Eternal Sonata

by Jamie Metzl

  “Before this morning, I’d have said no,” Chou says. “Now I’m not so sure. We also found heightened levels of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide in his mitochondria.”

  “What’s that?” Sierra asks.

  “NAD,” Chou answers. “A molecule that regulates oxygen levels in cells, it’s—”

  “Heller mentioned NAD in his lab,” I interrupt.

  “High levels of NAD can trick cells into thinking, and acting, like they are younger than they are,” Chou says.

  Even amid the symphonic hubbub of the lab, the sense of mind-bending wonder descending on the four of us is palpable.

  Chou continues, “But that’s not why I needed you to be here right now.”

  You’ve just described potentially one of the most significant biological transformations in history and that’s not why we’re here?

  All three pairs of our eyes plead him onward.

  “I told you I’ve been looking at Sebastian’s mitochondria,” he says.

  None of us move.

  “You probably know this,” Chou adds, “but mitochondria are filled with proteins, ions, and sugars. Mitochondria also have their own DNA, mitochondrial DNA.”

  “And?” I say, trying to push him along. This is no time for a biology lecture.

  Chou looks around the lab at his students in full motion, then focuses on the three of us to make sure we are following. “But when I examined Sebastian’s cells under the electron microscope, I saw something strange inside his mitochondria.”

  “Strange in what way?” Sierra fires.

  “Not natural,” Chou responds, “as if a piece of synthetic DNA had been inserted.”

  I feel my heartbeat quickening.

  “So we extracted it,” Chou continues, “and ran it through the sequencer.”

  “And?” I say, exasperated at the professorial pace of Chou’s explanation.

  “At first, it looked like a mishmash of unreadable code, but then one of my postdocs ran the DNA sequence against the UniProt protein sequence database, which gave us an essential clue. What do you know about DNA data storage?”

  My urge to complete the story is far greater than my desire for a tutorial. I hold myself back.

  “You need to understand this,” Chou says. “It’s important. DNA has been the greatest data storage medium in human history, far greater than silicon, graphene, phosphorene, or anything else. About a decade ago, scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute had the idea of using synthetic DNA to store data. They’ve made uneven progress since then. Our DNA sequencing machines are run on a binary system of ones and zeroes, like most computers. That’s why the synthetic data initially came out jumbled. The EBI system is ternary; it uses zeroes, ones, and twos to encode data into synthetic DNA for biostorage, so it takes a ternary analysis system to decode the data.”

  I’m desperate to know where this leads.

  Chou reads the frustration on my face and presses on. “One of my postdocs—Hee Chung Park—knew how to reset our newest Illumina sequencer from binary to ternary. We were running the sequence and just starting to see the data when I called you this morning. I’ve only seen a few fragments.”

  I can’t take this any longer. “What does it say?”

  Chou looks across the three of us one more time and takes a deep breath. Pushing the air out, he lifts his wrist and speaks into his u.D. “Open Heller DNA Read File.”

  31

  It takes a few moments for my mind to recalibrate. I am simultaneously focused and dazed, processing the new information and stunned by it at the same time.

  “The files were chopped into thousands of individual pieces,” Chou says. “We had to reorder them based on indexing data contained in the files themselves. We—”

  “What did the files say?” I can’t wait any longer.

  “One looks like it’s a letter from Dr. Heller to whoever unlocked the message. It’s just completing defragmentation.”

  “And the second?” Sierra asks expectantly.

  “The second looks like a sophisticated encryption access key.”

  “Can we just open the letter?” I plead.

  Chou glances over at one of his students. She nods back. He then dictates the command into his wrist.

  Sierra, Joseph, and I glance at each other nervously as the words flow across the wall.

  Then we begin reading.

  August 27, 2025

  If you are reading this letter you have already come a long way. I am presuming, perhaps only because I have no alternative, that I can trust you. I also recognize that if you are reading this I may in fact be dead.

  Although DNA data storage is potentially unlimited, I am writing a short message to increase the likelihood it can be accurately decoded. It looks like that was a good bet.

  Ten years ago, I began focusing all of my efforts on cancer research after that terrible disease took my beloved wife, Yael.

  Four years ago, I hypothesized an approach for reverting cells to their previous, precancerous state through a combination of molecular vectors, genetic manipulations, and integration of a critical number of cultured cells taken from the host at an earlier stage of life before the cancer had taken root.

  With the financial support of the Santique Health Corporation, I began extensive research and animal trials to prove this approach. After the cancer treatment protocol proved successful in mice, additional research was needed on a higher-level mammal.

  Sebastian, the dog carrying this message, had been a gift from Yael just before she died, given to help me through her loss. Sebastian became my friend and only real companion after I moved into my laboratory space in 2022. By early 2024, Sebastian had developed multiple lymphosarcomas and was in the last stage of his demise. At that time, I decided that Sebastian would be a suitable candidate for the next stage of trials of this highly experimental cancer treatment technique.

  At first, his cancer receded exactly as it had in the mice. Within a few months, however, it became painfully clear that the response to the treatment in the dog did not track with that in the mice. After significant analysis and additional testing, I realized that because the overall complexity and resilience of the dog’s entire system was far greater than that of the mice, the dog’s cellular ecosystem was more quickly responding to and rejecting the introduction of the specific inputs designed to revert the cancer cells.

  As Sebastian’s death became imminent, I took a step back, first theoretically and then in my research. If the complexity of the dog’s system was too great to allow for sustained change among a small group of cancerous cells, the two options were to change the way I was treating the individual cells or to somehow alter the overall system which was rejecting them. I tried the former first, but this approach was a dead-end. It was then I began experimenting with the latter.

  In my extended additional experiments with mice, I finally came upon the exact formula of genetic change induced through a precise combination of specific chemical compounds infused with specific levels of differentiation factor eleven, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, mononucleotide, telomerase, rapamycin, and N-acetylglucosamine molecules, along with CRISPR-inserted daf-2 and daf-16 mutations of cells extracted from the specific mice at earlier stages of their development. It took many thousands of different trials of these factors in different ratios to find the best ones, but even these trials never succeeded completely. The reverted mice emerged as poor versions of their earlier selves. It was only when I isolated and inserted specific strains of the Turritopsis nutricula melanaster jellyfish gene into their genomes that the mice successfully underwent total cellular reversion to earlier versions of their physical selves.

  When I placed these reverted mice into the mazes they had learned to navigate before their reversion, I found they were no longer able to remember what they had learned. When I tried the same experiment where they had learned one maze before their cells had been initially extracted and one maze after—but before their reversion
treatment—the mice were able to navigate the former but not the latter. This led to the inevitable conclusion that the mice were becoming younger but they were also losing all of their memories since the moment their original cell samples had been taken.

  As Sebastian’s cancer progressed rapidly toward terminal status, I made the decision to do my first higher-level mammal trial on my beloved companion. As you almost certainly have figured out by now, this process worked.

  While I was doing this research in isolation, I was also receiving considerable pressure from senior executives of the Santique Health Corporation to begin human trials of the cancer treatment protocol. Although Santique was not, by my design, aware of my total organism cellular reversion research, they were well aware of the progress I made in cellular reversion as a potential treatment for cancer and had begun additional research in their corporate labs based on my preliminary findings. Independent of me, Santique made the decision to go forward with experimental human trials in early 2025.

  If I am dead, I imagine you are asking how I knew I might be in danger and what has happened to my formula for the total cellular reversion of complex organisms or, more colloquially, the formula for eternal life.

  I have always believed that revolutionary science by definition brings with it danger. This perception has only grown through my experiences in South Africa, Israel, and the United States. Given the monumental societal and global implications of this work, and how many lives have been lost over the millennia chasing the ever-elusive fountain of youth, it was only prudent to believe that knowledge of my work could have profound and potentially deadly consequences.

  I have reflected at length about the potential global implications of my discovery. Unless properly controlled and regulated, this innovation could lead to mass chaos. People would very likely line up to be reverted to earlier physical states irrespective of the fact that they would be signing up to erase all of their memories, including those of their families and friends. Many would do whatever it took to bathe in this irresistible rejuvenation.

  I had first seriously considered destroying the research and euthanizing Sebastian once I realized what I had achieved. After a great deal of thought, however, I came to believe over time that this work has within it the possibility to cure most diseases that have tortured our species for the entirety of our existence. To achieve this, it must to be managed responsibly outside the control of any specific government or even governments at all.

  The only entity which I believe has the potential to be entrusted with this knowledge is the Council of Elders of Scientists Beyond Nations, and I cannot say I even trust them completely.

  The data file embedded in addition to this letter in Sebastian’s mitochondria contains an unbreakable encryption code that can, when paired with its parallel key, unlock access to my network in which my research files and other notes and records are located. The second encryption key code required to unlock this access is currently possessed by the SBN Council of Elders.

  Obviously, I could have given SBN the entire code, but I have divided the encryption key in the hope that whoever accesses the code embedded in Sebastian will have a level of sophistication to assess conditions in the aftermath of my presumed death. In light of the magnitude of my discovery and its potential economic and even national security implications, I do not trust any one entity enough to give them sole access or responsibility. This perception has been borne out by very strong recent indications that my fear and caution are not misplaced, which is why I have taken the step of encoding this message. Because you are reading this, I assume my worst fears for my safety may have been realized.

  But, as you are now presumably beginning to grasp, the knowledge contained in these files is far more significant than my life. It carries the significance of life itself.

  Only when the two encryption keys are matched will the total cellular reversion process, the formula of eternal life, be revealed.

  I am counting on you, whoever you are, to do all in your power to maximize the potential benefits, and minimize the dangers, of this revolutionary advance.

  32

  We stand motionless, the limited vessels of our minds unable to fully absorb the enormity of Heller’s words.

  Sebastian’s cells told a story we had conceptually processed by the parameters of the world we had known. If Heller’s words are to be believed, that world—a world of life and death, of limited time, of Adam and Eve begetting begats then returning to ashes, of noble lives and tragic deaths, the world of our parents and their parents and on and on since the beginning of our species, the world of human mortality—is on the verge of being transcended. The possibility of eternal life opens—magically, hubristically, tragically, dangerously—before us.

  “Who wouldn’t kill for that?” The words leak from my mouth.

  Sierra doesn’t seem to even hear me. “If the dog can be rejuvenated, we live in a different world.”

  All of us are lost in our own private, unfolding mazes.

  “Samsara,” Joseph utters.

  “It’s just a letter.” Chou breaks the collective trance. “It’s going to take a lot more than a letter and some strange cells to make the case Heller’s somehow conquered death.”

  I know on an intellectual level that Chou is right, but that’s not where my head is operating. The vague idea, more like a fantasy, had already crossed my mind when Maurice passed me the photo of Hart and Wolfson from Tobago, but the puzzle pieces now form and re-form in my head with compounding velocity. “If Heller knew he was in danger, why wouldn’t he have said who he feared?” My mind jumps back to Toni asking why Heller let us into his lab, why he said he wanted her to have the dog if something should happen. Did he see us as his last chance to get his message out?

  “Maybe he didn’t know specifically,” Sierra says. “Maybe there were different groups of people who wanted what he had or to stop him.”

  Joseph rubs his face, as if willing himself out of the trance. “Maybe he wanted to make sure the knowledge survived in the hands of people he trusted.”

  Images of Heller’s instantaneous bond with Toni flash through my mind, but my thoughts jump to a more immediate question. “What more can we learn about Scientists Beyond Nations?”

  “Great scientists on a ship in international waters—”

  “We’re going to need a lot more.”

  Joseph nods, perhaps slightly annoyed I’ve cut him off. But we all know that for the past five years, Scientists Beyond Nations, SBN, has been the quiet alternative to the sometimes raucous global debate about how to apply the radical scientific advances that have so deeply divided the world’s governments and paralyzed the United Nations.

  The news is always shrouded in mystery, but most people have a vague sense that SBN’s mothership, a refurbished old Soviet aircraft carrier, has been stealthily roaming the high seas outside of national jurisdictions and periodically threatening to fire upon any vessels that might possibly approach.

  Bringing together scientists from around the world committed to conducting their research outside the control, regulation, or political pressure of national governments, the ship may be all but invisible but the occasional pronouncements of their Council of Elders are anything but. Their releases announcing controversial new technological innovations arrive simultaneously at major health research institutes and media organizations around the world, as if out of thin air. When all countries have the new information, few have been able to resist the pressure of their populations to test the science and make available whatever treatments it indicates.

  Breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s treatment were a case in point after SBN researchers discovered a single rhesus monkey gene that could cure the terrible disease in humans. Not everyone was comfortable with editing monkey genes into humans, but fewer people were comfortable with Alzheimer’s.

  “Adam Shelton,” Sierra interjects.

  Joseph and I turn to face her. Shelton is not exactly a household n
ame, but most informed people have heard the rumors that the reclusive Cuba-based billionaire is funding SBN’s operations.

  “I’m a business reporter. Follow the money,” she continues.

  “And?” I ask.

  “If we’re digging on SBN, we’ve got to dig on Shelton.”

  “Can you do it?”

  Her lifted left eyebrow squashes the question.

  I turn back to face Chou. “Can you transfer these files to my u.D?”

  He hesitates. “We have no idea what all of this means, on a scientific level. This could have huge implications. All of my students have committed themselves to complete confidentiality in our work—”

  I lift my hand. “We need to be careful but there’s no way this can end here. Three people have been killed, two are missing, and more could be in danger. We have no idea who is behind it all. We’re just going to have to trust each other.”

  Chou stares at me for a moment before lifting his wrist to transfer the Sebastian files to my u.D.

  As we drive back to the Star, voices float through my head: Plato and Aristotle debating the immortality of the soul, Epicurus charging that only life’s transience makes it meaningful. What would it mean if we humans became as immortal as our invented gods, I wonder.

  But the images dominating my thoughts as we rush up the stairs are far more prosaic: Toni at my house and still in danger, her own house smoldering in the ashes; Heller’s half-devoured body floating in the jellyfish tank; Katherine Hart’s quiet dignity as she sits, head in her hands, in her living room. Yes, I think to myself, this may be among the greatest discoveries of all time, but it still doesn’t tell me who blew up Toni’s house, who killed Heller, and where Hart and Wolfson are, if indeed they are still alive.

  Martina is waiting for us in the conference room as we rush in.

  Joseph boots up the wall and starts folding in the new data as I bring her up to speed.

  “Ay, Santo Dios,” she mutters.

  Jerry’s face pops up on the wall, brought in through the video link by Joseph.