“I could spend more quality time with you …”
“That’s bullshit! I’m right here with your two daughters and a third child on the way and you’re not spending quality time with me, you’re setting up appointments with every guru in California! Do you really think you’d change if you were immortal? You’d set yourself some other impossible task: opening a nightclub on Mars or whatever. You want to defeat death not so you can live happily ever after, but to thwart fate. You’ve never known the meaning of happiness. I’m not criticizing: it’s what first attracted me to you. Your angst, your loneliness, your repressed romanticism, your awkwardness with Romy …”
Maybe, as a pregnant woman, Léonore was drinking too much Nespresso. Hormones plus caffeine are an explosive cocktail.
“You’re a doctor,” I protested. “Conquering death is your job.”
“No, my job is saving lives. There’s a subtle difference. I’m not fighting death, I’m fighting disease. Pain, infirmity, those are my enemies. At first, I found your hypochondriacal obsession with cell rejuvenation and genetic manipulation amusing, I thought you were sweet, like a little boy who’s read too much sci-fi. But later it became pathetic.”
“I’m a dreamer …”
“No you’re not: you’re a coward. And let me tell you something: there’s nothing sexy about being a coward. Be a man, for fuck’s sake. Can’t you see that all this ‘transhuman therapy’ is just a fantasy designed to humour infantile, ignorant, narcissistic megalomaniacs who can’t bring themselves to face the inevitable? For God’s sake, it’s blindingly obvious: these idiotic American billionaires are as scared of living as they are of dying! They all wear wigs—have you noticed? Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Steve Wozniak: the toupee brigade.”
God, Léonore was beautiful when she was angry! I shouldn’t have provoked her, but maybe I’m a masochist. That angry glint in her eyes … She was as sexy as Venus in furs with a whip.
“Don’t you think it would be wonderful, a life without end?”
“My poor darling, a life without end would be a life without purpose.”
“Really? So you’re saying the purpose of life is death?”
“Of course not, but without death, there are no stakes. No suspense. Too much time drains away the pleasure. Have you never read Seneca?”
“No, I haven’t read Seneca, I prefer Philip K. Dick. But they’re both dead. I don’t want to die, can’t you understand that? You’re not scared because you’re still young. Thirty years from now we’ll see how you feel about playing for extra time!”
“Listen, you’re fifty, you’ve still got two or three decades on earth, so stop whining, have fun, enjoy it, be grateful that nature has given you another child instead of pancreatic cancer. What I want is a father for my daughter, not an idiot in an Uberman outfit!”
She was becoming annoying; I became petty.
“You’re just jealous because George Church and Craig Venter have made more discoveries than your laboratory in Switzerland.”
She glared at me, her expression shifting from alarm to disgust and, finally, misery. It’s a moment I cannot think of without blushing in shame. And it’s not as though I haven’t been petty and spiteful many times in my life.
“Can’t you see that my boss in Switzerland was trying to warn you that your new heroes were crackpots who were only after your money? You’re stupider than I thought. Goodbye.”
Gathering Lou in her arms, Léonore marched to the door, and her rounded belly, her powerful breasts, her every step, her icy “Goodbye,” and the dull thud of the closing door, all these things were like knives in my stomach.
-
AND STILL I didn’t give up. I was too close. I wouldn’t listen to anyone. I thought that once I was enhanced, I’d have all the time in the world to win back my wife and child. I was as stubborn as a mule whose DNA had been CRISPR’d with a bull’s.
At night, the taillights of cars flowed like a river of blood down Sunset Boulevard. The radio announced a spike in air pollution. I felt particulates sting my eyes, my nose, my throat, just as they did in Paris. It was a curious idea to come looking for immortality in a city whose welcome gift was to give you lung cancer. After I had my “brain uploaded” all that remained was the transfusion of young blood offered by Ambrosia Health in Monterey. The clinic is a start-up founded by Jesse Karmazin, a medical graduate convinced that young blood is the fountain of youth. My cyber-daughter Romy/Pepper came with me on the road trip down Highway 1, which leads from San Diego to Monterey, from the south of LA to the south of San Francisco.
It was in Monterey, in 1967, that Jimi Hendrix burned his guitar; it was here that the first TED Talks took place—this is a city that welcomes pioneers. The road to eternal life wound past the sharks in the Pacific, between two earthquakes, to Silicon Valley with its orange groves of green and gold. Suburban California looked like a series of pharmacies and churches, patches of wasteland, gas stations, billboards, and then, suddenly, nothing but soaring granite cliffs against which icy ocean waves crashed beneath the sweltering sun. The geography of the West Coast reminded me of the Basque Country, with tuna tataki replacing foie gras. The car glided along the asphalt between the pine trees, the acacias, the palms, the pepper plants, and the apricot and walnut trees, towards an ultimate eternity. In the rear windscreen, the past scrolled away: families of humans kicking balls on the beach, deathly motels filled with mortal guests, white churches filled with unprotesting Protestants. I felt a certain nostalgia for my former species, but it was too late to turn back now. It was as though the road behind us was crumbling (something that did actually happen at Pfeiffer Canyon near Big Sur).
I spent several weeks in Monterey having my veins transfused with the blood of numerous hand-picked Californian teenagers: in the United States, blood is sold by blood banks and it’s possible to find out the age group of the donors (16–25 at Ambrosia Health). Vampire mythology had made only one mistake: garlic is not deadly, in fact, it promotes blood circulation. I ate cloves of raw garlic every day while being injected with the pristine blood haemoglobin of penniless surfers. The effect was astonishing: my neurons remyelinated at an abnormal rate. After two weeks of this eye-wateringly expensive treatment ($8,000 every two days), I felt as though I’d been hit by 10,000 volts. I was reborn as a skateboarder in a film by Gus Van Sant. I could feel my hair growing back, my chest swelling. I had a constant hard-on thinking about Léonore’s amazing breasts. I effortlessly took the stairs four at a time. Young blood is worse than Class A drugs: I felt as though I was hovering twenty centimetres off the ground and ejaculating by the gallon. I couldn’t resist turning on my smartphone and posting selfies of my transfigured torso on Instagram. These were the first images of my body since my televisual resignation. In the photos, taken at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, my rebooted ego exulted like a singer in a boy band. My wrinkles had disappeared, my cheeks were plump, my flat stomach now boasted reconstituted abs. I smiled and flexed my biceps like an oiled-up bodybuilder in a thong. Closer magazine published the photos without my permission, under the headline: “Beigbeder Dabbles in Vampirism in California.” The news had got out, I never knew who leaked the story about the Ambrosia method … though I strongly suspect it was Léonore.
Every night, I read Romy The Bloody Countess by Valentine Penrose, a surrealist poet fascinated by the torrents of fresh blood washing over the body of Elizabeth Báthory in the sixteenth century. “Beautiful and statuesque, haughty and proud, loving no one but herself and forever in search, not of the pleasures of society, but the pleasures of love, Elizabeth, surrounded by sycophants and libertines (…) tried to understand, but could not touch. And it was this desire to wake from not-living that gave her a taste for blood, for the blood of others which perhaps masked some secret that, from birth, had been veiled to her.” Romy loved the story too; I pretended it was fiction. But her W
i-Fi-connected brain quickly discovered that the Vampire Countess truly had drunk the blood of hundreds of slaughtered adolescent girls. I often sing a transhuman Marseillaise:
To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
March on! March on!
Let teenage blood
Water my furrows!
Romy and Pepper were married in a strictly private ceremony in Santa Barbara town hall. The mayor was proud to (illegally) officiate at the first human-robot union, to “promote the social acceptance of androids and put an end to robophobia.” After the ceremony, we ate grilled lobster at Stearns Wharf. While the newlyweds gazed out at the horizon, arm in telescopic arm, I finished watching Season Two of Fear the Walking Dead, which is set in Los Angeles.
There was no longer any distinction between reality and science fiction. Zombie movies showed the undead in search of live flesh: once again, Hollywood screenwriters had tried to warn us.
As soon as Jesse Karmazin published the first results of his vampire test, Silicon Valley’s nouveau riche were banging on the door of his clinic. With Peter Thiel leading the charge. Around the world, newspapers ran stories about Age Reversal. Le Monde: “In California, cars are recharged with electricity, and old people are recharged with young blood.” The New York Times: “Young blood transfusions: the future of rejuvenation.” Le Figaro: “Was Dracula right?” GQ France even ran a cover photo of me in a swimsuit, with the bright yellow headline “Beigbeder Reloaded.” Soon Ambrosia Health didn’t have sufficient teenage plasma to treat its senior citizens. Congress vainly appealed to elderly Californians to remain calm. Across the United States, people began searching for new sources of regenerative haemoglobin. Police could do nothing to stop students, the unemployed, the destitute, and drug addicts selling their blood to the vans mining this new source of energy. And, since demand creates supply, so began the race to the bottom. Wealthy old people were prepared to spend vast sums for a transfusion of youth. Before long, the blood trade in the US and Mexico was pushed underground and also outward to China and Eastern Europe. The following winter, blood mafias started to spring up. “Blood dealers” were selling a litre of “Young Plasma” for $5,000 to $10,000. A number of senior citizens contracted hepatitis, leukaemia, or AIDS, but such accidents did little to curb the demand … and the more the traffic increased, the greater the danger to adolescent populations.
The first “youth hunts” occurred in the suburbs of Los Angeles. There was a geographical logic to this: it is no coincidence that transhumanists have settled in the former playground of the Manson family. It is not surfing that attracted them to California, but the smell of sacrificial blood. The word “PIGS,” daubed on walls, heralded the humanized pigs that would soon provide us with new transplant organs and, metaphorically, the porcine future of a neo-humanity with its snout in the planet-trough. Cannibalistic gangs of traffickers attacked anyone under twenty. The bloodless bodies of teenagers were buried in the Nevada desert; the police regularly discovered mass graves filled with dry, tanned hides, like piles of human leather. There were unverified rumours of children being raised in battery cages in Nicaragua to feed elderly zombies. I had been a guinea pig in the experiment that triggered a vampire war between generations. I remember it as though it was yesterday. “Blood is a juice of rarest quality,” Mephistopheles (the devil) says in Faust. Rejuvenation is possible only by stealing youth from someone else, the blood of a virgin, the cells of an embryo, the organs of a motorcyclist who died the day before, or the heart of a humanoid pig. The problem with eternal life is that it needs to rob other people’s bodies. My new blood was not mine, it was better than mine, purer, fresher, more beautiful, but I was no longer me. Léonore had been right to run away: my humanity was disappearing by the day.
It was patently obvious: the only way for Homo sapiens to live forever was to slaughter its own children. Even God crucified his own son. I wasn’t able to follow the example of the Gospels: I couldn’t kill Romy. That’s why I got ill.
-
9 UBERMAN
“ZAB-CHOS ZHI KHRO DGONGS PA RANG GROL, STRID PA’I BAR DO NGO SPROD GSOL ‘DEBS THOS GROL CHEN MO CHOS NYID BAR DO’I GSOL ‘DEBS THOS GROL CHEN MO.”
Tibetan Book of the Dead (Eighth Century AD)
-
DIED TOO YOUNG
DIED TOO OLD
Roger Nimier
Antoine Blondin
Jim Morrison
Sacha Distel
Maurice Ronet
Charlie Chaplin
Arthur Rimbaud
Jacques Prévert
Jean-René Huguenin
Jean-Edern Hallier
Jean Seberg
Jeanne Moreau
Jean Rochefort
Marlon Brando
Boris Vian
Françoise Sagan
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Truman Capote
Kurt Cobain
David Bowie
Robert Mapplethorpe
David Hamilton
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Bernard Buffet
Amy Winehouse
Whitney Houston
Albert Camus
Jean-Paul Sartre
Patrick Dewaere
Gérard Depardieu
DIED TOO YOUNG
DIED TOO OLD
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
Alexander McQueen
Yves Saint Laurent
Jean-Luc Delarue
Pascal Sevran
Guillaume Dustan
Renaud Camus
Natalie Wood
Faye Dunaway
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson
Jimi Hendrix
Prince
George Michael
Elton John
Heath Ledger
Mickey Rourke
Prince
James Brown
Jean Eustache
Roger Vadim
Che Guevara
Fidel Castro
Brian Jones
Elvis Presley
Jean-Pierre Rassam
Harvey Weinstein
The moral: better to die young. But it was too late for me.
My advice: if it is too late to die young, don’t die at all.
-
FOR MY FIRST five decades on earth, I took no interest in the weather. I went to work with the same indifference come rain, wind, or sun. I didn’t give a damn about the sky; in Paris, I never saw it. My sixth decade was very different: I looked at nothing else, I followed the sun everywhere. I watched it shimmer on the white streets, the oil palms, the blue ocean. To age is to beg alms from the sun, even when you’ve got rebooted blood, regenerated organs, and a digitized brai
n.
In the early 2020s (the famous “Twenty Twenties” when everything changed), the war between the young and the old was symbolized by the clash between Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump. At every summit of the G7, you could tell the US President longed to feast on the carotid artery of the head of the French state.
As soon as I knew I was going to die, I recorded a hundred posthumous programmes to be broadcast on my YouTube channel every December 31: The Post-Mortem Show. The advertising revenue from these programmes, the first of which was triggered by a death, were enough to feed my family throughout the twenty-first century.
Children are afraid to go to sleep because sleep is a foretaste of what awaits us later: an endless night, a dark tunnel where no one has left the light on. But death is not like the dreams we have at night. Since I belong to the last generation of Homo sapiens, I’d like to describe my end.
There was something rotten in the gallons of young Californian blood transfused into me. I sensed it early on: six weeks after the heterochronic parabiosis I woke up exhausted with the taste of sulphur in my mouth, a strange dizziness, and blood in my stools. Analyses confirmed a rare, incurable form of hepatitis. My fatty liver was unable to withstand the shock of my accelerated rejuvenation.
Death is like the psychedelic scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey—you fly over arid neon deserts.
Death is like gliding to a soundtrack by Richard Wagner.
Death is like freediving in the depths of the ocean.
Death is like rain filmed in slow motion with a Phantom High-Speed camera.
A Life Without End Page 21
