Eternal Sonata

by Jamie Metzl

  He holds onto my words as if each is a rope dangling from another life, a past that will never be his future.

  “And I spoke with your grandson in St. Louis,” I add, looking at Wolfson. “He seems like a good kid.”

  Wolfson nods soberly. “They’ve told us about our histories,” he says after a heavy pause. “We just don’t remember them.”

  The two men seem to recuperate in the silence from the emotional shock of my words.

  “Can we offer you more coffee?” Wolfson adds. “We even have sachertorte if you like that sort of thing.”

  It is still unclear if I am their potential liberator or they are my hosts. I look them each in the eye, then nod slightly. “A plane is coming for me in two and a half hours,” I say.

  “We know,” Hart says.

  “And I have so much I need to discuss with you before I go.”

  “It’s four thirty in the morning,” Hart says. “Sometimes an entire lifetime must be condensed into a few hours.”

  “They briefed you?” I say.

  “They had an entire dossier on each of us,” Wolfson says. “As many digital photos as they could grab from our networks, the research files and papers we’d amassed over our careers, videos from vacations …”

  “Ofira’s bat mitzvah party,” Hart says with a surprising smile.

  “The recipe for my wife’s tiramisu,” Wolfson adds, plugging into Hart’s rally.

  “We can’t tell you how much time we’ve spent trying to decipher the memory fragments they downloaded from our brains during the reversion process.”

  My mind races back to the helmet I’d observed in Heller’s lab just after we found his body floating in the jellyfish tank. “Can you tell me more about that?”

  “That’s yet another thing that’s blown us away,” Hart says, “Forty years ago, no one had ever heard of neuroinformatics, connectomics, or brain-computer interfaces. No one could have imagined what a functional MRI machine could do or even pronounced the word electrocorticography. We’ve just started learning and it still feels like magic. They told us it was only in an experimental phase, but apparently there’s a way to download memories as they are being erased during the reversion process.”

  “Does it work?” I ask incredulously.

  “Bits and pieces,” Wolfson says with a shrug. “It’s almost like a fuzzy slide show with a lot of the slides missing. We’ve been in constant training these past weeks, filling in the gaps with electronic education modules and all kinds of reading about the past forty years.”

  “But was going through the reversion your choice?”

  “How could we have made a choice like that?” Wolfson asks, as if my question is absurd. “We were both practically vegetables.”

  “Or at least they told us we were vegetables. We had videos and photos and medical records for that, too,” Hart says.

  “And when you woke up you were forty years younger?”

  “Something like that,” Hart admits, “just suddenly a bit discombobulated and in a strange new place.”

  “And truly with no memories of ever being fifty or sixty or seventy?”

  “None,” Hart says. “I had a strange scar on my stomach I didn’t remember. I was missing a few teeth. Frankly, if they hadn’t done such a good job of convincing us, I’m sure we’d have both thought this entire thing was a hoax.”

  “You have to understand,” Wolfson adds, “our minds were still both in the middle of the 1980s. You’re probably too young to remember, but the computer era was just starting. Ronald Reagan was president.

  “We were both pretty hesitant at first, but they showed us the diode screens, the digital walls, the Augmented Retinal Display lenses, the fMRI magnetic electrocorticography helmets, the miracle of miracles you call the Internet. It was clear pretty quickly that either we’d been abducted by futuristic space aliens who happened to speak our language or what they were telling us might actually be true.”

  “But did you actually make a decision?” I repeat.

  “It’s impossible to answer that question,” Hart says. “Once we accepted their version of what had happened, we could have demanded to be returned to our families, to our children who were now our own age, to our wives who were now older than the age of our mothers, at least the age we thought our mothers were. What would we have done? Of course we miss our wives, the families as we knew them. There’s hardly a moment that goes by when I don’t think of Katherine.” Hart’s eyes begin to glaze. “She’s in my dreams every night …”

  “And where would we have gone?” Wolfson jumps in to relieve Hart. “They told us we had been chosen and they were right. As far as we know, eight people in the history of our species have ever been reverted to an earlier age on a cellular level. Ephraim, Michaela, Solomon, the two of us who went through the process with Noam, and David, Sasha, and Vlad who did it on the ship. And to have been brought back to live another life dedicated to the pursuit of scientific knowledge with a lab to die for, well”—he reconsiders—“not really, and unlimited funding?”

  “Bill is right,” Hart interjects. “Maybe we could have gone back. Maybe we could have made a run for it, even though they were careful to not give us the chance. But nature is cruel and it just may be that tricking nature requires a certain level of ingenuity, maybe sometimes even a commensurate cruelty of its own.”

  “And Katherine?” I say, perhaps cruelly.

  “I can’t know the woman she is now, what she must be like, but I know who she was, and I know how much she loved knowledge. And if she is mourning me having disappeared, I imagine she would also be mourning me if I were truly gone. I can’t even imagine what she’s going through. I’ve been given a great gift, but I also began mourning Katherine the moment I accepted what had happened. I’ve seen the photos and the video of the past decades, I’ve seen the blurred images from the fMRI and the ECoG, but in my head she is still thirty-two and doing back flips in the pool, still beaming at me when I surprised her on her birthday at her lab at Kansas University Medical Center; she’s still painting cat whiskers on the girls’ faces.”

  “It’s ironic,” Wolfson says, “they’ve gone to such lengths to recreate memories of our past lives but also to cover their tracks by destroying the records of our existence available to the outside world.

  “And what about Heller?”

  “Noam was a great man, a great scientist, a genius,” Wolfson says wistfully. “He sat with each of us all night after our transfusions. It was an incredible shock, of course, but he eased and welcomed us into our new reality.”

  “Your eternal sonata,” I add. A tribute to your wife, the music never stops. Heller had lost Yael but his eternal sonata was not only the music, it was Sebastian as the continuation of Yael’s parting gift, it was Hart and Wolfson and the others carrying their thirsts for knowledge in perpetuity, it was overcoming death itself while recognizing the wonder and the danger of what he had accomplished.

  “Do you know that Heller is dead?” I ask.

  Pain blankets both of their faces.

  “We do,” Hart says softly.

  “It’s funny,” Wolfson says, “Noam was chronologically younger than us but he’s also our father in some ways.”

  “And we are technically the same age as the people you just met with from the Council of Elders, but now we are their research assistants,” Hart adds. “If we crack the code of Heller’s formula for the catalytic compound, some day they will be ours.”

  “How did you get out of Heller’s lab?”

  “New identity papers, a private plane,” Wolfson says, then describes the longer journey.

  “Courtesy of Israeli intelligence?”

  “Not all intelligence is stupid, Mr. Azadian,” Hart says, responding to my tone. “What’s happening here could very well be called enlightened.”

  “Even if it’s benefiting one country?”

  “One country that’s trying to save itself from destruction. It can’t be lost on y
ou or any of us that the eight chosen ones, the immortals for now, are all Jews. Both of us were born in the mid-forties. For Jews and maybe for all people who have faced extinction, survival isn’t something to be taken for granted. Sometimes it even needs to be fought for,” Hart says.

  “I’m an Armenian American,” I say. “Believe me, I know that from my own history.”

  “And if a country is going to fight,” Wolfson adds, “how wonderful it tries to do so by advancing human knowledge. This same level of effort dedicated to nuclear or chemical weapons and biological warfare agents could have also been a strategy for Israel. In the relative scheme of things, helping a bunch of idealistic scientists float around the open ocean doing research and trying to figure out how best to use it would not be such a terrible thing.”

  “Even for the scientists beyond nations?”

  “I guess there are gradations of that word,” Hart replies. “If the world were simpler, our jobs would be a lot easier and life would be far less painful.”

  “And far less magical,” Wolfson adds, a twinkle in his eye.

  After two hours of conversation, Golan strides back into the room. My body instinctively stiffens as I see him.

  “The plane will be here in thirty minutes. We need to be on the flight deck in twenty,” he says politely, as though he can read the emotional signature of the room. “I’ll need to take you up in ten.” He turns back toward the door and steps out obsequiously.

  The mention of the clock retriggers mine. Two burning questions sear themselves back into my brain with a burning intensity.

  “Can both of you please tell me,” I say softly, “what you think I should tell your families?”

  Hart and Wolfson look at each other. I get the feeling traveling through mortality together has given them some kind of existential connection.

  “We thank you for all you have done, Mr. Azadian,” Hart says, “but those lives, those wonderful lives that we’ve studied but feel like we’ve never known, are better left untouched. We are here with the memories of the lives we know and I hope our families are cherishing the memories of the lives we lived but don’t remember. Perhaps,” he says with a profound sadness, “it is better to leave things as they are.”

  The second set of questions overcomes even the intense profundity of this moment.

  I am here, on this ship, in this ocean, facing the miracle of our species’ transcendence.

  I have learned so much but my every fiber knows I have answered nothing.

  I have come so far but the questions that propelled me here remain terrifyingly unanswered.

  Who killed Noam Heller?

  Who destroyed Heller Labs?

  Who blew up Toni’s house?

  Who may be still trying to kill Toni even now as I sit with this stupid fucking coffee cup in my hand in the middle of fucking nowhere?

  51

  The six elders greet me warmly as I enter the glass-enclosed command room overlooking the flight deck.

  Lynette Margolies reads the nervousness on my face. “I hope you understand by now how much trust we’re placing in you with the sensitive information we have shared.”

  “I do.”

  “And we hope you accept we had nothing to do with the murder of Noam Heller or the two explosions. Why would we harm the one person whose knowledge contains the key to our future? Noam should have been one of us instead of facing such a tragic end.”

  I’ve been mulling that question all night and have arrived at the same conclusion.

  She takes my hand and cradles it in both of hers. “The world is a dangerous place, Mr. Azadian. We know that. That is why we are here in the first place. There are many people, many organizations, many intelligence services, even, who are profoundly opposed to what little they know about us. I imagine if they knew everything, we might simultaneously have greater leverage and face greater dangers. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I say. I appreciate her words but am beyond eager to get moving.

  “We don’t know who killed Noam and threatened your lady-friend, but whoever or whatever organization did those things is as much a threat to us as it is to you. Are you following me?”

  I nod. “And I am also mindful of the promises you’ve made to me.”

  “Good.” She turns toward Captain Golan and gives him a signal to speak.

  “When the plane arrives in four minutes, you and Captain Flores will be onboarded at the far end of the runway,” Golan says. “The plane will only stop for a matter of minutes, so you will need to move quickly.”

  Margolies gives Golan a hand signal to speed things up.

  “You have asked about communications systems on the plane,” Golan continues. “The plane has an Iridium Telephonic Communication System. The ITCS will not be activated for security reasons for the first thirty minutes of your flight.”

  “And Flores?” I ask.

  “The plane will stop momentarily at Mr. Shelton’s compound in Cuba. Captain Flores will get off the plane at that time and arrangements will be made for his return to Arroyo Barril.”

  “How will he support himself now that—”

  “You are a good man to ask that question.” Francis Achebe says, taking a small step forward. “Arrangements will be made for the provision of a new boat, a much better boat. This has already been communicated to Captain Flores.”

  “Here is your universal.Device,” Golan adds, reaching down to wrap it around my right wrist, then unlocking and removing the biosensor bracelet from my left. “I have transferred a biometric application to your u.D that will first learn and then respond to your cardiac signature only. If and when you want to contact us you must open this application while the u.D is on your wrist with your biometric settings on. At that time, an access number will flash momentarily on your screen. Each time you do this, the number will be different. No number will ever be used twice. Call that number and leave a message. It will be delivered to us immediately. And by the way, your potassium levels are low. You should be eating more spinach.”

  I look at Golan, not sure how to respond. The transformation of my experience on the ship from entry to exit is too profound.

  “Et voila,” he adds, looking out the window wall at Shelton’s Airbus fast approaching. “Yallah.”

  I turn to face the six elders, feeling a strange cocktail of emotions.

  Shinobu Yakamoto is first to break the awkwardness. He steps forward.

  “Domo arigato, Mr. Azadian,” he says before bowing.

  I match his bow. “You should write a song about that,” I murmur, unable to help myself.

  “I assure you,” Frederica Singer says with a slight grin, “he has not the faintest idea what you’re talking about, but on behalf of all of us we want to thank you and stress again how essential it is that we maintain our bond of mutual respect and support, that you will respect our absolute need for discretion.”

  The rest of the elders circle closely around me, shaking my hand, patting me on the back, or, in the case of Margolies and Achebe, hugging me warmly.

  It doesn’t take much for Golan to pull me away. As connected as I feel to the elders, I know where I need to be.

  We meet Flores and the two commandos with him on the runway. Flores is wearing new khaki pants and an oxford shirt and carrying a cerveza. His wide smile confirms to me they’ve already told him about his boat. We shake hands.

  As we approach the taxiing plane, I observe the massive greenhouse lining the runway and the running track and vitacourse extending the full length of the ship. Crew members in T-shirts and shorts run up and down. In the madness of this extreme isolation, it seems a strange new form of community is budding, a Noah’s Ark for the exponential future.

  The plane comes to a stop and its door opens. Paige Newmark, as perfectly put together and formal as ever, steps down to meet us.

  “Maher, maher,” Golan barks, “let’s go.” He practically pushes us up the stairs.

  Flores’s mouth drops
as he takes in the luxuriousness of the interior. “He visto mejores,” he says with a smile.

  “You’ll need to strap yourselves in tightly,” Paige Newmark says as the door closes. “I don’t know if you’ve experienced a carrier takeoff before, but the G-force from the electromagnetic launch can be quite powerful.”

  The ground crew turns the plane and locks us on to the magnetic catapult. I look out my window to see the elders watching solemnly from their perch. Then I glance down at my u.D and set the timer to thirty minutes.

  The magnetic lunge slings us into the air and we are gone.

  Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six.

  Each minute feels like an hour.

  Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen.

  Maybe everything is fine, or at least as it was when I left Kansas City two days ago. It’s just that I don’t know. It’s just that I need to hear Toni’s voice telling me it is, telling me what she has remembered.

  Five, four, three …

  My u.D flashes zero. I put in the earpiece and tap the instruction on my wrist.

  System not activated.

  “I was told the phone would be functioning thirty minutes after takeoff,” I plead to Ms. Newmark.

  She looks down at her u.D. “Let me speak with the captain.”

  She steps into the cockpit and returns a couple of long minutes later. “It is now working. You may place your calls.”

  My heart races as I tap in. It’s six thirty in the morning in Kansas City. I picture Toni lying in my bed or preparing her morning coffee.

  Ring, ring.

  Come on, baby, pick up.

  Ring, ring.

  “This is Toni,” the voicemail says. “I’m so sorry to have missed you …”

  Could she still be asleep? I kill the call and try again.

  My body tenses with each ring.

  “This is Toni,” her voice again says sweetly. “I’m so sorry to have …”

  Fuck.

  I tap my u.D to call up her mother’s number.

  “Mrs. Hewitt, Elizabeth,” I say, trying to maintain an element of calm in my voice, “it’s Rich.”