Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  “If Roy’s life wasn’t on the line, I could take my time,” Jasmine said.

  “You break it, you bought it,” he said. “Watch this.” The seagull landed awkwardly, and sat in the sand next to Rammy, who slowly handed it another piece of brownie, then gently stroked its head.

  “You tame seagulls?” Jasmine asked.

  “They get strung out, just like the rest of us,” he said. “Half of us are strung out on life, and half of us are strung out on death,” he said, laying back and closing his eyes. “How much cash do you have?” “Cash,” Jasmine asked, surprised.

  “I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who works for Fujitsu, who has a certain, let us say, seagull type problem.”

  “I don’t want to commit any crimes, Rammy. We can’t ask other people to either. That’s where I draw the line,” Jasmine said, more than slightly rattled.

  “They could ask us,” he said.

  “But how could they possible get a supercomputer out of a heavily secured building?” Jasmine asked.

  “Same we they got it in,” he replied, making seagull sounds while petting the seagull.

  “What about the security?”

  “It’s just a big box. The security guys just care if there’s a big box there; they don’t care if there’s anything in it. And I know how to anesthetize the 9900’s callback to Tokyo,” he said, yawning. “Besides, it has my optimal parallel kernel running on it. I designed it.”

  “But, how could we possibly set it up and run all the cables and things?”

  “It’s sheer genius, and an open tab at the Los Gatos Porsche parts department. Maybe you could let your code talker run a few molecules?”

  Jasmine started to reply, but didn’t.

  “Let’s take a nap,” he said, pointing to the sleeping seagull. He stretched out on the big, red, plaid blanket, snoring with the seagull on his chest, when Jasmine turned back to him. Rammy was a giant she thought, remembering how he had solved insurmountable programming problems during the human genome project.

  Jasmine watched the small boat tack back and forth off the coast, the mast dipping with each green swell. The icy surges of uncertainty began to race through her again. The last month had been entirely out of character for her. She was a dedicated believer in working within the system, doing everything in the prescribed manner, and now she was involved in a completely alien world, where there were no rules, and no regulations. It was a squirrelly, grab ass world, where knowledge is traded for favors, and everyone had some agenda that was not discussed.

  Maybe it was the academic world, and the biotech world stripped to its bare essentials, but was it the future? Was it right? She agonized over what they were doing endlessly, but she arrived at the same point.

  “And you just do science,” she said quietly. She thought for a moment about her early work, and the excitement and dedication to solving evolution’s maddeningly complex riddles. Then it all changed. It changed dramatically from a mostly selfless quest for new knowledge to an opportunist’s picnic, with the real emphasis on commercializing the knowledge as fast as possible.

  “What we could have done,” she said aloud, recalling the times they waited for patent approvals, and material transfer agreements to be finalized. The months ran into years and the years blurred into a long almost forgotten swamp of frustration. They all hoped. All the scientists hoped that a fighter would come along and lead them, but the big names in science chose to adopt a Mr. Nice Guy acquiescence that played into the hands of drug companies and the right wing.

  As the wind slowly clocked around to the north and filled in, it got cold, and the sand sweeping down the beach peppering the backs of Jasmine’s legs. She put on a sweater and closed her eyes for a long time, wishing she lived in a simpler time, when the life around her was predictable.

  She thought of Will, and how much she desired him. She wanted to sleep with him and make love to him. Then she thought of Earl and the years of love they had shared. She thought of her mother coming to her in a dream after her death, and the sensation of complete acceptance of the vast mystery that life was. Then she felt the completeness of Roy’s treatment from her visit to the other side.

  “There it is,” she said, using Earl’s favorite expression.

  She found herself loving the success that life is. She felt like a cheerleader for life, leaping up and pointing ahead with big red pom poms. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight for life! Cause Life is Right! Right! Right! Right! Life Is Riiiiight! Why, doesn’t really matter she found herself thinking. “Why, doesn’t really matter,” she said aloud.

  Both Rammy and the seagull were still asleep as the sand started to pile up around them. She started to hum a song she used to sing to Malia.

  Go to sleep, you weary hobo.

  Let the towns drift slowly by.

  Can you hear the steel rail hummin’

  That’s the Hobo’s lullaby.

  She tried to get her mind to do another run through, but nothing happened. She looked down at Rammy, snoring with his hand on the stoned seagull. Why ask why? She asked herself. Why can’t the human race be a little wacky, and have a few wild cards? Evolution insists on wild cards she thought. So why do we resist behavior at the margins?

  She fell asleep in the dimming sun, thinking about the lovely skin of the girl in the Gondola on Lake Havasu, wondering how it could be wrong for someone to want to be lovely, to be soft, supple, and full of life. Then she imagined herself young again, young and in love with a powerful man.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Welcome aboard, skipper!” Larry Conway said as he helped Earl and Jasmine board Etude. The Farr 58 looked like it had never been out of a show room. “Here are her documents, warranty information, maintenance logs, and sadly, her sailing log, which is only two pages long,” Larry said wistfully. “We were going to sail her to the Marquesas from Mexico, and then do Tahiti, but we’re just getting too old for a passage like that. Guess we’ll do some chartering instead,” he said, in a resigned manner that Earl was hearing more and more.

  “I hear a lot of sailors are buying new Catamarans with electric winches. They say that they are easy to handle. You might look into those,” Earl said, settling into the soft yellow cushion in the salon.

  “I have this damn blood pressure problem now, and I bruise every time someone sneezes. I’m just too damn old for a hot rod like this,” Larry replied. Earl did not want to mention that he was older than Larry.

  The transfer went smoothly, and after a few last glasses of Chardonnay and tearful goodbye pats on the hull, the Conway’s left.

  When Earl had finished going over every inch of the boat and opening all the sail bags, he sat down in the salon next to Jasmine.

  “She’s ours!” he said. “And we don’t even have a boat payment!”

  “Let’s go sailing!” Jasmine said, after going through the galley.

  The brief motor from Pier 40 to the Bay Bridge only took a few minutes. “Let’s hoist under the bridge! Maybe we can see up a few skirts,” Earl said, bringing the bow into the wind.

  The big boom furler for the main sail was new to them both and worked so well Jasmine put her old sailing gloves away. It was much bigger than a normal boom, but looked better when the main was up.

  “A little easier than the Islander 36,” Jasmine said. They headed out into San Francisco Bay, running west on a broad reach, the stiff northerly wind had just starting to churn up a little chop. Jasmine saw the traffic backed up in the Marina district. “Rush hour,” she thought.

  They glided under the Golden Gate Bridge silently. The Bay was at it’s very best, a lush jade green with Mt. Tamalpais massive and still green in the background. They held each other every time they sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge. It felt good to be alive.

  “She’s so fast it feels like the tide is going out,” Earl said, steering her with the autopilot remote.

  “I wish we could go cruising. Right now, just sail to Hawaii, and take
a couple of years off. I’m starting to feel so overwhelmed with this sleigh ride we’ve chosen,” Jasmine said, taking the wheel for the first time.

  “Don’t tempt me! If it wasn’t for Roy we’d be locking the autopilot on two-four-two right now, and hoping for a nice pressure ridge for the next three weeks,” Earl said, easing the vang on the boom to put a pocket in the main sail. He suddenly reached over his back, clasping his shoulder.

  “Damn, that hurts!” Earl’s old torn rotator cuff injury forced him to sit down for a minute, closing his eyes tightly against the pain.

  Jasmine sailed on, watching Earl. He held his shoulder as he looked at the mast, carefully checking the tension on the shroud lines. We are getting older, she thought. Earl is sixty-seven, I am fifty-nine.

  A gust of wind heeled the boat over to the overpowered point, forcing her to lean into the heel. “Bring it up for a minute!” Earl said, as he let the main out and wound in the jib. Jasmine could feel the slight pain in her shoulders and knees as she held the wheel. Her knees were getting stiff, and the wind seemed colder than before, when they sailed their beat-up Islander 36 all day, and sometimes after dark.

  The potato-patch shoal area, just seaward of the Golden Gate Bridge, was beginning to look rough, in the late afternoon light. “Earl, what’s the tide doing?”

  “I completely forgot! Ten years on the beach will really take your edge off! Turn on the VHF, looks like it’s ebbing,” Earl shouted from the foredeck, where he was looking at the chromed jib furler.

  Jasmine flipped on the VHF radio and pushed the WX button for weather and tidal information, trying to remember how long it had been since they owned a boat. She instinctively touched her chest suddenly aware she was not wearing a PFD. Earl’s ironclad rule was everyone on the boat wore a life jacket on the Bay.

  “Earl! Put on a life vest! Jasmine shouted, but they were rounding Pt. Bonita, and the big green northwest swells were starting to jack up, sending spray over the bow.

  Earl jumped into the cockpit with a big smile on his face. “What a ship! What do you say we circumnavigate?” he said as the spray whipped past the cockpit.

  “I can’t hear the radio,” Jasmine said, but it sure looks like its ebbing.”

  Earl jumped into the salon and turned up the radio. “Tim left a PFD down here, put it on,” he said flipping the automatic life vest to Jasmine.

  “Seven-foot tide today, at five-thirty, so it’ll be in max ebb in a half an hour. Breaks my heart to be stuck out in the Pacific Ocean on one of Bruce Farr’s boats,” Earl said, zipping up his jacket, with a big smile.

  “You wear the PFD, you’re foredeck,” Jasmine said handing it to Earl.

  “No you wear it, you’re the next Nobel Laureate,” Earl said, turning the vest over in his hands. “Besides, it’s a self-inflator type and I don’t like those.”

  “Let’s tack,” Jasmine said, as they neared the rocks at Point Bonita.

  “Helm’s over!” She yelled, turning the big stainless steel wheel to the left.

  As the bow came through the wind it caught the forward hatch and blew it back on the deck with a bang just as a swell punched the bow up and back down into a nasty trough. The spray roared over the bow and into the open hatch.

  “I got it!” Earl yelled and headed up on the foredeck. Jasmine grabbed his arm and spun him around, slipping the blue PFD on his arm.

  “Snap it up, Honey,” she said, as Earl reluctantly snapped the nylon PFD on, and scrambled up on the heaving deck to close the hatch.

  “It’s going to be lumpy gravy around the corner with this wind and tide, let’s go back,” Earl said, jumping back into the cockpit.

  “I think we’re out here for a few hours, until the tide slacks some,” Jasmine said.

  When the big tides went out in San Francisco Bay, the current under the Golden Gate usually ran between seven and eight knots, which meant that they couldn’t get back in, even if they used the motor.

  “That’s fine with me,” Earl said.

  “I’ll wind in the jib and we’ll just figure eight with the main. I’d like to see how it jibes in some wind anyway,” he said, heading up to the foredeck.

  They sailed out past the Potato Patch and carefully jibed downwind, riding the big swells on the turn. Jasmine was an excellent boat driver, and Etude was a joy to steer. It balanced so well, it seemed to anticipate the helm, and held a course even when coming off a big swell from behind. “I think we found a winner!” Jasmine shouted.

  She suddenly realized that she was relaxing. The monstrous questions and anxieties that had occupied her life for that past several months were forgotten completely. She breathed in deeply, grateful for the reprieve. “Maybe it’ll all work out,” she said, inhaling the natural world.

  Earl came back and sat down in the cockpit. “Let’s see if we can sail to a standstill!” he said, letting out the jib.

  “We haven’t done that for years!” Jasmine said, kissing him suddenly. When they were caught outside the Bay in a big ebb tide they would pick a spot just seaward of the bridge and trim the sails to equal the tide. The GPS would tell them when they zeroed.

  “Sheet in the main a little,” Earl said. “We’re still sailing backwards.”

  Earl stood behind her and held her at the wheel for a long time, laughing every time the GPS indicated 0.0 KTS. He began to caress her breasts and then her navel. “We forgot to christen this boat,” he said.

  “We’ll take care of that when we tie up,” Jasmine said, feeling very close to Earl.

  “Marjorie says the stem cells made her feel twenty years younger,” Jasmine said, looking at her hands on the wheel.

  “She looks great. She said something weird to me the other day. She said she missed some great contact sports when she was young and wasn’t going to let that happen this time around,” Earl said, watching a big tanker ship buck the tide as it passed them on the way into the Bay.

  “When we’ve got a reliable treatment, she’s going to do it.”

  “How much have you thought about it?” Jasmine asked.

  “More than I expected to,” Earl said clasping his hands around her waist.

  “Your hands are cold!” Jasmine said.

  “My knees hurt,” Earl said taking the autopilot remote and sitting down.

  “No one will be able to resist it,” Jasmine said. “No one is going to endure the disintegration of their bodies if they don’t have to. No one is going to look in the mirror everyday and see another layer gone, and leave the outdoors and moments like this. No one,” she said evenly.

  “Will is cloning a batch of stem cells for me,” Earl said.

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Jasmine said.

  “And for you,” he finished.

  Jasmine paused, thinking about what Will said in Lake Havasu about the effects of stem cell treatment.

  “We’ll be able to pick the age we want to live at,” Jasmine said.

  “We can synchronize our ages this time,” Will said

  “I wonder how long we’ll live, and what will happen to us?” Jasmine said.

  “We’ll be the first, the first immortal human beings. We can live as long as we want,” Earl said, “if we don’t screw up the treatment.”

  “I wonder what will happen after living a really long time. How will our minds handle the experience of being alive that long?” Jasmine questioned.

  “We’ll be able to clone neurons by then and maintain cell function,” Earl replied, handing the autopilot remote control to Jasmine.

  “I don’t mean the physical part; I mean what will happen to our minds? Will there be a point when we just can’t stand any more reality or any more life? Will there be a point when the sum of our experiences finally compresses and drives us mad? Will we feel guilty for living for so long when so many others don’t?” Jasmine closed her eyes now for long seconds as the spray began to irritate her eyes.

  The sun had set behind the fog bank. “Oh Dark Thirty,” she said, reme
mbering one of the old sailing terms.

  “Oh Dark Thirty,” Earl replied. “Good thing we’re the best sailors alive,” he said, looking up at the perfectly trimmed sails.

  Jasmine squeezed his hand, trying not to obsess on the thought of a stem cell treatment waiting for her in Lake Havasu.

  “I think the mind is pretty resilient. I think we’ll just go on living, probably having some new medical problems, but by then we should be able to deal with just about anything,” Earl looked over at Jasmine, admiring her figure.

  “Would we have another family? Jasmine said.

  “Why not,” Earl related.

  “At some point we would all be the same age.” Jasmine said.

  “Yeah, once your children reached maturity, everyone would be about the same age. Wonder what they’ll call it,” Earl said.

  “I just, I just… have this terrible feeling, way down inside me that says we’re changing something that has succeeded so beautifully, for so long and this, this change, might bring about some really bad things for people,” Jasmine lamented.

  “Gene wars,” Earl said suddenly. “That’s where it’ll eventually lead. The bio-engineered elite will slowly become a new race; a race that will start at the top and stay there. The population pressure in the industrialized countries will become intense. Then, I guess there’ll be a global gene war with countries designing the kind of people they think will succeed.”

  Jasmine rubbed the back of Earl’s neck slowly. “Do you think there’s any chance people might see the beauty of benevolence, with a little more intelligence and a longer life span, and choose a more enlightened model of behavior?”

  “Probably after a few nuclear wars, when they don’t have any options. I think for the next thousand years or so people will want smarter, faster, more aggressive traits, but the intelligence factor might win out, if there’re some hormone controls, which there might be in a super smart group of gene jockeys,” Earl imparted.

  “Should we do this?” Jasmine asked, closing her eyes for a long time.

  “Yes,” Earl answered. “It’s going to happen anyway, and soon. It’s going to be the most earth shattering change in human history and the human race has had a hard time dealing with change. We might be able to somehow help, somehow try to inject some enlightenment in the beginning,” Earl looked at her.