by Jo Nesbo
In a corner of the apartment, in front of the refrigerator, is a brown leather suitcase. It’s a bomb. When it’s opened, everything will be blown to bits, everything we know and aren’t supposed to know will be gone. But before that can happen, whatever is inside it must be devoured, each brain cell must be consumed, must grow wings. Only then will it be time for the great flight. And before that I must forget everything I know.
But first I have to remember, call up the memories that need to be removed.
The white face on the screen of the shredder looks like a mask in a Greek tragedy. I try not to blink as I study my own reflection and manoeuvre my head so that my pupils are in line with the holes in the mask. Every trace that either directly or indirectly can lead them to the formula must be obliterated. I try to concentrate, because I know that only what I can remember now will be wiped out. Everything else they will be able to reconstruct from my brain, even when I’m dead. And I also know that the most efficient and complete deletion comes when the shredder is fed with memory pictures in chronological order, because then the associative memories are destroyed too. ‘Think of it as like gutting a fish,’ the sergeant who was instructing our research team said. ‘Only the fish is you.‘
OK. First the idea.
The Idea
It came to me in the middle of the night. I’d woken up beside my wife Klara needing to pee. I got up as quietly as I could so as not to wake her and made my way to the bathroom. We were living in Rainerstrasse, in that part of the city that still has electricity and running water. It was raining outside. I know that because I would have remembered if it hadn’t been raining. Half awake, and about to urinate, I noticed I had the beginnings of an erection. I tried to remember what I’d been dreaming but there was nothing there that might have caused sexual arousal. My researcher’s brain simply registered that my body had produced nitric oxide and norepinephrine. As I stood there my thoughts wandered on, created a new dream. I was dead, and my condition was what they referred to during the public hangings that took place directly after the Last War as angel-lust. As a medical student I learned that there was a simple physiological, not chemical, explanation for angel-lust, the fact that some of those on the gallows had erections visible through their trousers: the rope exerted an increased pressure on the cerebellum, and it was this that caused the priapism. Whoever invented the name angel-lust had probably been playing with the idea that there might be pleasure and joy, perhaps even some kind of liberation in death. But only playing. Death is, after all, the ultimate seriousness. The enemy who is always on our trail, whom we spend our lives fleeing from but who will, sooner or later, find us. It’s just a question of when.
The reason my thoughts went looking that night for a connection between lust and extinction, desire and death, was obvious. For some time now our research team had been working to find a cure for hadesitt, the deadly sexual disease that had broken out just before the war, decimating the population of Africa before reaching us in both the western and eastern confederations, as HIV had done almost a century earlier. We had already managed to prolong the lives of certain patients with the medicine HADES1, and slightly lowered the mortality rate in other groups, but it was still up at 90 per cent and we were working with what we hoped was an improved version, HADES2. In connection with this we had been looking into the ways in which the disease spread. It came as no surprise for us to discover that those who had oral sex often, and frequently changed partner, ran a markedly greater risk of being infected with hadesitt than others. It was not until I began to analyse the second column of figures that a further – and quite remarkable – aspect of the study struck me.
We had assembled a smallish group of deceased prostitutes and porn actors, some of whom had died of hadesitt, others from different causes, in search of signs that the mortality rate and the danger of infection had fluctuated over time. The reason for this was that the hadesitt virus had not only developed a resistance to medicines but other survival strategies too, as every living organism does in the compulsive pursuit of eternal life. Since, as previously noted, the death rate from hadesitt was over 90 per cent, it was surprising to note that those who had more than the average amount of sex seemed also to have a longer average lifespan than the rest of the population. Bearing in mind both that this group was more vulnerable to hadesitt and the unhealthy lifestyles of many prostitutes one would have expected them to live shorter, not longer lives.
Of course, it’s not unusual for researchers to see mystical connections and patterns in their data, often related to something that has no connection at all with the hypothesis being tested. Many of my colleagues have been quite properly ridiculed for pursuing research they’ve come across in this way. If you throw a dice to test out a hypothesis that you can influence telepathically to land on four, and it turns out that it lands with an unnatural regularity on five, then there is an obvious temptation to claim that what you were testing was whether the dice would land on the number you were thinking of, plus one. Ethically speaking, of course, that would be rubbish. The rule is: test what is to be tested, answer the question that has been asked. Any answer can be misused by changing the question so that it fits the result, thereby giving the researcher an apparently sensational breakthrough in a wholly different field. And that was exactly what happened to me that night.
I thought of nitric oxide and norepinephrine and in a dreamlike and yet clear-sighted moment spotted a connection. A connection I knew I could not dismiss, not even if it meant falling headlong into the classic trap. I also knew I could not tell anyone about the researcher’s sin I was about to commit.
I flushed the toilet and went to the living room. Light from the last working street lamp on Rainerstrasse filtered in through the rain that ran down the glass. It fell onto the photograph of my brother Jürgen on the wall, onto the elephant rifle hanging above the fireplace, and on the pen Klara had given me as a birthday present one year. I picked up the pen, found a sheet of paper and noted down my wild ideas. Then I crept back to bed, where Klara was still sleeping in peaceful innocence. I looked at her face – calm and still beautiful – but ageing much too fast, before turning the alarm clock back an hour and a half, as though it were a symbolic act.
After I let myself into the laboratory the next morning, before anyone else had arrived, I at once began studying the figures more closely to test out my new hypothesis.
The Hypothesis
Three months after the night I had first thought of the link between sex and increased lifespan I was sitting in the office of my boss Ludwig Kopfer, the administrative director for Antoil Med. He had been listening to me for some two hours, almost without interrupting. Now he clasped his hands together and looked at me over the tops of his spectacles. They were without arms, the kind that just pinch over the nose; I think Sigmund Freud wore a pair.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Kopfer said, the way he always does, and without any suggestion that such an interruption would in fact be tolerated. ‘But what this boils down to is that a compound of nitric oxide and norepinephrine can retard the ageing process and combat disease. And this is something that happens at the cellular level. That in theory this component can completely halt the ageing process.’
‘We know that nitric oxide and norepinephrine affect the blood vessels in the genitals of both men and women during sexual arousal; but they’re also important for the autoimmune system. It’s the combination of norepinephrine and a couple of other substances that retards the ageing process. And I haven’t found any reason why the right combination shouldn’t be able to halt the process completely.’
‘As in –’ he whispered the word – ‘immortality?’
I coughed. ‘As in preventing the body from degenerating with age and ultimately dying from some otherwise harmless illness. There are numerous other ways in which to die.’
‘Immortality,’ Kopfer said again, as though he hadn’t heard me,
leaning back in his high-backed chair and looking thoughtfully through the window. ‘The search for the holy grail!’
For a long time neither of us spoke. Outside, the smoke from Dusseldorf’s factory chimneys rose silently into the air. It was strange to think how, fifty years ago, these had almost disappeared. Finally Kopfer spoke.
‘You realise what you are asking for, Herr Jason?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You risk ruining the reputation of the whole company.’
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘So what if I say no?’
‘Then I’ll hand in my notice and take the material to one of our competitors.’
‘You can’t do that – the data you’re basing this on is the property of Antoil Med and we’ll sue not just you but the company you take this to.’
‘Naturally, I won’t use any of the material from here, I’ll get new data. And now that I know what I’m looking for, better data. And no one can take the idea away from me, because that’s in here.’ I tapped my temple with my index finger.
I could see Kopfer muttering something inaudible, and then he sighed loudly. ‘But eternal life. Good God, Herr Jason.’
‘Of course, there are years of research remaining before we’ll know whether I am right,’ I went on. ‘But I’m willing to stake my reputation and my career on it.’
‘Of course you are, and if you are right then a Nobel Prize in either medicine or biology awaits you, probably both. And if you’re wrong, then you can just start all over again. But for the company…’
‘The company won’t double its value times a hundred if I’m right, it will do so a thousand times. In other words, if there’s a two per cent chance I’m right then it makes rational financial sense to go for it.’
‘For the Eggen family and the other stockholders maybe. But to put the livelihoods of our workforce at risk like that…’
‘The risk to workplaces here will be greater if a competitor gets to develop the medicine. It will replace between sixty and seventy per cent of all other medicines. The branch is facing a bloodbath. The only question is, Herr Kopfer, which side of the bloodbath will you be on?’
Kopfer had a way of rubbing the palms of his hands through his curly grey hair when he wanted to think, as though the static electricity activated his brain. And he did this now. ‘If,’ he sighed, ‘if I allocate you the resources you’re asking for, then it must be on terms of such secrecy that no one, not even husbands and wives, knows what it is you’re working on.’
‘I understand that.’
‘I’ll be talking to Daniel Egger, and he can decide whether or not the rest of the board should be informed. In the meantime, this has to stay between you and me, Jason.’
‘Of course.’
* * *
—
Four days later I was summoned to Kopfer’s office again.
‘Egger and I are agreed that this must be kept under the radar for the time being,’ he said. ‘That goes for internally too. The fewer who know anything at all, the better. I can’t hide a project as heavy on resources as this in the budget; we’ll have to pretend it’s about something else.’
‘I understand.’
‘It will appear to be a development of the hadesitt project, and for practical reasons be relocated to Africa.’
‘Africa?’
‘We own a building in El Aaiún, in the Spanish Sahara. It’s Off-Broadway. Avoid the prying eyes of industrial spies and the media. We’ll explain that it’s closer to the source.’
‘I see. Like the Manhattan Project, a lot of brains isolated in a desert.’
‘Yes,’ he said and looked out of the window. ‘Only that was to invent a bomb capable of wiping out the human race. While this is –’ he looked directly at me – ‘the exact opposite, right?’
The Bomb
The smell of diesel and bars of white sunlight each time the wind moves the carpets. It’s been many years now since the last electric car ended up on the scrapheap and they reopened the oil wells in the Sahara. Somewhere out there a siren is wailing; I don’t know if it’s an ambulance, a police car or one of the military emergency-response vehicles.
Two bangs, in quick succession. Fire and answering fire, or a double puncture at one of the roadblocks? Hopefully it’s about the colonial overlords chasing the guerrillas, or the other way round, and not about me.
El Aaiún always has more questions than answers.
The watch on my wrist is ticking. A present from Klara on our wedding day. I know it’s slow, but it’s not slow enough.
Three months after the company’s decision I, along with twenty-two hand-picked researchers and three semi-trailers filled with laboratory equipment, was in place in El Aaiún. Officially the project was known as HADES2, internally it was referred to as Ankh. Researchers are used to working under conditions of confidentiality, and no one knows more than they need to know to do their jobs, but I was aware that they knew the price they could ask for disclosing information about the project to one of our competitors might be temptingly high. For that reason I had, through the chairman of the board Daniel Egger, a former colonel who still had connections in the military, acquired a memory-shredder which had made the trip out with us. Each member of the team had signed a contract agreeing to subject themselves to it once they had submitted their final reports. The memory-shredder had been developed during the Great War, when the military were given exclusive rights to develop and use technology above the third degree. It was used by officers who possessed information they no longer had any use for, but which could be exploited by the enemy if the officer were taken prisoner. Because even if the officer could withstand the torture or followed standing orders and took his life with the cyanide pill they all carried, our enemies in the Russo-European Confederation had developed Exor, which was even then capable of extracting the memory from a dead and physically destroyed brain. The memory-shredder versus Exor. It was like an image of the technological warfare, move and counter-move, that had brought the world to such a wretched state, and led to the banning of technology in civilian life after the war. Yes, those of us in the health service are occasionally permitted to use the memory-shredder to remove memories in the psychiatric treatment of trauma patients, but this only ever applies to a member of the elite.
Research projects are like films or building projects; they’re never finished on time, or within the budget.
But Ankh was.
That was chiefly because I, as head of the project, had at two critical junctions taken risky decisions concerning the way forward, and focused all our resources on these. If just one of them had turned out to be a blind alley it would have killed off the whole project. My assistant as head of research, Bernard Johansson, who was the only one besides me who had enough of a total overview to question my decisions, asked: ‘What’s your hurry, Ralph?’
He thought both times that we should have split into two groups at these crossroads, the way things had been done in the Manhattan Project. And he was right; we had the personnel, the money and the time for it. They had the time for it. The fact that I didn’t have wasn’t something I could share with Johansson. What I could share with him was the euphoria once we realised we had found it, the ultimate medicine.
It was – as is so often the case once you’ve got your answer – surprisingly simple. But complicated too, in that it demanded a new way of thinking. Evolution’s way is for certain species to survive through producing new, healthier, better adapted individuals, with the older variants getting scrapped and dying out. But if the cell renewal in an existing individual is so comprehensive that the ability to learn is also updated then, metaphorically speaking, there is nothing to prevent an individual from giving birth to itself over and over again. Where normally a baby has to be taught everything from scratch, this reborn individual will appear complete with experien
ces that give it a crucial advantage in the struggle for existence. So why didn’t such a species already exist? I think perhaps the answer is that it has taken time to develop a species intelligent enough to solve the mystery, but since all mysteries are solved sooner or later then we – meaning nature – have all along been on the right track. Intelligence is natural, the survival instinct is natural, ergo eternal life is natural.
That, at least, was what I was trying to convince myself of as I raised my head from the microscope at six o’clock one ice-cold morning in El Aaiún, looked at Bernard Johansson and whispered: ‘We’ve found it.’ And at the same time sublimated the question: ‘Exactly what have we done?’
We pulled back the curtain and looked out over the desert. As the shimmering red rim of the sun rose over the horizon Johansson said that this was the dawning of a whole new day for mankind. While I thought how that sun must have looked like the flash from the first successful detonation of an atom bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945.
‘Nobel Prize?’ said Johansson.
Maybe. Definitely. But a whole new day for mankind wasn’t what I was looking for.
We dismantled the laboratory at top speed, left just a few things behind, including the shredder, crated up the mice and headed back home to Europe.
The Mice
‘These,’ I said into the darkness, ‘are the twenty African pygmy mice used in the test.’
I depressed the lever on the projector and a new image appeared on the screen. ‘When the experiment started they were all one year old, which corresponds to the average lifespan of the pygmy mouse. We gave ten of them injections. Two months later they were all still alive, while the ten who did not receive injections were all dead.’
