Frankissstein

by Jeanette Winterson

  In some sense, if you are dedicated to the preservation of life, then you are, by definition, not dedicated to the inevitability of death. It is my job to extend life. Alcor hopes to extend life indefinitely.

  Max More, the CEO and director of the facility, hoped I might be part of their international team – in my case, UK-based – as the future expanded. Max is British. He wants us to catch up with the future.

  We call this place Alcor, he said, because that’s the name of a 5th-magnitude star. You can see it if you have good eyesight, but it’s in the distance, like the future.

  One day, says Max, we’ll live among the stars.

  The only problem with cryonics is that no one knows how to reheat the body without destroying it. But, as Max points out, Leonardo da Vinci made drawings of helicopters centuries before powered flight.

  The time will come, says Max. It always does.

  He suggested I look around for myself, get a sense of the place.

  So here I am in what looks like a giant stainless-steel warehouse. It’s silent except for the hum of systems.

  To protect privacy there are no names on the cylinders, but for one, far smaller than the rest, looking more like a cigar tube than a space-pod. It bears a label that reads: Dr James H. Bedford.

  I learn that Bedford was the first human to be cryonically preserved back in 1967.

  1969: astronauts went to the moon, Bedford had gone to inner space. He was a pioneer of cryonics. So much so that for a few years his family kept him in a self-storage lock-up and topped up the liquid nitrogen themselves.

  He was recently removed to a more up-to-date container. The opening of the casket was emotional, like he was a modern-day mummy from old Memphis. Apparently his body was in excellent shape, apart from a chest fracture and a collapsed nose. That can be fixed when he returns.

  I heard a voice behind me. It’s a little like an art installation in here, isn’t it? Have you seen Damian Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank? What does he call it? The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

  I turned round. A man in his fifties, well-preserved. Botox for sure. Perhaps more if I could look for the scar-lines behind his ears. Tight skin, clean-shaven, dark, restless eyes. He held out his hand to greet me.

  My name is Victor Stein.

  I shook his hand. Ry Shelley.

  He held on to my hand: Have we met?

  And the strange, split-second other-world answer is yes.

  No, I say.

  He looks at me, nodding slightly.

  How long are you here?

  I leave in the morning. I’m a guest of Max.

  Ah, yes. The English Doctor?

  That’s me. Do you work here?

  No, no. I am here to see a friend. Call him the English Patient.

  He smiles. I smile. Then he says, Well, would you care for a drink later? When you’re done with your business? There’s a place I know …

  I am in the process of saying no.

  Yes, I say. Why not?

  Time is a zip. Sometimes it snags.

  And so, a few hours afterwards, when Max More had gone home and there was nothing for me to do at my motel except pack, eat a takeaway and watch terrible TV, I got into Victor’s rented SUV and we headed out of town. Diners, gas stations, retail outlets, trucks going somewhere, a broken-down Jeep going nowhere. Heat on the windshield. A road stretching distance into distance. Dust trails behind us.

  We drove into the radiant emptiness of the Sonoran Desert.

  Where are you from? he asks me.

  Manchester.

  That’s funny.

  What’s funny about Manchester?

  Nothing – well, maybe some things, only, my lab is there, at the university. It’s privately funded but hosted by the University of Manchester.

  I was born in Manchester. I don’t live there now.

  London?

  Yes, London.

  We’re all global travellers, aren’t we? We’re all somewhere else. Did you know that there are thirty-six Manchesters in the world? Thirty-one of them in the USA?

  That’s the Industrial Revolution for you, I say.

  In fact, he says, it was the Lancashire cotton workers’ solidarity with Abraham Lincoln over slavery. Manchester workers refused to process cotton from the slave plantations. In those days, ninety-eight per cent of the world’s cotton was processed in Manchester. Can you imagine that?

  Times change, I said.

  Yes, he said, many cotton workers, pressed by hardship, booked passage from Liverpool to the brave new world of America and took their Manchester with them. The future always carries something from the past.

  Like humans, I said. Mitochondrial DNA.

  He nodded. Men don’t carry it, do they?

  I said, Men carry it but they can’t pass it on. Only the mother passes it on, right back to the mother of us all.

  He said 200,000 years ago in Africa. The first humans. Think how long it took us to reach the Industrial Revolution. And think how far and how fast we’ve travelled in the last 200 years.

  Are you having your body preserved? I ask him.

  Certainly not! You?

  No!

  It’s old-fashioned. No one will want their diseased body back. The brain, though – well … And that’s where they’re heading now – pardon the pun – I am sure Max told you? You saw this on their website? Victor passes me his phone.

  Cryopreservation that is focused on doing the best possible job to preserve the human brain is called ‘neuropreservation.’ The brain is a fragile organ that cannot be removed from the skull without injury, so it is left within the skull during preservation and storage for good ethical and scientific reasons. This gives rise to the mistaken impression that Alcor preserves ‘heads’. It is more accurate to say that Alcor preserves brains in the least injurious way possible.

  Do you really think a brain can be brought back to functioning consciousness? I say.

  Probably, he says.

  His hands on the wheel are long, well-kept and clean. I notice hands. I am a surgeon. He wears a gold signet ring on his little finger.

  He swings the wheel and pulls the car into a dirt lot. I see a shack with a tin roof and a covered walkway to beat off the sun. Cacti. Jack rabbits. Wooden tables outside. Swivel stools at the bar. Pretty waitress wearing an Eagles T-shirt. TAKE IT EASY. Four Roses Bourbon on the rocks. Toasted cheese. Haze of sunset. Big birds flying across the sky.

  Of course, says Victor, what I would prefer is to be able to upload myself, that is, upload my consciousness, to a substrate not made of meat. At present, though, that is not an effective way to prolong life because the operation to scan and copy the contents of my brain will kill me.

  Isn’t content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn’t free-floating; it’s enmeshed.

  That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora – that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind – global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves – all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.

  Nationalism is on the rise, I say.

  He nods. That is a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.

  I ask him what he does. His speciality is machine learning and human augmentation. A first degree in Computer Science from Cambridge. A PhD on computer learning from Virginia Tech called Do Robots Read? Impressive stints in robotic engineering at Lockheed, then a mysterious time at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency based in Virginia. DARPA is a federal government agency, lavishly funded, that works on military tech, including unmanned drones and killer-bots. Now he’s an advisor to Railes Prosthetics on how ‘smart’ artificial limbs might become integrated body parts.

  But his day-to-day work, he says, is
in his lab teaching machines how to diagnose the human condition.

  Good luck, I say. I have no idea how to diagnose the human condition, much less how to cure it.

  End death, said Victor.

  That’s impossible.

  It is only impossible for biological organisms.

  The waitress comes over. Short skirt. Wide smile. She catches me looking at her TAKE IT EASY T-shirt and misinterprets my interest. She doesn’t seem to mind; I guess she’s used to it. She turns round. On the back there’s a line from the song: We may lose and we may win though we will never be here again.

  That’s kinda sad, isn’t it? she said.

  Would you like to live forever? Victor asked her.

  Forever is too long, she said. I’d like to look good and be healthy. Maybe live to a hundred looking twenty-five.

  How would you feel about dying if you reached a hundred and looked twenty-five? asked Victor.

  The waitress considered this question carefully. Maybe we could be programmed to end? she said. Like the replicants in Blade Runner.

  That will be hard – when the moment comes, said Victor. The replicants didn’t like it.

  I think I could manage hard, said the waitress. I am managing right now. I have a kid. I work this job and I am a hair stylist too. Life is hard. Hard is OK. It’s hopeless and helpless that sucks.

  Do you believe her? said Victor, when she had gone to lean over another table.

  I believe she believes herself. That’s different.

  Victor nodded. He said, Tell me this, Ry, if you were certain that by disrupting everything you take for granted about the mind, about the body, about biology, about death, about life, if you were certain that such a disruption would bring about a personal, social, global utopia, would you risk it?

  (He’s crazy, I thought.)

  Yes, I said.

  He poured us more bourbon from the bottle. What’s the future of alcohol? I said.

  He raised his glass. As I said, the future always brings something from the past.

  I have a sense he drinks heavily. But there’s no paunch, no redness, no sag. He looks like a macrobiotic fitness freak on cucumber water. He downs his whisky. He hasn’t touched the toasted cheese. I decide to finish his. He can tell what I’m thinking: he says, I don’t mix protein and carbs. We can get a steak here later.

  I’m leaving first thing in the morning.

  Then as you are not leaving tonight we could have dinner.

  It is easy to be controlled by someone who is controlling and charming. And, outside of my job, I dislike decisions. I’ll go with the flow on this – in any case, I’ve just spent the day at a recycling centre for dead bodies. Food, drink and a madman are a good distraction.

  I get the sense, deep down, that Victor Stein is a high-functioning madman.

  He says, You’ve heard of Alan Turing, of course?

  I’m nodding. Hasn’t everyone? Breaking the Code. Bletchley Park. Benedict Cumberbatch playing a suitably autistic computer genius.

  Then, said Victor Stein, I wonder if you know that when Turing first used the word, the term, computer he wasn’t referring to a machine at all – but to a person. The person would be the computer … admittedly the person would be analysing machine-generated data – but unconsciously, perhaps, when he thought of a computer as a person he had a futuristic sense of where we would travel.

  Where are we travelling? I said.

  That depends on whose story you believe, said Victor. Or whose story you want to believe. It’s always a story, you know.

  What are my options? I said.

  Well, in no particular order, said Victor, options are as follows: humans will learn how to halt and reverse the ageing process; we will all live healthier and longer lives. We’re still biology but we’re better biology. Alongside that, we can enhance ourselves with smart implants to improve our physical and mental capacities.

  Alternatively, because biology is limited, we abolish death, at least for some people, by uploading our minds out of their biological beginnings.

  I interrupted him, But then we’re just a computer programme.

  He frowned. Why do you say ‘just’? Do you think that Stephen Hawking, whose body was useless to him, was ‘just’ a mind? He was a mind, certainly, and the closest thing we have seen to an exceptional and fully conscious human mind trapped in a body. What if we had been able to free his mind? What would he have chosen, do you think?

  But he began in a functioning body.

  And so will any mind that is uploaded – and that brings me to my third option.

  I decide to shut up and let him talk.

  He smiles at me. He has a questioning smile. Part invitation, part challenge.

  He says, At the same time as all or any of those possibilities, we also create various kinds of artificial intelligence, from robots to supercomputers, and we learn to live with newly created life forms. Life forms that might, eventually, phase out the bio-element altogether.

  Or we could just go on as we are, I said.

  He shook his head. Of the scenarios I have sketched, your alternative is the only one that is impossible.

  The waitress came over with our check. There’s a storm coming, she said.

  Victor Stein suggested we leave the SUV in the parking lot and walk a while, before returning to eat that steak.

  I like to walk before dinner, he said.

  How are you going to manage that when you’re just an upload? I asked.

  I won’t be eating dinner, he said.

  He was laughing. Once out of the body you will be able to choose any form you like, and change it as often as you like. Animal, vegetable, mineral. The gods appeared in human form and animal form, and they changed others into trees or birds. Those were stories about the future. We have always known that we are not limited to the shape we inhabit.

  What is reality? I said. To you?

  It’s not a noun, said Victor. It’s not a thing or an object. It isn’t objective.

  I said, I accept that our experience of reality isn’t objective. My subjective experience of the desert will be different to yours, but the desert is really there.

  The Buddha would not agree with you, said Victor. The Buddha would argue that you are a slave to appearances, that you confuse reality with appearance.

  Then what is reality?

  The best minds have asked this question forever, said Victor. I cannot answer it. What I can say is that just as consciousness appears to be an emergent property of brain function – you can’t pinpoint consciousness biologically – it is as elusive as the seat of the soul – but we would agree that consciousness exists – and we would agree that at present machine intelligence isn’t conscious. So perhaps reality is also an emergent property – it exists, but it is not the material fact we take it to be.

  In front of me I watched the material fact of a pocket mouse racing towards a creosote bush. We heard the storm before we felt it. The deep crash of thunder. Then the forked lightning above our heads.

  And then it rained.

  The Sonoran Desert is one of the wettest deserts in North America. It has two rainy seasons – this was the summer season – heavy and sudden.

  This won’t last long! shouted Victor above the smash of thunder. This is a BWh climate. Dry, arid, hot.

  I said, Makes no difference how you classify it; we’re soaked.

  And we were. As if buckets of water had been poured over our heads. Victor’s blue linen shirt clung to his body. My T-shirt hung loose and dripping.

  Victor took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. Who carries a handkerchief?

  There’s an overhang! We can shelter under that rock!

  We ran towards it. There was barely room for us both. I was conscious of his body, a warm, wet animal, next to me. I lifted my T-shirt to rub my eyes, feeling the stream of rain down my stomach. When I looked up, Victor was staring at me.

  You’re shivering, he said. It’s not cold
but you are shivering.

  A thunderclap dislodged small pieces of rock above us. Victor put his hand on my shoulder. I think we had better go, he said.

  We walked in silence. Nature can cancel thought. We needed to walk and there was nothing more to say.

  Out on the porch of the bar under the clatter of rain on the tin roof I could see our waitress waiting for us.

  You boys need somewhere to take a shower and dry off? There’s a room out the back. I can wash and dry those clothes if you want. Won’t take an hour.

  Where does kindness come from? I said to Victor.

  Evolutionary cooperation, he said. Competition alone would have wiped us out.

  Can you programme kindness?

  Yes, he said.

  We stood on the porch, stripping down to our boxer shorts. His were blue to match his trousers. Mine were orange.

  Cute, said the waitress; you can throw those into this basket when you get inside.

  Do you do this for all your customers? said Victor.

  Most of ’em don’t go walking in the desert when I say there’s a storm coming. Now go on in and I’ll bring you both a whisky.

  The room was dark. The window was dusty with sand behind a half-closed shutter. There was a bed, a couple of chairs, a battered TV and a wardrobe. The shower room was white-tiled and basic.

  You first, said Victor. Throw me your shorts and I’ll put them in the basket. She’s waiting.

  I went into the bathroom and tossed my shorts through the door. I heard Victor turn on the TV to the weather channel.

  The shower was plentiful and strong and the water was hot. I soaped my body, getting rid of sand from every crack and soft place. Soon the room was as steamy as a Hitchcock movie. I didn’t notice Victor had come in until I stepped out of the shower. He handed me a towel. Then he saw me.

  He saw the scars under my pecs. I watched his eyes work down my body. No penis.