by Hammond, Ray
‘And this is me twenty years ago,’ said Nesbit. ‘At age ninety-six.’
The screens now showed identical pictures of an old man, who although erect, had white hair and very wrinkled skin. Then the left-hand screen switched back to show the close-up image of the speaker on the stage. The man on the right looked like the grandfather of the man of the left.
‘My message is, rejuvenation technology works!’
The excited audience burst into another round of applause. Many here were as enthusiastic users of the technologies as the man on stage, others were still contemplating making the expensive first step.
‘Using a combination of genetic engineering, stem cell therapies and RNA interference medicine, every organ of my body has been persuaded to regenerate itself into a far more youthful form. I am proud to tell you that no matter what it says on my birth certificate, my medically-checked biological age is now thirty-eight years old. And I don’t anticipate getting any older!’
*
Half a mile away from the conference centre two naturally young men sat in a garishly decorated hotel room watching the webcast of Marvin Nesbit’s keynote address to the Extreme Longevity society. Both youths were Americans, and both were recently trained active-service volunteers of the reborn Humans First Direct Action.
‘See how arrogant that ancient old prick is?’ eighteen-year-old Ralph Francisco shouted at his fellow volunteer. The teenager was clutching a small black plastic device in his right hand as he spoke. ‘There are far too many people in the world. How can he be so fucking selfish? What makes him so special he should live forever?’
‘Hold on man,’ barked Yanny Walduck from Detroit, the youth who had been selected to run this ‘warm up’ action, this second prologue before HFDA’s global campaign got under way proper. ‘Wait till he gets to the part about uploading.’
*
Inside the conference centre Marvin Nesbit walked to the edge of the stage and peered down at his enthusiastic audience. Many looked ancient, many appeared to be as youthful as himself. Before and after.
‘How many of you have been alive for more than a century?’ asked Nesbit, shielding his eyes against the spotlights as he stared out into the crowded hall, his vision gradually enhanced by Nancy. Hands shot up all over the hall. There were hundreds.
‘Show your appreciation,’ Nesbit told his audience, leading the applause himself.
‘How many here are over one hundred and twenty years old?’ he asked when the appreciation for the centenarians had died away.
Squinting into the lights Nesbit’s vision increased to 20/10 and he picked out one hand, then another. There had to be at least forty scattered about the hall.
‘Stand up,’ he told the super-centenarians. Again he led the applause as startlingly youthful-looking men and women stood and waved energetically to the delegates around the hall.
‘Well, I have a message for you all,’ continued Nesbit. ‘No matter how excellent organ rejuvenation therapy has become, human biology remains frail. An accident, or a sudden disease, can take any of us away tomorrow.’
He let this universal truth hang in the hall. He was coming to the main part of his speech, the topic which was the theme of this eighteenth annual conference and associated exhibition organized by the American Society For Extreme Longevity and sponsored by Mondo Transhuman Technologies, Inc.
Inside the expo hall next door hundreds of vendors were manning booths ready to sell life extension technologies, medical therapies, virtual assistants, health supplements and drugs to this committed group of life extenders and to members of the wider public who would be visiting. Nesbit himself would be signing autographs and promoting digital downloads of his new book, Man’s Transhuman Future.
‘Biology is frail,’ Nesbit repeated for effect. ‘Starting this fall I will be working with Mondo Transhuman Technologies on a project that will lead to the first full uploading of a human brain into computer memory. That brain will be mine, ladies and gentlemen. I intend to be the first permanent human in history.’
*
In the hotel room three blocks away young Ralph Francisco was on his feet.
‘But you won’t be human then!’ he screamed at the image of Nesbit on the wall screen. ‘Don’t you fucking realise?’
‘Do it,’ said Walduck.
‘A fucking permanent transhuman!’ ranted Francisco, ignoring him. ‘That is obscene!’
‘Do it now!’ ordered Walduck.
The man on stage at the conference centre was holding up his arms again to quell his excited audience.
Walduck snatched the wireless control from his agitated accomplice. ‘Biology sure is very frail,’ he said. Flipping up a plastic safety cover on the hand-held control he pressed a large red button.
Three blocks away 240lbs of C6+ explosive provided by FARC and smuggled daringly by car up into the USA by Walduck and Francisco, exploded beneath the stage of the Las Vegas Conference Center. Marvin Nesbit and one copy of his virtual assistant, Nancy, were blown to pieces as were sixty-seven members of his partly rejuvenated audience. Another three hundred and twenty were seriously injured. Within a split second of the blast hundreds of embedded VAs were summoning the emergency services whilst attempting to stabilize the vital signs of their injured biological hosts.
In a completely different time zone over 6,000 miles away, former physics professor Alexander Makowski smiled, then laughed out loud. The screen in front of him had suddenly gone blank. Only seconds before it had been displaying the image of an arrogant transhuman who was boasting that he was going to live forever.
‘WE’RE COMING FOR ALL OF YOU,’ Makowski yelled at the blank screen.
*
The vaulted cargo storage area was filled with the smell of ozone – the air almost crackling with the powerful high-energy fields that were being produced. From high overhead, tungsten arc lights lit the scene in a harsh glare.
In the centre of the cramped floor space stood four articulated lorry trailers – each without its cab – that had been drawn close together, two abreast. On the top of each trailer sat a large rust-coloured cargo container which had been trucked to this London location from the former tile warehouse in Bradford. Linking these containers were scores of cables – some massive power carriers, others more delicate fibre-optic links.
It was nearly midnight on a Saturday evening and the cargo storage area – specially rented and equipped by HFDA’s Dutch procurement office – was in a large, converted railway arch close to London Bridge Station, just south of the River Thames and a few hundred yards from the Guy’s Hospital healthcare campus and the private London Bridge Hospital. The small back streets outside were deserted and the first trial run-up of the HFDA’s new super weapon had been underway for two hours.
Dr Sergy Larov and six members of his technical team from the physics department of Che Guevara University in Caracas had now been checking, calibrating and connecting the four containers without rest for almost sixteen hours.
Inside the front left container Larov read-off the speeds and energy levels that were being created within the miniature particle accelerator that had been designed and built in his university department – once HFDA volunteers in the United States had finally tracked down the classified designs that President Gerald T. Weeks had ordered to be destroyed for ever.
But the key to achieving even further miniaturization of particle accelerators had been Professor Makowski’s own breakthrough in the science of transmitted superconductivity. This had allowed him to design the outer skin of the accelerator bore to act as a single continuously moving magnetic force field which accelerated and steered the speeding nuclei around the collider. The development and construction of the actual weapons had then taken Makowski, Larov and the team at Che Guevara University another three years.
Now Sergy Larov nodded in satisfaction as he examined the instrument readings from the miniaturized collider. All outputs matched the computer simulation predictions th
at the Russian physicist and his team had developed. All that would be needed to make the weapon effective when the time came would be to increase power to the maximum and to introduce the very special heavy-metal nuclei and anti-nuclei that the HFDA’s tenacious American-based direct action volunteers had spent so many years tracking down and acquiring, years during which he and Makowski had been patiently developing and refining their new weapon.
Larov stepped out of the container, crouched and jumped down onto the warehouse’s concrete floor.
Even though the three other containers were sound insulated, the roar of their powerful generators could be heard throbbing from the ventilation and exhaust ducts.
‘Switch off all power,’ yelled Larov over the noise.
Five
Harry Floyd lay back in the hospital bed and, by force of will, tried to control the itching around his face. It felt as if a swam of red ants had got inside his bandages and were now biting his skin off in tiny mouthfuls. Itching is a symptom of rapid healing, he told himself.
Turning his head, he gazed out of the window at the sunlit Buckinghamshire countryside. The day before he had reported to this government-run clinic just outside the small town of Burnham.
‘For the sake of speed, we’re going to carry out all the superficial procedures together,’ the plastic surgeon had explained. ‘Implant removal first. Then nose, jaw, forehead and ear shaping. But I’d prefer to delay the re-characterisation of your vocal chords for a few days.’
‘Just so long as this is all one-hundred per cent reversible,’ Floyd stipulated.
‘As always,’ the doctor had reassured him. ‘And rapid-healing plastic surgery has come on a long way since your last visit here. The first thing we’ll do is to make laser profiles of your existing bone structure and tissue mass. The computer that will control your reversal procedure will use those as its templates.’
While Floyd had waited for the pre-med procedures, he had asked Maria to pull up the CTU’s files on the man he was about to impersonate.
Gary Tipton was twenty-five, ten years younger than Floyd, and he had first joined a radical anti-technology movement while studying politics at Bristol University.
Let’s see some footage, Floyd ordered Maria with a thought.
The wall screen lit with a shot of a protest rally moving through urban streets. A teenage Gary Tipton was highlighted in the crowd and was carrying a placard which read ‘Ban Anti-Human Technologies.’ Behind him a young female student carried a banner proclaiming ‘Machines Want To Take Over!’
Floyd shrugged. Although the majority of young people took to virtual assistants and mental web connections as if such technologies were their birthright, neo-Luddite protests had become very fashionable with a minority of radical, anti-establishment youth in the past couple of decades. They objected to both to the development of technology with super-human capability and to rejuvenation therapies which encouraged wealthy old people to hog far more of the planet’s scarce resources than a normal life span would require.
The CTU agent returned to the file on Gary Tipton. The suspect had dropped out of university before finishing his degree and after working at various temporary jobs he had joined the British army as a trainee officer. But shortly after completing his training he had been discharged abruptly from the army, dismissed following an internal enquiry into the bullying of new recruits. After that Tipton had drifted around London, losing regular contact with his family and taking one short term job after another. The only note of continuity in the young man’s life seemed to be regular, almost obsessive karate training which he maintained even while on the move. The CTU had picked up on him after he had started attending meetings of the Natural Rights Organisation, a fringe political group known for its support of Humans First Party objectives and suspected of having direct links with the linked HFDA terrorist organization.
After two hours of viewing surveillance footage of Tipton and reading background details of the man’s life in Essex and his recruitment as a would-be active-service member of Humans First Direct Action, Floyd was beginning to feel confident he could take the man’s place. He was roughly the same height and build as the subject and although Floyd was almost ten years older, the remodelling processes would take care of that.
Later that evening Floyd had undergone keyhole microsurgery for the removal of his tiny cerebral implant and had then endured cosmetic surgery under a six hour full anesthetic to become a Gary Tipton look-alike. The CTU surveillance operation had provided the cosmetic surgeon with many photographs, video tapes and sound recordings from which to work. The images had included infra-red range-finding information and this had allowed the surgeon to construct an accurate 3-D model of Tipton’s head, face and skeletal structure before the surgery started.
Now, in an effort to forget about the itching, Floyd spoke out loud and told his VA to patch a rolling news channel to the wall display.
Now that the Mondo implant had been removed, Maria’s personality had been transferred to a slim, chrome-plated multi-purpose communicator which lay on the bedside table. After two years of living with her inside his head Floyd felt vulnerable and naked and more than a little lonely without her intimate presence. He also missed the sensory enhancement Maria could provide when required. Reduced to normal human levels of vision and hearing the CTU agent felt vulnerable, for the first time in years. But it was something he would have to get used to.
‘The terrible bombing of the Las Vegas Conference Center is something to be condemned by all responsible citizens,’ the well known face of American President Robert Brabazon was telling a White House press conference. ‘We will never give in to terrorist threats. Progress cannot be halted by bombs and guns. Policy is made democratically by voters, not by violent murderers.’
The camera pulled back to reveal a youthful, tall man dressed informally in fashionable black shirt and trousers standing just to the right of the president.
‘I now want to introduce Joel Cummings, the new CEO of Mondo, Inc.,’ said Robert Brabazon
On a nod from the American leader the guest speaker stepped up to the microphone.
‘Everyone at Mondo mourns the loss of our founder, Harrold Darrenbaum, and we all condemn violent action by anti-tech terrorists,’ said the CEO in a light Californian accent. ‘But we will not be deterred. We are determined to press right ahead with our groundbreaking research into super-cognitive computing and transhuman enhancement technologies.’
There was a rap on the door to Floyd’s room and a medical specialist he had met the previous day entered. He was the genetic trichologist charged with adjusting melatonin expression in each of Floyd’s hair follicles. The CTU agent’s blonde hair had already been cropped short to match Tipton’s hair style and within two weeks Floyd would no longer need to dye his hair or eyebrows dark. They would be growing that way naturally.
‘Ready for another session, sir?’ asked the doctor, as the nurse laid out a tray of instruments, syringes and local anesthetics.
Floyd groaned. His body already felt like a pin cushion. Only an hour before he had been inoculated against malaria, yellow fever, typhoid and Hepatitis A in preparation for his insertion into the Venezuelan jungle.
*
Dr Sergy Larov took his satellite communicator to the window of his hotel bedroom and ensured that he had a signal. As a point of principal nobody connected to the Humans First Party communicated via mind-links and none made use of implanted virtual assistants. Those in the origanisation were proud to remain naturally and wholly human.
Switching on full-strength encryption, Larov checked the time and placed the call as scheduled. As he listened to the echoes of network connections being made around the planet, he gazed down at the dense afternoon traffic on the street below. He was in a small motel overlooking Stevens Creek Highway in Mountain View, California. He had arrived in Silicon Valley to oversee the installation of the second and penultimate weapon that would be used to force the Americans a
nd the other technocracies to abandon development of all transhuman technologies.
Earlier in the morning, Larov and his technical team had visited a warehouse on an industrial park two miles to the north. There had been a trial run-up of the second weapon and the physicist had declared himself satisfied.
Now both demonstration weapons were safely in place at their targets and he was pleased to be able to report that everything was in position and ready as planned.
‘Yes?’ The voice came through clearly, despite the satellite jumps and the quantum encryption filters.
‘This is Sergy,’ said Larov. Then he delivered a code phrase.
There was a silence. Then a breath as someone else came on the line.
‘Well?’
‘Everything is in place in both locations. The schedule can be kept. My technical team has completed the work. We are ready.’
