Greg Bear: Vitals

Dave pushed Mary’s Triumph backward with a few spurts of the thrusters. I could make out the fishing boat’s name, just as Dave remembered it, painted in a broken arc on the smashed stern.

‘Let’s go east,’ Dave said. ‘And up a bit. The boat dragged a few lines behind her when she went down.’

We met in the mansion’s Great Room, as Betty Shun described it, almost sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. This was the room that smelled of anise and crème de menthe. Skylights hidden in the forest above dropped the day’s last filtered green light on a broad mahogany desk covered with magazines, newspapers, and a small laptop computer. Couches upholstered in rich yellow fabric awaited our attentions, like the laps of generous houris. The furniture floated on a velvety-smooth mauve carpet accented by white moons and antique yellow suns.

Betty Shun introduced us and gave Montoya a packet she had printed out a few minutes earlier. Then she left, wagging her finger and saying, with a smile, ‘You boys be good.’

Montoya held out his hand. I gripped it and judged it, which is always unfair and completely natural: skin moist, pressure light. A polite handshake. He was good looking in a rugged way, with a short, pushed-up nose and probing black eyes. His cheeks had been pocked by youthful acne and a thin black nubbin of beard adorned his chin. His smile was quick but shy. His clothes fit loose but well, and his sandals were old friends, worn and comfortable. Montoya would not have impressed anyone had they met him on a street corner.

He invited me to sit at a long, ornate brass and maple bar.

‘Welcome to the Fortress of Solitude,’ he said. ‘I’m the butler. Betty is really Supergirl. Coffee now, wine with dinner at eight, Madeira for dessert, and late-night chat, if you’d care to stay.’ He went behind the bar. ‘What’s your jolt?’

‘Latte,’ I said. ‘Please.’

Montoya had sold TeraSpin three years earlier and spent most of his time serving on the boards of charities. He had given grants and funded scholarships for more than sixty universities around the world.

He stood before the professional espresso machine and hummed the theme from The Empire Strikes Back as the valve roared and spat. Having my milk steamed by one of the world’s wealthiest men was intriguing. I thought there was a touch of ennui in his eyes, but it’s easy to overanalyze the rich. Maybe he looked that way because he had been disappointed so often.

‘Did Betty tell you about Gus and Phil?’ Montoya asked as he poured foam and hot milk from the small steel pitcher.

‘She did,’ I said.

Being around Gus Beck made me nervous. He was twitchy and far too brilliant. I never knew when he might erupt in a fit of righteous technical criticism. Phil Castler was just the opposite – old-world gracious, fierce in debate but otherwise mild and self-effacing.

Montoya sprinkled cocoa over the peak, handed me my latte, and came around the bar carrying another mug filled with plain black coffee. He sat on the stool next to mine. ‘And?’

I smiled. ‘Uploading into cyberspace, living in a computer or a robot brain, immortalized in hardware, in silicon…’

‘Makes you laugh?’ Montoya asked, sipping.

‘No. I just don’t think it’ll happen in time for me and thee.’

‘Tell me why,’ Montoya asked primly.

‘The devil is in the details. The mind is the body. Gus is still back with Descartes in believing they can be separated.’

‘Explain.’

‘Downloading the brain’s patterns isn’t enough. Everything you know and think is embedded in your neurons, but your consciousness is in the cells of your entire body. Your mind is really a complex of brains, with major contributions from the nervous and immune systems. The flesh is intelligent, all flesh, and all of it contributes to your personality at one level or another. Take the body away, and you become near-beer, bitter without the kick.’

Montoya chuckled and looked away, rubbing one hand on his breast. ‘Why not capture the state of each cell, each neuron, in a computer? A super MRI machine could do something like that, right?’

‘Each one of our cells is like a huge factory with thousands of machines and workers. What the cells do, the decisions they make, how they live, contributes to what you think and how you behave. We won’t capture that much detail in any artificial memory in our lifetime. Even if we could, one human being would probably fill all the computer capacity on Earth.’

Montoya nodded. ‘What about Castler – sending in nano-machines and cleaning up an aging body?’

Easy questions so far. ‘It’s a good scheme, quite possible, but how old are you, Owen?’

‘Forty-five,’ he said.

‘You’ll be ninety before nanotech is proven and safe. Fifty years creeps up awfully fast.’

I was playing down the prospect of Phil’s success a little; thirty years was not unlikely.

‘You’re not just saying that to get me to fund you?’

‘I think Gus and Phil are brilliant. I encourage you to fund them both. But their ideas are longer-term.’

‘They hate being told that,’ Montoya said. He looked at me squarely. ‘How are your theories any more convincing?’

‘I won’t turn you into a corpsicle and hope somebody knows how to fix you in a hundred years. I won’t shave you down neuron by neuron, then upload you into some memory bank no one has even begun to design. I can begin to increase our life span in the next few years, with minimal intervention. If you and I want to stay young and healthy longer,’ I said, closing in, ‘our only hope is medical maintenance, keeping our bodies vigorous. Specifically, mitochondrial chromosome adjustment.’

‘Beck turned red when I told him I was meeting with you,’ Montoya said. ‘He said you were insufferably arrogant. He said you were re-hashing theories proven wrong back in the nineteen twenties. I thought about asking Betty to fetch him a spit-cup.’

‘There’s a lot of passion there,’ I said. Gus and Phil were my rivals and might have called me a fool once or twice, but they deserved a modicum of respect, even from a man as wealthy as Montoya.

‘I agree, they’re way off track,’ Montoya said. ‘They’ll never see the promised land. I’ve read your papers. I like them. Tell me more.’

‘That’s new,’ Dave said, swiveling the DSV and shining our upper bank of floods on a clump of tube worms. Beyond the worms, the sub’s lights shimmered through white clouds like old, chalky paint: a bacteria-rich spring, small in diameter but productive.

‘Let’s see.’ He sidled the sub in a few meters. I pulled down my data glove, feeling the plastic limiter box click into place, guided a sensor-laden mechanical arm, and pushed a probe into the spring outflow.

‘Shove it, shove that old rectal thermometer right into the Earth’s fundament,’ Dave said with another leer. He wasn’t funny. ‘Eighty-six degrees Celsius,’ he said.

‘Congratulations.’

‘I’m just the pilot,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘You’re the researcher. You’ll get the credit.’

Montoya listened to my presentation for two hours. We broke for a quick dinner – crab cakes and stir-fried vegetables, served with an excellent Oregon pinot gris. We were studying each other, and neither of us was willing to reveal too much. Looking a little glazed, he called a break at ten p.m. Betty Shun appeared to take me on a tour of the house while Montoya fielded some phone calls.

The glass wall fronted the east wing. The west wing ended in a boat launch built into the native rock of another cove. It easily doubled what had at first seemed merely huge. The floor plan of Montoya’s Fortress of Solitude had to total a hundred thousand square feet – two and a third acres, topped by wind-winnowed forest, the air-conditioner vents camouflaged as tree stumps and the condensers as moss-covered boulders.