James Halperin - The First Immortal

With this act of heroism, his place in Paradise would be assured.

Within three hours he would abandon his Land Rover AI-Safari near the Hindu Kush Pass in his own Afghanistan, safely out of reach of Pakistani scips and extradition treaties.

Congressman Wesley Seacrest (D. IA) and I, Trip Crane, now a twenty-seven-year-old MIT Assistant Professor of Nanotechnology, each suppressed an irrational impulse to shout obscenities at our Pakistani driver. Since meeting us at the airport in a driver-operated taxi (neither of us had seen a driver-operated car on public streets in over a decade), the man had already taken two wrong turns, hopelessly ensnaring us in a so-called traffic jam.

“We’ll never make it in time,” the forty-nine-year-old politician complained. Wes tugged lightly on his blue ponytail. “I s’pose we’ll catch hell for it, too.”

“At least we sort of cancel each other out, don’t we?” I said, and half chuckled. It was annoying to miss our most important round-table debate of the conference, but there was also something humorous about the whole situation, as if we’d somehow gone back in time to watch people muddle through life without the modern AIs.

“Yes, I suppose so. But I’d’ve enjoyed debating you again. Interesting that the Formation Council always schedules us to appear sequentially. I was especially looking forward to it. This time you were s’posed to go first.”

I adjusted my earlobe microchip, absentmindedly coloring my eyeballs and most of my hair an iridescent lime-green. I glanced at my image on the backseat screen, and decided I liked the effect. I still looked decidedly male, but somehow feline, a green tiger, perhaps. “Then I guess I should be thankful we’re late.”

Seacrest caught a quick glimpse, too, and must have mused that even his own generation was not quite so over-the-top. “You’re really opposed to a world government, aren’t you, Trip?”

“I couldn’t very well lie about my feelings with all those ACIPs pointed at me, now could I?”

“Guess not. But yours is an unusual position for a nanojock to take. Most of you fellas are running scared as jackrabbits at a dog-cloning center. ‘Course, you guys actually understand what nanotech could do in the wrong hands.”

“Yes, we do. But don’t you think scips can prevent that?”

“Truth Machines won’t prevent crimes in places where they aren’t used, and if anyone can flee to jurisdictions where they’ll be immune from punishment, how’ll we stop ‘em? Because with nanotech, we’d damn well better stop ‘em all. Remember, criminals can be resourceful, and very evil.”

“So can governments,” I said.

The Hyatt was now fully in view, a maddening ninety car lengths away.

“Looks like we’ll only be fifteen or twenty minutes late,” I was telling him, just as the first- and second-floor facades of the hotel vanished into a cloud of smoke and flying debris.

We heard the roar of the explosion a second and a half after we saw it. The force of it snapped our heads back. For a moment the taxi seemed to buckle.

I leaned forward, trying to see through the smoke and haze. Debris lay everywhere; men and women slowly picked themselves up off the street. I heard screams all around and the piercing, painful blare of locked car horns.

My first jumbled thoughts were of the people inside the building. The dozens of scientists from all over the world. My mind groped for names; faces swam at me. The loss was catastrophic. The politicians, the diplomats. Jesus! Most with families at home.

Instantly I thought of my own parents. Rage flared. I’d been barely nine and a half when their plane crashed; then a decade of being nurtured back to some semblance of mental health, first by Uncle Gary, then by my grandmother. And the therapeutic salvation of work, which sustained me until (finally) the trial, only last year.

Now I pictured the faces of the three cowards who’d masterminded the airliner shoot-down. Seventeen years of living with the act had done a lot to temper their self-righteousness. Each had received a forty-year prison sentence under the Spanish Amnesty Act. With cryonics and nanomedicine, the bastards would probably all live to see the fourth millennium.

I felt my fist shatter the rear passenger window of the taxi. There was an instant of surprisingly sharp pain, fascinating in its rarity. As I stared at my bloodied hand, it took several seconds to realize that if we’d had a more competent driver today, Wes and I, too, would now be scattered among the smoldering debris.

October 30, 2033

—The Tufts School of Dentistry files for patents on a one-hour surgical orthodontic procedure, which when performed on any normal 7-year-old will guarantee a lifetime of perfect tooth alignment.—Only 16 months after Intel created their computer of near-human intelligence, Sun Microsystems demonstrates a system capable of achieving test scores in excess of 180 IQ level. A company spokeswoman calls the advance “just the beginning,” and predicts that Sun will bring a full line of advanced, nonsentient AI products to market within a year.—The FDA approves BioTime’s “Respirocytes,” the first nanotech protocol it has ever allowed on humans. The computerized machines, each of which comprise approximately eighteen billion atoms and which can transport up to nine billion air and nutrient molecules at a time, are somewhat smaller but much more efficient than the red blood cells they were designed to replace.

The skies remained dark, but stars were disappearing; the air felt calm and refreshingly chilled.

“You ever going to show me the thing?” Father Steve asked.

Both partly hoped it would be no time soon. With some goals, the pursuit is more gratifying than the realization. Of course, Gary would create other pictures, but perhaps never another like this. And whatever the public thought of The Dawn of Life , whether they spurned the art and the artist, or embraced both, the culmination of the work would leave an indescribable emptiness within the hearts of these two men.

“Before too long,” Gary answered solemnly, carefully steering the aluminum skiff through six sonar and microwave-surveillance buoys marking the small-craft lanes of Boston Harbor. “It’s close, I think. And you’ll be the first to see it. But not till it’s ready.”

Five minutes passed; the sun began to backlight the heavens. The two had already absorbed several dozen sunrises together, and Gary had seen at least a hundred others over the previous six months, from every vantage point imaginable. He still awaited that special convergence of color, light, and refractivity, a limpid impurity and brilliant haze that would define the moment, over three billion years ago, when that which was bare matter had all at once become more than itself.

The last stars were subsumed by their awaking master, and there it was.

Gary and Father Steve stood to witness the ascent of an inanimate object that rendered all life possible. The top of the great fireball bubbled from the eastern Atlantic like molten lava, its halo of ardent gold and red and magenta illuminating the wispy clouds and vaporous mists of morning; radiating a brilliant warmth that seemed to energize the billowing, oceanic earth.

Its sensors having alerted the freighter’s AI that it had veered off course by nearly 150 yards and must correct immediately, a Russian container ship turned ponderously, like an oversized apatosaur plowing through a rain forest. Its 2,300-foot reinforced steel hull sliced through the water, displacing 137 billion gallons, throwing a seven-foot wake that would easily reach the shore several miles away.

“That was it,” the priest said. “Wasn’t it?”