So projects would have to be devised immense enough to motivate trillions and occupy their time and effort.
Perhaps one goal could be to find a way to bridge the ocean of darkness between galaxies, beginning with Andromeda two and a half million light years away. An inconceivable distance, twenty-five times the distance between one edge of the Milky Way galaxy and the other.
And the ultimate goal, of course, would be transcendence to a higher state of being. But not just transcendence. The goal would be to achieve this state while still preserving the essence of what it was to be human. Otherwise, how would a transcendent individual be any different than a computer superintelligence, cold, unfeeling, and empty?
What good was existence without emotion? Without a beating heart to quicken during an intimate embrace. Without an ability to revel in beauty at a primal level, well beyond that of simple intellectual appreciation. Without the ability to love?
In short, without a soul?
The road ahead would be long and challenging for humanity. Allie vowed to ensure this was the case. Because it was critical for the species to continue to strive. Because there could be no rewards without challenges to overcome.
She had no idea how things would ultimately turn out. But she did know that she was beginning this journey with two extraordinary people by her side, both of whom she loved.
And who could ask for more than that?
Author’s Discussion of the Novel
Thanks for reading The Immortality Code. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you’re interested in reading other novels I’ve written, I’ve included a complete list of my books, embedded with links to their Amazon pages, at the end of this section, along with my author bio.
At the conclusion of most of my novels, I include a section detailing what in the work is real, and what isn’t, along with a few personal anecdotes—and these sections have been extremely well received. So here I go again, beginning with a passage about how I came to write this novel.
But first, if you enjoyed this book, I’d be grateful if you could help spread the word by recommending it to friends and family, and posting about it on social media.
Also, since a large number of ratings, good or bad, can be instrumental in the success of a novel, please consider rating it on Amazon, throwing up as many stars as you think it deserves.
To do so, just go to The Immortality Code’s Amazon page, scroll down to where the reviews begin, and click on the link that says Write a customer review.
I love hearing from readers and always respond to email messages, so please feel free to write to “Doug” at [email protected]. Finally, you can visit my website, www.douglaserichards.com—where you can sign up to be notified of new releases—or Friend me on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author.
So now, without further ado, I’ll get right to it. I’ve listed the subjects I’ll be covering below in order of appearance. Since research and interpretations can differ, I encourage you to explore these topics further to arrive at your own conclusions. And if you aren’t interested in an early topic on this list, feel free to skip ahead to one that might interest you more.
How this novel came to be, and other personal anecdotes—Why nanites? Why alien tech? Straining my brain. Chumming the water. The squeaky keyboard crisis. Taking things for granted.
Going against consensus (breaking the mold)
Nanotechnolgy—3D printing gone wild
The human soul. Are we just the sum of our parts?
The Star Trek replicator
Quantum biology
Hot qubits
Quantum computers and decryption
Encryption a quantum computer can’t break
Tech Ops and the great US/China tech war
Graphene, carbyne, and octa-nitro-cubane
The psychopaths among us.
Smart contact lenses
How this novel came to be, and other personal anecdotes
WHY NANITES?: Whenever I fear that something I want to write is too far out there, I think of other things I take for granted that I find equally impossible. Like cell phones. Like scientists being able to sequence billions of bases of DNA in a single day. And most astonishing of all, like the ability of all creatures, great and small, to reproduce.
I had never really thought about this last until I took a graduate level course in developmental biology, which forever changed my appreciation of the miracle of birth. In this course I learned what’s known about how a fertilized egg becomes a human baby at the molecular level. The more I learned about it, the more impossible it seemed.
How does an organism convert food into the raw materials necessary to make more of itself? How could something as complex as a human being—as a human mind—be built up from a single magic cell?
The answer, of course, is that it can’t be. Can. Not. Be.
Of all the impossible things I can imagine, this is the most impossible of all. Trillions of cells, specializing and working in concert, all arising from a single cell. More than a hundred billion neurons all spawned from this same humble beginning, all in the right configuration to produce consciousness. It was utterly absurd.
When my wife became pregnant I was much more stressed out than I let on. Because I knew something that many people don’t. I knew that making a baby out of basically thin air wasn’t really possible.
Fortunately, my son, and later my daughter, didn’t know as much as I did, and stubbornly found a way to be born anyway.
Which brings me to nanofabrication. If babies are possible, why not this too?
So I fell in love with the concept of nanites, and I’ve used them as a peripheral part of several novels now, being sure to describe the miracle of human birth each time I do. I can’t help myself, and I find this example to be instructive when considering the miracle of microscopic molecular assemblers (although I have yet to come across this same comparison anywhere else).
For The Immortality Code, I decided to take the plunge and finally make nanites the star rather than a supporting player. I decided to bring them out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As usual, I had no idea how I might do this, or what the plot might be, but I was determined to find a way.
WHY ALIEN TECH?: Those of you who’ve read my other novels will know that along with nanites, I’ve introduced alien visitations, alien probes, and alien technology in a number of my recent works. I’ve done this for two reasons. First, as I’ve mentioned in previous notes, UFOs have become more real, and harder to explain away than ever. In fact, after considerable research, I’ve come to agree with the renowned physicist and science popularizer Michio Kaku. I quoted him in The Enigma Cube as saying the following: “When it comes to the existence of UFOs, we’ve reached a tipping point. The burden of proof used to be on the believers to prove that UFOs are real. Now the burden of proof has shifted to the government and military to prove that they’re not real. Because the evidence is overwhelming.”
Second, I write what I like to call near-future science-fiction thrillers. Which means that, unlike space opera, my novels take place on Earth and examine our society in basically its present form, and the impact various scientific advances might have on us. As advanced scientifically as I expect us to become in the next twenty years, this is still limiting, as there are certain technologies that will take much longer than that to develop. Perfect nanotechnology is one of these, as are the extraordinary capabilities of the cube from The Enigma Cube series.
In short, given recent admissions from our government that make it clear that the presence of UFOs among us is nearly indisputable, and given my interest in exploring tech that is hundreds of years beyond our current capabilities, I’ve found the idea of alien technology on Earth to be a useful plot device. This being said, barring any sequels, I strongly suspect that this will be the last of my novels to make use of such a device.
STRAINING MY BRAIN: I’m one of the luckiest people alive. I get to work from home and live my dream. I get to b
e creative and earn a living just from my imagination. So I know how annoying it is for me to complain even a little.
But here I go anyway.
The truth is that I probably make what I do harder than I should. First, I insist on doing considerable research, and juggling it all can at times feel backbreaking (or, more accurately, mind-breaking). And I use every good idea I’ve ever had in each novel. Then, for the next novel, I have to scramble and come up with more ideas. I like plot twists, and villains as brilliant as my heroes, and clever escapes. And these are all plot points I have to squeeze out of my brain, which sometimes feels about as easy as getting juice from a block of cement.
I’m not looking for sympathy, because I do know how lucky I am. Really. But I couldn’t resist writing a passage about my own often agonizing process for coming up with plots for my novels, using Allie Keane and theoretical physics as stand-ins for Doug Richards and plotting. The passage reads as follows:
And maintaining a laser-focused train of thought was everything for a theoretical physicist. Yes, she read literature and conducted other research, but radical breakthroughs were most likely to come about through thought experiments and insane leaps of imagination. Which meant hours at a time of lying on the couch in her office with her eyes closed, looking to be asleep, and trying to force her tortured brain to forge unique connections between unrelated physics knowledge and theories that she had crammed inside. Only stopping each day when her mind screamed for mercy.
Most of the time this exercise was pure, unadulterated torture. Flailing blindly in the abyss of her own thoughts, almost panicking as she went around and around in circles, unable to force a connection, drowning with no sign of a single buoy to grasp onto.
Her job description sounded like heaven to outsiders, being paid to lie around and be creative. Generate ideas.
If only truly revolutionary ideas didn’t require such agony to achieve, the mental equivalent of pushing the biggest of newborn babies through the tiniest of pelvises.
I’m not sure how this became my life, but my wife has gotten used to stumbling onto me during the day lying on our bed, or the floor, or the couch, with my eyes closed. “Are you sleeping,” she often whispers, “or are you plotting?”
Alas, while I wish it was more often the latter, it’s usually me struggling to find a way to push a plot forward, convinced that I’ll never find it.
This being said, there’s nothing like the supernova of a eureka moment finally striking . . .
CHUMMING THE WATER: When Colonel Hubbard describes her snorkeling outing, and dispersing an entire loaf of bread underwater, this was actually me. Yes, I’m that stupid.
It was a real Dr. Seuss moment. One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Yikes! A billion fricking fish!
So here’s a pro tip. If you’re trying to feed fish, don’t put yourself in the center of a million particles of food.
THE SQUEAKY KEYBOARD CRISIS: While writing this novel, the space bar on my keyboard began to squeak, which threw me into a panic. I’m a bit of a creature of habit. You’ve all heard the old saying, “You can’t teach an old Doug new tricks.” Well, nowhere is this clearer than with my writing habits.
This is my life. I spend at least forty hours a week in front of a computer, and writing is my sole source of income. So if I were to fall in love with a chair that cost thousands of dollars, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy it. But it turns out the chair I like the most costs seventy-nine dollars. I’ve tried keyboards lined with gold and diamonds (metaphorically), and have hated them all. I continue to use the most basic keyboard in the world, but it’s one I love. (I’m not sure why I tend to gravitate toward cheap, no-frills items, but I do). My keyboard is so old, in fact, that I can’t even plug it into a computer anymore without using an adapter.
Anyway, I ended up taking the keyboard to a computer repair shop to have it de-squeaked, which I believe is the technical term for it. To the repairman’s credit, he did advise me that the repair would cost twice as much as the keyboard is worth. Totally worth it.
Oh well. If only I had nanites, I would put my keyboard into memory so I could use it forever. On the other hand, I suppose I could find even better uses for the tiny creatures (if only they could write novels).
TAKING THINGS FOR GRANTED: As I began this novel, I happened to watch a short series on Amazon called Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity. Wow! I knew I had taken the miracle of human reproduction for granted, but it never occurred to me just how much this was true for electricity also. I had never reflected on just how long it had taken humanity to tame this elusive substance—and just how important it was.
Talk about a game changer that transformed every aspect of our lives and world. And learning the history of humanity’s journey from only being aware of static electricity, to creating an electrical grid covering much of the civilized world, was eye-opening.
At the time, I knew I wanted Allie to come up with a breakthrough qubit, but I was researching in another direction. When I saw the part of the documentary about the torpedo fish, and how it had answered a question humanity hadn’t even thought to ask, it hit me that I could draw a parallel and make this qubit part more interesting (at least to me—hopefully to my readers as well ).
I also loved the idea of having an impossible-to-synthesize biomolecule that the nanites could facilitate, which dovetails beautifully with my personal experience as a pharmaceutical and biotech executive. As I mentioned in the end notes of another of my novels, the story about the quest to discover a way to make the anti-cancer drug, Taxol, using synthetic methods, is true. I was once the Director of Biotechnology Licensing at Bristol-Myers Squibb, the company that marketed this drug, and I know its history well. Human chemistry has come a long way, but we can’t come close to matching the variety and complexity of molecules that living things can produce.
So I wrote the scene that described Allie’s qubit innovations in the context of the history of electricity, and discussed how we’ve come to take this miracle for granted.
And then, just a few days later, we had a power outage. Really. I couldn’t make this up.
The outage ultimately only lasted twelve hours, but SDG&E was saying it might last as many as three days. That’s when you begin to feel a little panicked.
But even twelve hours reinforced my appreciation for this invisible, mysterious substance that powers our industries and our lives. First, I couldn’t write. The days of typewriters are gone. Without electricity, my computer and I were dead in the water. When my phone ran out of juice, I had to drive my car around to recharge it. Our food went bad, our freezer began melting, and lights, powered garage doors, microwave ovens, hot water heaters, televisions, and the like were rendered useless.
I went to my local grocery store for ice to try to salvage certain items from my freezer and learned that even this national chain was ill-prepared. They had one emergency generator, but that was only enough to keep the lights and registers on. If they hadn’t managed to bring in other generators they would have lost untold thousands of dollars of inventory. Whenever I think about the hundreds of steaks and thousands of quarts of premium ice cream they almost lost that day, I can’t help but tear up.
“Not Haagen-Dazs Deep Chocolate Peanut Butter,” I still scream in my nightmares. “Anything but that!”
But getting back to the power outage. Soon enough, as we’ve all seen happen before, day turned into night. Darkness fell.
But this darkness was a lot darker than I was used to.
What fun, sitting around by flashlight, watching my freezer drip water on the floor, and deciding if I was desperate enough to take an ice-cold shower in the dark. I wasn’t. Instead, I made reservations at a powered hotel.
It was remarkable how quickly the veneer of civilization faded away. Bigger cities can be even more reliant on juice than we were in San Diego. I read an account of the Manhattan blackout of 2003. The subways didn’t work, so people had to walk many miles to get home, and then many
of them had to camp out on the sidewalk, unwilling to live in an apartment separated from the ground by fifty flights of stairs and no working elevators.
Finally, our power did return. But during the twelve hours it was gone, I guess the universe decided that my acknowledgment that we take electricity for granted was too intellectual, and it wanted me to experience this on a more visceral level.
Well played, universe.
Later that year, while I was still writing The Immortality Code, Christmas rolled around, as it tends to do, and the lights in my neighborhood were spectacular. I drove around in delight, thinking about what the scientific pioneers who had cracked electricity’s secrets would think if they could see my neighborhood today, with revolving holographic displays, colors and lights dancing in computerized choreography, light that appeared to be forever racing down icicles, and other dazzling combinations of color, computerization, and modern imagination.
Talk about showing off.
Finally, I’ll end this section by leaving electricity behind and quickly touching on two minor innovations that I also find noteworthy.
First up is a simple invention that made me wonder when it was introduced what took the collective genius of humanity so long. When I was a kid we lugged massive suitcases through airports until we thought our arms would fall off. Yet I’m pretty sure the wheel was one of humanity’s first inventions. So how did no one think of adding wheels to luggage for so many millennia?
Last, and probably least, are self-closing drawers, cabinets, and toilet seats. We had the same house for twenty years before I moved a few years back, and I had never encountered this technology. So while my wife took a tour of what was to become our new home, I remained behind in the kitchen for ten minutes, slamming doors and cabinets and watching in delight as they decelerated and came to a gentle close.
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