Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

I never wanted to live for ever.

But there’s a good chance that I will.

Health has always fascinated me. Largely, I suppose, because of my lack of it. When I was five I had to wear glasses. When I was nineteen, I started to suffer from hearing loss, and from the age of thirty-one I was regularly using a hearing aid. And, of course, my skin was regularly subject to burning and scarring in the light of the sun.

So I tried to turn these weaknesses into advantages. After years of wearing chunky glasses, I was eventually able to purchase a pair of toric multi-function soft disposable contact lenses that fully corrected my vision. These were “smart” lenses, able to adjust on a daily and even hourly basis for the needs of the eye, and the environs. With these lenses, I could see perfectly at night; I could read fine print that was invisible to 99 per cent of people with 20-20 vision; my eyes were never dry or dusty; I could even, with some fiddling, amplify my vision to the level of a pair of cheap binoculars.

These lenses cost me almost six months’ salary, but I felt it was worth it. Then, when my deafness got worse, I cajoled the university’s medical insurance department into paying for me to have a pair of inner-ear hearing aids to replace the chunky clip-ons I’d originally been allocated. These sleek plastic tubes slipped easily into the ear itself, and moulded perfectly to the contours of my inner ear passage. Ever since they’d first been introduced – in the early years of the twenty-first century – these digital hearing aids were computer-adjusted and tailor-made to amplify only those frequencies that the wearer had difficulty hearing. So the sound quality was flawless. And, with some fine tuning, I was able to improve the accuracy of these hearing aids so that I could follow a conversation taking place at a table on the opposite side of a crowded restaurant. I could eavesdrop both sides of someone’s mobile phone conversation. I could, literally, hear a pin drop.

Then, when the second edition of my book was published, sales went through the roof and my fortune doubled. It helped that I was now a semi-glamorous figure – a “consultant to the UN Police Authority”. It helped, too, that by this time I had gained a few pounds – enough to stop me looking like a starved librarian – and changed my dress style. I’d become, almost, sexy; the book was a massive hit; and I became rich.

And I kept working on my gadgets. I was one of the first to improve the smart contact lens data-carrying capacity; and I was a pioneer of attempts to create wireless connections between remote computers and the smart lens’s “brain”. I did the same with the hearing aid. I purchased a massively expensive subvocaliser, which allowed me to access computer programs via signals sent from my earpiece – by simply articulating my requests subvocally.

And I worked out at the gym. I had my breasts non-surgically boosted – not excessively, just enough to give them a sensual curve and an exciting nipple flourish. I took a melatonin implant to shed the freckles, and acquired a pleasing all-year-long golden glow. During the last few years of working with Tom and the team, I was no longer a pale, skinny nerd – I was a sleek, bronzed, busty nerd. For me, the psychological difference was immense.

Then, after the squad disbanded, I had my heart attack; and when I recovered consciousness, I insisted on having a smart heart installed, instead of a biological pig’s heart. The smart heart was made of bioplastic; it automatically regulated and monitored buildups of deposits in the arteries, and it had a phenomenal pump capacity.

Tom came to see me in the hospital – but capriciously, cruelly, I wanted nothing more to do with him. I could tell he was hurt – I could see the pain sag through his proud body. But I felt, you see, different. I was a new woman. Tom was a part of the old Lena; so I cut him out of my life.

And then, a few months after leaving hospital, I started training. I ran, I lifted weights, I did yoga to relax, I made my body my temple. Before long I became fit; then very fit; then frighteningly fit. With this new heart, I could run a mile in three minutes, and not be out of breath. My physical strength was increased twofold, because of the increased efficiency of oxygen flow in my muscles.

And with my new heart, I knew that I need never fear heart attacks or strokes. Microbe-sized ionised probes in my bloodstream were analysed each day by the heart, and any irregularities broadcast to a medical computer. Heart and artery problems could be solved long before they actually became problems.

The new heart cost me 2 million euros. I bankrupted myself to buy it. But then, of course, I wrote another book, based on my ideas about emergence, but now refocusing all these ideas into a self-help manual. Naturally, I wrote it just for the money; and it made so much money. The book was called You Are God 2, and it featured photographs of me clad in Lycra, outrunning athletes.

As a result, I became a sex goddess, and an internationally famous self-help guru, the ultimate Before and After Makeover Person.

With the money I made, I was able to fund my ongoing process of self-renewal. Some of the techniques I tried were quasi-experimental; I became a guinea pig for the Anti-Agers. And so, at the age of fifty, I had the body of a thirty-five-year-old. At the age of fifty-five, I looked like a thirty-year-old. And by the age of sixty-one I had the body of a gorgeous, hot, seductive twenty-five-year-old.

I became a founder member of the Nematode Society, devoted to promoting pioneering research into how to reverse the ageing process. The trick is to realise that ageing is not a natural process; self-renewal is the natural process. (Think of the skin, which sloughs off layers and then grows afresh every day of our lives.) But through a process of natural selection, which of course favours reproduction over survival, organisms have evolved mechanisms that hinder the self-renewal and regeneration of the cell. To put it another way: as human beings, we have “death genes” that program us to degenerate and die. It’s Nature’s method, if I may be whimsical, of clearing the garden to make way for new crops.

But if we isolate these genes, and replace them with cell-renewal genes – the Perpetuity genes, as they are now known – the body itself becomes able to regrow limbs and even brain cells. In a perfectly regulated Universe, I always idly thought to myself, the human being would be like a worm – so that if you cut a man in half, both halves would regrow into fully formed human beings…

In practice, it doesn’t entirely work that way. If you lose a leg in an accident, it’s much easier to buy a new one from a lab than to grow a new one of your own. There are sects that doggedly insist on doing things the Natural Way – they have ceremonies in which they lop off fingers and even arms and then wait decades for them to regrow. But, in our busy consumer-led world, it’s easier by far to purchase over-the-counter limbs, eyes and ears than to, as it were, do it yourself.

But the Perpetuity gene still has a vital role to play; through a series of coded messages distributed throughout the body by RNA, the gene replenishes and regenerates internal organs, it eradicates cancer, and it keeps arteries clear.

It cures baldness in men too. And that, if I may say so, is such a boon.

To continue: I wasn’t, of course, the only one to be taking advantage of anti-ageing technology. Many others were doing the same; my point here is, I was the first. Or at least, one of the first. One of the pioneers.

I am now nearly a thousand years old, subjective elapsed time. I still have the body of a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old. I am the third-oldest human being in the entire Universe. And the other two, trust me, look weathered and tired.