The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  Already seated were Ben’s wife, his mother, four children, six grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren (including Alica and me), two great-great-grandchildren, eight spouses or former spouses of his offspring (including Brandon, Virginia, Caleb, Noah, Kimber, and Stephanie Van Winkle, my former assistant—who three years ago had become my wife), Epstein, Toby, Father Steve, and of course our dogs: both Wendy-girls. Ben had been the last to arrive.

  How long have you known about tonight’s ambush? Ben telepathed Gary.

  His Cerebral Implant Nanotransceiver system, ideal for such gatherings, permitted private conversation even in noisy crowds. Ben was so used to the eleven-month-old innovation that he barely had to think about the destination of his transmitted thoughts. This biological upgrade, partially based on Cache research at our Neuro Nanoscience Labs, consisted of approximately seventeen billion nanomachines swallowed in a small pill, then self-deployed throughout the brain. Although NNL’s royalty percentage was infinitesimal, nearly every human throughout the solar system had purchased the product. Royalties from the invention had allowed Virginia and me to expand our business to forty-six employees, and at the same time reduce our own working hours—a fact that had played a role in the decision that Stephanie and I intended to announce next.

  About a month, Gary confessed.

  Ben declared out loud. “We must’ve seen each other two dozen times in the last month, and not even a hint about it?”

  “So now you know I can keep a secret. Happy birthday, Dad.”

  “Thanks, son. Without you, I wouldn’t be here at all. In more ways than one.”

  Gary smiled, without effort.

  I was nervous as hell, so when I rose to speak, I put my hands on my wife’s shoulders. “We have an announcement, something Stephanie and I have been saving for tonight’s celebration.” Everyone stopped talking. I grinned at my great-grandfather.

  “We’re going to clone Trip’s parents,” my beautiful wife said.

  Ben’s knees seemed to buckle. “But how?” he demanded.

  “How? We’ll bring them back as infants.” I laughed, then answered his real question: “I commissioned a search of my parents’ medical records, and found a usable skin sample of my mother from 2011. The AIs interpolated Dad’s genetic code from his parents’, Katie’s, Mom’s, and mine. Chance of error’s less than one in four million.”

  Ben collapsed into his chair, his face radiant.

  Stephanie kissed me, then added, “We figure it’s about time Trip nurtured something more than his wounds…” Wendy II snatched a canapé from my hand and swallowed it in a single gulp. “…and our dogs.”

  Everyone laughed. Rebecca and Katie embraced. Ben rewarded me with a wide smile, then rushed to hug Stephanie. Gary hugged me and whispered a simple, “Thanks.”

  This moment had to be bittersweet for everyone there; it certainly was for me. An injury that would finally be diminished, though never healed.

  “What a perfect gift,” Ben finally managed. “You’ll make a wonderful father, Trip.”

  I felt my face redden, more from fear than embarrassment. No turning back now. “I’ll sure do my best.”

  “No child could hope for more than that,” Gary said. Then he stood and lifted his wineglass. “I propose a toast to the man who taught me through example the two most valuable qualities a parent can demonstrate to a child: logic and perseverance. The key components of a successful life.”

  “Thank you,” Ben said. “But I have to disagree, Gary. Two even more valuable qualities are those which I was pleased to discover in you: compassion and forgiveness. Toby, do you remember what I used to say, back when we were teenagers, about every act of kindness?”

  “Of course. That any act of kindness, or spite, is like a stone pitched into an endless sea.” Toby explained: “Both throw off ever widening waves.”

  “You said that, Dad?” Gary asked.

  “Yep. Although I managed to let myself forget it for about thirty-five years.”

  “Well, thirty-five years isn’t such a long time anymore. Kimber taught me that. I’ve been thinking a lot about human kindness, and I agree with you.” Gary looked first toward Father Steve, then at Epstein. “Which is why Christ was such an important philosopher. Whether or not you believe he was really the son of God, his teachings might well have saved the human race. I suspect forgiveness may be our most life-preserving characteristic.”

  Alica wrapped an arm around the shoulder of her grandfather, Noah Banks. Noah smiled, then nodded at Ben, whose chance at life he’d once tried to eliminate; who, despite that, had revived him twenty-six years ago. Yet Ben’s decision to do so was actually rational. For in today’s world, such unsustainable and impotent defects of character as Noah had once displayed now seemed utterly harmless. Ben returned the nod.

  Father Steve grinned. Yes, he transmitted to the entire room, whether or not Jesus was the son of God is irrelevant. His philosophy is what mattered.

  “Probably true at that,” Epstein agreed aloud. “Without Christ’s doctrine of forgiveness, we might’ve self-destructed a century ago. Philosophy’s a powerful preserver of our species.”

  Ben’s mouth flew open in amazement. Sure, you’ve mellowed over the years, Carl. Yet who would have ever expected you to endorse the value of religion? I must be dreaming.

  Many laughed.

  Epstein nodded. “Like your widening waves, Ben. That which leaves you is that which finds you.”

  “Yes,” Ben said. “Everything influences everything else, given enough time. Everything’s intertwined, from human history to the trajectories of celestial objects.”

  Ben detected a few titters from the group, but assumed that they came more from habit than anxiety. Hardly anyone worried about Nemesis anymore; confidence in science and human ingenuity seemed to have permeated world culture, at least for now.

  “I know that’s true,” Kimber said. “I’m proof of it myself.”

  “You? How?”

  “Ever since I was a little girl, growing up in the very early twenty-first century, I knew I wanted to live in America. You know why, Ben?”

  “Tell me.”

  “It started with my grandfather, my father’s father, who was just a child himself when the Nazis occupied France. He was seven when the war ended, and nine when the Marshall Plan was adopted. Half a century later he still remembered the packages of food that tasted a hundred times better because everyone who got them had been so hungry. He told me how he felt about the Americans who sent those packages, kind people who’d liberated France at great sacrifice, then after returning home from that victory, in the midst of their own daily troubles and concerns, made sure the children of their allies were sustained until their economy could recover. What loyalty! he’d thought.

  “But years later he was amazed to learn that Americans had also fed and helped rebuild the economies of Germany and Italy; the same countries whose armies had sent so many of your sons home in coffins.”

  “And that’s why you decided to move here?” Ben said. “I can thank George Marshall for the daughter-in-law who sent my son back to me?”

  “There’s more,” Kimber said. “When I moved to Japan after my first divorce, I heard other stories. We Japanese compartmentalize well. Sure, we remember the Americans firebombed Tokyo, and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—our own comets from the blue. But we also know these allied occupiers, especially the Americans, were fair with us once the war actually ended. My great-grandmother described how American soldiers would receive care packages from the Red Cross. Yet she’d rarely seen Americans themselves consuming anything from those packages. They’d give it all away to the street children and starving women, the loved ones of their enemies. In the face of crisis, these men acted so that all might survive.”

  “Yes,” Ben said, remembering the words of Colonel Rand, his commanding officer at Purgatory, on the day they had learned of Japan’s surrender: Grudges just ain’t part of the Ame
rican way. So remember that, and do us proud.

  “But the most impressive story of all,” Kimber continued, “was about my great-grandfather, a man I never knew. He died of an aneurysm in 1987, ten years before I was born. When the war ended, most men of his rank committed suicide. He was the commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp, and had brutally interrogated an American sailor to get information about their ship movements.”

  Ben froze.

  “Following the orders of his general,” Kimber went on, “he’d tortured and permanently maimed many of that sailor’s friends and shipmates. Yet that same American convinced my great-grandfather that any human life was too precious to destroy, even his own. An American’s forgiveness is responsible for the fact that I exist at all. That’s why I decided to live here, and why forgiveness is a concept I value so highly.”

  “Oh? Tell me, where did your great-grandfather serve? What camp?” Ben asked, his voice flat, the best acting job of his life. “He was taisa Hiro Yamatsuo, stationed at Futtsu. Why? Did you know him?”

  Ben recalled their short telephone conversation in 1985 and wondered why, like so many of that time, Yamatsuo, a man who’d seemed so open to a second chance at life, had ultimately succumbed to his innate fears, inertia, and the superstitions of Deathism.

  “Know him? Not really,” he said. The Truth Machines all stayed green. “But I know his great-granddaughter, and that’s enough to know he was worthy of life.”

  Ben also wondered if there was any more he could have said back then to convince the man. He hoped not.

  Kimber smiled. So did Ben. He then looked at Epstein, who wore an expression proclaiming that maybe he’d just seen God.

  Ben winked, then glanced toward Toby.

  Dear Toby, he transmitted, you fought off all those superstitions you were raised to believe; fought them off through sheer force of will. But when I asked you to gamble on what must have struck you as quack science, you never thought twice about it. You accepted a sketchy premise that helping me die was the only way to save my life.

  Toby smiled, giving his head a single nod.

  Then Ben considered the fates of Sam and Mack, and the original Marge and Alice, each of whom had also given him gifts of life yet did not survive their own incarceration in decaying bodies.

  But at least he had the new Alice and Marge: children of a new era, yet familiar, too, each a bewitching composite of two identities, almost like another kind of being.

  He looked across the table toward his granddaughter Katie, noble and wise, once imprisoned by the same disease that had destroyed Marge; but Katie had survived by assuming rational influence over her life while she still could.

  He contrasted Katie’s fate with that of her brother, his grandson George, my father, whom history now regarded as a warrior for humanism and logic, incinerated as a collateral casualty in a lesser war he’d neither waged nor understood.

  Now Ben gazed toward me, transmitting his thoughts: Even in Final Death, George granted an incalculable gift to our family and to the world: a son, wounded, but also inspired to achievement, by his parents’ murders. A legacy far beyond mere DNA.

  As he mourned lost loved ones, Ben also relished the celebration, here among so many of his offspring and their loving partners in marriage. He found a special joy and justice in welcoming Brandon Butters into his family, and in reconciling with Noah Banks, father of Sarah, David, and Michael, grandfather of Alica, great-grandfather of Lysa and Devon.

  Then he gave thanks to a God he would never deny or fathom for the far easier pleasure of forgiving his three daughters, who, although they’d never stopped loving him, had once foolishly abandoned him for dead. Indeed, Ben felt an astonished gratitude that all four of his children were with him tonight, especially Gary.

  Finally here, if only in spirit, was Hiro Yamatsuo, whose code of bushido, his blind loyalty to a deified emperor, had cost all semblance of rationality, taking him to the brink of a suicide that even Ben, the colonel’s tormented prisoner, had regarded as too evil a punishment for crimes committed in search of doubtful honor. And now, somehow, through an accidental sequence spanning one and a half centuries, Colonel Yamatsuo had returned the kindness through progeny, when his great-granddaughter Kimber restored to Ben his only son.

  Yes, he thought. All of us who arrived too soon upon this Earth have suffered the senseless bondage of Purgatory.

  Ben stood, eyes sweeping the room. The legion of his extended family began to rise, and those he loved as blood stood with them. Generation upon generation of Smiths, all alive, all together tonight. Soon many more would join their number. And somehow he knew that he would live to greet them all.

  “I stand here before you in celebration of my two hundredth birthday, a thing quite impossible even a few decades ago. Though now the rarest of events, I hope this bicentennial marking of a human birth will soon become noteworthy only in its commonness. And it will, unless we lose sight of who and what we are: human beings, uniquely able to examine the nature of our own existence.”

  Ben raised a champagne glass, first to his eyes and then to the full extension of his arm, and spoke words that were his alone to speak:

  “This battle is nearly won. All that stand between us and eternal life are fear and gullibility: Dread of the unknown forges faith in the unknowable. Confronted by lost security, we overreact, and too often we self-destruct. But not you, dear ones. Not anymore.

  “So what shall we do with our hard-won prize? Consume or build? Slumber or advance? Withdraw into pods or soar through the universe? I cannot speak for the world, but for you gathered here, yes, I would dare.”

  Ben Smith tipped his glass toward the assemblage, and each of us felt his salute. “The treasure is yours,” he said. “Now go and live it.”

  THE END.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am forever grateful to the following friends, loved ones, and experts, who either offered ideas for this story, read the manuscript and made suggestions and corrections, or both: Don Bagert, Stephen Bridge, Richard Brodie, John K. Clark, Thomas Donaldson, William Dye, Marc Emory, Robert Ettinger, Robert Freitas, Dr. Abigail Halperin, Audrey Halperin, Edward Halperin, Gayle Ziaks-Halperin, Marjorie Halperin, Duane Hewitt, Penn Jillette, Steve Mayer, Ralph Merkle, Jennifer Miller, Max More, Mike Perry, Will Rossman, Roderick A. Carter-Russell, Brian Shock, Jeffrey Soreff, Andrew Tobias, Paul Wakfer, Brian Wowk, and especially Edward C. Root.

  I would also like to acknowledge the following professionals associated with the publishing industry who assisted with this manuscript or were otherwise instrumental in advancing my skills and newfound career: Ellen Archer, Shannon Atlas, Joyce Engelson, Jean Fenton, Joel Gotler, Jerry Gross, Ellen Key Harris, Teri Henry, Milton Kahn, Saul Kent, Timothy Kochuba, Kuo-yu Liang, Richard Marek, Gilbert Perlman, Tammy Richards, Shelly Shapiro, Heather Smith, Pamela Dean Strickler, Scott Travers, and James O. Wade.

  ADDENDUM

  You and I enjoy a dubious distinction: Almost certainly, we live among the last few generations of mortal humans. If the human race does not self-destruct, our great-great-grandchildren, grandchildren, or even our children may stave off death long enough to witness the defeat of aging itself. We, however, probably won’t. And once we die it is only a matter of time, and generally not much of it, before we, along with nearly everything we value, are forgotten.

  Over the coming century, technological advances will render civilization unrecognizable. In The First Immortal, I have presented an optimistic view of our future, but perhaps not so optimistic as it might seem. Human life has steadily improved, on average, for centuries.

  It does seem clear that any twenty-second-century world that cryonically frozen human beings could actually reach would have to possess the spirit, though not the specifics, of the world I’ve drawn. For people to be revived on a wholesale basis, the ultimate value of human life as a philosophical axiom is prerequisite. Any society with such science at its command could have no other reason to revive huma
ns from the ice. But would we accustomed to twentieth-century life enjoy even a “utopian” future?

  All change takes getting used to, yet we may have good reason to adapt. Just imagine how today’s civilization would seem to those who had lived five centuries ago. After an initial psychological trauma, former citizens of the 1500s would quickly come to appreciate modern life as miraculous, a place of seemingly unending marvels to absorb. Despite its many problems, our world is an astounding improvement over theirs.

  What would it be worth to glimpse, and perhaps inhabit, the world of a century or more from now?

  The desire to extend one’s healthy life is not an arrogant wish but a fundamental component of our species’ nature, as intrinsic as the need for air or water. Over the past two years, while researching this novel, I immersed myself in the culture of the cryonicists. I subscribed to their newsletters and e-mail lists, monitored their newsgroups, joined various organizations, and devoured countless books and Web sites on cryonics and nanotechnology. I’ve corresponded with pioneers of cryonics, always trying to keep an open mind. I’ve also listened to and read the often well-reasoned arguments of detractors, skeptics, and cynics. And while I have not become a star-struck true believer, I’ve opened my mind to the realm of the possible and have decided that I am more than willing to gamble a little to save so much.

  WILL CRYONICS WORK?

  Nature herself proves that repair at the molecular level is possible, but when will such technology become available? That is unknowable, of course, although time is on our side. Liquid nitrogen temperature will hold cells in near-perfect stasis for thousands of years.

  As for the standard question about what happens to the soul while one is on ice: If you believe in vitalism, consider the fact mentioned in the text of the story that many humans alive today were once frozen at liquid nitrogen temperature, as embryos. One could hardly call these individuals soulless. Rather, they are convincing evidence that the soul, if it exists, remains with us when frozen.