Unwelcome Bodies

by Jennifer Pelland

  * * * *

  It took some convincing, and a glowing recommendation from the team leader, his former med school classmate Dr. Brenda Burkehart, but the college eventually let him join the telomere project and pull out of the OR. “Glad to have you on the team,” Brenda said, tucking a stray lock of ash-blonde hair behind her ear. “The work’s a little dry, but we think it’s important. I’m kind of surprised you ditched your own project, though. The field of cellular repair mechanisms seems so promising.”

  “Not as promising as your telomere project,” Alex said.

  She raised her eyebrows, one finger trailing along the lapel of her lab coat. “Oh, really? Seriously, why did you jump tracks?”

  He pulled out the carefully rehearsed answer he’d used in his interview. “I honestly believe that there’s no reason for people to suffer in old age when the technology to stave off cell death is within our reach.”

  “Oh, and I suppose you came to this conclusion because of all the old people you saw dying in the hospital and don’t have a single ulterior motive.”

  “Well…of course.” He could feel himself starting to sweat. Did she know? How could she? He’d been so careful. He’d left no forensic evidence behind. No one even knew that Cassie was dead.

  He felt the weight of God’s disapproval pressing down on him from above and struggled to breathe.

  Brenda laughed, and he startled back, rudely jolted from his panicked thoughts. “Right. It had nothing to do with your own mortality, did it?” She playfully tapped a finger on his receding hairline.

  He let out a long sigh. Good. She didn’t know.

  “Hey, don’t worry. I switched over to this line of research when my gray hair got so bad that I had to start dying it blonde instead of brown so the roots wouldn’t show.” Her hazel eyes twinkled, and he wondered what she was looking at that was so fascinating. He’d have to check his forehead for moles next time he used the men’s room. “You’re in fine company,” she continued. “We’re all middle aged ‘fraidy cats in this department.”

  And so he got to work.

  The research was tedious. There were cell lines to be developed, primate models to be worked out, and mouse dissections galore. Plus the solution for how to keep the telomerase enzymes from fueling cancer cell growth was still eluding them. But he plowed through. The price of failure was too high: his immortal soul. It kept him focused. It kept him hungry. He could feel God’s eyes on him at all times, watching, judging. There was no way He could be happy with Alex’s plan. So there was no way Alex could afford to fail.

  His colleagues had to pry him away from his work to eat lunch each day. “What’s with the rabbit food?” Sham asked. “You eat like a pathologist. Lighten up! Ham and cheese with mayonnaise won’t kill you.”

  Fat, cholesterol, food poisoning, oh yes. It could kill him. Alex carefully assembled his soy cheese, hummus, tomato, and lettuce sandwich and set out his small assortment of carrot sticks and grapes—all organic. “I’m just trying to be healthy,” he said. “I’d like to live long enough to apply our research to myself.”

  Sham shrugged. “Well, we haven’t even started primate testing, although that’s not too far off. If it goes well, and we manage to crack the cancer problem, we’ll be in phase one clinical tests in five years. Best case scenario: we’re done with phase three in what, eleven years? And then there’s still the FDA approval process, and the long-term effects studies. Face it, none of us will be benefiting from this research any time soon.”

  “I know,” Alex said. “So it would be a real shame to die of something preventable before we get FDA approval.” He had no intention of waiting for the clinical trials to be over. If phase two went well, and his research showed the procedure to be safe, he was going to administer it to himself. Yes, it would be a risk, but it would be less risky than letting his cells continue to decay with age.

  “You are so driven,” Sham said. He turned to Brenda and asked, “Has he always been like this?”

  She shook her head, her bobbed hair swinging. “He’s never been what you’d call wild and crazy, but back in med school, he was downing pizza, beer, and Chinese with the rest of us. Alison used to come along sometimes too. She was working on a PhD in zoology, so we made her an honorary intern and let her hang out with us. It’s a shame about you and Alison. You used to be such a fun couple.”

  Alex shrugged. “Well, we became very different people.” Alison asserted that he was the only one who’d changed, and she was right. She didn’t seem to care about how much time she was racking up in Purgatory, but he’d made all the right lifestyle choices to lessen his own time there. For all the good it had done him. “It’s for the best,” he said. “It’d be hard to spend this much time on the project if I were still married.”

  “Man, something lit a fire under you,” Sham said. He propped his elbows on the small lunchroom table. “I’d sure like to know what that was.”

  Across the room, another colleague switched on the wall-mounted television. The midday news announcer said, “And in other news, the family of twenty-three-year-old Cassie Baird is appealing to the public for any information that might help authorities locate her. Ms. Baird, a grad student at Tufts University, has been missing for three months, and was last seen leaving her night job at the Teardrop Lounge near Copley Square.”

  Alex gasped and sucked a chunk of carrot into his windpipe. Cassie’s picture stared down at him from the television as he struggled for air, hands scrabbling at his throat. Sham grabbed him from behind and started performing the Heimlich maneuver, but even through the gagging, the suffocation, the blind panic, all Alex could focus on was Cassie’s face staring down at him from Heaven, God looming behind her, arms crossed, His judgment sealed in stone.

  God had orchestrated this. He knew it.

  He tried to apologize to Cassie’s image. Tried to mean it with all his heart. But as oxygen deprivation started squeezing his vision into a narrow field of dots, he could feel his hatred for her welling up, thick and black. Flames licked at his feet and—

  With a painful crack, he was jolted back to reality. Coughing spasms racked his body, and when he tried to curl into them, a searing pain lanced into his left side. He reflexively pressed himself against the wall to keep his body straight. He could hardly breathe, hardly see through the tears of fear and pain that wouldn’t stop pouring from his eyes. He needed to cough, but every time he tried to take in a deep breath, he was viciously stabbed again and ended up gasping and clutching the wall. He was alive. Broken, but alive. Satan couldn’t claim him yet.

  Brenda gently ran her hands over Alex’s midsection, jerking them back when Alex cried out in pain. “I think you broke a rib,” she said, voice soft.

  “Let’s get you over to the hospital,” Sham said.

  “No hospitals!” Alex croaked. Hospitals were full of infections, misdiagnoses, overworked interns, aging elevators, catastrophic equipment failure—

  Sham shot him an odd look. “Don’t be crazy. I’m taking you and that’s it.”

  Despite the nearly overwhelming agony, Alex triple-checked the dosage on the pain medication before he would allow the nurse to give it to him. He wouldn’t let the x-ray technician take more than two plates so he could keep his radiation exposure down. And he refused the offer to stay at Brenda’s apartment for the night, instead heading directly to the subway to go home. He took the subway everywhere, including to New England Medical, even though he only lived one stop away. It was safer than walking. He hadn’t heard of a single fatality on the Green Line in years, but pedestrians in the Boston area were routinely struck by cars while crossing the street. His subway pass was worth every dollar.

  He painstakingly made his way down the stairs to his excruciatingly tidy new basement apartment and draped his coat on the treadmill. He’d bought it so he could stay in shape without facing Boston’s murderous drivers, but he wouldn’t be using it for a while now. The television beckoned, but he knew the evening new
s would be on. Cassie would be on. His Cassie. Cassie Denton. She would have taken his last name like a proper wife. Not like his ex.

  At least Alison hadn’t been money-grubbing along with everything else. When she’d gotten the money from the sale of their expensive Back Bay condo, she used it to pay in full for a townhouse out in Waltham where she could sloppily scatter her paints and books and knick-knacks wherever she wanted. “Just take this and get out of my life,” she’d said, handing him the leftover money from the sale. “Midlife crisis my ass. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, and I don’t know why no one else sees it, but I just want you gone. Why I stayed with you as long as I did is beyond me.” He had no idea what she’d meant, but he didn’t care. He had the money now. If he invested it carefully, he’d be able to build his safe house outside Route 128 in five or ten years.

  But that’s not what he’d wanted to do, not what he’d dreamed about. He’d wanted to get a little house out in the country with Cassie. Have a couple of beautiful children. Work in a small county hospital while she stayed home with the kids. Grow old with his beloved wife.

  Cassie. Sweet Cassie. Bitch Cassie. Dead Cassie.

  Thanks to her, he couldn’t afford to grow old anymore.

  Alex glared up at the ceiling, through all the floors of the apartment building, right up into Heaven itself.

  The gates were closed and locked tight.

  He stared across his apartment, breath coming in shallow gasps to keep his ribs from screaming. He had to get back to work first thing tomorrow morning. He couldn’t let God win.

  * * * *

  He didn’t feel any different now that he was immortal. He’d expected to feel different.

  The phase one and two clinical trials had been a success, Alex’s secret personal trial included. Phase two had gone so well after the first year that Alex had unblinded the results and decided to administer the treatment to himself before that phase was complete. While there was no way to measure the long-term effects other than watching the test subjects over the course of decades, so far the procedure had proven an unqualified success. Alex’s hairline had even stopped receding, and his grays were slowly turning brown again.

  And then one of the phase three test subjects died when an undiagnosed blood clot migrated to her brain. Despite her robust chromosomes, she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. They weren’t able to revive her.

  Clearly, chromosomal immortality wasn’t enough. Alex needed to be able to keep his body in constant repair. He turned to the nanotechnology team at New England Medical to see how their research was going.

  “Human testing’s still a couple of years off,” Dr. Manuel Torremocha said. “But we’ve had some promising results in chimps. Right now, we’ve got ‘bots scouring their bloodstreams to clean up arterial plaque. The next test is to put monitoring ‘bots in them to continually scan for internal abnormalities that might indicate budding cancers or other possible health problems.”

  “How long until you can get them to do more major repairs?” Alex asked. “You know, helping regrow tissue, knitting broken bones, breaking up blood clots.”

  “Well, blood clots are next on the schedule,” Dr. Torremocha said. “And we think there might be some dentistry applications as well. The rest is just not possible. Not with today’s science. These little guys aren’t a replacement for doctors. They’re just helpers.”

  Alex could hear his blood thunder in his ears. He tried to calm himself, tried to bring his blood pressure down to a healthier level using the biofeedback routines he’d carefully taught himself over the past seven years, but he was too agitated. He could hear God laughing at him from above. Vengeful bastard. “You might be able to do those things in the future, though, right?” he asked, hoping the answer would bring his blood pressure down.

  Dr. Torremocha shrugged. “Maybe. We have no way of knowing. I’m sure that if the tests continue to go well, we’ll keep searching for new applications of nanotechnology for the human body.”

  “Good, good. Keep me posted, okay?”

  Dr. Torremocha winced and looked pointedly down at the latex gloves on Alex’s hands. “No offense, but…I’ve heard things about you.”

  Alex felt the blood drain from his face. “Oh,” he said quietly. “Well.”

  He went back to his office, eyes focused firmly on the floor. So, those damned rumors had been spreading. He heard people murmur when they thought he couldn’t hear. He’s crazy, they’d say. There’s something not right about him. You can see it in his eyes. He wears those gloves everywhere—even to lunch. Have you seen how he wears a bicycle helmet when he goes outside? They won’t even let him lecture anymore. He’s got no life outside of work. He’s too single-minded about his project.

  They had no idea.

  He put it out of his mind and fired up his computer to see how his investments were doing. His mother had been gracious enough to die of pneumonia and leave him a substantial inheritance three months ago. It was so convenient not to have to pray for her soul. Being damned had its advantages. Now that he had her money, it was time to start searching for a suitable parcel of land, one that fit his new rules. He wanted to build in a town with a low crime rate and a nearby commuter rail stop so that if he wanted to go into Boston, he didn’t need to risk his life on the Mass Pike. He also wanted to find a place that had low numbers of reported cases of Lyme disease or rabies, and that didn’t suffer from basement flooding. He knew all too well all the dangerous molds that ended up in damp and flooded basements. And of course, the property needed to have a good hospital nearby, just in case the worst happened.

  He hoped Cassie appreciated how much he’d had to rearrange his life for her these past seven years.

  Maybe she hadn’t gone to Heaven at all. Maybe she was still in Purgatory, burning off her sins. Fornication: he was sure she’d committed that with that boyfriend of hers. Lying: she’d done that to him in spades. She’d broken up his marriage—surely that had to count for something. Marriage was a sacrament. He’d still be married to Alison if it weren’t for her. And married men lived longer and healthier lives. If he died prematurely, surely it would be Cassie’s fault.

  The building started to rumble, and Alex snapped his head up. No. It couldn’t be. In Boston?

  From across the hall, Brenda yelled, “Get in the doorway, you idiot!”

  He leapt from his chair and braced himself in the door frame. His helmet! No, he couldn’t go back to get it now. He stared helplessly at Brenda, who was standing in her own doorway.

  Brenda’s eyes were wide, but she managed to quip, “Act of God, eh?”

  His chest tightened painfully. No. This couldn’t—God wouldn’t kill a whole building full of people to get at him, would He?

  He heard a creak, and turned just in time to see his large wooden bookcase wobble and start to fall. Time slowed like molasses, and his guts seized up as he realized that the corner of the bookcase was going to hit him. Blunt force trauma, several hundred pounds of force, all concentrated in a sharp point of wood. He’d be torn open like wet tissue. There was no way he’d survive. Alex saw flames flickering in his peripheral vision, and his chest felt like it was ablaze. He opened his mouth to scream as the heat rose, flames slowly licking higher—

  The bookcase missed him by an inch.

  And then the shaking stopped.

  Brenda sagged against her doorframe and tittered nervously. “Man, that was something! I knew they said Boston was due for a big earthquake some day, but I never thought I’d live to see it!”

  Alex collapsed, trembling, onto the floor. It was wet. It was…

  Oh God, he’d pissed and shat all over himself.

  Brenda sniffed. “Pipes must have burst. Come on, we should probably get out of here.”

  “Just…just a minute,” Alex said weakly.

  She took a tentative step toward him. “Are you all right?” Then her eyes widened in understanding before narrowing again in sympathy. “Oh, God. A
lex.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ll be outside.”

  He tried to close the door behind him, but the fallen bookcase wouldn’t budge. So he stood behind his door and changed into the spare set of clothes he kept in his desk, wiping the shit off of himself with his lab coat.

  An act of God.

  He had to get that safe house built, and fast. He was too easy a target in the city. If God wanted to kill him, He’d have to work for it.

  * * * *

  Alex had to steal his nanobots and a copy of the monitoring software. Luckily, it wasn’t hard.

  He managed to stay at New England Medical long enough to inject himself with generation one, two, and three nanobots before he finally succumbed to the constant pressure to take early retirement. So he retreated full-time to his safe house in Wayland. It had cost a fortune, but it had been worth it. His floors were covered with mold-resistant carpet, even in the kitchen and bathroom, so he wouldn’t have to worry about slipping and hitting his head. There were no sharp corners anywhere. The house ran completely on geothermal energy generated on his own property, so his power would never go out. Every room was equipped with panic buttons, so if anything happened, he could summon an ambulance immediately. He had a food irradiation system. He had a refrigerator full of every medication he’d been able to get his hands on.

  Everything he needed was delivered to his doorstep, so he wouldn’t have to risk getting into an accident by venturing outside. The water was heavily filtered. The house and everything in it were flame retardant. The windows were photograyed to keep out harmful UV radiation, and bulletproof to keep out projectiles. The locks and security system were keyed to his biometrics. The neighbors were all upstanding citizens. There was a fire station less than a mile away. There was a police station less than two miles away. And there was a hospital less than five miles away.

  With any luck, he’d never need it. The nanobots cleaned away arterial plaque, destroyed blood clots, kept his teeth free from plaque, repaired minor damage to blood vessels, and constantly monitored his body for irregularities. Between them and the telomeric enhancements, if he was careful, he might never die. If he just followed his rules. The rules that were more important than ever.