Misspent Youth (commonwealth saga)

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “What are you two cooking up?” Tim asked.

  “Murder! Revolution! Martyrdom!” Graham chuckled, a sound like an aggressive avalanche. “Going to join us?”

  “I’ll give it a miss, thanks. I’m seeing my girlfriend later.”

  “How is Zai?” Alison asked.

  Tim winced. “Annabelle.”

  “God, you’re as bad as your father,” Alison said. She settled back into her own sunlounger and picked up a tall glass of gin and tonic. “I remember what he was like back in the seventies and eighties. Not that the nineties were much better. I had to be very careful about introducing him to my girlfriends. He tried to get most of them into bed.”

  Tim was fascinated by this sudden revelation of parental behavior. “Really?”

  “Pay no heed, Tim,” Graham commanded. “Alison’s so-called history is all feminist revisionism. Your father was a fine bloke. I’ll overlook the fact he annihilated my world and cast all us delicate sensitive artistic types into eternal purgatory. So who is Annabelle?”

  “She’s a friend. Lives over in Uppingham. I really like her.”

  “Good for you. Is she pretty?”

  “So much!” Tim looked around the patio. The wisteria creepers that twined round the awning poles were in full flower. Alison’s garden was shaggier than those of her neighbors, but it was just as attractive. And the view across the water as the sun shone on the ripples was fabulous. “Do you really think you’re in purgatory?”

  “Come on, you know we were the lucky ones, Tim,” Alison said. “The only reason I can afford to live in this dreadful ghetto is because I made a mint writing…what do you call it? Pre10. Yes, pre10 console games.”

  “Right.” Tim produced a mildly awkward grin. He’d grown up with every byte in the datasphere being free. That was the natural way of things; instant unlimited access to all files was a fundamental human right. Restriction was the enemy. Evil. Governments restricted information cloaking their true behavior from the media and public, although enough of it leaked out anyway. He’d never really thought of the economic fallout from the macro storage capability delivered by crystal memories. It was a simple enough maxim: Everything that can be digitized can be stored and distributed across the datasphere, every file can be copied a million, a billion, times over. Once it has been released into the public domain, it can never be recalled, providing a universal open-source community.

  After the turn of the century, as slow phone line connections were replaced by broadband cables into every home, and crystal memories took over from sorely limited hard drives and rewritable CDs, more and more information was liberated from its original and singular owners. The music industry, always in the forefront of the battle against open access, was the first to crumble. Albums and individual tracks were already available in a dozen different electronic formats, ready to be traded and swapped. Building up total catalogue availability took hardly any time at all.

  As ultra-high-definition screens hit the market, paper books were scanned in, or had their e-book version’s encryption hacked. Films were downloaded as soon as they hit the cinema, and on a few celebrated occasions actually before they premiered.

  All of these media were provided free through distributed source networks established by anonymous enthusiasts and fanatics—even a few dedicated anticapitalists determined to burn Big Business and stop them from making “excessive profits.” Lawyers and service providers tried to stamp it out. At first they tried very hard. But there was no longer a single source site to quash, no one person to threaten with fines and prison. Information evolution meant that the files were delivered from uncountable computers that simply shared their own specialist subject architecture software. The Internet had long ago destroyed geography. Now the datasphere removed individuality from the electronic universe, and with it responsibility.

  Excessive profits took the nosedive every open-source, Marxist, and Green idealist wanted. Everybody who’d ever walked into a shop and grumbled about the price of a DVD or CD finally defeated the rip-off retailer and producer, accessing whatever they wanted for free. Record companies, film studios, and publishers saw their income crash dramatically. By 2009 band managers could no longer afford to pay for recording time, session musicians, promotional videos, and tours. There was no money coming in from the current blockbusters to invest in the next generation, and certainly no money for art films. Writers could still write their books, but they’d never be paid for them; the datasphere snatched them away the instant the first review copy was sent out. New games were hacked and sent flooding through the datasphere like electronic tsunami for everyone to ride and enjoy. Even the BBC and other public service television companies were hit as their output was channeled directly into the datasphere; nobody bothered to pay their license fee anymore. Why should they?

  After 2010, the nature of entertainment changed irrevocably, conforming to the datasphere’s dominance. New songs were written and performed by amateurs. Professional writers either created scripts for commercial cable television or went back to the day job and released work for free, while nonprofessional writers finally got to expose their rejected manuscripts to the world—which seemed as unappreciative as editors always had. Games were put together by mutual interest teams, more often than not modifying and mixing pre10 originals. Hollywood burned. With the big time over, studios diverted their dwindling resources into cable shows, soaps, and series; they didn’t even get syndication and Saturday morning reruns anymore, let alone DVD rental fees and sales. Everything was a one-off released globally, sponsored by commercials and product placement.

  It was a heritage Tim had never considered in any detail. Then a couple of years back he’d watched Dark Sister, the adaptation of one of Graham’s novels. The pre10 film was spooky and surprisingly suspenseful, and he’d made the error of telling Graham he quite liked it. The novelist’s response wasn’t what he expected. Graham held his hand out and said: “That’ll be five euros, please.”

  “What?” a perplexed Tim asked. He wanted to laugh, but Graham looked fearsomely serious.

  “Five euros. I think that’s a reasonable fee, don’t you?”

  “For what?”

  “I wrote the book. I even wrote some of the screenplay. Don’t I deserve to be paid for my time and my craft?”

  “But it’s in the datasphere. It has been for decades.”

  “I didn’t put it there.”

  Tim wasn’t sure what to say; he even felt slightly guilty. After all, he’d once complained to Dad about not raking in royalties from crystal memories. But that was different, he told himself: crystal memories were physical, Dark Sister was data, pure binary information.

  “Fear not, Tim,” Graham said. “It’s an old war now, and we were beaten. Lost causes are the worst kind to fight. I just enjoy a bit of agitation now and then. At my age there’s not much fun left in life.”

  Tim didn’t believe that at all.

  “DO YOU WANT A DRINK, Tim?” Alison asked.

  “No thanks.” Tim held his helmet up. “I’m on my e-trike.”

  “Good man, Tim,” Graham said. “Don’t touch drink, and don’t smoke, either.” He pulled an undutied Cuban cigarette out and lit up.

  “Are you coming to Brussels on Tuesday?” Tim asked. “You haven’t answered any of Lucy Duke’s txts about it.”

  “I certainly haven’t. Arrogant little woman. Did you see any of them?”

  “Er, no.”

  “Someone should teach her to say please.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. So are you coming?”

  Alison sighed, and swirled the ice cubes around in her glass. “No, Tim, I’m not. I’m sorry, I don’t think I can cope with that damn circus.” She gave him a long glance. “You do realize it’ll be a circus, don’t you? Those wretched politicians will hijack every news stream to make capital from this.”

  “I know.”

  “Well then. Besides, I don’t think I’ll be much of a priority for
my big brother. He’ll want to see you more than anything. And your mother.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. I’ll watch the news streams from here.”

  “Okay. But Mum’s having a welcome home party for him on Saturday evening. She says she’d like you to come to that.”

  “I’ll be there. I do want to see him, Tim, just not under the spotlight.”

  “I understand. I wish I didn’t have to do it, either.”

  “You’re not worried about meeting him again, are you?” Alison asked gently.

  “Well. You know. No.”

  “Tim, he’s going to be delighted to see you. Really. You’ve sailed through these last eighteen months. Anybody would be proud to have you as their son. Hell, I’m proud just to have you as a nephew.”

  Tim chewed on his lower lip, hating to show any vulnerability. “You think?”

  “God, yes.”

  “I really missed him, you know. I mean, not that we did much father and son stuff together, soccer and things. He was a bit old for that even with his ordinary genoprotein treatments. But he was always there, you know, he’d listen and try to help. I don’t suppose I told him how much I appreciated that. Not very often, anyway.”

  “I’d hope not! You’re a teenager. You’re supposed to spend the entire era in a bad sulk.”

  “No way!”

  Graham and Alison burst out laughing. Tim blushed, trying not to smile.

  Alison patted his knee. “It’ll all work out fine. You’ll see.”

  8. DREAM ON

  IT WAS A WARM, hazy summer day, with a strange orange-tinted sky as if twilight had started at lunch. They were on one of the manor’s big lawns, just Timmy and himself. Kicking a soccer ball about. Sweaters on the grass marked the goalposts. Timmy was about ten years old, skinny legs sticking out of baggy blue shorts. He ran back and forth, nudging the ball with his toe, swerving around imaginary opponents.

  Jeff wanted to run after him. Tackle him. Lose the ball back to him again. As it should be between father and son. But all he could do was stand in the goal, his joints aching from arthritis, too ancient and wizened to move.

  Timmy ran toward him, feet pounding, the ball bouncing along in front. He took a mighty kick, and the ball sailed past Jeff as feeble claw hands waved about uselessly in the air.

  “Gooooal!” Timmy shrieked. He danced about on the spot, his arms raised high.

  Jeff clapped delightedly. “Well done, son. Jolly well done.”

  “Let’s play again. Play with me this time, Dad, please, I want us to play together.”

  “I can’t, son.” The tears were rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Why, Dad, why?”

  And all Jeff could do was stand there, just as he always did at this moment, hands reaching out while Timmy frowned and sulked. Every time the same. Every time he failed his son.

  “Jeff?” It was a female voice, disembodied. “Jeff, can you hear me?”

  Jeff moaned as the manor and its grounds wavered and darkened. This wasn’t part of the dream. Never before, anyway.

  “Jeff?”

  There was only the darkness of a foggy moonless night. And pain. An all-over sharp prickling that grew and grew, as if his skin was igniting. A thin wail escaped from his mouth. He could barely hear it.

  “That’s it, Jeff, focus now, please. Focus on me.”

  The darkness was fading out, as swirls of bright light emerged from all over. Jeff blinked furiously. He’d been dreaming, so this must be waking, he realized. Damn, it hurt. His skin was still inflamed, and now he could feel a deeper ache in every limb warning him not to move any muscle.

  “What?” he gasped feebly.

  His one simple word was greeted by a lot of people cheering. Idiots, couldn’t they see he needed help?

  “Jeff, don’t try to move. Just keep calm. You’re fine. The suppressants are going to take a while to wear off.”

  Soft tissues dabbed at his eyes, soaking up the moisture. The world resolved around him. Unsurprisingly, he was in some kind of hospital room, with a bank of equipment at one side of his bed. Two people dressed in medical smocks were bending over him, electronic instruments in their hands. More people stood at the end of the bed. He frowned, and concentrated on one of them.

  “Timmy?” For some reason his lovely son was different. Older. His face was wound up with nervous apprehension.

  Memories began to seep into Jeff’s sluggish thoughts.

  “Hiya, Dad.” Tim’s voice was choked up with emotion.

  “Hello, Jeff,” Sue said politely. She was standing next to Tim.

  “Uh… what happened?” He worried he’d had some kind of accident.

  “Can you tell us?” one of the medical people asked. His voice had a German accent. “Do you remember the treatment you were scheduled?”

  The memories were welling up now. The meetings, endlessly sitting around conference tables with oh-so-serious doctors and geneticists. The agonizing week they gave him to make up his mind, the indecision and fear. He found some of them frightening. Back in the public eye again after so long in modest obscurity, reporters from every news stream pounding incessant questions at him. Politicians, hordes of the bastards wanting to be associated with the project. Slick spin doctors circling in vulture flocks. He wanted to stop remembering, to keep the bright images and sounds sealed away, but the torrent had begun now.

  “Jesus wept,” he moaned. His hands were shaking uncontrollably as realization swept him along. Judging from Timmy’s age, he must have been in the tank for months, more than a year. That must mean it was over, complete.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Tim promised anxiously. “It worked. You’re fine. You look great.”

  Jeff tried to raise his head. Both of the medical staff pressed him down again.

  “Mirror,” Jeff said. “Give me a mirror.”

  Sue nodded at Tim, who moved closer. The lad held up a mirror.

  * * *

  THE EUROHEALTH COUNCIL originally began the research project back in 2023, dispensing grants to universities across the continent, then tying in various corporate laboratories as well. It was exactly the kind of forward-thinking, benefits-the-people endeavor that Europe’s ruling classes were keen to pursue, and even keener to publicize. Officially, the Eurohealth Council called the project “multilevel synchronous replacement vectoring.” To the news streams it was simply rejuvenation. The concept took genoprotein treatments several stages past organ enhancement and cosmetic improvement. Researchers were aiming for the ability to vector new and complete DNA strands into every component of the human body. It was DNA copied from the patient, then engineered back to the state of late adolescence, before they began losing telomeres and suffering replication errors. Young DNA.

  In theory, the next generation of cells reproduced within the body would be those of an adolescent. The patient’s entire body would grow progressively younger. But there are billions upon billions of cells in the human body. To produce a new, and perfect, gene for every single one and insert it correctly was immensely difficult, and fabulously expensive. By 2036, when the project leaders announced it had reached fruition, and that they were ready for their first human subject, the dedicated Eurohealth Council budget for rejuvenation was larger than that of the European Space Agency. With such generous resources distributed among seventy universities and over nine thousand biomedical subcontractor companies, it was possible for the project to rejuvenate one European citizen every eighteen months.

  Before Jeff went into the suspension womb, the Brussels University Medical Centre had stopped him from taking the genoprotein treatments that kept his bones thick and strong, and maintained his glossy skin. They extracted his ceramic teeth, withdrew his retinal implants, and canceled the vectors that helped sustain his major organs. The cold turkey purged his body of the alien biochemicals and aptamers that had kept him fit and active. His true seventy-seven years of age had crept up on him in less than a
fortnight, terrifying in its humbling. He had come to know the wintertime grip of wheezy asthmatic lungs, stiff painful joints, labored arthritic movements, the degradation of soiled pants and misty vision. He had watched his skin dry and shrivel, veins protrude, liver spots bloom like invading bacteria cultures; seen virile silver hair fade to gray and fall as dead and desiccated as autumn pine needles to contaminate his collar.

  Jeff had discovered then exactly how much he hated old age. It frightened him badly. The incontinence, the weakness, the frailty, all reminding him he was mortal, a reality from which a great many of his generation had successfully hidden themselves away.

  He could quite clearly remember the last sight of his wrinkled, decrepit face before he went into the suspension womb; but he had to swim back through decades of compacted and jumbled memories to reach the face in the mirror, and even that didn’t fit perfectly. When he had been twenty, his mouse-brown hair had reached fashionably down to his shoulders. Now he looked at this foreign youth’s firm jaw, small pale lips, shocked gray eyes, baby-smooth skin, downy stubble, and a short punky fuzz of hair.

  Nonetheless, this face belonged to him.

  He was afraid to reach up and paw at the mirror in case its mirage shattered; it seemed fairground trickery. Rejuvenation treatment was a modern alchemy: Close your eyes, a long blank second while the wizard waves his staff, open your eyes, and you’ve been reborn.

  Then his personality began to pull together, skittish thoughts calming. This young face, he noted, had slightly thinner cheeks than he recalled himself having fifty-eight years ago. That must be due to diet; the suspension womb would have fed him a perfectly balanced nutrient supply rather than the junk food and bar snacks he lived off during his student days.

  Jeff Baker grinned at himself, revealing teeth that were perfectly straight and white. Then he started to laugh, despite the pain.