This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2015
A Kindle Scout selection
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To Harper, find a happy life and stick with that one.
Contents
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part 2
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Part 3
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Epilogue
A Note From Josh . . .
Prologue
i·dem·po·tent [AHY-duhm-POHT-nt, ID-uhm-], adjective
unchanged when multiplied by itself.
— Dictionary.com
Idempotence (pronounced /ˌaɪdɨmˈpoʊtəns/ EYE-dəm-POH-təns
) is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science that can be applied multiple times without changing the result.
— Wikipedia.com
For Garrett Hawpe, turning 201 years old was an inescapable accomplishment; another checked box in an unending list of “accomplishments” that now arrived on a yearly cadence. On this day, in this palindromic year of 2112, as would occur every year for the rest of years, Garrett Hawpe would be reaffirmed as the oldest living human being in recorded history.
In reality, Garrett’s only true accomplishment had been a unique ability to stumble over dumb luck. For it was luck that allowed Garrett to live a naturally long life of one hundred years prior to requiring unnatural assistance. It was luck that continued to favor Garrett when he was chosen as the oldest subject in the first successful trials to engineer custom organs. One hundred humans on the brink of varying organ failure had their lives extended, thanks to humanity’s ability to invent. Stemgineering, the media had dubbed it. It was a modern miracle. Hearts, livers, kidneys, gonads—made to order, while you wait. Your way, right away. Stemgineering a healthier life!
Garrett had just celebrated his centennial birthday at the time of those initial trials. Aside from the fact that he was dying from numerous ailments—including time—he had otherwise been in good spirits. Of course, at one hundred, good spirits came simply from not being dead. Garrett could still get around with his walker, and in his own judicious opinion, he could have driven better than most of the damn fools on the roadways—if only the state had allowed it. Unfortunately, his spry demeanor was merely a mirage, for Garrett had pancreatic cancer, a diseased heart, and a liver that had seen its share of too many liquid libations. He had been given two months to live, if he was lucky. And lucky he was—a few stem cells, a sterile Petri dish, less than ten thousand lines of breakthrough code, a few hours of baking, and Garrett Hawpe’s internals would be all patched up. Good as new.
New he did not appear, however. While his made-to-order, just-off-the-factory-line-perfected pancreas, and, later, matching heart and liver were now stronger than a teenager’s, as the decades rolled by the old man’s bones turned feebly frangible, his muscles atrophied into limp twigs too easily, giving way to a dusting of snow, and his skin flicked off like paint from atop a rusting pole. A few people older than Garrett received their custom stemgineered organs in the next round of trials, but they died from either the simple agony of cracked skin—a new extended-aging illness, termed dermatrophy—or the failure of muscle and bone to provide even the fragile grip to hold a cup of coffee, let alone the frame to allow one’s lungs to intake oxygen.
Cell regeneration was discovered just in the nick of time for Garrett; lucky once more! Garrett was whisked into a new set of trials, cell regeneration within the living tissue of a human body, again utilizing stem cells and complex computer code. Stemgineering 2.0, the media termed this next-generation breakthrough—and it was wildly successful. Within a year’s time, Garrett’s skin was ironed to perfection, his nascent muscles rippled once more, his eyesight sharpened, and his bones calcified to the consistency of steel. The corporation behind the breakthroughs (and the patents) became the largest on earth, and Garrett became the oldest human around the time of his 150th birthday. He would never again look a day over thirty.
His two hundredth birthday had provided the entirety of Earth a reason to celebrate—rather, those classes who could afford such luxuries as extended life. Lavish parties were thrown across the globe. Governments showered adulation upon their trueElderly—those born before the stemgineering to revolutions, one hundred years ago. Those born after the stemgineering revolution became known as the foreverYoung.
Seventy-three trueElderly from the initial stemgineering trial had lived on, and in honor of Garrett’s two hundredth birthday, the group of seventy-three were gathered together at the White House to meet the then ninety-seven-year-old president; the oldest sitting president in the history of the Union (he didn’t look a day over forty). The group would become known as the First Seventy-Three.
One year had passed since that wondrous celebration, and on this day Garrett was turning 201. As he sat atop Olympus Mons, looking out across the drafty crimson landscape of Mars, Garrett reflected on the various vagaries and serendipities—otherwise known as luck—that had brought him to this point in his life; a simple man who had only ever wanted for simple happiness had instead been granted fame, fortune, and life.
And yet . . . He sighed deeply. Luck be damned—Garrett Hawpe was terribly, terribly depressed.
It was only natural to expect a letdown on his 201st birthday. Still, Garrett had hoped at least a few dozen people would show up: some portion of the First Seventy-Three, his extended family (for that was all he had left
), maybe a few of his more recent virtual friends, and possibly, just possibly, Ellie. Garrett had even gone so far as to post his virt location, Olympus Mons, across some of the darkNets; he figured his fame would draw a few interested stragglers. As it was, however, he sat alone atop the mighty Martian mountainside on this dusky day.
A few passersby had appeared briefly, virtTripping in and out—they hadn’t even recognized Garrett. Their eyes would stray toward him briefly as they possibly wondered why he was wearing a Martian atmospheric suit within the safety of a virtual projection of a realWorld location. But the passersby quickly decided they didn’t care enough to know the answer, so they went about their way, virtTripping to their next exotic destination.
The small sun was setting now, begrudgingly. Soon, as the sun touched the multiple tips of Martian terra, the typically muted orange hue of the planet would momentarily spin the planet’s color wheel into a conflagration of fierce oranges, reds, and browns. The flash would be over quickly, but the sun was persistent. The dust in the atmosphere was already starting to capture the sun’s rays; it would rain those rays back down to the surface for the next several hours, until at last the sun would acquiesce to the spinning planet and the brilliance of the Martian night sky would be restrained no longer.
“Hey Jimmy,” Garrett uttered to no one. A moment later, Garrett’s oldest friend and fellow member of the First Seventy-Three, James “Jimmy” Santos, materialized next to Garrett. Jimmy was holding a caipirinha and was wearing a darkly colored, floral print shirt that flashed moving iconography subtly across its front. He had short black hair and the perfect amount of stubble on his sharp chin. He looked taller and more muscular than the last time Garrett had seen him, but this was merely a virt representation of Jimmy—he could appear as a dragon if he so desired, though most people chose to appear as slightly better versions of their realWorld selves within virts, more or less.
VirtTripping to realWorld locations was becoming more and more popular to the underground technorati. The anonymity was enticing; within a realWorld virt, the traveler could see all realWorld people at that location in real time, but the virtual traveler was a mere ghost to the unsuspecting public. With the proliferation of microdetailed satellites and ubiquitous video monitoring, realWorld public locations that were off limits to virtTrips were becoming few and far between, even atop the tallest mountain on Mars.
“Garrett? That you in there?” Jimmy asked, referring to the Martian atmospheric suit that Garrett was wearing.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Uh, what’s with the virt atmo-suit avatar, buddy?”
“I’ve been thinking about taking a realWorld trip out here. Wanted to know what it would feel like. I’ve even got my virt environmentals dialed in to replicate the temperature, pressure, and gravity.”
“Wow. Cool, man. I heard about those new Mars cruise liners. I think that’s one of ’em out there.” Jimmy pointed out toward the blinding horizon in front of them. “EGC corp, right? When are you thinking of doing that?”
“Real soon, now. Real soon.”
“Cool, man.” Jimmy paused and took a few sips of his drink. He had obviously had several already. If Jimmy’s image hadn’t been virtualized, Garrett could have smelled the booze on him a Martian mile away. Instead, somewhere Jimmy lay quiescent on a couch, wired into illegal, unapproved, black-market tech, known as darkTech. The tech would simulate the taste of liquor while dispensing alcohol into his bloodstream. Ocular implants, known as ocImps, would project the nearly perfect real-time images from Mars into Jimmy’s easily fooled brain. Many of the First Seventy-Three were wired into various forms of illegal darkTech. The government looked the other way, ostensibly due to the public reverence they received, but truly due to their relationship with the corporation that held the patents to much of the darkTech, not to mention everlasting life: NanoRegenSoft, or NRS.
Jimmy piped back up, “Haven’t seen you virtTripping in a while. You been busy?”
“Yeah, I guess I have—been doing this and that. Actually, I’ve been doing a lot of realWorld traveling. I was trying to stay out of the virts for a while.”
“Cool, man. Kind of dangerous to be realWorlding it, but cool. Where you been?”
“Eh, nowhere great. Went back and visited some distant family in the Midwest, mostly. I did get over to Europe for a while to see some of the old war sites. Trying to rekindle some lost memories.” Garrett’s smile faded. “I don’t know why I wanted to remember any of that, though.”
“That’s right! I forgot, man. You actually fought in that war, right? Was that the first war?”
“Sure did, Jimmy. Nope, it was the second one.” His atmospheric visored helmet shook slowly. “You know, most of my pre-stemgineering memories are blurry. As if they happened in some flat movie I saw as a child. But, the memories of the war—those memories—those are still as vivid as the knife I used to cut my stem steak with earlier tonight.”
The bottom of the sun had touched the horizon. Both men became quiet while taking in the expansive view. Even after witnessing a Martian sunset dozens of times within the virts, it still served to remind Garrett of how small the human race was. The hue of the lights from the domed encampment near the western edge of the Amazonis Planitia could now be seen, the sun sparkling off the hexagonal panels of the dome. It was the largest of the Martian encampments, one of the first ten domed settlements on the planet; one million people resided there now. A monolithic cruise ship docked next to the dome. The logo of the travel corporation flashed on the side of the ship in bright, neon colors: EGC, Earthwide Gaming Corporation. The entirety of the massive ship and the encampment it was docked upon still appeared merely as a piece of fuzz when compared to the expansive Martian horizon, as if it could be easily flicked into space by God’s forefinger, should he so choose.
“Hey Gar—sorry, man, I really thought at least some of the First Seventy-Three might stop by tonight.” Jimmy had never been comfortable with silence.
Garrett merely grunted a response.
“You know, I saw Ellie just a few months ago. She went Japanese blonde—I didn’t even recognize her. I always preferred her trueElderly look, but I guess that’s out of style now. Hell, that's been out of style for fifty years.”
Garrett perked up, glanced at him, smiled, then looked back toward the horizon while adding, “Glad she’s doing well. Haven’t seen her since the divorce. Well, aside from my two hundredth birthday party last year. But she avoided me there.”
“Oh, shoot man. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up. I always forget it was a divorce and not an expiration. Sucks, dude. She shouldn’t’ve left you.”
Along with Jimmy and Garrett, Ellie had been part of the initial trials for both stemgineering breakthroughs (organ creation and cell regeneration). Ellie was the youngest of the group; she had been twelve during those initial organ trials. Her heart was failing, and the scientists had grown her a new one. Garrett had been one hundred years old during those trials, and they hadn’t spoken much, but the elder Garrett had often checked in on the little girl, rolling his walker into her room to bring her small gifts in an effort to comfort her during the painful surgeries.
Twenty years later the same group was back together, taking part in the stemgineering 2.0 cell regeneration trials. Ellie was now an attractive woman of thirty-two, and Garrett was an impossibly old man with cracked and bloodied skin and a body that could barely function in a mechanized-assisted chair. As the NanoRegenSoft cell regeneration trials got underway, Ellie would bring Garrett flowers each week: a small token of her appreciation toward his largesse when she had been a child. At first, Garrett didn’t have the ability to speak his appreciation, but as the weeks progressed, the NRS trials elicited incredible results. Garrett began to speak, to move, to see, to hear, and even to walk again. Eventually, his appearance began to reverse; he started to resemble the attractive man he had once been, back when wars were still fought by men instead of bytes. He w
as average height, muscular, and had a large frame around his shoulders with smaller legs and sandy brown hair to top him off.
As Garrett grew younger, Ellie grew fonder. They shared a strange bond, one that few humans could relate to. Marriage followed one year after their NRS trials ended. Garrett loved her deeply and, he supposed, she had loved him, too. But time and age—or the lack thereof—changes people. Given the potential of an infinite life, Ellie had decided she wanted to live as many experiences as possible. Those infinite possibilities were impossibly limited while married to Garrett. He became a burden to her, and she left him with a simple, prerecorded two-minute vid message.
Garrett snapped back to the present. “It’s okay, Jimmy. I don’t blame her. Who wouldn’t get bored of someone if you had to live with them forever?”
“Hey!” Jimmy quickly changed the subject. “I heard Randy nearly bit it in the realWorld!” Randy Dansby was another of the First Seventy-Three trueElderly. “The rumor is . . .” Jimmy’s voice lowered an octave. “The rumor is that NRS tried some experimental memory backup-and-restore procedure they’ve been tinkering with for a while now. They’ve been keeping these experimental backups on us for just this kind of thing. You know—recording everything we see and do in our ocImps. I dunno, man. That’s scary shit.” Jimmy whistled and shook his head. “I ain’t chancin’ that shit, man, I’ll tell you what! No way. Who knows what we’d be coming back like; too much of our trueElderly past is not in memory backup. I heard through a virt friend that Randy’s totally scrambled now. Not the same guy."
Jimmy’s voice dropped another register to reflect the gravity of the issue. “This guy says that he knows Randy Dansby ’cause he was Randy’s ex-five-year-wife’s brother. But it was just a five-year marriage commit, so I never met this girl, so I dunno how reputable this dude’s information is . . . But, anyway, so this guy, he says Randy babbles semi-understandable nonsense most of the time, but if pressed for information from before his memory backups started, he starts speaking in tongues; basically anything before NRS started keeping those memory backups on us. Guess that’d be about fifty years ago now, right? Makes me superjealous of the foreverYoung.”
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