The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (22 page)

Thomas Zed’s face is illuminated by the soft glow of the chopper’s computer display as Arjun opens the door. “We’re ready.”

“All right, then. Let’s get this done.”

Green watches in fascination as Zed totters through the security scanner. The old man seems like a grotesque caricature of advanced aging. When they arranged the meeting, he had no way of knowing whether or not Zed had undergone any treatment. Apparently not. It’s all the ancient figure can do to join him at the railing on the edge of the parking structure.

“Good evening, Mr. Green,” Zed says in a reed-thin voice. “I hope you’re taking good care of Dr. Anslow. He’s a bit misguided, but really quite a decent fellow.”

“I’m sure he is,” Green agrees. “And also quite brilliant. I could hardly believe what he told me.”

Zed smiles shrewdly. “It does seem pretty astounding, doesn’t it?”

“I have to say I’m a little disappointed, though. I thought that you yourself would be proof of concept, and obviously that’s not the case.”

Zed’s eyes narrow and nearly disappear in the massive wrinkling. “Look at me closely, Mr. Green. Very closely.”

“I’ve already done that. I never forget a face. An essential tool of my trade.”

“Good. Because the next time you see this face and hear this voice, you’ll have your proof.”

“And how long might that be?”

“Soon. Very soon. So as it turns out, our meeting is well timed. But enough about me. Let’s talk about you, and where you’re going. I have to congratulate you on a brilliant career. You’ve come a long way in a remarkably short time.”

The pair stares out over the river to the East Side of the city. Random bits of light dot the darkness. The bright ribbons of streetlights that once formed a dazzling grid are gone, victims of declining budgets.

“I’ve come only as far as history will let me,” Green replies. “The times make the man, not vice versa. If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.”

“Ah, but it’s not someone else. It’s you. And that’s why I’m here.”

“Should I be flattered?”

Zed smiles. “Your life is a matter of public record. Mine is precisely the opposite. You see, I’ve never been a prime mover, like yourself. I’ve always been a facilitator, a mediator, a consolidator. And to be quite honest, I’ve profited handsomely in this role, very much so. But that misses the point.”

“The point being?”

“The world needs both of us. We’re both indisputably the best at what we do. You supply the social vision. I supply the economic means to realize it. You might say we’re complementary sides of the same coin. But most important, we need to stay in our respective roles on a more or less permanent basis. The world owes us that, and the world will benefit greatly from it.”

Green nods. “So where do we go from here?”

“For now, I think you should retain Dr. Anslow as collateral. Once I’ve demonstrated that the process works and you can derive benefit from it, we’ll talk about other arrangements. As a public figure, you’re a special case. We’ll need to moderate the treatment so you don’t suddenly appear dramatically different. From then on, it will be a matter of periodic applications.”

“And what about yourself?”

“Anonymity has its benefits. There’s no reason that I can’t be a young man again.”

“Congratulations.”

“And the same to you, Mr. Green.”

***

“I’m still having a hard time with this,” Rachel admits as she and Lane step off the MAX train at the Goose Hollow station. “I mean, you’ve traced this Autumn West to Mount Tabor. Wonderful, but the twenty-something centenarian part is pretty wobbly. Are you sure that the picture by her bed wasn’t doctored? Or maybe she’s just the best work ever out of some big-time rejuve shop.”

“Don’t think so,” Lane says. “I think she’s something else.”

“What else?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out.”

They enter the Goose Hollow Inn through the rear door. It’s early, so the booths and chairs in the back are empty. They walk on through to the front, where a woman in her middle sixties is pouring a glass of beer for a bearded patron who hunches over an open book at the bar. Wynn Pearson expertly dumps the excess head, tops off the pour, and wheels the beer around to the bar, where the patron grasps it without ever looking up from the text. As she plunges the patron’s smart card into the machine, she whisks back a stray strand of gray hair that escapes her ponytail.

“Lane!” Her blue eyes brighten as he sits down. “How you been?”

“Same as always. Cutting class.”

“You could afford it,” she says. “You had the brains.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that back then?” Lane asks. “I might have buckled down. Might
have become a professor.”

“ ’Fraid not,” she says with a slightly naughty grin. “You were way too hunky for anything like that. Besides, I don’t think biology was exactly your favorite subject—except for the reproductive process.” She looks over to Rachel with appraising yet kind eyes. “So who’s your friend?”

“This is Rachel. Rachel, Wynn Pearson.”

“Watch him,” Wynn twinkles at Rachel. “He’s definitely cute, but he’s a lot of trouble.”

Lane can still remember Wynn in his sophomore biology class at Lincoln, steering their young minds through cell chemistry, taxonomy, and basic genetics. She was a great teacher. They all loved her. “I can still see you with the scalpel and the frog. You were magnificent. Why aren’t you still doing it?”

“I think we’ve had that conversation, big guy.”

After the public schools collapsed, her only real option was to take a private teaching job, but she wouldn’t even consider it. As she told Lane more than once: “Goddamned if I’m going to show rich kids how to get even richer.”

“Well, guess what?” Lane says. “I’m ready to repent. I want to go back to class. And this time, I promise I’ll pay attention.”

“Aha, Lane the scholar,” she quips. “Truth is, you were always a bit of scholar, especially for such a cute kid. You were curious, and you read all the time—at least when you weren’t raising hell. So what to do you want to know?”

“How long can people live?”

“Easy one,” she says playfully. “Exactly as long as they’re supposed to.”

“Let’s suppose for a moment that we don’t believe in predestination. Then how long?”

The place is empty except for Lane and the patron immersed in the book, so she leans back against the counter and folds her arms. “The maximum human life span is generally agreed to be about one hundred twenty years—with no time off for good behavior.”

“And how often does that happen?”

“I can’t give you an exact number, but it’s probably only one in several hundred million people. It’s rare enough the international media gloms on to those who make it and hauls them out on a slow news day. Besides, from a biological standpoint it doesn’t really matter. In the end, we’re all slaves to the Gompertz curve.”

“What’s that, Ms. Pearson?” Rachel asks.

“It’s the rate at which we age. Let me put it this way. Remember when you were a kid?” she asks Lane. “Maybe ten or so?”

“Yeah, vaguely.”

“Except for accidents, do you remember anyone in your class at school dying?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s the healthiest time of our lives. We’re past childhood diseases, and the bad grown-up stuff has yet to hit us.”

“So when does the curve get thrown at us?”

“Now think back to your high school class. Remember anyone dying?”

Lane can still see the faces. Two girls and a boy.

Cancer, or leukemia, something like that. “Yes, I can. Three people.”

“That’s the curve starting up. Now think back over the last ten years to people about your age that you know. Anybody expire of natural causes?”

“More than I want to think about.”

“The curve shifting into a higher gear. Let’s go back and start with that class of ten-year-olds, all alive and kicking. Each year, the odds go up that one or more of them will expire during that year. Very small at first, maybe one in a few thousand. But by the time they reach high school, it’s maybe one in a few hundred. Still pretty small, but big enough that you see it working. But by the time they hit your age, it’s down to one in, say, fifty. Get the idea?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Well, by the time you hit one hundred twenty, the odds are essentially one in one. As you age, more and more people in your age group die each year of natural causes. If you plot it all out, it’s a curve, called the Gompertz curve, after the guy that figured it out.”

“Lucky fellow.”

“Let’s go back to where you started. You asked how long people live. I’m a little disappointed in you, Lane. There’s a much more fascinating question that’s hardly ever considered, and that’s why do people age at all?”

“If we didn’t get old and die, we’d overrun the planet, which we’ve almost done anyway.”

“That’s a problem, but it really doesn’t answer the question.”

“Then what does?”

“If you put aside spiritual beliefs, evolution requires only two things of you. The first is to survive until you’re old enough to reproduce. The second is to pass your genes on through the so-called germ line, which extends all the way back to the origins of life itself. Now, as it turns out, nature is very finicky about the germ line, and much less so about you personally.”

“So what’s that got to do with getting old?”

“Every organism, yourself included, has a limited amount of energy at its disposal to do things. Nature assures that you’ll have a big energy budget to spend on keeping your eggs or sperm in good shape to maintain the germ line, and something less on the upkeep for the rest of your cells. As it turns out, this second part of the budget is just enough to make sure that you live
until you reproduce and take care of what popped out for a while.”

“And then you start to go to hell.”

“Pretty much. In the past, natural selection let us last until about thirty, then pulled the plug. By that time, we were past our peak and got sick, murdered, eaten, or all three. The bodily upkeep budget no longer mattered. So now we have the answer: All your cells have repair mechanisms, but by the time your salad days are over, they can no longer keep up with the damage. You get old. You die.”

“So what if you could repair the damage faster than it accumulates? Could you prevent someone from aging?”

“Great in theory but almost impossible in practice. Your cells are the product of millions of years of evolution. They don’t answer to you. They answer only to life itself.”

Lane thinks of Autumn, of the stunning contrast between her youthful beauty and her apparent age. Maybe it has nothing to do with prevention. “Okay, so what if a person was already old and you wanted to wind the clock back to when they were young. What then?”

Wynn smiles patiently. “Boy, you drive a hard bargain, don’t you?”

“So what would you do?” Lane persists.

“Simple. I’d put everything back in original working order. I’d repair all the genetic damage to each cell.”

“And how would you do that?”

“Through some kind of extraordinarily advanced genetic therapy. To pull it off, you’d have to raise an entire army of very specialized artificial viruses.”

“Viruses?”

“Yes, viruses. You see, nature has already provided us with a highly evolved vehicle to deliver genetic material into the cell nucleus, where the genome resides. It’s called a retrovirus.”

“So why does the virus have to be artificial?” Lane asks.

“Many reasons,” Lynn answers. “For one thing, the immune system usually destroys real viruses before they can reach all their destination cells. What you need is a little protein vessel that’s of no real interest to the immune system. Now there’s all kinds of such devices.”

“You think they’d do the job?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a very old song with a line that goes, ‘Got to make it real, compared to what?’ You have to have some way to define exactly the extent of the damage that’s accumulated over the years. A tricky business, at best. The human genome has about three billion base pairs. So which ones are still good, and which ones have gone bad and mutated? And you also have to analyze when and how the genes are expressed. Then you have to figure out how to imprint them
onto the proper locations with the genome.”

“But if you could do all that, could you wind the clock back to that golden age,” Lane asks, “when the genes in all your cells were in a maximum state of repair?”

Wynn smiles. “Lane, you’re still quite the clever boy. Now, you get back to me when you’ve figured out how to do that.”

***

“Well, hello Mr. Durbin,” Warhead says as Lane enters into his chaotic jumble of technology run amok. “Are you having fun with your new self? Getting a little more pussy than usual?”

“Not really. You got a minute?”

The maze of indicator lights and small displays is broken only by a large Ultrares screen that shows a woman in coveralls binding a somewhat younger woman with bungee cords to the crumpled chrome bumper of a wrecked highway rig in a junkyard somewhere in the urban wasteland.

“A minute, huh?” Warhead says. “That’s my minimum billable increment.”

“I’ll take it. And maybe a few more, if you can help.”

“So what’s your problem?”

“There’s a woman named Autumn West. She was born about a hundred years ago in a small town somewhere in Nebraska. I need the location and the date of birth.”

Warhead spews an incomprehensible stream of phonemes into the microphone mounted on his headset. His wheelchair twists toward the array of consoles and displays, which are rapidly shifting their visual content. He rattles out yet another verbal stream, which spins him back toward Lane.

“This might take a minute. I told you about how I got to be a stub, right?”

“You mean the dope and the plane crash?” Lane hopes he has the right version.

“Yeah. Well, they put me on trial for drug smuggling. Didn’t work. All the evidence went up in the fireball at the crash site. Everything except me. I wound up in a tree, like a big piece of trimmed meat. After all that, they just gave up and sent me home.”