James Halperin - The First Immortal

Not even $110 million.

He would retain over ninety percent of his wealth, plenty for his wife and him to enjoy a comfortable life during the decade or so MediFact had projected remained before they’d require biostasis, and enough to endow a very respectable INA account for life after revivification.

The Smith Family Cryonic Trust would receive the actual amount of the fraud based on Webster’s most honest recollection. But $6.98 million today was worth barely $240,000 in the dollars of 1992, when the last overbilling had occurred.

As his decaying legs, aided by quasi-bionic muscle-stimulation trousers, carried him outside to his waiting programmed-transport vehicle, he considered the ever-expanding dominion of the AI machines. With a machine doling it out, justice was an objective measurement of human input, uncolored by emotional reprisal or lenience.

A decade ago such authority in the tenure of machines would have been alarming. No human could match their intellectual horsepower, and throughout history the greater minds had tended to enslave those lesser endowed. The machines had no weapons, of course, but given time, communication becomes persuasion, and persuasion is enough to command.

Power corrupts, the old saying went, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Yet the machines did seem to render justice with a consistency no human could match. Since the United States Software Act of November 7, 2022, and similar legislation in every other nation, it had been illegal for any machine to be programmed with a survival instinct or emotions. And now, with the Truth Machine at society’s command, no attempt by human programmers to violate this act was likely to go undetected.

Armstrong’s Truth Machine had also made biostasis infinitely safer. Intentions of terrorism were routinely detected in everyday licensing “scips,” long before any such plans could be carried out. Not a single suspendee in the U.S. had been lost to terrorism since the infamous January 2025 attack on the cold-storage cylinders of Forest Lawn in Burbank, California.

Following the lead of the United States, many other nations had passed laws to deal with the plethora of crimes committed before the Truth Machine had eliminated such temptations. In Paris, for example, on the same day as Webster’s routine confession, Drs. Claude Noire and Edouard Binette were forced to endure a harsher inquisition, their crimes being far more significant. The doctors had failed a customs scip (Truth Machine test) that morning while attempting to leave Paris for a pharmaceutical convention in Hong Kong, and were “invited” by the douanier to answer questions.

“If we refuse to answer…?” Binette had asked the young bureaucrat at the Institut Nationale pour la Vérification des Recherches Scientifiques.

“No problem.” The man had pointed the Truth Machine at himself. “We will just assume that every experiment you have ever submitted is fraudulent, and sentence you accordingly.”

The ACIP light glowed a chilling, steady green.

Confined to separate rooms, the two doctors gave virtually identical testimony. Both testified that the deep-frozen-mouse revivification, which had changed the worldwide paradigm on cryonics, had been a simple scientific fraud. A genetically identical clone of one of the cryonically (minus 79 degrees C) frozen mice had been deanimated, cooled to 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and secretly switched prior to the reanimation. Of course, the replacement had been the sole survivor out of the entire group of 1,300 mice. They had repeated the fraud nearly a dozen times in subsequent years, with convincingly mixed results, but for purported “competitive reasons” had refused to release the formula to other scientists.

The only significant difference in their testimony concerned motive. Noire had perpetrated the fraud to attain wealth. Binette’s purpose had been less rapacious but equally selfish: He hoped to foster public acceptance of cryonics. Both still believed that vitrification under the guidelines of the Prometheus Protocol was the best hope for preserving identity and memory of mammalian brains.

Of course, now it was apparent that they were only guessing.

May 30, 2031

—Memorial Gardens on the World Wide Web reports reaching a milestone 750 million “grave sites” where family members and friends post permanent epitaphs, stories, photographs, and recordings of their departed or suspended loved ones. The statistic does not include deceased pets or inanimate objects, which if added would raise total sites to nearly one billion.—In a speech to Republican supporters, Senator and likely presidential candidate Jonathan Salyers warns a largely indifferent audience: “The meme of the mouse reanimation has infected our brains to the point where we can’t seem to recover from it, even after Nobine’s exposure as fraud. In fact, predeath cryonics is the equivalent of simple suicide.” President David West asserts, “It is interesting that this bombshell has had so little effect on the public’s attitude about cryonics. Still, I suspect most suspendees will eventually be revived and rejuvenated, and even if not, to anyone about to die or lose memory, the mere possibility seems well worth the limited risk and expense.”

Gary and Father Steve watched from the artist’s workshop/dwelling. Perhaps a third of the world’s adult population were also witnessing, in real-time, today’s trial in Paris.

The two “chronies”—as Gary had dubbed them when they reached their mid-eighties—shared a nutritionally optimal lunch that the priest had brought with him: mostly fruit and whole grains, but also nine ounces of a delicious cultured chicken breast. Like most Americans, they refused all food that had ever been part of a sentient organism, now that modern cell-culturing techniques enabled “farmers” to produce healthy meat at affordable prices without slaughtering animals. This was no hardship; the stuff tasted great.

During the past six and one-half years, both men had undergone other significant lifestyle transformations as well.

In January 2025, Gary had ordered the VR machine removed from his apartment, and was now the only person he knew who did not keep one. Furthermore, he hadn’t gambled in six years. In April 2025 he’d spent nearly all his remaining money on AI and graphic computers, and since had immersed himself in the discipline of digitally enhanced artistic synthesis.

Having yet to attempt to sell anything, he was nearly broke, yet felt satisfied and mostly optimistic.

For fifty-one months he’d worked tirelessly, with a tenacity exceeding even his previous peak levels of obsession, on a single picture which, when completed, he was convinced would be regarded as the finest composition of his career.

He had never shown the work to anyone.

For seventy-seven months, Father Steve had irrevocably embraced the creed of biological immortalism. While he remained a devout priest and faithful Christian, beneath his crucifix now dangled another sacred ornament: his biostasis protocol.

In His own image… If the biblical verse were true, his action would be vindicated. If it were not true, what had he to fear?

The three-dimensional screen on the west wall of Gary’s dwelling placed the two men at front row center in the gallery of the courtroom. The device had recently been reprogrammed to adjust its own acoustics, conveying the compelling feeling and sound of actually being there. To their left sat Drs. Noire and Binette, shuddering nervously as they listened to prosecutor Antoine Bardot’s strident summation.

A simple AI device on Gary’s screen translated Bardot’s harangue into English:

“…worst fraud of the entire third millennium. The defendants have personally extracted over ten billion ECU’s per year in each of these past fifteen years, from the trusting citizens of the world. They accepted blood money for a product whose efficacy they knew had been demonstrated by duplicitous means; indeed, a product which they were able to sell as proven only through their own deceit; mere sleight-of-hand. Their original and perpetuated design was simply to defraud the public of these funds.