The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  Getting excused from school had been no problem, especially under these circumstances. I’d been enrolled in a self-directed learning program since age seven, and had remained at least two levels ahead of any other nine-year-old in my school. Besides, I’d finished all of that semester’s courses back in February, and had been studying independently for the previous four months.

  Politics seemed as good a subject as any, even without the research advantage family connection afforded. And any opportunity to watch Dad in action was not to be given up, for it would certainly be my desire to follow in his path. My eyes rarely left him.

  “Do you really believe,” my father, now Senate Minority Leader George Crane, lectured, “that the death penalty is appropriate punishment for failure to pay the premium on one’s biostasis insurance?”

  Of course not, I thought. Way to go, Dad! Exactly!

  Fortunately, Dad’s question was rhetorical; otherwise the overwhelmingly Republican assembly might have intoned a resounding “Aye.”

  But this fourth-term Democratic senator (a rarity these days) was shrewd enough to brandish a more cogent justification: “Apart from simple decency, it will cost the government a lot less money to subsidize suspension for those who can’t afford it than to sustain the greatest class conflict since our turn-of-the-millennium War Against Crime.”

  I’d been studying contemporary politics, and realized that my father’s admonition addressed the single obsession of the prevailing Republican majority: money. I well knew that cost efficiency had been the measure of every major legislative and executive decision since Swift and Sure author Travis Hall’s election as President in November of 2004. His landslide reelection in 2008 and former Vice President Garrison Roswell’s convincing victory in the presidential elections of 2012 had only reinforced their philosophy. The Swift and Sure Anticrime Bill itself exemplified “neorightism,” since the true impetus behind it had been money; President Hall hadn’t sold his bill as a moral absolute but rather as the only financially sustainable (and therefore politically tolerable) method of winning the War Against Crime.

  Since then, codified pragmatism had become the banner of third millennium Republicans. Sacrifice the few for the many, don’t try to rescue everyone, or the overloaded ship-of-state might sink.

  Faster and cheaper computers allowed instant access to all public scientific data, but approaches for filtering objective data from self-serving hyperbole were still evolving. The Republicans were wise enough to encourage the free market to do the sorting. Financial incentives had already been instituted to encourage businesses to set up open “electronic fact forums” in easy-to-follow hypertext, allowing scientific experts, both human and artificial, to rate each other’s theories for objectivity and clarity of thought. The market insisted on due process and confirmable double-blind analysis by tending to ignore those opinions that failed to use objective standards. Hyperbole was filtered out through the SPERs (statistical peer-review expert-credibility ratings), upon which opinion makers gained or lost most of their influence. As artificial intelligence machines became progressively smarter, Republican legislators and their staffs gradually developed the habit of giving the AIs access to as much data as possible, then letting them suggest where to deploy available funds to do the most good.

  We leftists would assert: Some values can’t be gauged. For example, every law-abiding American citizen is too precious to denominate financially. We should never surrender even a single life we could reasonably expect to save.

  The New Republicans’ answer: Life has always been a commodity, measured in terms of dollars. Long before the achievements of TraffiCop and satellite navigation, we were perfectly capable of making our cars safer and saving thousands of lives per year; but then fewer of us could afford to drive. We could have lowered the speed limit and saved even more lives, but in America, time is money, and money is the coin of life. So we opted for a dispassionate trade-off: money and time saved with the loss of random human lives as a secondary consequence. And in so doing, we improved the average prosperity, and average quality and quantity of life for all of us.

  This example illustrated the common principle of the New Republican Dynasty: the cold-blooded calculation of value, the axiom of putting a price in dollars on everything and everyone, the striving neither for individuated morality nor political appeasement, but for precise, objective appraisals. Not necessarily the Good; only the greatest Feasible Good. Compared to them, we seemed like well-intentioned mystics, romantic dreamers ready to embrace each new political theory as long as it seemed fair and compassionate. The rightists behaved more like scientists; dispassionate and cold, attentive less to political justice than to results and evidence.

  Although more hard-nosed than Dad even back then, I found these neorightest number-crunchers inhuman and mostly contemptible. But that opinion was becoming harder for me to maintain, because their policies obviously tended to work.

  I also understood that throughout history, in almost every significant conflict regardless of moral imperative, the scientists had prevailed over the mystics. Realism, a clear view of the world as it is rather than as it ought to be, and the willingness to let that view stand or fall on the basis of unprejudiced experiment, had been a nearly insurmountable weapon. Over the previous century of American politics, the invincible cannons of science had been passed back and forth between these two armies many times. But for a solid decade they had thundered from the Republican side.

  Within eighteen months after the enactment of Swift and Sure in January 2005, the crime problem had abated, people felt safer in their homes and on the streets, taxes had been lowered, GNP had increased rapidly, average life expectancy had risen with record velocity. And except in Massachusetts and a few other liberal states, Democrats were becoming much harder to elect.

  “We all agree,” Dad continued, shifting to a more conciliatory and, I feared, ultimately unpersuasive argument, “that someday most humans will live much longer life spans than we enjoy today, with or without cryonics. We all agree that, with or without cryonics, the ultimate goal of medical science is to discover how to banish all aging and death. We also agree that cryonics is the only realistic hope for our own generation, and perhaps the next few generations, to participate in this utopian age that is already coming into view, yet seems cruelly out of our grasp.

  “We all deem it irrational to require the terminally ill literally to die before entering suspension. We agree that those in suspension must have rights, including legal control over the disposition of their frozen brains and bodies, some means to preserve their estates, a minimum of confusion and red tape, and the assurance that they would not be prematurely unfrozen even if their private insurer and their cryonics facility each became insolvent simultaneously.

  “That with which we cannot agree is their metaphor of cryonics as a ticket on a private monorail to this gleaming future world we all envision, and if one can’t pay the fare, one can’t board the train.

  “As Americans, our moral tradition does not countenance human sacrifice. We do not cast our babies into the Nile. Our aged and infirm are not left to die on mountainsides.”

  I caught my father’s eye, clenched my fist and scowled. Scare ‘em, Dad, I tried to telepath. (Of course, we couldn’t back then.) Don’t preach to them. They’re too far gone to hear you. But maybe this was just a buildup?

  “My grandfather served in the Navy during World War Two,” Dad continued, “and told me that the vital difference between our side and theirs, the reasoned doctrine which gave him the greatest pride in his country, was this notion of all for one. We risk a battleship to save a PT boat. We do not abandon our wounded. We dive into the ocean rather than let a fellow sailor drown. For it is not the sailor we save that matters so much as the knowing, by every sailor, that if you find yourself cast overboard, your shipmates would unhesitatingly imperil their own lives to attempt rescue.

  “That is how a nation prevails against a ruthless enem
y, be that enemy the Axis powers or Death itself. The choice, gentlemen, is simple: World War Two, or Vietnam. Share immortality, or brace yourselves to wage this War Against Death, the most overwhelming enemy in the history of humankind, with only halfhearted cooperation on your own side.”

  As I listened to Dad’s summation, I winced. Not strong enough. He’d have to terrify these clowns to convert their votes. I even considered e-mailing him via wristband PC, but decided the transmission wouldn’t be listened to in time.

  Nine Republicans and one other Democrat had already spoken today, and eighteen more senators would address the floor before S. 1122, the Cryonics Regulations Bill, was amended and voted upon. So far, the Republicans had simply ignored the Democrats.

  President Roswell’s “pet senator,” Lawrence Bayless (R. TX), had argued convincingly to require that suspendees deposit all money not bequeathed to their survivors into a U.S. Government Inflation Neutralization Account (INA). Such a program would safeguard (though not increase) every suspendee’s wealth, while providing a bonanza of low interest loans to the government. Projected taxpayer savings: at least $2 trillion over the next ten years.

  Senator Thomas Hollandsworth (R. CA) had suggested the recognition of four categories of the “nonliving,” listed here in reverse order of status: (1) The irrevocably dead, that is, cremated, lost at sea, et al. (2) Persons frozen or otherwise DNA-preserved, but with hopelessly irreparable brain damage. (3) Persons frozen after death with brain tissue arguably saved. (4) Persons in suspended animation, frozen prior to death and any material brain decay.

  The legal implications would be staggeringly complex, and such categories would no doubt occasion countless lawsuits over their designation.

  God, I hated the guy, but he did seem the perfect person to draft these regulations. I quelled a laugh. “Hollandsworth’s so anal,” I’d once overheard Dad tell my great-uncle Gary, “you couldn’t get a pencil up his ass with a pile driver.” He’d have been upset to know I heard him use such language, and especially that I’d bugged his digital communicator, but naturally I thought it hilarious.

  Earl Churchman (R. NE) argued on behalf of the insurance industry, a strong supporter of S. 1122. Insurance executives were already salivating over the banquet they were about to attend. After the bill passed, a typical suspension and indefinite maintenance contract was projected to cost only $34,000 per person, barely one month’s average American household income. Nonetheless, about eighty-five percent of those intending to sign up for the dormantory expected to fund this contract through a “cryonics all-contingency” policy. Most also planned to purchase “death or suspension” insurance with their INA accounts as beneficiary.

  Churchman asserted that a government reinsurance agency, similar to the FDIC and FSLIC. would be the most effective instrument to infuse financial confidence into the cryonics system.

  Finally Clarissa Westervelt (R. MI) addressed population and environmental issues: “My husband and I have been married for twenty-three years, and our original plan was to have three children. So far, we have only one; yesterday was her seventeenth birthday.

  “But we intend to produce at least two additional offspring.

  “After the turn of the millennium Glen and I decided that instead of raising two more children at that time, we would save our money, and use it to dispatch our own DNA into the next century. And along with our DNA, we agreed to send as many of our memories as we could salvage, preserved in our own frozen brains.”

  I found her metaphor both intriguing and comforting, but such comfort would be short-lived.

  “Some of you,” Westervelt continued, “might laud this restraint of our breeding instincts, while others may deem us selfish for having deprived the world of new life. Opinions about population growth remain diverse.

  “I am an optimist. I believe technology’s ability to help us sustain population growth is advancing faster than world population itself. New farming disciplines are revolutionizing agriculture, while energy and transportation steadily decrease in cost. And the sciences of oceanic husbandry are perhaps the most promising of all. By breeding fish and other sea organisms using the latest techniques, undersea farming experts insist we can quintuple our annual harvest from the oceans within six years.

  “But wealth is not merely about material goods; it is about life itself.

  “A person earning $100,000 per year, that is, just below today’s official poverty level, can expect to attain seventy-nine years. A person who earns $1 million, roughly two and one-half times the average worker’s income in 2015, has an average life expectancy of ninety-six years. A $10 million wage earner will, on average, see the far side of a century.”

  She stared at Dad, addressing her next observation to him, as if lecturing a child. “With or without cryonics, Senator Crane, money buys survival. Always has. Always will.”

  My initial anger dissipated as I saw determination ignite behind Dad’s eyes. Westervelt’s speech had awakened my father, and perhaps the entire Democratic party.

  “Citizens must,” she proceeded, “through labor and prudence, provide themselves and their families the means to sustain their own lives. And if these same citizens are willing and able to provide such means to others through voluntary charity, I admire them for it. But I will not betray my constituents by voting for any legislation that requires them, through involuntary taxation, to diminish their own odds by paying for others to be frozen.”

  Westervelt’s oration continued for nineteen minutes more, after which the Minority Leader was permitted to respond on behalf of the Democratic senators. I hoped Dad would now tender their most forceful inducement: enlightened self-interest.

  “Contrary to popular opinion,” he began, “even we liberals believe that property rights are important. But the crux here is not wealth redistribution. This argument does not wrangle between provision for the poor versus the sanctity of individual achievement. And while consequential, neither is morality today’s primary topic.

  “Our current state of affairs has all the makings of a genuine emergency. And in an emergency, all bets are off!”

  Yes! I celebrated. Now we had a shot.

  “Do I overstate my case? Consider this: If you are drowning, doesn’t the issue of ownership of any fresh air above you become meaningless? Wouldn’t you fight, and rightly so, to breathe it?”

  “Perfect,” I said to Grandmother, not quite whispering. Impolite, but what could she expect?

  She smiled warmly at my over-enthusiasm, in spite of herself.

  “We stand here today,” Dad continued, “full of hope as we witness the dawn of a new paradigm. Taxes may be inevitable, but Death, that other prehistoric absolute, is no longer certain.

  “Do you wish to act in your own self-interest? Then let us make this truly new world available to all. If we don’t, many more lives will certainly be lost, forever, to those clawing past us to breathe the sweet air of permanent life.

  “No matter your politics, no matter your religion or creed, understand now the certainty of the conflict we face. The drowning man is no thin or artful metaphor; he is an exact allegory. We’re all drowning. And yet there’s plenty of air for all of us in the peaceful sharing of it. By voting your pocket-of-today, you squander your fortune tomorrow. Let us make victory against death a prospect for all, lest it become a prospect for none.”

  * * *

  Later that day, when the Senate was polled on individual components of the enactment-bound S. 1122, the only tie vote was on the issue of government subsidization of cryonics for the poor. Even conservative senators such as Juanita “Chacha” Guerrero (R. PR) voted for the subsidy. Dad’s rebuttal had converted the contest from hopeless to too-close-to-call.

  Roswell’s first-term vice-president, Henry Rearden, transmitted the deciding ballot, and by a margin of 55 to 54, our side lost.

  I was disappointed, but already viewed this political process as a marathon, not a sprint. That had been just the first
leg of this race, I thought, love and pride for my father, and a sense of my own destiny, perhaps someday my place in history, holding sway over any other passion. This very close race.

  September 7, 2015

  —A woman in Montreal, Canada, gives birth to healthy octuplets, two girls and six boys. The mother had been taking fertility drugs when she became pregnant. The smallest of the infants weighs 11 ounces, and may require incubation for up to a year. All eight are expected to survive, and if they do, will become the second set of living octuplets in Canada.—Shakespeare2, the Intel and Oracle joint venture, launches its literary career today. The giant computer system accurately mimics the human brain, but is tens of thousands of times faster, with flawless memory and calculation abilities. In two weeks, Shakespeare2 has written 1,702 novels, 5,240 screenplays, and over 10,000 essays. Today, at the firm’s first sealed-bid auction, 13 of the novels were purchased by publishing houses, and 21 screenplays optioned by studios. New York Times critic Lynde Tversky predicts, “Based on the Shakespeare2 oeuvres I’ve had time to read so far, these should not be expected to become blockbusters.”—The United States Congress repeals the Silver Standard Act of 2014, which has for nearly three years backed each dollar with 1/117th of an ounce of silver. Although the move was expected, Hong Kong silver prices nevertheless climb $4 to $129.40 per ounce in heavy trading.

  During the three weeks following the deaths of my parents, I’d never been alone for more than a few minutes at a time, even at nighttime. My aunts, uncles, and grandmother rarely left whichever room I happened to occupy. Each night, my great-uncle Gary slept on the floor of my bedroom, and often I would catch him staring at me as if he feared I might stop breathing. In retrospect, I think it was a spontaneous form of suicide watch, the entire Smith clan instinctively closing ranks around their most vulnerable member.