The Immortality Code

by Douglas E. Richards

  “Sounds like you felt guilty about withholding them,” said Allie.

  “I did,” replied Aronson. “Very much so. But events have shown me that I made the right call. Definitely.”

  He lowered his eyes. “I did, however, make one unforgivable error,” he added in self-disgust. “It took me three days to realize I should have just encrypted all nanite functions, not just the AI and self-replication. It would have been simple to ensure the nanites only took orders from me, period. No matter what the order. But Tom had lulled me to sleep. He never once attempted to give an order, which gave me a false sense of security. Made me feel like the nanites saw me as their one and only boss.”

  He paused. “Even so, after three days it finally occurred to me that I was being careless. That in addition to burying the AI and self-replication behind an encrypted firewall, I should have done that for all functions. I had removed the bullets from the gun, but had forgotten that this same gun could still be used to pistol-whip me to death. A costly mistake. One I’ve been beating myself up over ever since it came back to bite me. But let me wait a few minutes before I get to this part, if that’s okay?”

  Allie and Reed both nodded.

  “Anyway, when I told Tom the nanites had been activated and brought him up to speed—give or take some key lies and omissions—we began to work together. Tom insisted, and I welcomed the help and company. And brainpower. He really does possess a towering intellect. As does Allie. And from what I understand, Zach, you’re impressively bright yourself.”

  “Thanks,” said Reed, “but we all know I’m not in the same league as you and Allie. And not in the same league as Hoyer, either, it sounds like.”

  “I’m not even sure that I am,” said Aronson. “He’s that brilliant, as he so modestly told us himself. A monster, certainly, but he could have been a Nobel Prize caliber scientist. Even though he didn’t have formal training, his grasp of quantum physics, his ability to design experiments, was extraordinary. We conducted experiments on telepathy, invisibility, nanite capabilities, and so on. He brought plenty of insight to the party.”

  Aronson let out a long breath. “But I didn’t agree to have him work with me for his scientific contributions. To be honest, I didn’t expect any. I figured this would give me the best chance to take his measure. Really decide in the trenches how much I could trust him. And he brought another important capability to the table. With the power he had as ET Ops’ second-in-command, he could keep close watch on leading-edge quantum computer research being conducted anywhere in the world.”

  “Right,” said Reed. “Since a quantum computer would give you the key to unlock the nanite’s scanning capability. Not to mention give humanity the ultimate travel pass.”

  “Not that I told him that,” said Aronson, “but yes.”

  “What did you tell him?” asked Allie.

  “That we needed a quantum computer to unlock the self-replication function. That it was important for us to be able to generate more nanites. Carefully. He pretended to be just as concerned about the destructive potential of unlimited nanites as I was. In fact, we had endless philosophical discussions. I was struck by how incredibly like-minded we turned out to be.”

  “Except that you weren’t,” said Allie. “He was just feeding you what you wanted to hear.”

  Aronson winced. “He had me believing whatever he wanted me to believe. Until he made his move against me, and I learned who he really was. But he made a mistake. I was days away from trusting him completely. Days away from telling him everything, giving him the keys to the kingdom. If he had only waited to attack me, the world would be at his mercy right now.”

  Reed and Allie exchanged anxious glances. Had the future of humanity really pivoted on such a fine razor’s edge?

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself,” said Aronson. “Right after I brought him up to speed, lies and all, we agreed that we should keep this secret. At least for the time being. We needed to learn what we were dealing with before any disclosures.”

  “Except that you already knew what you were dealing with,” said Reed. “Knew the stakes, and the dangers.”

  “For the most part, yes. If not, I would have insisted on sharing our discovery. But as it was, we didn’t even disclose it to the rest of ET Ops. Tom ran interference for us. He disguised the time he spent with me. And while I was sequestered away, he made sure I wasn’t bothered, had unlimited funding, and so on.”

  “What a prince,” said Reed sarcastically.

  “The horrible part is that I really thought so at the time. Soon enough, he convinced me to let him fake my death. I was reluctant, but he had this way of being persuasive. He explained that other members of ET Ops were wondering where I’d been, and that his excuses and lies were wearing thin. That the general in charge was insisting on in-person reporting when I returned from the overseas conference Tom said I was attending.”

  “So you agreed,” said Reed.

  Aronson nodded. “Tom took care of everything. He staged a fake auto accident.”

  He paused, remembering. “I didn’t realize at the time that I had set myself up. He could now kill me whenever he wanted without any possible repercussions. No one could ever suspect him of murdering me.”

  Aronson shook his head in disgust. “Because in the eyes of the world, I was already dead.”

  53

  There was a long silence in the study. Hoyer’s eyes were still closed, and he remained perfectly still.

  “So if I’m following you correctly,” said Reed, “Hoyer ultimately attacked you. Just days before you would have told him everything.”

  “Wasn’t much of an attack,” said Aronson. “He simply hit me with a tranquilizer—effortlessly. I awoke in the lab, tied up, with an anti-telepathy helmet on my head. Exactly like I am now,” he added pointedly. “Then he taunted me. Revealed his true colors. Told me that he had learned a lot from me, but that I was no longer needed. And he held nothing back. He gave me a speech about his greatness. Bragged about being ruthless and predatory. Described his boredom, and his desire to become the most powerful man on Earth. Just for the challenge of it, if for nothing else. And he described his true thoughts about the nanites. How he planned to use them. It was a long conversation.”

  “How did he plan to use them?” asked Reed.

  “Can we come back to that?”

  Reed nodded. “Sure.”

  “Once Tom was done taunting me,” continued Aronson, “he pulled an eighteen-wheeler up to the lab and ordered our entire supply of nanites inside. I was stunned, but Tom was only too happy to explain, and gloat. He had gotten the better of me right from the start. The very first day I demonstrated the nanites, he discovered they’d take orders from him too. But he didn’t tell me that. Instead, he ordered the nanites to set up secret backdoor access for him, triggered by a certain thought. When triggered, the nanites would only follow his orders, not mine. By the time I finally had the sense to block them from responding to anyone but me, three days later, I was already too late.”

  “So you were playing chess,” said Allie. “But he was thinking ahead more moves than you were.”

  Aronson sighed. “I’m afraid so,” he replied. “Using his backdoor access to wrestle control, he stole the entire supply we’d recovered from the Adriatic. After he made off with the nanites he did what I should have done at the start, encrypted them to only take orders from him—of any kind.”

  Allie and Reed continued to stare at him, unblinking, completely transfixed.

  “But to back up,” continued Aronson, “he didn’t just walk off with the nanites and leave me behind to contemplate my mistakes. Stealing them from me wasn’t enough. First, he made sure to taunt me about the theft to rub salt in the wound. Then, he took a few steps back, grinned, and shot me in the kneecaps. Shattered them both. As calm and carefree as if he were taking a walk in a park. He waited there for a few minutes, relishing my shrieks of agony, and then left me to bleed out, just as casually
as he had shot me.”

  Aronson paused, remembering. “So why the kneecaps when he could have shot me in the head?” he continued. “It was obvious, but he still made sure to explain. He didn’t want me to have a quick death. A kneecapping was excruciating, and the relatively slower blood loss would prolong my life. A bullet to the head would have let me off easy. He wanted me to suffer.”

  Allie’s lip curled up in disgust.

  “Then he drove off with the nanites and my computers and left me to die. Later he was able to hack the computers and learn everything I’d been keeping from him. He learned the history of the Ions, and that I had encrypted the nanites to prevent them from reproducing. Fortunately, I had blocked this function before he even knew the nanites had been activated, so there was no backdoor entrance for him to exploit to get it back.

  “He also learned that I had blocked the AI’s second level of functionality. And, finally, he learned about the nanites that patrolled my body.”

  A smile crept slowly across Zachary Reed’s face. “That’s when it hit him that he hadn’t left you for dead, after all,” he said. “Instead, he had left you to be quickly healed by your microscopic doctors. He must have been absolutely furious.”

  “That’s a safe bet,” replied Aronson. “His own cruelty screwed him over. I couldn’t have come back from a headshot. Fortunately, it took him several days to hack my computers. By the time he realized the nanites would repair my knees and stem my blood loss, I had already gone to ground.”

  “In his version of the story,” said Allie, “he stole your nanites just before he attacked you on a private island.”

  Aronson shook his head. “Pure fiction.”

  “I’m surprised he wasn’t able to find you,” said Reed. “Given his skills and resources. And your lack of experience.”

  “I was lucky in the beginning. I’ve read a lot of thrillers. And I did a lot of internet searching. Ironically, I was able to use the principal tool of the grid, the internet, to learn how to stay off the grid. But I got better and more savvy fast. Impossibly high stakes brings about impossibly high motivation.”

  Aronson let this thought hang for several seconds. “As soon as I could,” he continued, “I accessed one of the emergency supplies of nanites I had hidden, thanking God that I had taken this precaution. Since these still responded to my commands, and I could unlock their ability to make copies of themselves, I was back in business in no time. I soon had all the nanites I could ever want, and access to the AI that these were able to collectively generate.”

  “That’s quite a story,” said Reed.

  “It is. And if you give me the chance, I’ll prove every word of it. I suspect you know the rest. I stayed off of Tom’s radar while forging secret agreements with the military. I did this to secure funding, yes. But also because I wanted to help our country, warts and all, maintain a leading military presence on the world stage. America isn’t perfect, but in my book it’s better than most alternatives.”

  Allie nodded. “And you also made sure to get your own systems in place to monitor research into quantum computers.”

  “I did,” replied Aronson. “Which catches us up completely. Using the obvious alias Steve Smith, I made sure Colonel Hubbard kept me informed of important developments. I was delighted when the commander rescued you and brought you to Fort Carson. You were the key that would unlock infinity for the human race. Open up the cosmos. Potentially open up true immortality, which I haven’t really touched upon yet. But just when I thought the game was over, and I had won, the Chinese got to you again. Even on a military base. And then Tom outplayed me from there.”

  No one said a word for almost thirty seconds. There was much to digest.

  “Let’s back up,” said Reed finally. “Allie and I agree that Hoyer is a monster. That’s a given. But we’re trying to make sure you aren’t one also. That you don’t have hidden agendas of your own. I get your fear of the nanites’ self-replicating mode. Believe me. But you can block that. You have blocked that. So why not give the nanites to the world? You’d be the only one able to whip up more, but you could whip up a batch big enough to give everyone a Hoyer-level supply. The world would be safe, and poverty would vanish. We really could have a utopia.”

  “Maybe,” said Aronson. “But probably not. First of all, you can’t put the self-replication genie back in the bottle. As soon as someone developed a quantum computer, my encryption could be removed. It’s only a temporary safeguard. I’m working on encryption methodologies that are foolproof, safe even from quantum computers, but that’s easier said than done.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve heard,” said Reed miserably.

  “Second,” continued Aronson, “even if I could stop them from reproducing forever, they wouldn’t bring utopia. In fact, possibly the opposite. You’re only looking on one side of the nanite ledger. You’re letting yourself get carried away by the heavenly possibilities, forgetting to take human nature into account.”

  “How so?” said Reed.

  “I’ve had a lot more time to think this through. First, you don’t need an infinite supply to use the nanites for destructive purposes. A few days after he left me for dead, Tom used the nanites to kill everyone in ET Ops. Just like that. What he accused me of doing. And there are plenty of options more destructive than digesting your enemies one by one. You could dissolve the first floor of a skyscraper, for example, and fell it like a tree. You could manufacture endless explosives. Dissolve the wings of a 747 in mid-flight. I think you get the picture.”

  Reed cringed. “I only wish I didn’t,” he said.

  “But there’s more. Tom figured out how to make backup copies of himself. How to create duplicates that are alive and conscious. Not to put too fine a point on it, but exactly as alive and conscious as you and Allie now are. So what does that do to a society when individuals can make copies of themselves? Crazed narcissists could make hundreds of duplicates. Thousands. And these aren’t exactly the type of people you want more of.

  “The law would break down. Catch a murderer based on fingerprint evidence, and he’d just claim he made a duplicate, and the duplicate is responsible. What about property rights? Family rights? Who owns what? Do duplicates have any rights? And if so, how could you tell the difference between the original and duplicate?”

  “Good points,” said Allie. “You’d have an epic mess around the world.”

  “But let’s imagine these aren’t issues,” said Aronson. “Let’s imagine you would have the utopia of unlimited wealth, unlimited energy. No one would ever have to work again. Ever have to strive again. But would that be a good thing?

  “I’d argue it wouldn’t be,” he continued, answering his own question. “Because we aren’t wired for utopia. Evolution didn’t drive us to the top of the food chain by allowing us to be content. Human evolution favors anxiety over happiness. Happiness dulls our sharpness. Anxiety, on the other hand, ensures we maximize our attention to possible threats to our survival.

  “We’re also wired to challenge ourselves. To overcome adversity. Compete. Generate adrenaline. Achieve. Tom takes this to a dangerous level, but it’s in all of us. If we’re handed everything on a silver platter, we don’t really appreciate it. We grow complacent. Lazy. Bored. We’d go through life aimlessly, indulging our every whim, like the super-spoiled children of an absentee billionaire father.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Allie. “We’d each be free to pursue our passions. Writing. Science. Painting.”

  “This is true,” said Aronson. “Certainly for people like us. But I fear that most don’t have anything in their lives that they’re all that passionate about. But even climbing a career ladder, providing for oneself and one’s family, gives many among us purpose, even if they won’t admit to themselves that endless leisure would be a disaster. We’d have far too much time on our hands. We’d vegetate. My own belief is that drug addiction would skyrocket. And nothing would be earned. We’d have diamonds and caviar, not because
we worked hard, built a business from the ground up, but because we were issued a set of nanites. Period. Those who slaved to get ahead will resent those who never lifted a finger, yet find themselves in the same place.”

  “How are you making utopia sound like Hell on Earth?” said Allie.

  “I’m sure I’m overstating the case. But all I’m trying to convey is that our species might not be ready for the perfect world we think the nanites will bring about. We have to consider unintended consequences. Another example, if the nanites patrol our bloodstreams and repair what would have otherwise been fatal injuries, and duplicates and immortality schemes abound, overpopulation could choke the planet. Despite the nanites providing unlimited food.”

  Reed looked deeply troubled. “I’d love to tell you that you’re way off base,” he said, “but I can’t. I think you might be more right than wrong.”

  54

  Allie stared at the bound and helmeted physicist, spellbound, ignoring the absurdity of it all, as if having a conversation with a man trussed up in this way was commonplace.

  Aronson sighed. “Eventually, humanity will adjust,” he continued. “Eventually we will be on our way to utopia. But why would I play Santa with the nanites right now? Hit the world with the most disruptive technology we’ve ever faced? Why risk a worldwide meltdown?”

  He paused to let this sink in. “Why take any risk,” he continued, “until we unlock the ability to spread our eggs to other planetary baskets?

  “I thought true quantum computing was ten to twenty years away. But now it’s only one or two. Which is even more reason to be patient. If you’re running a marathon, why risk changing shoes one inch from the finish line? One inch from infinity and true immortality.”

  “And one inch from a quantum computer rendering your anti-replication encryption useless,” said Allie.

  “Exactly. Giving nanites to the world will be as disruptive to our society as anything has ever been. As I said, potentially causing as many problems as it solves—at least in the near term. But of course it has to be done. We’ll eventually get through to the other side. Eventually learn how not to become spoiled and complacent. To adapt. But the time to do this isn’t now. Or even when we unlock all nanite functions. The time to do it is when we can implement a foolproof way to block nanite replication.”