiting lasers. We might take shelter deep in the Earth’s crust. We might colonize new star systems. Or we may come up with a new solution through more creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Something no machine would ever consider. And whatever we do, humans will have to decide what and how. Sure, our machines could help us do any or all of these things, or help solve problems not yet conceived. But they can function only as our servants, not our saviors. And sometimes it takes a crisis to remind us of that.”

  Wendy licked Ben’s hands as Gary began to clap his own.

  After leaving me, Ben and Gary walked through the Japanese rock garden in front of my building. Their stroll hadn’t been planned, but when they’d left the place, their common gravity attracted; held them together.

  Ben stopped at a crossroads in the perfect pathways, listening to the music of water dancing over pebbles. The small, rounded sandstones had been carefully placed, he knew, each angled to create perfect dulcet tones. This was a symphony of natural materials, finely tuned under the fingers of thoughtful human beings. Like himself.

  Like his son.

  “They’re going to need us, Gary. I used to worry about that all the time, you know.” Ben hunkered down on his knees and stared into the water. “Used to worry I had nothing to offer. But it wasn’t true. You and I, son, we both know how to think differently, because we came from a time before machines started thinking for us.”

  Gary sighed and nodded.

  Ben dipped a finger into the cool water. It felt wonderful. “I think it’s a genetic reversion, son. I think, like all events that bring forth disproportional responses in humans, we have a species memory, much akin to instinct. I think at times in the dim human past, comets and meteors must have struck the earth with devastating consequences. Nothing like the comets that killed the dinosaurs, of course, but terrible just the same. And millions of our ancestors must have witnessed such events. I guess the basic fear of objects falling from the sky never burned out of our genes.”

  Again Gary nodded.

  “I think it’s like our fear of spiders. Even infants seem scared of them. I think spiders used to bite us in the darkness—in the caves.”

  Gary tipped him a smile.

  “That’s why this Nemesis thing is going to become a nightmare. Or could. We’ll need to be allies in this, son. For once, we have the better perspective.”

  Gary offered a broad grin.

  It wasn’t until he was halfway home that Ben realized how much he’d enjoyed talking to his son, and also, that Gary had never uttered a single word.

  July 25, 2096

  —In what begins in Tokyo as a peaceful symposium on the Nemesis threat, seventeen partisans are temporarily injured when heated arguments come to blows. Most of the violence appears to have been initiated by Machine Rights activists who want immediate repeal of all software regulations prohibiting emotions, sentience, or survival instincts from being programmed into machines. “Right now, we desperately need every ally we can create,” asserts Rightist leader Bar Safreit. World President Lewis Erinplah has described the Rightist solution as “borderline insane.”—In the midst of the so-called Nemesis Panic, former United States President David West and his wife Dr. Diana Hsu West joyously announce the impending rebirth of their son, Justin, who died from a genetic disorder in March 2013 at the age of 10 months. Justin West was cloned from repaired DNA in February, immediately after World Government AIs determined that the comet shower from the Nemesis/Oort intersection would begin to reach Earth during mid-2308, and that the Nemesis Singularity itself would arrive by early 2309. In a Worldscreen interview, David West states, “Diana and I made this decision based on our love of life, and our unshaken confidence in the capacity of the human spirit to overcome any obstacle.”—In Tulum, near the ancient Mayan ruins on the Yucatan Peninsula of the state of Mexico, 470 people are di
scovered dead from an apparent mass suicide. The site is thought to have attracted the so-called Judgment Day cult because of its proximity to the impact point of one of the dinosaur-killer comets, and because the cult professed that this area possessed holy connection to Mayan astronomers. All victims stabbed themselves in the heart with ceremonial daggers, each bearing a stylized likeness of a comet on its haft. Another 41 who did not strike themselves mortal blows have received emergency restoration and cerebral repatterning, and will survive with memories intact. Unfortunately, because the historical area closes from 5:00 P.M. to 9:00 A.M., the fatal victims are beyond the help of nanotech.

  A familiar face filled Ben’s VR pod. This one was young, the real McCoy.

  It wasn’t much of a trick to tell the twenty-something faces from those merely appearing to be twentyish. Their eyes told him. Something about their color—their sheen—advertised real youth, middle age, or the deep glowing depth that came only with wisdom. The difference wasn’t something Ben could put into words, though he figured an artist like Gary could.

  Ben had also found he could differentiate yesterworlders like himself from the main body of humanity. He could tell them by their facial expressions; by their responses to dubious ideation or outright silliness. His fellow survivors from the bygone days were quicker to display cynical reactions. And they were more easily infuriated on those occasions when he screwed up and became patronizing or preachy. Ben supposed folks who’d been steeped in the poison of Watergate, the O. J. Simpson mess, and the Nobine mouse fraud, were by definition apt to be less trusting, and less susceptible to suggestion.

  Raised in a world virtually free of what these people called greed-lies—as opposed to leave-me-alone lies or politeness-lies—new-timers had built up little resistance to fantasy or speculation cults, clubs, and parties. Offering one’s particular spin on what might have happened, why something happened, or what could conceivably occur in the future, had nothing to do with lying per se. Unfortunately, the results could be as bad as any lie. The potential for damage, when such illusions were foisted on the genuine innocents of these new times, seemed limitless.