James Halperin - The First Immortal

“Remember,” I went on. “Even the smallest silicon chips back then were made from transistors comprising half a trillion atoms apiece. Yet almost every late twentieth century scientist agreed we would have unimolecular transistors by now—and, of course, we do. Most nanoscientists today believe that such transistors, currently maintainable only under sterile laboratory conditions, will be commercially viable within a decade.

“Already we can build a mechanical computer, as powerful as a turn-of-the-millennium ‘laptop’ but much faster—because it’s so much smaller—in a space slightly larger than a human cell. In twenty years we’ll assemble electronic computers perhaps a thousand times smaller and ten thousand times faster than those of today.

“We now have nanomotors smaller and mightier than a bacterium’s, constructed atom by atom, molecule by molecule, from ceramics and metals far more durable and predictable than proteins. Don’t forget, nature typically demonstrates only the lower boundaries of the possible.”

Grandmother smiled, nodding her head, envisioning, perhaps, an eagle trying to race against a mach-seven luxury liner, or someday, a starship.

“We can already build computerized machines powered by today’s smallest motors, and your smallest capillaries could easily accommodate hundred-lane superhighways of such machines. Yet nanoscience is still an infant; a precocious one, but an infant nonetheless.

“We should also have realized long ago that self-replicating intelligent machines had the potential to take over, or even destroy, the world—because we ourselves are such machines, and very crudely fashioned as compared to that which physical law allows.

“Imagine a machine the size of a single human cell, possessing humanlike ability to communicate, but with immensely greater clarity and speed of information processing. And imagine that machine, if you dare, as an entity devoid of comparative experience, philosophy, and objective purpose beyond survival and procreation. Imagine it as a tiny, hyperintelligent tiger shark. Now give that machine the ability to reproduce itself every fifteen minutes. Such a machine, the fabrication of which the laws of physics in no way prohibit, could devour the earth in thirty-six hours, and ten hours later engulf the entire mass of our solar system.

“Of course, these machines must be designed by humans, or by AIs thankfully at our command, and you’d have to be insane to want to build something destined to destroy you. But it would be a simple matter to make the machines selective; perhaps consuming only your enemies, while sparing yourself and your friends.

“A nanowar could make us all nostalgic for the nuclear terrorism of the early twenty-first century.

“Here is the reality check, ladies and gentlemen: With the science that will be available to me fifteen years from now, I could get together with five or six friends and assemble in my basement the very machine I have just described. Three decades from now, there will be tens of millions of individuals with that capability. Only one of those people need go insane for a moment, and poof! The end of humanity. It’s a good thing we have the Software Act and a Truth Machine, isn’t it?

“I once argued against a world government,” I admitted. “But in the world as it has become, I now see no safe alternative to a well-reasoned central authority, embodying this single root axiom: that no person need fear any other, because the mere intention to murder or subjugate a fellow human being would be impossible to sustain, and murder itself would inevitably become an act of suicide.”

Grandmother smiled through glistening eyes. Dreaming of her lost son—my lost father—I knew. I returned her smile.

June 15, 2042

—Scientists at Eastman Kodak say they have developed an artificial eye and compatible occipital lobe implant which together can enable even congenitally blind persons to achieve nearly normal eyesight. They expect to bring the device to market within four months.—The mayors and city councils of Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, announce plans to unify the two city governments immediately upon installation of World Government, expected to take place in about three years. The two cities have functioned in near unison over the past two decades. Windsor Mayor Gordon Lightfoot III is quoted, “We’ve done much to erase large artificial boundaries; why not small?” The merged city, to be renamed Michigan Shores, will become the world’s 170th largest.

Alica Banks, a legal historian, and Dr. Virginia Gonzalez, the renowned neuroscientist, sat nervously on an interview couch at the Boston Eugenics Laboratory while the nanomachines spun twenty-eight of Virginia’s eggs into sperm. To get any closer, one woman would have to have climbed onto the other’s lap. Alica had never meant to fall in love with someone of her own gender, and indeed until she met Virginia six years before, had always enjoyed a healthy sexual appetite for men. But reproduction was no longer the exclusive province of heterosexuals, and with medical advances offering longer life spans and greater opportunity for experimentation, most vestiges of familial stigma over gay or bisexual lifestyles had been erased. At the age of thirty-four Alica had, for sixty-one months, been comfortably and happily wedded to this fifty-three-year-old woman. Today the couple was about to embark upon an adventure.

“Boy or girl?” the AI machine asked.

“We don’t care.”

“Intelligence?”

“Highest importance,” Virginia said. Alica nodded.

“Physical characteristics?”

“Tall would be nice,” Virginia said.

“But only if all other considerations are equal,” Alica added, thinking it would be foolish even to give up a one percent loss of intelligence for six inches in height.

“Any special family traits we should look for?”

Alica answered. “Virginia’s mother was an Olympic swimmer, and my great-uncle was Gary Franklin Smith, the painter.”

The AI intoned: “Out of forty-eight pairings with perfect genetic physical and mental health, we have one that is exceptional athletically and artistically, and another that’s off the charts in aesthetic perception, but only of average athletic endowment. Each would be a brown-eyed female; the former would be six feet tall, the latter five-eleven.”

Virginia and Alica smiled at each other. “We’ll take the second one,” they proclaimed in unison.

Conveniently, the two women found themselves in the midst of an obstetric technological revolution. Cloning, also known as parthenogenetics, the precursor of same-sex parenthood, had become legal in the United States in July 2034, a decade after the first successful adult human cloning in France. Same-sex parenthood, or homogenetics, had first been offered in the United States in May 2042, and Alica Banks would be among the first one hundred women in the Boston area to try it. (Male couples would require a female surrogate until pods became available in 2045.)

The Eugenics Laws, to govern selective breeding of humans, had been passed in August 2022. The Democrats had been in power that year, and President Gordon Safer had wisely pushed for unilateral parental control. Granted, had the government been involved in eugenic decision-making, characteristics such as honesty and emotional self-control might have pervaded today’s teenage population at only slight cost to vivacity and physical beauty. Nevertheless, government interference, or even incentives, would have wrought unforeseeable political and social consequences, perhaps even some diminution of the bond of love between parent and child.

As it turned out, fears of unleashing a billion self-absorbed geniuses upon an ill-prepared world were unfounded. In fact, parents tended toward the selection of more socially valuable qualities for their offspring than they might have chosen for themselves: intellectual honesty, emotional intelligence, and compassion, among others.