James Halperin - The First Immortal

“Don’t knock it.”

“But I need more. Besides, I’ve got four children, four grandchildren, my mother, and a best friend still in suspension.” “They won’t know the difference between being revived in ten years or fifty. The AIs are projecting that by 2120, nanotech will be so cheap, it’ll cost less to revive people than to store them. Their transition into the modern world will be easier by then, too.”

“I know all the arguments, Carl, but I’ll know the difference. Besides, if we don’t figure out how to motivate people pretty damn soon, the human race is gonna have a big problem. People have to accomplish rewarding work; we need to achieve things with our lives.”

“How can people achieve things,” Epstein posited, “when machines are smarter, faster, stronger, and more talented than we are?”

“Machines don’t care, and people need to be cared about. Machines can only do what we tell them to; it’s still up to us to decide what we want. Only the living can achieve satisfaction from accomplishment. That’s why swimmers are still setting records, 150 years after submarines were built. Artists still paint, two and a half centuries after the invention of the camera. And novelists still write books, even though they have to compete with 55t parallel internal memory chips.”

“Brave souls, they. Why not simply relax and enjoy the ride?”

“Because I refuse to be part of the problem.”

January 14, 2075

—After less than a century of existence, the Extropy Institute attains membership of one billion, making it the second largest religious or philosophical organization in the world. Founded as an educational corporation in California during the early 1980s, the Institute propounds a philosophy of immortalism, self-transformation, atheism, and spontaneous order through evolution, technology, and institutional intelligence.—Studying a brain cloned from skin cells of ATI Chairman Randall Petersen Armstrong, researchers at Amgen LaRoche isolate a nerve-impulse enzyme that allows perfect access to all neuronal memories. Within two weeks the World Drug Administration expects to decide if the drug, Mnemex, which could grant every human virtually total recall, should be approved for general use.

The fifty-six celebrants filled all three rooms but did not overcrowd them. A lovely party, Ben thought. Yes, lovely was the word.

He’d gotten used to the fact that every female he met was attractive, and often available. At first he’d been astounded by how relaxed sex had become during the eighty-three years he was on ice. But it made sense. Every adult was at sexual peak, and consistently desirable. Furthermore, without the danger of deceitful infidelity, disease, or unwanted pregnancy, societal attitudes had rendered jealousy less of a roadblock. Sex was now mainly a source of joy and pleasure, perhaps an expression of friendship or affection.

Still, Ben knew that even in today’s world, the fascinating, intelligent, dark-eyed woman with whom he was presently engaged in lively discourse was off limits, a prohibition having little to do with the fact that she was gay. If two people with incompatible sexual orientations did fall in love, or were just sufficiently attracted to each other’s personalities, gays could easily become bisexual or straight, or vice versa, simply by undergoing a painless neuronal restructuring regimen. A far more daunting, indeed impassable, roadblock to such an encounter was that Virginia Gonzalez was married to his great-granddaughter.

The occasion was Ben’s 150th birthday, which Epstein, who’d recently embarked on a career as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at City College of New York, had arranged at the St. Regis Hotel. During the previous week, in keeping with the St. Regis’s annual custom, self-replicating mini-assemblers had rebuilt the hotel from the ground up, and down. These ultra-cheap fabricators connected units approximately one-tenth of a cubic micron each; microscopic, but still a million times cruder than the individual molecules arranged by nanomachines.

The festivities took place in a medium-sized suite on the 317th floor, sixty-seven stories above street level. Suites on the underground floors were cheaper to rent, and indistinguishable from those aboveground—each cubic meter was climate-controlled based on guest preference, and real-time 3-D screens and artificial sunlight created the illusion of picture windows—but Epstein had good reason to pay extra. Over every fireplace on floors 300 through 349, including the one in this suite, hung an identical copy, perfectly reproduced by microassemblers—that is, about a thousand molecules at a time-of Gary Franklin Smith’s Boston Common.

Each room had been decorated by a new AI system programmed to complement the sensibility of the human eye. The acoustics worked flawlessly alongside Ben’s inner ear sound-filtering system, the latter a luxury Ben could appreciate while everyone under the age of fifty took it for granted. The crowd was animated and amiable, many having had their moods lifted by drozac-laced social interaction enhancement tonics. And the hors d’oeuvres, which had been prepared in a nanoassembler unit (borrowed from yours truly), were so delicious that certain otherwise restrained guests appeared to have metamorphosed into gluttons.

Ben realized, to his amazement, that he was having a wonderful time.

Not eighteen months earlier, upon moving into his own dwelling, Ben had plunged into chronic melancholy. At the time, he could neither understand his gloom nor share it, so he’d simply pretended to others that he was fine.

Marge’s absence remained his fiercest ache. But after a year of soul-searching, he’d come to realize that a primary motivation for having been frozen in the first place was his need to reconcile with Gary, who was not only still in biostasis, but likely brain-impaired. Ben decided he needed to make himself independent; earn enough money to revive his family, as well as Toby, and to take care of his son. His estranged son: a once-renowned artist, who might remember nothing about that former life. Or his father.

Ben wondered how he could achieve the requisite financial wherewithal for revivs and care of his loved ones. He possessed no skills to contribute to society. His medical experience was worthless. Human medical technicians and counselors were in demand, but that vocation required reeducation, and his antiquated knowledge would actually place him at a disadvantage: He would have to unlearn much of what he’d been taught in medical school.

Of course, he’d always possessed business acumen, people did like him, and he knew he was capable of working tirelessly; all still remunerative qualities even in the 2070s. Nonetheless, he believed he could never compete against those conceived in the crucible of eugenic selection and raised under conditions far more similar to present society. Sort of like the difference, he decided, between a well-maintained late model automobile versus an ancient one that had been overhauled. Which would most people prefer to own?

“What aspect of modern life did you find the most surprising?” Virginia was now asking him. Ben got that one a lot, but hadn’t tired of it. He regarded it as a natural question, since he was now one of the planet’s hundred oldest conscious mammals.

“The fact that there are no human doctors was disconcerting,” Ben answered, “and the effects of eugenics, DNA repair, and genetic reengineering: everyone being so smart and youthful, tall and good-looking; I must say, I found that rather intimidating. Still do. Then to see so many talented and intelligent people squandering their lives in designer drugs and VR pods. But I guess it would have to be the amount of information at our fingertips, and that even in the midst of data bases a billion times more comprehensive than anything we had during the twentieth century, there’s still so much we don’t know.”