The Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

“People come along, tourists, and you tell them lies for money,” he explains.

  * * *

  Jenna and Clay were on the front lawn, looking like two space cadets from the future. Jenna—svelte, high-cheekboned, in her late twenties—wore a powder-blue terry-cloth leisure suit, unzipped to her belly button. She had large gold elephant earrings and a shock of fuchsia makeup above each eye. Clay, roguishly handsome, sported a wig of curly black Lionel Richie hair and an undeniably futuristic V-shaped vest whose Technicolor fabric effected a kind of jagged electrical pattern. Large rings of green plastic encircled each shoulder.

  “We decided you should be the minister of intergalactic affairs for Azerbaijan,” Jenna said, handing me a bag of clothes, barely stifling her laughter. The top, a loosely puffy, silver concoction, looked like a repurposed sleeping bag. My emerald-and-gold, ankle-length skirt was matched by a large, circular fez-type hat. The outfit sparkled.

  I quickly changed in the foyer, as Clay critiqued the crepe blinds, the imitation van Goghs, the marble fireplace, and the pleather furnishings. “This is the sort of style you always see with insecure millionaires,” he sniffed. “The whole place smells like white leather and juice machines.”

  As we spoke, the naked-looking lady in the wig ambled by. “Oh, I wanted to come in the pantyhose bodysuit,” whispered Jenna. “Good thing I didn’t. It would’ve been awkward for both of us.”

  A man in a dojo came over and asked where we were from. When Jenna said Canada, his eyes lit up. “I take citric acid intermediates as a caloric-restriction mimic. It’s a tiny pill from Canada—have you heard of it?”

  “No, no, I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “Does it work?”

  “I sure hope so. But the problem all of us have is, how do you test for it? You can’t measure their effect upon individual genes. Yet! In the meantime, we gobble pills and mix shakes. I also take methionine, which is great.”

  On our way upstairs to the second floor, Jenna’s heel got caught in the cuff of her leisure suit and her glass went flying. Red wine splashed all over the wall, her outfit, and the marble stairs. Luckily the only person who noticed was a maid, who rushed over to clean it up and told us not to worry. Within a few moments, Jenna’s wine had oxidized the marble and turned it blue. As it drizzled down the stairwell to the first floor, she couldn’t help wondering whether the stain would last forever. “If the owners of this house were to attain immortality,” she asked Clay, “do you think they would eventually embrace this stain like a special wrinkle, a sign of having lived a good life full of parties and adventures? Or will they just have the help clorox it away?”

  * * *

  In the living room, Joe Sugarman of BluBlockers fame was regaling a group of partygoers with tales of daily life in 2068. He spoke of how humanity had solved every disease by the year 2020, but that people still loved using his hair-restoration potions and libido enhancers. He started hyping an amazing “feminine sexual-enhancement cream” called Pure Fulfillment. He recommended rubbing it on any part of the body, internally and externally, to combat dryness.

  Next to them, on the balcony, Aubrey de Grey was chugging a beer, checking the Internet, and attempting to ignore Sugarman. “In the year 2030,” Sugarman said, raising his voice, “Aubrey figured out a way to make his beard grow very fast.”

  De Grey made a pained rictus, as if to say, What am I doing here?

  Sugarman continued, “In the following year, Aubrey was taken to—”

  “A lunatic asylum,” de Grey interjected, breaking his silence, and making his annoyance evident.

  “—a hospital,” Sugarman continued, unperturbed. “For tripping over his own beard.”

  A couple of partygoers giggled nervously. De Grey shrugged, emptied his beer, opened another, and turned back to the computer. His assistant, an ultrathin blond woman, stepped up to the mic. Speaking quietly, she introduced herself as Maria. A few people turned to watch, but the rest didn’t seem aware that a performance was under way.

  “Shut up, everybody!” de Grey commanded.

  “Thank you, Aubrey,” Maria said, louder now, with a thick Spanish accent. Starting an instrumental CD backing track, she began to sing a terrible, maudlin number about how special it was to be a seventeen-year-old girl in the big city.

  When the song ended, I started a conversation with Aubrey, who had busied himself on the balcony with e-mails. “Are you enjoying the party?” I asked.

  “This is the first party I’ve been to in over a year,” he said, his thick British accent muffled by the density of the beard engulfing his mouth. “I don’t have any social time whatsoever I’m so busy working.”

  I nodded and said I understood completely—being a writer is such a full-time occupation it can be hard to find the time for anything but research. He affected a professorial impatience, hurrying me along as I spoke.

  “I’d like—”

  “M-hmm, m-hmm?” he prodded.

  “—to—”

  “Yes, go on!”

  “—interview—”

  “And?”

  “—you.”

  “For what?” he said even before my last syllable made it out.

  “I’m-writing-a-book-on-the-fountain-of-youth-and-the-quest-for-immortality,” I intoned, at breakneck speed.

  “It’s been done before,” he sneered.

  “Many times.” I nodded. “Even five thousand years ago in Sumeria.”

  He huffed and took a gulp of beer. From what I could tell, he’d condescend to an interview.

  “Would this be a good time?” I ventured.

  “Sure, I do interviews in my sleep.” He was undeniably charismatic, in a circus-sideshow kind of way. Mountebank is a sixteenth-century word for a quack who would stand on a bench or pedestal or knoll selling elixirs. To me, Aubrey was an Internet Age version of the age-old immortality pitchman, a cyber-proselytizer spreading his gospel through chat rooms and forums.

  “So it’s 2068,” I said, kicking off the interview. “What have the past fifty-nine years been like for you?”

  “I retreated into glorious obscurity in 2035, having achieved my goals.”

  “And what did you do from that point on?”

  “I started watching movies and reading books, doing all the things I couldn’t do when I was busy.” He waved his arms around. “I moved to Madagascar. I entered a state of indefinite leisure.”

  “Why don’t you just watch a bit of those movies and read those books now as you’re working?” I wondered out loud. “You wouldn’t really want to just watch movies all the time, would you?”

  “I’m too busy to watch movies now,” he replied severely. “But trust me, I wouldn’t get bored, that’s for sure.” As he spoke, he ran his hands along his bushy beard. It seemed to have the texture of angel-hair pasta—softer than I’d imagined, less wiry. Perhaps he shampooed and conditioned it.

  We spoke about his theories—SENS, the seven steps, the War on Aging (WOA). He told me about his late-night breakthrough after spending the day with Dave Kekich a decade earlier. He was positive that the sunshine of perpetual youth would drive away “the dark specter of the age plague” well before 2068.

  What he calls the post-WOA era will shift into effect when a portion of the baby boomers—in his words, “the richest ten percent of those in the richest ten nations”—are able to afford treatments that will extend their healthy life span by twenty years. In those two decades, what with all the vivisecting of apes we’ll be doing, it’s “virtually certain” that new therapies will be found that will extend those privileged lives for a further decade or two. From there, it’ll be a cinch to reach 150. Once we are sesquicentenarians, we will start to experience what he calls a diminishing mortality risk, or “an increasing remaining life expectancy as time passes.” The more years go by, in essence, the longer we’ll live. Until we never die. This achievement is called “life extension escape velocity.”

  I asked him how he thought people would react to his ide
a of having these colonies of apes—tens of thousands of them—that we would be using in whatever ways we wanted in order to allow humans to become immortal.

  “Well, the main difficulty with animal rights activists is that they don’t communicate with logic,” he said.

  “Sure, but you must realize that there will be opposition to dissecting living primates,” I countered.

  “Primates?” he scowled, getting worked up, but trying to maintain his temper. “We want the primates to live for a long time because we want to live for a long time. We want to live forever. Those primates are not going to have a longer-than-normal life span unless we treat them really well.”

  Here he looked at me as though I were foolish to not realize that immortality scientists were going to be treating these apes well.

  I looked dubious.

  He didn’t care. “There are going to be lots of colonies all over,” he continued agitatedly. “Many, many colonies.” As he spoke, becoming increasingly enthusiastic, he started hopping up and down. The hopping made it even harder to make out what he was saying. The crux of it was a roundabout explanation of how our performing in vivo experiments on apes would actually be something they would want us to do. He kept using modifiers intended to lend a scientific dimension to his statements, such as “experts claim” or “it is probable” or “almost certainly.”

  We were both relieved when our interview was cut short by the sound of hushing all around.

  * * *

  Dave Kekich lowered the microphone and announced, “Welcome, everyone, to the house I lived in fifty-nine years ago. It’s interesting that you’ve all shown up with your avatars, because we’re actually in cyberspace, and you did so with no prompting.”

  He started describing the events that had taken place in the six decades leading up to the present moment in 2068. It all began when he started a stem-cell-product company with Joe Sugarman, a peptide doctor, and some molecular specialists. “From 2011 to 2016, we worked to turn around the aging process. Our company generated millions and millions.”

  “Zillions!” said Her Most Serene Highness, the Celestial Empress.

  “Trillions!” added Joe Sugarman. “Billions!”

  “We redirected all the money we made into other biotech ventures,” Kekich continued. “We were getting spectacular results. Billions poured into antiaging research. Unfortunately, in 2018 there was the total collapse of the US dollar and all other currencies—but in 2019, a new global currency was released called the Universal Dollar. It stabilized the world economy.”

  The audience clapped politely.

  “In 2023,” Kekich said excitedly, “Aubrey’s SENS finally took place.”

  Aubrey rested his lager on the terrestrial globe in front of him. “I thought it would be sooner than that,” he said, not smiling.

  Kekich was unfazed. “In 2025, scientists did the first brain-to-computer transfer. Aubrey became an overnight billionaire.”

  Aubrey coolly sipped his beer. Someone’s phone beeped and rang in the back of the room.

  “In 2029, cell phones became obsolete,” Kekich said, getting a laugh. “By the following year, we figured out how to turn old people young. Twenty thirty-two was the dawn of immortality. We learned how to fully upload ourselves to the computer, and so if you stepped in front of a bus, you were backed up. Five years later, cryonics companies successfully managed to resuscitate and reanimate frozen bodies. In 2038, my parents, after a year of being reorientated, went on a second honeymoon. It was a cruise in outer space. Then, in 2041, the Singularity happened. And you all know what happened after that.”

  “We all became immortal,” said Jackie Silver, the woman in the schoolgirl kilt who was aging backward. “Except for those who didn’t bother to back themselves up.”

  Everyone applauded. I turned to Clay and asked for his impressions. “I was just thinking that everyone here seems so rich and afraid of death,” he answered. “And then I thought, so am I.”

  Kekich poured little plastic shot glasses of Hennessy X.O. As they were being handed out, Clay started rapping about sippin’ Hennessy while poppin’ Ecstasy with “a couple naked chicks sittin’ next to me.” Kekich asked if anyone at the party came from out of state.

  “I came from outer space,” said a short man with male-pattern baldness and long, stringy, gray hair.

  “What’s your name?” Kekich smiled benevolently.

  “Narayan de Vera, MD.” He was wearing a maroon tunic covered in beads and mirrors. “You may also address me as Chief Olomayana, the Blessed One.”

  “Okay, Blessed One. Are you from somewhere close by in space?”

  “Five light-years away,” Narayan boasted. “From the solar system Zaikunta. I had to precipitate into a physical body to attend the party.”

  “Do you do that often?” someone asked.

  “Every twenty thousand years.” He took the microphone and began speaking about the birth of planets and moons, about the nature of elemental particles, and about the earth’s thousand-year-long period of weightlessness (which is how the pyramids were built). He’d discovered a plant, he said, called Kalanchoe daigremontiana bryophyllum, that could reduce mortality rates by 95 percent. Still, long life doesn’t eliminate poverty, and poor people in 2068 were simply poor for a much longer time. “So money is important,” he added, making an appeal for funding. He ended his monologue with an aside about how he was getting sentimental remembering the days when we actually had physical bodies. Then he poured some of his cognac onto the plant next to him.

  Jenna and Clay were looking at him with their mouths open.

  “Okay!” said Kekich, getting back on the microphone. “Anybody else from out of state?”

  A couple wearing matching blue capes lifted their hands. Beatrix and Jose said they’d traveled five hundred billion warped light-years to come to the party.

  “And where did you come from?” Kekich asked.

  “We flew here from the Galaxy Final,” Jose said.

  “Using our solar capes,” Beatrix added, twirling the fabric around. “We belong to a civilization that knows everything.”

  “What’s it like over there?” Narayan inquired. “Has the Singularity happened?”

  “Nothing is the way we thought it would be,” Beatrix answered.

  22

  Refrigerator Heaven

  Once you had gone so far, you might as well test the limits . . . and all but sleep in the waves.

  Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

  I stay under glass

  I look through my window so bright . . .

  I see the bright and hollow sky

  Over the city’s ripped backsides

  Iggy Pop, “The Passenger”

  THE SINGULARITARIAN vision of the future is not so singular. In fact, it’s eerily akin to one proposed in the 1960s by another proto-immortalist movement: cryonics. Although largely ignored today, the “freeze-wait-reanimate” cult also made a faith out of science.

  They were concerned less with the feasibility of attaining physical immortality (a certain eventuality, in their view) than with developing the means of storing frozen bodies until science had figured out how to make people immortal—by which time it would also be a cinch to resuscitate properly preserved corpses and heal them of whatever caused their terminal condition.

  Today, when a cryonicist dies, others in their community don’t see them as dead. They’ve simply “deanimated.” Once frozen, they rest in indefinite suspension, awaiting reanimation. Diehards consider the brains of those in metabolic arrest to be “alive.” To them, dead bodies are actually “temporary incurables,” patients to be stored in a deep freeze until eternal life arrives. Sooner or later, cryonicists are convinced, bio-medical specialists will be capable of curing any disease or illness. This isn’t a fantasy, cryo-activists say. It’s progress. We’re nearly there. Imagine if we could just be transported by ambulance to a point in time when all injuries can be repaired and undone. This fast-
forwarding ambulance is precisely how the movement’s pioneers view cryopreservation.

  Many prominent figures in the contemporary immortalist scene—de Grey, Kurzweil, Minsky, the Mores—are signed up to enter biostasis when pronounced “legally dead.” They see this as a fallback plan in case something happens before the Singularity occurs. But not all cryonicists see eye to eye with radical life extensionists.

  In fact, Ben Best, the president of the Cryonics Institute from 2003 to 2012, has suggested immortalists reconsider the desire for eternal life. “Forever is not just a long time,” he points out quite sensibly, “it is eternity and therefore beyond realistic conception.” Rather than strive for the unrealistic goal of immortality, Best suggests aiming for one thousand years—a more reasonable and, in his view, altogether attainable ambition.

  Before his deanimation in 2011, the movement’s creator, Robert Ettinger, also criticized modern campaigns for ending aging. The primary message of Aubrey de Grey’s book, Ettinger emphasized, is “send-me-money.” That didn’t necessarily bother Ettinger: “I hope the appeal is successful.” But as a more seasoned futurist (and mad scientist), he did take issue with the lack of calculations to support de Grey’s guesstimate that “there is a fifty-fifty chance of a large improvement in longevity within thirty years.”

  Despite these gripes, there isn’t much of a distinction between the two denominations—at least when it comes to their abuses of verifiable science. For example, Ben Best states that reversible suspended animation of the brain “could happen in anything from ten to fifty years.” Whatever calculations one uses to arrive at that formulation, it’s still just a random, magical prediction.

  There are other points of overlap. Like the 2068ers, cryonicists, too, dream of putting human brains into machine bodies. A robot twin will likely be needed in cases where a cadaver is too damaged to be reconstructed. And Ettinger, well before Kurzweil’s time, also breezily brushed aside the complications of consciousness: long-term memories, Ettinger once argued, consist merely of “changes in protein molecules in the brain cells.” But if it’s that simple, then why can’t we cure Alzheimer’s yet?