The moment of my death. Are they still trying to put me down? I struggle against the bonds, and try to scream against whatever immobilizes my mouth and throat.
“Heart rate 132,” a nurse beside me announces. It’s a female’s voice, not the gruff, bellowing tone of Dr. Cranton. “EEG waves show cortex spiking . . . ”
“Do you want adenosine?” Another woman.
“No. Keep the course.”
This voice appears to emanate from the man to my left, where Ivan Wilkes was situated. But Ivan’s voice is different—younger. All the fond memories of our work and our adventures together are eclipsed by the memory of Ivan restraining my hand in my final moments, conspiring to deny me my right to live.
I thrash against him. I don’t want to die. As I writhe against the bed, I am not weak and emaciated, but strong and full of energy.
“Extubate him,” Ivan orders someone at the head of my bed.
“It’s me.” Ivan rips off his surgical mask and lowers his face closer to me, to better make out his facial features. A wide smile splits his face, which is unusually tanned and firm, void of his wrinkles and bushy eyebrows. “It’s Ivan. Do you remember?”
What happened to him? He doesn’t look a day over thirty.
He puts back his head and roars a belly laugh. “We did it! We’re gods now.”
Someone behind me peels the tape off my cheek and pulls the breathing tube out of my throat. Extreme coldness stiffens my arms and legs. I cough, and a warmth zips down my extremities as if I am struck with a bolt of electricity.
I gag, and a scream of rage finally unleashes. “Get away from me!”
“Calm down, dear. You’re fine.” I turn to my right. Morgan takes off a mask in the corner of the room. Her lips are fuller, her cheeks smoother, and her bosom bustier.
“Morgan?”
“It’s me!” she boasts.
“Why are you trying to kill me?” I shout. Her smile fades to a disappointed frown. “I told you I changed my mind . . . ”
“Look!” Dr. Cranton removes the surgical hair cover off my head, and holds a clipboard just 18 inches from my face. He taps a lighted button at the top and it transforms into a mirror.
What? I look like I did the day I graduated college, except my skin is a golden tan. My hair is full and thick and my complexion smooth. My acne scars are gone! My face is young! My cheeks are not sunken in, and the veins in my forehead are no longer bulging. I stick out my tongue, and the sores and the dryness that characterized it have been replaced by a smooth, moist, pink texture. I place a hand on my stomach. The nausea that has tormented me for the past year of my life is gone, and a growl of hunger escapes. I press into my abdomen and feel moguls of muscle.
How can this be?
My wife comes to the edge of the bed, leans forward, and kisses me on the cheek, but I cannot remove my eyes from what I see in the mirror.
“We did it, Raymond.” Ivan flashes his young grin around the room, full of pride. “You did it!”
Ivan begins to clap, and the whole room of nurses and physicians applauds and cheers. This surgical suite has a second level, and hundreds of observers are present. The applause is deafening. I run my hands behind my ears. No hearing aids. I run my fingers through my hair, and discover a sensitive, slightly bulging horizontal scar on my forehead. I bring the mirror closer and examine the barely discernible scar.
Morgan kisses me again.
“What is going on? Where are Louie and Savannah?”
Morgan grimaces and backs away, as if I’d just rudely sneezed in her face. Suddenly she forces a wide smile, fluttering her long eyelashes. “You’re just not going to believe how great everything is!”
I turn to gaze into the mirror. This can’t be real. “I can’t be in heaven, but this can’t be hell.”
Morgan grins. She kisses me on the lips, playfully biting my bottom lip, her breath minty. “Heaven on Earth, babe.” She rests a hand on my firm, flat abdomen, and whispers in my ear. “Immortality.”
3
IN THE DOCTOR’S LOUNGE, THREE dozen of the most flawless physiques and intelligent minds in the world join me for a meal of vegetables and tofu soup. The muted television is a three-dimensional image on the white wall, cast there by a projector on the ceiling. The physicians and scientists surround me like I’m a freak of nature that might go away if they blink. The older docs and scientists flood me with information too quickly to take it in. I devour the delicious food rather than their updates on the advances in medicine.
“Slow down,” Ivan counsels me. “There’s more where that came from.”
“I don’t remember food tasting so good.” I take a gulp of water. “Or water, for that matter. Is this water?”
“That’s because we’ve removed many genetic aberrancies from the seeds before we grow them and the animals before we breed them.”
“The CRISPR technique,” Redd adds, “has evolved, excelling all expectations.”
Ivan nods. “Our research has had many practical applications, but none as profound as perfecting the human genome and transplantation.”
As my ravenous appetite eases, their impromptu science updates become more interesting. I move my morsel into the corner of my mouth. “How many years since I was, um . . . ?”
“Cryo-preserved? Twenty-seven years.” Dr. Redd Cranton’s easily-identifiable voice is instantly repulsive to me, the memory of my final moments in my last life being so fresh in my mind. My disgust eases with the beaming of his youthful countenance. It’s difficult to shake the outrage I felt in that candle-lit hospital room.
“I was out 27 years? It’s 2053?” I gasp. They nod. “That’s, that’s so hard to believe.”
Ivan, who sits across from me, rests his chin in his clasped hands. “I can’t imagine.”
I wave my fork across the room. “And you all went through this already?”
“Yes and no.” Ivan shows me the scar just under his full head of hair. I can barely see it. I lean closer. “We were old like you . . . ”
“Middle-aged.” Cranton chuckles.
“But alive when we were surgically transplanted into our own genetically engineered bodies,” Ivan continues. “We had several failures first . . . ”
“You mean, no one had been brought out of cryo before me?”
Ivan shakes his head. “We kept Gates alive for, what . . . ”
“Ninety-three seconds,” Cranton answers.
“But you were the first to undergo some new cell regeneration technology we’re perfecting, and it looks like it worked like a charm.”
“You mean, you never did it successfully before me? You could’ve killed me.”
“Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve,” Redd Cranton bellows. “Obsessions of losers.”
Ivan turns to Cranton. “Looks like our business is about to take another leap, huh?”
Redd smirks. “To heretofore unsurpassed levels, I’m sure. Just in time, too. During the last administration, it looked like the government was about to harmfully intervene in New Body science.” The doctors and scientists around the table nod and grunt, as if to affirm the general distaste they share of the government’s increasing attempts to control the boundaries of their scientific breakthroughs. “We have a friend in the White House now, but conservatives in the House have been threatening to sanction us for years, and they have a majority. It was now or, maybe, never.”
I fix my eyes on Redd. “And if I died during your revitalization?”
Redd turns his gaze to Ivan, who shrugs.
“You were the first to be brought back successfully from suspended animation,” Ivan reminds me. “Be thankful.”
I frown. “Thankful? That you almost killed me?”
“Yes, thankful.” Cranton rests a hand on Ivan’s shoulder. “Ivan had so many problems attempting to clone your replacement from the DNA extracted from your cryo-preserved tissue. A lesser scientist and a lesser friend would have given up long ago, but not Ivan.”
&n
bsp; “It was probably the scattered mutations due to chemotherapy,” Ivan explains. “Sixty-eight failures before we finally got a good clone. It seemed fate that we at least attempt the ocular-neurospinal transplantation . . . ”
My eyes widen. “Ocular-what?” I lower my fork, frowning at my colleague and our cloud of ambitious neophytes. “I thought we just reversed cell decomposition. You, you mean, this body’s not mine?”
The neophytes laugh, like they’ve never seen someone they considered so brilliant so utterly ignorant.
“No, no, no,” Ivan Wilkes shakes his head. “When your hovercar gets dilapidated and worn, Raymond, you can repair and replace spare parts until it’s all you ever do. Or, for less cost up front, you can simply . . . ” He pauses and raises his eyebrows at me, as if he expects me to answer.
“Buy a new car?”
“And transplant you into it,” a resident adds.
He motions toward my body with a wide grin. “We transplanted your brain, complete with your brain stem, your optic nerves and eyes, into your new body. You are an almost exact genetic match to your old body, with all the impurities filtered out.”
“You what?”
“Welcome to the new you, replaceable every 25 years if you have the credit for it. Imagine the potential, Raymond, to have brilliant old men in broken old bodies revived to youth so they can continue living, learning, inventing, and discovering. No more transporting knowledge to young bloods, hoping they get it. What if Edison could have been resurrected and could have continued growing in knowledge . . . ”
“We’re workin’ on that right now,” a young researcher announces.
“Or FDR, or Marx,” another doctor adds.
“Or Gandhi,” another physician leans forward.
“Or Jesus.” Dr. Cranton laughs.
One of the younger residents dares to speak up. “Many believe He’s already resurrected.”
Cranton heaves a mocking chortle at the resident. The whiteness and straightness of his teeth are amazing. Much improved over the crooked, yellow things he was nurturing when I last knew him. Cranton glares at the resident, “What are you, a fanatic?”
The resident lowers his eyes and blushes.
“How can you transplant a brain?” I run my finger along my scar.
“What part of the human body have we not transplanted besides the brain?” Ivan shrugs. “When you were still working here, we had been transplanting tissue from cadavers for decades—bones, retinas, hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, skin.”
“And substantia nigra tissue,” a resident adds.
“Yes.” Ivan crosses his arms over his chest and nods. “As far back as 1987, we were transplanting fetal brain tissue into Parkinsons patients. People have been conceiving and aborting their fetuses to exploit them for transplantation tissue since the 1990s.”
The biggest question finally finds its way to the surface of my swirling ocean of inquiry. “How did you connect the severed spinal cord?”
He levels an index finger at me. “We almost had the mystery unlocked, you and I. We had the right genes, Doc, right there all along. Using our own stem cells as the platform, instead of foreign stem cells, was the perfect solution. No rejection. We just needed to find . . . ”
“The biochemical trigger? You found the trigger?”
“To connect severed nerves, yes. Every cell has all the information in its DNA to heal itself, just like the salamander’s tail and the crab’s claw, just as you suspected. Indeed, any cell with intact DNA can transform into any type of specialized tissue it wants. We just had to find the trigger to make it want to.”
“How did you do it without cancerous transformation?” Previous experiments to stimulate nerve growth frequently resulted in uncontrolled growth of archaic nerve cells, resulting in malignant masses.
“Once we correct the genetic mutations inherent in every cell division, we have a 92% success rate in triggering targeted cell growth, including perfect spinal cord reunion.”
“No way!” I raise a fist in triumph.
Ivan leans forward and pats me on the hand. “That was a decade ago, Raymond. The old technology has gone the way of cell phones. The most amazing thing is that we don’t have to heal severed spinal cords anymore. We just grow a paralyzed person’s new body, complete with all genetic aberrancies purged. We’ve been doing it for nine years now.”
My eyes widen. “No cell phones?”
Dr. Cranton taps his right ear. “A voice-activated nanophone replaces those cumbersome bricks we used to carry on our belts. Small as a match head. You can get one today if you want.”
“Transplanting brains into perfected genetic clones—that’s not even scratching the surface, Raymond.” Ivan leans forward, his elbows on our table. “In our studies with autistic children and savants, we’ve identified the genes that turn on photographic memory, speed-reading, and the masterful mathematic calculating abilities of the most brilliant autistic patients, without all of the social detachment and communicative defects. You wouldn’t believe what was possible in our genome all along, if we only knew how to turn it on. Now we do! Nothing’s impossible now. Every person will be cloned genetically perfect in thirty years, and each of those people will be a god. The whole human race will be comprised of savants who never stop learning, discovering nature’s secrets, and mastering its remedies.”
I sit back, my jaw hanging open. Science has truly brought heaven to Earth.
My wife comes up from behind me and sets her hand gently on my shoulder. “What if the women of your dreams never grow old? Hmm?”
I turn toward her. “Women?” She doesn’t flinch. “Plural?” She smiles seductively. Our eyes fasten. “Polygamy’s legal?”
“Two of me,” she responds, “with identical DNA, is not polygamy.”
“Not that there’d be anything wrong with that, if you want,” Ivan adds with a pleasure-infatuated grin.
“Polygamy’s only meaningful in a nation that pretends marriage is a valuable institution anyway,” Redd Cranton adds. “Practically, we’ve been a nation of polygamists since the 1960s, our men just never committed to the women with whom they copulated.”
“We’ve had a separation of church and state fully recognized in all practical applications for fifteen years,” Ivan assures me.
“Took long enough.” Morgan raises her eyebrows at my colleague. “Religion has been a shackle on the ankles of science for too many years. With the state free of religious constraints, there’s no limit to what we can do now.”
“Well, there are political limits, or threats of limits, anyway,” Redd Cranton cautions. “But hopefully you will help us with that.”
I turn my chair so I can more fully look my wife in the eye. “Are you telling me there’s another you?”
“No. But you can order one. The adult version’ll be ready in eight years. Though you’d have only one me. The other would be, um, like a servant, if that’s what you want.”
“A servant who can speed-read, has a photographic memory, can master two to three languages and musical instruments a year, and is a walking thirty-digit calculator.” Ivan laughs. “Consider the potential, Raymond.” He is as excited as Edison must have been discussing his first successful light bulb. “How much quicker will we begin to evolve now, with all the geniuses enjoying immorality?”
“In another decade, we’ll make in vitro fertilization of error-free embryos less expensive than a hospital delivery.” Dr. Cranton is giddy with enthusiasm. “As long as they sign their old body over to our research facility when they’re done with it.”
“In these new bodies, we’ve corrected the errors in the mitochondrial DNA.” Ivan’s eyes dart from doctor to doctor along the table, boasting. “We simply lift the DNA strand from the nucleus, repair damage, replace corrupted DNA with the proper sequence, and reinsert a perfected genome into the nucleus, tweaked to be less vulnerable to oxidative stress. Then, bam! Every baby gets a Garden-of-Eden mind and body.”
�
��By the time you are ready for your new body in 25 years—which has already been ordered for you a few years ago—sickness and disease will be as antiquated as homophobia.” There’s something magical and contagious about Cranton’s youthful smile.
Ivan leans forward with his elbows on the table. “We’ve got aging de-mystified. We can modify the genome to prevent the accumulation of beta-amyloid, transthyretin, and lipofuscin. I predict your new body may age much slower than your old one.”
My stomach is finally full. Which of my thousand questions should I ask first? My wife’s hands massage my shoulders and I experience the flicker of sexual desire alien to me without medication for at least several years before my cancerous demise.
Morgan grunts approvingly. My eyebrows shoot up. This is not something that she would normally do in public. I scan the room. There is a lot of touching and flirtation around me. A huge cultural shift must have transpired in the past few decades about what is considered acceptable in public. I raise my spoon at Dr. Wilkes in a silent salute. “My appetite has returned.”
He laughs. “Yes, I can see.”
I must have eaten too fast; nausea is setting in. It’s just too much to take in all at once.
“Are you feeling up to a tour of our company, or do you want to take the day off?”
“Our company?”
“Yes. We’re the owners of this giant. We’ve got a half dozen docs who can do the surgeries, but it’s our baby. Come on.” He stands and beckons me toward the door of the physicians’ lounge.
I stand and face Morgan. “I can’t believe this isn’t my body?”
The automatic door slides open, and Ivan urges me with a wave of his hand. “Come on, Raymond. I’ll show you.”
I turn toward the door but my wife wraps her arms around me from behind. She whispers in my ear, “Mmm, when am I gonna get you alone?” She presses her fingers into my rippled abs through the lightweight cotton scrubs they gave me when I was revived. “You feel good for a 95-year-old.”
Ivan pauses in the doorway.
“Just a moment,” I tell him.
“Take your time.” He turns, then suddenly stands at attention. “Madam President!”
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