Stephen Leather - Once bitten

The Prison And that was the last time I saw her. Until today that is. Ten years, that's how long it took, ten years of trying to convince them that I was on their side, that I regarded Terry Ferriman as nothing more than a laboratory animal to be studied. I knew that if I ever let on just how much she meant to me then they'd never let me see her, so for the first eight years I didn't even try. I stayed with the LAPD but started to do some research work at UCLA, initially an extension of my criminal work but I gradually moved into the effects of ageing on intelligence and behaviour and particularly comparisons between chronological, biological, functional and subjective age. It was interesting research in its own right, notwithstanding that my main reason for doing it was to get to see Terry again. At any one time a person's age can be classed as in those four ways – how old he is in years, how old his body actually appears to be, the status level the person holds in society, and how old the person feels inside.

Take me for instance, sitting at my military desk with Terry's picture in front of me, the orange light of the computer screen reflecting off my face. Chronological age? No problem – forty-six.

Biological age? Well, if I'm brutally honest I'd have to say my body is that of a man a good ten years older. I can't read or drive without glasses, four of my teeth are capped, my hair is thinning.

My hearing is nowhere as good as it used to be, especially with high frequency sounds. I can't get through the night without getting up to go to the bathroom at least once. My skin is losing its elasticity fast which accounts for the sagging around my jowls and the wrinkling.

Functional age? I guess I've done well, and achieved quite a lot during my academic career.

Even being modest I'd say I've achieved as much as most academics would have done by the time they were sixty. I was in a rush, I suppose.

Subjective age? I dunno. Inside I feel exactly the same as I did when I was sixteen. I know a few more tricks, I know how to handle situations because I've been through them so many times, but inside it's still the same teenager, the same insecurities, fears and desires.

The lighting flashes behind me again, a double flash. How would I rate Terry's age?

Chronological – something close to four thousand, I suppose. Biological – in her late teens.

Functional – God, it would take a normal person, even a highly successful businessman, hundreds of years to acquire the assets she has. Subjective? That I didn't know. I couldn't comprehend how it must feel to live so long. Maybe she too still felt as if she was sixteen.

Anyway, over the years I developed a program similar to the Beaverbrook Model which through question and answer could determine the four ages of a subject. Much of the work I did involved measurement of fluid intelligence, the ability to solve new and unusual problems. Fluid intelligence peaks at adolescence and then declines steadily, whereas crystallised intelligence, the knowledge and skills acquired in life, increases up until the start of adolescence and then increases only slowly until it plateaus in old age. I published a stack of papers in the best psychology journals and though I kept working for the LAPD I managed to travel overseas a lot to interview some of the oldest people in the world – in Ecuador, Russia and India, incorporating the results into the computer model. I put in a few other features too, so that the program got into a person's psyche more thoroughly than ten years with an analyst.

Unlike Sugar and his researchers, I made sure I published as much as possible, and I knew it would be obvious to them that the work I was doing could be helpful in their hunt for immortals.

Used properly, my new research could be used to identify members of the population whose functional and subjective ages were way out of kilter with their chronological and biological ages.

I kept applying for access to Terry and the rest of the immortals – for research purposes, I said.

Eventually permission was granted by some agency or another and a team of six agents came and picked me up at home in a limousine with darkened windows, darkened so that I couldn't see out. I told them I needed the Toshiba computer and they allowed me to take it with me. One of the agents took a chrome gun-like thing out of an aluminium case, placed it against my upper arm and pulled the trigger. Everything went hazy, and then black, and when I woke up they'd taken my watch and the Toshiba and I was in what could have passed for a Holiday Inn bedroom except for the fact that there were no windows. There was a TV and the papers were delivered every day and I could choose my own food from a leather-bound menu but other than the food deliveries I didn't see or speak to another human building for two weeks. I was in quarantine. Before they'd allow me to see her they had to be convinced that I wasn't being followed. No conversations, no phone calls, no letters. After two weeks a guy in a white coat unlocked the door and gave me another shot. When I awoke I was lying on a bunk in a steel-lined room. The first thing I saw was a remote control television camera staring at me. I guess it was being monitored continuously because within seconds of my waking up the door was unlocked and two beefy men in grey overalls came in. Someone had taken off my clothes while I was unconscious and had dressed me in a pale blue overall with "VISITOR" stamped across the front in large white capital letters. One of the men handed me a styrofoam cup of warm water and I drank deeply to wash away the bitter taste that coated the inside of my mouth.

"You'll soon feel better, the effects disappear quite quickly," said a voice at the door. I looked up to see an elderly man with a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He had a kindly face, topped with a mane of white hair, and he spoke with a vaguely French accent. He sat down on the bunk beside me and felt for my pulse. Satisfied, he shone a small torch into my eyes, nodded, and pronounced me fit.

He disappeared as quickly as he'd arrived and another man arrived, this one younger and fitter and wearing a dark blue suit and carrying a clipboard. It was a check-list of things I was not to disclose during my conversation with Terry (though she was referred to throughout as The Inmate), mainly news events, the date, time of day, location of the prison (not that I knew it), that sort of stuff. When he'd finished reading the list out to me he handed me a pen and made me sign at the bottom before he, too, left the room. The two guards then escorted me along the corridor to a lift.

Both carried M-1 carbines and the safeties were off, their fingers never leaving the trigger guards.

They tapped a six-figure code into a small keypad to call the lift and when it arrived the doors hissed open to reveal another grim-faced guard, wearing a similar uniform but holding an M-14 assault rifle at the ready.

There was no way of telling how far down the lift went but it fell quickly enough to make my stomach heave and it was a full thirty seconds before it came to a halt and the door opened. Two more guards were waiting for me, almost doubles of the ones who'd led me to the lift God know's how many floors above and they escorted me along another metal-lined corridor, their steel-tipped boots echoing as they walked. My bare feet slapped on the cold metal floor. The overalls were all I was wearing, I could feel that I was naked underneath the cotton material.

There were television cameras at regular intervals along the corridor and as we passed them I could hear the whirring of a servo-mechanism as they turned to watch us go. At the end of the corridor was what looked like another lift but after one of the guards tapped in another six-digit code and pressed his thumb against a small square of illuminated perspex the doors opened to reveal a square room, about the size of a school classroom.