Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  “What if someone can’t keep up?” asked the woman.

  “Well, normally you’d freeze to death.” He smiled benevolently, touching her elbow. “But if anything slows you down, you’ll just get stem cells injected into all your joints. That way, you’ll be able to do it.”

  Andrews was an avid jogger on earth as well. En route to the party, his car ran out of gas, so he simply pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway’s shoulder and sprinted the rest of the way. He was wearing a full-body white outfit made from ultralight, UV-blocking fabric, including a modernized legionnaire hat. With his aerodynamic goggles and a salt-and-pepper Vandyck, he looked the part of a classic 2060s interstellar scientist.

  Six decades earlier, a journalist had asked Andrews to describe his job. “If you were to meet me at a cocktail party and ask me what I did and I told you I was selling something to immortalize your cells, you would think I was saying I’d found the Fountain of Youth for cells,” he responded. “You’d think I was a snake-oil salesman selling bullshit, and I wouldn’t blame you.” In reality, he never sold immortalizing products so much as formulated them. His “age-reversing” nutraceuticals were distributed through an Arizona-based, multilevel marketing company called Isagenix.

  As several people at the party gathered around Andrews to hear more about the moon race, a beetle-browed, dark-haired man wearing a gaudy gold-sequined shirt strolled in.

  “Joe! You look so futuristic,” the Celestial Empress cooed, patting his sleeves.

  “In the future, we’ll all be shiny,” Joe quipped. Everybody laughed. It was Joe Sugarman, the direct-marketing pioneer who’d made millions in the final quarter of the twentieth century selling BluBlockers sunglasses over 1-800 numbers. He’d brought samples of his latest blockbuster breakthrough: an antiaging product that could make anyone live to 120.

  “What’s that quarter-inch port for, Bill?” Joe asked, gingerly fingering Andrews’s neck.

  “Mind uploading, of course,” Andrews answered.

  The blond woman looked over Sugarman’s Stem120 potions. “Your packaging is amazing, but people don’t need this sort of thing anymore,” she said. “We can live forever, remember?”

  * * *

  The disease of aging had been cured long before 2068. Everyone was immortal—except those who didn’t bother to back themselves up.

  Decades earlier, scientists figured out how to digitize the contents of human minds. Using microscopic semiconducting crystals, a technology called quantum dots, they were able to etch a mirror image of the brain’s neuronal wetware into silicon substrates. Whole-brain emulation through magnetic resonance imaging was a paradigm-shattering breakthrough. For a reasonable fee, all our thoughts, memories, opinions, and experiences could be scanned, mapped, and cached onto computerized information systems. By duplicating synaptic interconnections and plugging them into the cybernetic matrix, humans could transition back and forth between flesh and data. Once noninvasive, static uploading was legalized, our bodies stopped being bodies the way bodies used to be, all messy and illness-prone.

  First we replaced the blood in our veins with cell-size nanobots. The legalization of respirocytes—tiny robots that patrol, clean, and repair the body’s four trillion tissue cells—led to the discovery that mechanized lungs were far more effective than the inflatable disease bags we’d initially been saddled with. Once we eliminated the need to breathe, we soon dispensed with the digestive system, which allowed us to eat as much as we wanted without gaining weight. Biotech lobbyists succeeded in making fiber-optic spines mandatory. After bionic white blood cells called microbivores became available, pollution-munching nanoscale filterbots were released into the atmosphere, solving all concerns about industrialism. Kidneys just caused stress, so once they were gone, nobody ever worried again. The liver, the pancreas, and the spleen turned out to be extraneous. “Although artificial hearts are beginning to work, a more effective approach will be to get rid of the heart altogether,” prophesied a futurist named Ray Kurzweil in 2004. He was right: Human Body 2.0 was mainly nonbiological. We made ourselves into bodies without organs.

  Our eyes were surgically enhanced with monitors that connected our retinas and minds directly to the Internet. Chips and processors implanted in our brains were synced to Google. We all came to know everything there is to know. Designers developed a new type of skin, made from color-morphing polymers, so we could choose whatever skin tone suited our mood. Soon, there was little distinction between virtual and analogue realities. What the inhabitants of the early twenty-first century considered physical products became information files—e-mail attachments. Pleasure devices were invented that allowed us to have sex with tangible replicas of our fantasies. Annual dechronification checkups continually reversed the body’s age to an optimal twenty-four. After Permanent Rollback became a reality, nobody ever needed to die again. Each person was archived in various storage media (biweekly identity-reconstruction scans were recommended), and if one’s body was damaged, broken, or killed, all one had to do was download oneself into a new clone-husk.

  These artificial bodies were composed of subatomic, self-reconfiguring robotics components that swarmed together in malleable utility fogs. They’d rendered plane tickets obsolete—we could instantly transfer our “selves” across the globe into foglets (as bodies were now known) wherever we needed or wanted to be. Through identity diffusion we could even be in several places at the same time, using wireless links. The expression I changed my mind came to mean something else entirely. By midcentury, we evolved. We became living machines. Cyborgs. Immortals.

  * * *

  On the second floor of David Kekich’s four-story home, the costume party was heating up. A small group danced jerkily to a CD of music generated by the human genome. Bleeping chimes and chirps issued from the speakers. It sounded like synthesizer bells playing space-station Muzak. “Is this music helping us age backwards?” asked Dr. Lord Lee-Brenner, a self-described pioneer in the use of human growth hormones. His date did a little moonwalk. She was wearing a beauty-pageant sash that said C. ELEGANS, the Latin name for the roundworm traditionally used in biological longevity experiments.

  Next to them, in an I’M FROM THE FUTURE T-shirt, was the birthday boy himself, David Kekich. He was in his wheelchair, setting up a microphone stand, when two fiftysomething women in schoolgirl kilts and fuck-me heels walked over to greet him.

  “Happy one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday!” one of them said, leaning in to kiss his cheek. “You don’t look a day over sixty!”

  “Thank you!” he replied. “I’m sorry—I know we’ve met, but what’s your name again?”

  “You don’t remember?” her friend asked in mock indignation.

  “No,” Kekich responded, laughing. “Memory has been eradicated, right?”

  On the ground floor, the topic was insulin-swing lag times. A lady in a black sweater emblazoned with the words THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR glided in on shoes with little wheels on the bottom. “Just like the kids!” she said, laughing.

  “What’s the Singularity?” asked a child whose clothes were covered in aluminum foil.

  “It’s the old-fashioned term for humans merging with computers to become immortal,” answered the roller woman.

  A copy of Ending Aging lay on the coffee table. When it was published in 2007, it claimed that people alive then would easily live to a thousand. Everybody at the party felt positive that would happen.

  * * *

  The lady with a HELLO MY NAME IS: KAT COTTER sticker affixed to her ample chest smiled at me. Interweaved within her waves of auburn hair were serpentlike tresses of glittering tinsel. She wore a black-and-gray robe with a futuristic, almost cultlike silver pendant. The large buckle on her belt was made of interlocking circles bedazzled with cubic zirconia.

  I walked over to introduce myself as the writer who’d come from Canada to attend. “You must be Kat?” I said politely.

  “No,” she said, continuing to smile enigmatic
ally.

  I glanced down at the name tag.

  “Kat couldn’t come. I’m her wild clone who drinks too much.”

  “Aha: Kat’s clone from the year 2068—of course.” I shook her hand. “My costume is stuck in a wormhole, but it’ll be here soon.”

  A woman wearing a plaid schoolgirl skirt came over and handed us each a cocktail. Her name was Jackie Silver. “I’m aging backwards,” Jackie purred. “I’m actually underage-drinking right now.”

  Upon learning my profession, Jackie immediately started telling me about her antiwrinkle cream. It’s called Replenish and she sells it through her website www.agingbackwards.com. “Replenish can quite possibly reverse the aging process,” she explained. “I discovered this age-defying coconut-honey complex. The active component is called baicalin. It’s a proven, risk-free cellular regenerator. It basically creates an invisible cushion of moisture that makes you look decades younger—like me!”

  Even dressed like a porned-up version of a Catholic schoolgirl, she clearly looked like a lady of a certain age. “I get mistaken for a younger woman all the time,” she writes on her website. “It happens when I’m out with my teenage son, Trent. People think I’m his sister! Sometimes, I’ll even get asked out by men in their twenties.”

  Whoever thinks she’s in her twenties would also have no trouble believing that the key ingredient in Replenish, baicalin, has miraculous properties. “Not only can it delay cellular senescence, it also helps your skin recover the youthful characteristics you had ten years ago,” explains her promotional material. “It fixes the problem of telomeres shortening by creating the missing end piece. It’s also been proven to increase skin firmness and elasticity, improve skin restructuring, and increase the number of fibroblast duplications.” I wondered what the Nobel-winning scientists who discovered telomeres would say about her cream creating a “missing end piece.”

  My phone rang. Clay and Jenna were a few miles away. “Wait until you see your costume,” Jenna said, laughing. “Clay is dressed like a mad scientist, and I’m a radical futurist-feminist. I’ve published several volumes of poetry on the vagina—now that it’s no longer needed.”

  As we spoke, a lady in a bright red wig and mirrored ski goggles came into the kitchen. She put down her bag and removed her tie-dyed T-shirt and denim miniskirt. For a moment, I thought she had gone totally naked, but then I realized that she was wearing flesh-colored, head-to-toe pantyhose. She had no bra on, so the nipples on her small breasts were plainly visible. It was impossible to see what her face looked like as the wig and shades covered them so much. “Your timing is perfect,” I gasped into the phone. “See you out front in ten.”

  As the quasi-naked redhead sashayed out of earshot, an elegant-looking woman walked over. She seemed to me like a conservative, churchgoing mother, and she was taken aback by what she’d just witnessed. “That lady in the body stocking has more nerve than anyone I’ve ever met,” she muttered.

  “Welcome to 2068!” I said.

  Within minutes, it became clear that Barbara’s prim attire did not reflect her ideas. She had joined the Methuselah Foundation 300, a group of three hundred philanthropists who agree to donate $1,000 per year for twenty-five years to help create “extended healthy life, enjoyed by all humanity . . . forever.” The names of each donor, she explained, will be etched into a steel-and-marble monument for all time.

  “We’re even into going off-planet,” she continued. “We’re going to be off-planet by 2068, for sure. I would love to live off planet Earth. I don’t care if we make fake planets. We’ll find something new and make it better. I’m looking forward way past what we’re doing now.”

  Two young men came over to join Barbara. They were brothers: one in high school, the other doing an undergraduate degree at Harvard in human evolutionary biology. I asked them if they were interested in living forever. “Of course!” said the younger one. They had been passionate about immortality since childhood. “When we were little, my brother and I decided neither of us wanted to die in any way ever,” explained the older one. “Later in life that translated into a fascination with the purpose of life rather than a fear of death. There’s too much we don’t know to just leave it all unresolved when we die.”

  “Are we immortal?” I asked in the spirit of 2068.

  “I hope so,” he answered sincerely. “With the improvements we’re making, it seems pretty certain to me. There’s no way of predicting when the breakthrough will come, but when it does—pow! I have to believe yes, otherwise there’s nothing to be working for or towards.”

  As we spoke, the two brothers and I couldn’t help taking peeks at the woman in the body stocking.

  “Is that what it’s going to be like in 2068?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if it’ll be like that,” the elder one said. “That’s kind of gnarled out.”

  His brother just laughed.

  “Would you like it to be like that?” I asked him.

  “Selectively.” He grinned slyly, stroking his chin.

  Then a ripple of excitement spread through the room. A thin man walked in dressed up like the life-extension theorist Aubrey de Grey. He had the look down perfectly: the long beard, the pallid countenance, the matted ponytail, the skinny jeans, even the ratty tennis sneakers.

  “Have you met Aubrey?” Barbara asked.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “He is the guru of nine-tenths of what we espouse,” she said.

  It wasn’t someone dressed like Aubrey de Grey—it was Aubrey de Grey. His long, scraggly beard gave him an eerie and wizardly Rip Van Winkle vibe. He looked consumptive. The first thing out of his mouth was “Where’s the beer?”

  * * *

  On June 25, 2000, almost a decade earlier, Aubrey de Grey and Dave Kekich, alongside an invitation-only group of other biogerontologists, spent the day debating the future of immortality research. They were in Manhattan Beach, a forty-five-minute drive up the coast. The roundtable discussion was heated, and fruitless. Heading back to his room at the Marriott that night, de Grey felt frustrated at the gathering’s inability to agree upon a concrete plan for combating aging. He wanted results, and he wanted them soon.

  In bed, his mind kept racing with ponderings about the nature of metabolism. Running his hands through his abundant beard, he stood up and started to pace around the room. Until then, he and everyone else in the prolongevity community had seen aging as a hopelessly complex inevitability, a nightmare about which nothing could fundamentally be done. But was it a question to theorize and argue about, or was it one to answer? There must be a way of reengineering the body, he mused.

  At around 4:00 a.m., de Grey had his eureka moment.

  “I swept aside all that complexity,” he recalls, “revealing a new simplicity in a complete redefinition of the problem.” To end aging forever, he realized, we simply need to address what he calls the Seven Deadly Things. His “possibly comprehensive plan” entails fixing seven categories of cellular and molecular issues that we cannot currently fix. This includes curing cancer through WILT, eliminating the buildup of unwanted cells, rectifying chromosomal and mitochondrial mutations, flushing out lipofuscin, and wiping away other bulky detritus from our lysosomes.

  If we could only activate an intracellular janitor, a broom of the system capable of cleaning out all the dust and scree that accumulates in our bodies as they age—why, then we wouldn’t age at all. If each of the seven habits can be handled, we can all be highly effective people—forever. Calling his theory SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, de Grey declared a WOA (War On Aging).

  The message was so simple it caught on. SENS became a media sensation. De Grey started foundations, wrote a book, and gave countless interviews to amazed journalists. He claimed that his acronyms would save “tens of thousands of lives a day, possibly including your own or your most dearly beloved.” He started being compared to Jesus. He became the face (or the beard) of what he himself characterized as
the most important mission humanity ever faced. The goal of preventing death never left his thoughts, he lamented. To cope with the responsibility, he drank many pints of beer every day.

  What could the rest of us do to help? He recommended writing letters to Congress telling them to support his research. “But an even more powerful thing you can do is to donate to the Methuselah Foundation,” he wrote in Ending Aging. It couldn’t be easier: all we have to do is give him money and we’ll never die. The donations are even tax deductible. Although his official title is chief science officer, it may be more accurate to call him a fund-raiser. “Five thousand dollars may not sound like much, but SENS Foundation is fantastic at spending money incredibly efficiently, on account of our fabulously committed workforce, so it’ll make a genuine difference.”

  De Grey is emblematic of early twenty-first-century extreme scientific optimism—and its attendant ignorance. That a computer programmer taken for a professor from Cambridge could gain so much credibility testifies to this era’s incapacity for separating truth and fantasy.

  In 2005, more than two dozen of the world’s most important biogerontologists published a peer-reviewed paper distancing themselves from de Grey’s seven factors. “None of these approaches has ever been shown to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans,” they concluded. “To explain to a layman why de Grey’s programme falls into the realm of fantasy rather than science requires time, attention and the presentation of detailed background information.”

  De Grey has lashed back with hundreds of pages of interminable, quasi-rebuttals. “If you look at my reasoning, how I get to those conclusions,” he claims, “it becomes very much harder to actually identify anything that I’m saying that is unreasonable.” But wading through his papers, as I did in preparation for the 2068 party, isn’t something most people would subject themselves to in their free time, unless they wanted to be freaked-out by his dystopian vision of primate colonies.