“Were you the one that provided her with the new identity?”
“No, this was an advantage from Helena’s powerful connections in the drug cartels. Rosa Gutierrez really had existed. She had died of overdose in the aftermath of a rave party in Acapulco, in 2002. The narcos had stolen her identity just in case it would be needed. And as Helena was still supervising the cartel’s investments, they did her the favor. Our own organization of identity change came fully into play for the first time, when we organized the simultaneous death and divorce of George.”
“Was George’s wife aware of Telomerax?”
“George had given her Telomerax without telling her all the details. He knew he could not completely trust her, so as the relationship soured over time, he set up the perfect death. By 2003, he declared to have a rare form of cancer, and he started losing weight. From time to time he would visit ‘Le Jardin’ where he underwent a light, controlled chemotherapy. I was dead afraid that it might interfere with Telomerax, so for one year I suspended the treatment.
In 2005, he started attending less and less public events, with photos of him looking frailer and frailer appearing in magazines. In the meantime, Tarek procured a brand new identity from the CIA thanks to the French secret service. George McKilroy would become Sean Ewals, a twenty-five year old graduate from Boston University, who had inherited a small fortune from his deceased parents.”
“How come the identity was obtained from the CIA via the French secret service?”
“Tarek had done a favor for both agencies. In 2004, the Americans were involved with Iraq and the CIA needed air support for their secret operations. Due to secrecy, they refused to ask the US Air Force for help because this meant that their archrivals, the NSA, would know. So they looked for external support. At the same time, although France was publicly portrayed as being against the Iraq war, their air force could not bear the fact that their UK and US cousins had plenty of room to test their latest weapons. To close the triangle, Jordan had just made a deal with France to supply a dozen brand new Mirage 2000 fighter jets for their armed services. Do you see how it is coming together now?”
“You mean that the French were hired by the CIA to bomb targets in Iraq? This must be where Tarek enters the picture.”
“You got it. Tarek was the mediator. He was going back and forth from Jordan, since that was where major effects of the war were taking place; with refugees, spies, and soldiers on leave, contractors searching for new assignments, and all the rest you can imagine. One day, at a restaurant, he spotted a French Air Force officer and began a conversation. The officer stayed silent and pointed to an article on a training mission having to do with the recent Mirage contract, that was already public news.
Tarek then called his contacts at the Jordan secret service and found out that the French were not happy, as Jordanians would never let them fly into Iraq by their own initiative. US approval was needed for that. Jordanians would not ask for it directly, as it would sound like an attack on their troubled neighbor, nor would the French ask the US and risk exposing themselves to diplomatic blackmail.
The US had to make the first move, but how would they do it? After all, they were already set with what they had. Tarek knew very well, though, that there could be something they were missing. Once he was back in Dubai, he immediately contacted the CIA station manager, who he had known since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war. Would the CIA be interested in getting free air support from Jordan, on jets flown by French pilots under cover?
The French pilots would get all the real life training they wanted. In case anything bad happened, the occasional French instructor would be blamed for accidentally trespassing into the Iraq airspace.
Organizing this deal brought him huge credit, and all he asked for in exchange was free access to the pool of secret identities. Initially he asked for unlimited access, but eventually he settled for two identities a year, for ten years. This was the news of the year at the 2005 meeting, that was otherwise quite gloomy and uneventful.”
“When did the final act take place?
“In September 2005, we invited Sheila, George’s wife, to ‘Le Jardin’. I behaved as if I knew George was about to die and tested her feelings. She was obviously sad, but she also made it clear the marriage had not been working for some time, even before the illness. She basically had not left him, out of kindness.
That was all we needed to know. I called Helena, who in turn called her friends on the West Coast to organize his “death”.
A white van arrived at George’s villa in Sunnyvale, California, and after entering the garage, it unloaded the body of a man about the same age and with the same complexion, who had died from overdose the night before in Los Angeles. George boarded the van and sped away to the private terminal of San José International Airport, where he received his new set of papers. He then boarded a Gulfstream jet that took off and headed to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Once in Rio, George/Sean spent a couple of weeks relaxing and washing away the effects of the chemotherapy, then he visited a beauty clinic specialized in plastic surgery. It was not a dramatic change, but as George wanted to continue to work in the Silicon Valley startup business, he had to undergo some minor face-lifting. We had nothing to worry about, though, considering more than six months had passed since he had met anyone face-to-face and his last images did not resemble him at all.
Back in California, the doctor who was also on the narcos payroll, notified the public authorities of the death and contacted George’s recently appointed lawyer, Scott Drummond, for the execution of the will.
He had been given the will by George himself a few weeks before, with the explicit order to open it as soon as he heard about his death and act according to the instructions.
What Scott read was strange, but not unexpected, as he was used to eccentric millionaires. Basically, George left his villa and assets with a value of over five million dollars to Sheila, and asked to be buried immediately with only the coroner and the lawyer in attendance. Then, he asked to be cremated and his ashes left with Sheila. Only after the cremation, could the death be publicly announced and in the will there were also the coordinates to a half a million dollar account to fund any public ceremony Sheila and his friends might have deemed appropriate. All that was left over had to be distributed to charities.
Scott thought a man like George should have had a much bigger fortune, but there was no trace of it in the will, and maybe - who knows - much of it had gone away to pay for the treatments.”
“Did you attend the commemoration ceremony to make the death seem realistic?”
“There was no ceremony organized. I just paid a public obituary in the “Mercury”, the local newspaper, and gave all the remaining money to a charity that helps children with leukemia. Dora and I flew to California with Sheila. She did not expect George to pass away so soon and she felt somewhat guilty during the flight. As soon as she learned the contents of the will, however, the guilt turned into resentment as George had decided to part ways from her before his last journey.
She handed the box of ashes over to me, together with the will and the funeral party budget. If I wanted to set up a ceremony, it was up to me. As for the ashes, she thought George would be happier to be buried at the clinic, since he loved the place.
A few days later, I called him in his new house in Connecticut and he told me that he did not like the Geneva lakeshore as his final resting place. Then he asked about the half a million dollars and when I told him it was gone to charity, he was a bit upset.
I burst into laughter. “Boy,” I said, “dead men do not usually complain that their will has been followed through with, exactly as was written!”
“When did Tarek and Valerio switch identities?”
“Valerio jumped into his new life in 2008, soon after the death of his mother. He first sold his public relations business, took a plane to Brazil - like many retired Italians of his age did, even if he looked much younger - and
reappeared a few months later after a short visit to the same clinic that had served George, back in 2005.
He re-entered Italy under the name of Antonio Colonna, an Argentinean son of native Italians, who was repatriating like some soccer players with Italian ancestors do. The customs officer told him he looked just slightly older than the twenty-two years written on the passport, and Antonio was quick to blame the dire economic situation of Argentina for making him become a migrant.
He immediately set up his new public relations and media company in London, and started shuttling across Europe to rebuild his network. He got in touch, this time, with the young public relation professionals who were replacing the old generation of Valerio’s former colleagues.
As for Tarek, he did not really change his identity. Over time, he was able to set all of his family members’ birth dates back by fifteen years, pretending there was a mistake in the records. He relied on the fact that he had actually started a second life before, when he left Egypt in the eighties.
As for his family, he put his sons on Telomerax between 2002 and 2008, as soon as they hit twenty five years of age. He just told them it was an age-delaying drug, and they would get about twenty to thirty years of life added on. He told me, the description he gave his sons bought him about thirty years to prepare a better explanation.”
“And how about you, Louis? Who did you transform yourself into?”
“Dora and I liked our professions and wanted to change as little as possible, but we could not continue to live in the closed neighborhood surrounding the Swiss clinic. So we pretended to retire, sold the whole clinic, morphed into a young couple - a biologist and a psychiatrist - and relocated to Lugano, in the Italian speaking canton of Switzerland.
For a while I considered going to a fancier place, like Monte Carlo or Cannes, but we realized there were too many of the old customers from ‘Le Jardin’ there. As a young biologist, I founded a startup which allowed me to stay at the forefront of biological research - both contributing to new developments and watching out for the invention of drugs similar to Telomerax.”
Chapter 11
“And then we arrive at January of 2009, when Barack Obama took office at the White House. According to your strategy, at the time, the economy was still not ready, as the world was in the midst of the financial crisis. Is this when you decided to change your strategy to reveal Telomerax?”
“Yes. The turning point was the meeting we held in the fall of 2009, in a resort on the Greek island of Patmos. It was no coincidence, as this is the island where the apostle John is said to have received the final book of the Bible, Revelations.
Once again, the group was split between George and Helena versus Valerio and Tarek. George and Helena, who were now dating, were pushing to make the announcement of Telomerax within the next ten to fifteen years, while Valerio and Tarek did not see this as a realistic timeframe. Dora and I were arbitrating in the middle. We argued for three days, and eventually we came to the conclusion that it was time to start “preparing for the preparation” or to set “a date for the date”, if you may.
It is better to go directly to the motif of the meeting, which was opened by Helena, who gave a bleak outlook on the economic perspectives.”
“Gentlemen,” she said, “as we traveled here we saw how dire the situation of Greece is. I can tell you, that this crisis will spread to the rest of Europe and there will be governments falling from Ireland to Italy. Our data at the firm shows that China will manage to dodge the crisis, and the US will bounce back in three to four years, but Europe and other areas will stay stagnant for several years.”
“All right,” Tarek jumped in, “so we can adjourn the meeting to 2015. Even though politics are somehow improving after George Bush and his cowboys, we do not know how the crisis is going to evolve. Europe could divide itself, creating an uproar around the world.”
Helena fell silent, staring coldly at Tarek for a long second and then turned her eyes to George without changing expression.
“Tarek, please..”, George said, “..if we keep following this line of reasoning we will never be ready. We saw over the past sixty years that the window of opportunity opens for a period of two or three years maximum, and by the time you realize it’s there, it’s already gone. If we continue like this, we will wait for centuries.”
Valerio slowly raised his hand, with his impeccable manners, and waited a few seconds before starting.
“George, if there is one thing we have on our side, it is time. We have tested the identity change process and it worked perfectly, buying us enough time until at least 2035. I have looked over the research that Helena and you started back in 2000 and got in contact with my connections at the World Bank, and you know what I found out? That despite all the uneasiness, things are improving overall. Slowly, but surely.
If you look at these slides, the statistics show that international income, deaths caused by violence, and births per woman are all going in the right direction. So there is evidently no reason to rush. We can sit back and relax.”
“Valerio, for once I do not agree with you,” Tarek burst out. “Your statistics would have shown you the same thing for Europe on the eve of World War I, and we all know how that ended up. On the other hand I do agree we can talk about this over a glass of wine for the next thirty years and do nothing in the meantime. In other words, just do usual business.”
“That would mean we sit around twiddling our thumbs while someone else is discovering us or, worse, discovering Telomerax. You know that very well, Tarek,” Helena hissed. “You did not wait for Israeli pilots to plan their attacks and then make up a strategy to counteract them back in 1973. Apparently all these luxuries and petty conspiracies have washed away the fighter that was in you.”
Tarek was about to reply, his eyes seething with rage, but George was faster and harsh enough to defuse the fire Helena was starting.
“Helena, please cut the bullshit now. It is getting personal and we cannot afford it. The fact is, we have a huge opportunity here to become the most famous people in the history of mankind, surpassing Jesus Christ, Mohammed and the likes, and we are letting it slip through our fingers. We just cannot let that happen.
May I also remind you, that research in biotechnology is expanding big time, from fertilizers to - guess what - techniques that fight aging. I know it because I am investing in a number of ventures. But I cannot control everything forever. How long do you think it will take before someone else finds it and we become the biggest morons of all time? Louis, do you really want your discovery to go to waste?”
This hit home. “I agree,” I said, “We can no longer rely on my strategy we have followed for the last ten years. I was also approached by a number of biotech firms and these guys are starting to get ideas of how to get to Telomerax. They are still far away, as there are a number of obstacles they have not yet figured out, but nothing that could not be solved over the next thirty years or so.”
“So in my opinion we must at least start preparing the disclosure, so that when the next window of opportunity appears in the next ten to twenty years, we are ready to go public. I think we should forget about all the talk on politics, and economics, and focus on a very simple question: how do you prepare mankind, of the Internet age, to the idea of becoming immortal?”
As Tarek was still getting over the attack from Helena, Valerio took over the challenge to answer on behalf of the team.
“We certainly cannot set up courses of philosophy and biochemistry for billions of people, nor ask the Pope to announce it from the balcony of Saint Peter, after briefing him that our invention is not so much at odds with the Catholic doctrine.
We first have to get a communal idea of immortality. One that fits Telomerax, yet stays generic so as to upset as few people as possible. Our goal is, when the announcement comes, it is not totally unexpected and everyone can cope with it. Just think of aliens. We see and read so many movies and books with enough evidence, that if a spac
ecraft appeared in the sky, quite a few people would say it was high time they showed up.
Anyway, a number of trends are already working in our favor. For example, people know that there is a lot of research and money being spent on biotechnology, so something extraordinary can pop up at anytime. A bit like when people were talking of computers eventually being in every office, during the sixties. It sounded like science fiction but it naturally became part of the world.
Second, there is also a trend to delay aging and stay fit as long as you can. This obviously gives us a lot of leverage. Third, at least in developed countries, people are coming to terms with the fact that as long as you are fit, you have to work to keep society sustainable. This means major macroeconomic and political adjustments might be accepted, for example you don’t retire until you are dead.
Fourth, there is undoubtedly an ethical and, in many cases, religious aspect. Who has access to immortality? At what cost? Is this lifestyle acceptable? I can imagine all sorts of reactions. But let’s face it, even today discrimination in healthcare access is a reality and the same applies to ethical values.
Think of access to cancer therapy and abortion in the United States, just to focus on the most developed nation on the planet. The question here is if adding immortality to the equation would cause people to run away, or embrace it. I do not have an answer.
When it comes to the environment, global warming, and all the way down to the preservation of whales, I believe immortality will be nothing but yet another variable in the puzzle.”
“Good summary Valerio,” Dora intervened, “but how do you translate that into a program? What do we have to do? We are just six, and unlike Saint John, we have got no revelation.”
“Do not underestimate the power of media and word of mouth. I mean, you do not need an army of people to build an efficient communication system. We have to immediately spread scientific propaganda. I think we have to use a two-pronged strategy.
The Last Enemy - A history of the present future - 1934-2084 Page 6