THE
IMMORTALITY
CODE
Douglas E. Richards
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Douglas E. Richards
Published by Paragon Press, 2021
Email the author at [email protected]
Friend him on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author
Visit the author’s website at www.douglaserichards.com
All rights reserved. With the exception of excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.
First Edition
PART 1
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
—Michael Crichton.
1
Dr. Allison Keane entered the modest home she was renting and collapsed onto a comfortable beige sofa. She had just returned from treating herself to a rare breakfast out and her taste buds were positively humming. She took a deep, cleansing breath, closed her eyes, and let herself drift through the cavernous darkness, alone with her thoughts.
Could it be that she might finally be getting back on track?
She was afraid to even think it, to allow herself to believe it for a moment. In a more innocent time, she would have been giddy, literally dancing in celebration and fantasizing about a glorious and consequential future.
But this was not a more innocent time. This was long after she had had her dreams torn from her as cruelly as a bully might yank the legs from a spider. Long after she had been confronted by pure evil, and had lost.
Lost her dreams. Lost her belief in justice. And lost her way.
But for the past three years she had begun to claw back. To inch her way out of the pit of Hell. And the step she had just taken was far greater than just an inch. It was an exhilarating explosion that could launch her from the depths of despair to towering new heights.
As jaded as Allie Keane had become, even she had to admit that her life was finally looking up.
If one could call what she had a life. She spent every waking hour she wasn’t eating or exercising pursuing her passion. And while she considered herself lucky to be able to do so, there was such a thing as balance, which was something she had woefully neglected.
But she vowed that this would begin to change starting now. No time like the present.
Three mornings earlier, she had finally gone public with the results of her last two years of work, a pre-publication of a theory that she was convinced was groundbreaking, and would finally garner the respect and acclaim that had been stolen from her.
She had only published the big-picture version of the theory, and only in an online physics forum, but the more formal, thorough version wouldn’t be far behind. First, she wanted to test the waters, get an initial reaction. This way, she could better address the vicious critiques and dismissals she knew would be par for the course from scores of smug, entrenched physics luminaries, who might be brilliant, but who were often trapped by group-think and fearful of venturing wildly beyond accepted physics dogma.
Every truly revolutionary advance was met with harsh resistance when first introduced, and she expected her ideas to be treated more brutally than most. As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had famously expressed, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Of all the quotes she had ever read, this was her favorite. Followed by one from the great pioneer of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, who had said, “We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough.”
Online comments regarding her revolutionary ideas were already flying in. The last time she checked, right before retiring the night before, she had found dozens of savage, biting critiques. But also two responses from world-renowned physicists who had issued guarded praise of her ideas. Shocked praise, really, which almost seemed pried from them against their will, but praise nonetheless.
She could only imagine their dismay as they read her work, expecting glaring, amateur-hour errors and relishing the chance to poke holes in her ideas, math, and conclusions large enough to swallow continents. Relishing the chance to put the lowly Associate Professor of Quantum Physics, just recently promoted from the even lowlier rank of postdoctoral fellow, back in her place. An associate professor at the University of South Dakota no less—an institution that few of the elite physicists at MIT, Stanford, Princeton, or Cambridge could even find on a map.
But instead, these two giants had grudgingly admitted that her work was original, groundbreaking, and in some ways, breathtaking. She had to give them credit for this admission, which she wasn’t sure would be forthcoming, and which couldn’t have been easy while commenting on the work of a physics peasant. It was as if Luciano Pavarotti found himself upstaged by a tenor he had stumbled upon singing opera to a herd of cows in a pasture.
Allie hadn’t always been considered a physics peasant. In fact, many years earlier, she had been thought to be quickly moving toward physics royalty. She had been a child prodigy beyond compare, but with a personality that didn’t draw attention to this fact. Many she encountered had marveled that she came across as a fun-loving and well-adjusted “normal” kid. She had frequently been compared to a character on a show called Young Sheldon, a little blonde girl named Paige Swanson.
The show centered on a pre-teen genius named Sheldon Cooper, who was portrayed as being stereotypically quirky and socially inept. But Paige Swanson was a character who broke this mold. As brilliant as Sheldon, but personable, extroverted, and anything but robotic. Allie had been told she resembled this character, not only with respect to her personality and genius, but her appearance as well, although Allie’s hair was light brown instead of blonde, and her eyes were green rather than blue.
At the age of fifteen, an only child, Allie and her parents had moved from South Dakota to Acton, Massachusetts, so she could live at home and attend MIT. She graduated three years later at the top of her class, and then continued on at the same revered institution, working toward her Ph.D. in quantum physics.
But as she approached her twenty-second birthday, just as she was putting the finishing touches on her Ph.D. thesis, her life took a tragic turn. In the blink of an eye she was swatted from her towering pedestal and impaled on jagged rocks below. Her beloved parents were hit in their car by a drunk driver on the interstate, killing her father instantly and leaving her mother barely alive.
Her mother, Mary Keane, did manage to hang on by a thread for six months, through dozens of surgeries, which did little but provide false hope and prolong Allie’s agony. During this nightmarish stretch, Allie’s emotions were laid bare, as despair and heartbreak suffocated her normally upbeat spirit, and stress shredded her gut as surely as if she had eaten a bucket of broken glass. It was the most horrible six months of her life.
But this was only the beginning.
After taking off two additional months to mourn the loss of her parents and get her he
ad on straight, Allie returned to MIT to finish her doctorate, only to discover that her advisor, Abraham Sena, whom she had admired, had stolen her thesis while she was gone, publishing it as if it were his own work.
Instead of losing herself in her work to help recover from the tragic loss of her parents, Sena had seen to it that Allie was pushed even further under the murky seas. And held down. Because robbing her of the fruits of her labor and genius wasn’t cruel and horrific enough. Sena needed to twist the knife, to insulate himself from Allie’s certain fury, accusations, and attempts to prove his theft.
So he had framed her. Obliterated her reputation and credibility.
Esteemed Professor Abraham Sena had managed to perform a hacking magic trick, erasing all traces of her work from her computer and even from her account in the cloud, and adding overwhelming evidence that she had been the one planning to plagiarize him.
Sena’s defamation of her had been genius, his manipulation of hearts and minds an evil masterpiece. And he had the reputation, the legitimacy, that she did not. He even had the gall to pretend to be sympathetic to her for having carried out the crime for which he had framed her, insisting only that she be thrown out of MIT in disgrace, but pleading that this should be her only punishment. It was tragic, he had said, that this poor girl had entered a stressful graduate program too young, got in over her head, and had flamed out.
And given the even more tragic loss of her parents recently, she should be pitied rather than loathed.
It was all too much for what was left of Allie Keane, and she came very close to a nervous breakdown. She spiraled down into the depths of Hell, finding drugs, and sex, and alcohol—and always despair.
But, somehow, after a number of lost years—little more than a drug-addled blur in her memory—she had slowly, painfully, turned things around. She had sobered up, and had begun to put her life back on track. And while it had taken time, she was still only twenty-eight, and there now seemed nowhere to go but up.
She frowned deeply, her eyes still closed in contemplation.
Nowhere to go but up, she repeated in her mind. Sure. She wasn’t about to fall for that again. After all, she had thought this once before, six years earlier.
So now, despite the unexpectedly positive reactions her work had earned, she found herself more wary than hopeful. She had become so traumatized by the loss of her parents, and the theft of her work, that she now cowered in fear after being handed a beautifully gift-wrapped present, sure that it was only a matter of time before the box would blow up in her face.
She shuddered as she imagined eagerly pulling open a red-satin bow on a magnificent gift, only to have the package explode, vaporizing her entire head in an instant.
A loud rap at the door interrupted Allie’s reverie, just as she was envisioning this grisly scene, and she almost jumped out of her skin. Her eyes shot open and she bolted off the couch, an anxious expression now firmly frozen on her face.
Who could it be? She wasn’t expecting any deliveries, and it was still only nine in the morning. And she hadn’t had a single visitor in over a year.
Her phone was off, resting on an end table in her bedroom, so her door cam was no help. She would just have to learn the identity of her visitor the old-fashioned way, by actually opening her door, as barbaric as this method now seemed.
Given when the knock had occurred in her stream of thinking, she couldn’t help but imagine that it portended something truly horrible. Part of her wanted to pretend not to be home, ignore it. But she knew to fight this instinct. Just because her world had been gutted before, at the most optimistic point in her life, didn’t mean it would happen again.
But it also didn’t mean that it wouldn’t.
Dr. Allison Keane took a deep breath, braced herself, and reached for the doorknob.
2
Allie swung open her front door to reveal a slim woman wearing too much makeup and too much jewelry.
“Kathy?” she said in shock as the visitor came into view.
Her neighbor, Kathy Angus, was the last person she expected to find standing there. Allie had only seen this woman a handful of times since their initial introduction two years earlier. Not entirely surprising, since Allie had made it a point to keep to herself, and typically left early for the university and returned late. “Is everything okay?” she added warily.
“Hello, uh . . . Allie,” said her visitor, as though having to dredge up this name from the depths of her memory. “Sorry to bother you so early.”
“Not at all,” replied Allie, still wary, making no move to invite her neighbor inside. “Actually, I’ve been up for hours. What can I do for you?”
“Did you just post some kind of . . . physics paper online?”
Allie’s mouth fell open. Her neighbor worked as a hairdresser. If Allie had made a list a thousand pages long of possible questions Kathy might ask, this wouldn’t have been on it. She tilted her head in dismay. “How do you know that?” she said. “Only a few thousand people in the world should know—at most. And they’re all frequent visitors to the Cambridge Quantum Physics Forum.”
Kathy shrugged. “Well . . . here’s the thing, one of the people who know about it just called me on my cell about ten minutes ago, asking about you. A guy. Deep voice. Called himself John. Said he had read your work but was having trouble contacting you. Suspected your phone wasn’t on.”
Allie shook her head, barely able to believe what she was hearing. “So why did he call you?”
“Yeah, no kidding. I asked him the same thing. Turns out he wants to offer you a job. I told him that this was great and all, but it still didn’t answer why he was bothering me. You were bound to turn your phone back on at some point today.”
Kathy frowned. “Speaking of which,” she continued, “since you’re awake and dressed, why isn’t your phone on?”
She asked the question as if it was one of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. As if the idea of not having a phone on and by one’s side every waking instant was inconceivable.
The answer was simple. Allie’s job required very deep, very sustained thinking. And cell phones were the ultimate distraction, carefully designed and evolved to become as addictive as possible. She had been sucked into the satanic device’s irresistible black-hole pull completely just after she had emerged from what she called her dark years, having traded one set of addictions for another. But she had finally managed to beat this back also, to the point of maintaining an almost monk-like phone celibacy. Prior to this, even having the cursed device in the same room with her resulted in her checking it every five minutes, a drug addict willing to kill, if necessary, for a desperately needed hit, each time destroying her train of thought and forward momentum.
And maintaining a laser-focused train of thought was everything for a theoretical physicist. Yes, she read literature and conducted other research, but radical breakthroughs were most likely to come about through thought experiments and insane leaps of imagination. Which meant hours at a time of lying on the couch in her office with her eyes closed, looking to be asleep, and trying to force her tortured brain to forge unique connections between unrelated physics knowledge and theories that she had crammed inside. Only stopping each day when her mind screamed for mercy. Then rinse and repeat, day after day, year after year.
Most of the time this exercise was pure, unadulterated torture. Flailing blindly in the abyss of her own thoughts, almost panicking as she went around and around in circles, unable to force a connection, drowning with no sign of a single buoy to grasp onto.
Her job description sounded like heaven to outsiders, being paid to lie around and be creative. Generate ideas.
If only truly revolutionary ideas didn’t require such agony to achieve, the mental equivalent of pushing the biggest of newborn babies through the tiniest of pelvises.
When Allie was flailing around in her own tortured skull, she’d seize on any excuse to come up for air, and a cell phone was far too tempting. If she
wanted to attack the mysteries of the universe, her phone needed to be off and out of reach—for days at a time. It was as simple as that.
Not that her neighbor would have interest in any of this, or that Allie wanted to take the time to explain it. “My phone’s in the other room charging,” she lied instead. “The battery died while I was sleeping.”
She leaned forward intently. “But let’s get back to the conversation you had with this John. When you asked him why he was bugging you about me, what did he say?”
“Just that he’d like to offer you a job, and didn’t want to waste even a minute. Said he wanted me to stop by and ask you to turn on your phone.”
“You do know how crazy that sounds, right?”
“Tell me about it. I thought it was some sort of prank call. Or a scam. Or a guy who might be some kind of demented killer. I mean, it’s creepy how he knows I live next door to you, and also my phone number. How did he manage that?”
Allie arched an eyebrow. “Well, there are probably ways. By checking county records of home purchases and so on. But it would take some work.” She paused. “Not that you aren’t right to be concerned about his motives. But you’re here, so you must have decided he was legit. Why?”
“When I hesitated to do what he asked, he had me check my bank account. When I did, I saw that five grand had just been wired in. Five grand! He said he’d deposit five more if I’d stop by and ask you to turn on your phone.”
“Ten thousand dollars? To stop by a neighbor’s house for a few minutes? Just like that?”
Kathy nodded. “Just like that.”
“And that didn’t make you even more suspicious?”
“It did. But it also made me a lot wealthier. So I figured, what the hell?”
Allie considered. He could have probably gotten Kathy to do this for free, but if not, for a few hundred dollars at most. Wiring this much money into Kathy’s account, when she hadn’t even given him routing numbers, was his way of showing off. His way of getting Allie’s attention.
The Immortality Code Page 1