Obviously, I would not have done any of this without an agreement. I was basically banking on the assumption that any organization interested in Telomerax would also have had a clear interest in keeping it a secret. So no matter how evil their intention may have seemed, we would have had this crucial goal in common. Removing me from the equation against my will meant immediate public availability to the formula.
At the time, I could only come up with a few ways how the drug could have gone public. The first, being my sudden death in a totally unexpected catastrophe like an accident, or natural disaster. Otherwise, through a failed negotiation with an unreasonable party. Or, perhaps, the chance of someone actually wanting to take it public.
In the first case scenario, I told myself it would have been fate’s desire to let all mankind share my legacy. As for the other two, I figured that this would show the presence of such extreme corruption and ignorance that mankind would desperately need this gift.
However, I did not consider the fact that showed up later on, that I would become the prime target of hatred for years after my discovery went public. Then, there was also the time factor. This secret had to be kept over a long period of time, for as long as I would live. Hanging around your neighborhood at age ninety, running a clinic looking barely forty, could get suspicious. Even if people know you are a genius in the business of cosmetics.
Because of this, I knew I had to figure out a way that allowed me to completely change identity and start a new life somewhere else, every thirty or forty years. I immediately realized that the tricky part was not so much transferring the assets and the money, but rather creating a believable story around it, to give the new Louis a real past. I would need assistance from people knowledgeable in the functions of secret services, security agencies, and organized crime. Basically, I could not do this alone. I needed to build a small and extremely trustworthy network of…let’s say, ‘immortal guardians’, whose one mission was to keep Telomerax hidden.
But, unlike biochemistry, this area was unfamiliar to me and maybe it is no surprise that despite the caution I took, and the initial success, this is the part that did not go as smoothly as I had hoped.”
Chapter 4
“Was your second wife, Dora, aware of the nature and extent of your work?”
“She was not aware of all the details until 1995, which means thirteen years after our marriage, eleven years after Telomerax was stable, and ten years since I started giving it to her without her knowing. It is worth explaining how I organized this phenomenon, because it marked the beginning of the immortal generation.
I met her in the summer of 1980. She came to the clinic as the rich, young, and somehow bored wife of Johann Feldstein, a respected lawyer and professor at the University of Basel.
She was the daughter of Jacob Bershidsky, a German-speaking Sudeten Jew, who was freed by Allied troops in Dachau. He came back to his Sudeten homeland just to, then, be driven out by the Czechs. He eventually moved to Freiburg, where he worked as a shoemaker. He opted for his German side, decided to forget his past, by declaring no religious affiliation, and eventually became a West German citizen and married Elke Freising. She was a widow who had lost her husband on the Eastern front and now had to settle for a second marriage with a renegade Jew, because she badly needed help to raise her small child, Helmut.
Dora was born in 1953 and lived an uneventful childhood in the German province of the “Wirtschaftswunder”, the post-war economic miracle. Her parents decided to keep their former lives hidden and Dora sensed a clear preference her mother had for her elder brother, Helmut. She went to college, where she met her first husband, who was a brilliant professor in commercial law and was ten years older than her. Shortly after they married in 1976, her father called her aside and told her the truth about himself and her mother. He could no longer bear keeping the facts hidden, as his wife was slowly being killed by the Alzheimer’s disease and he was afraid Dora would find out the wrong way, if he was not the one to tell her.
She was shocked by the news and almost broke off her relationship with her father. Even worse, she was not able to tell her husband. She felt he was continuously absorbed by his career and their relationship was quietly cooling down after the first months full of passion.
When she entered the clinic, her soul was a complete existential wreck but she was still a very attractive woman; tall, voluptuous and elegant. Her head was crowned by a forest of long, curly brown hair that reminded me of a Greek goddess, but her face was veiled in sadness that emanated from her icy eyes. Even though I was more committed than ever to my research, I could not resist the temptation to invite her to the ‘terrace dinner’.
This was a huge celebration held by the clinic that had been started by Dr. Klettendorf and consisted of a lavish meal, taking place every Wednesday evening.
The event was held for the clinic’s most valuable customers, on the beautiful terrace on the top floor, overlooking the Lake of Geneva.
We had on average fifty to sixty guests who would spend one or two weeks at Le Jardin, and we would personally choose who would attend the dinner. There were two main purposes.
First, we wanted to create a deeper sense of exclusivity among the already exclusive clients that chose to stay at the beauty farm. Second, we carefully selected the guests to create a network of connections which we could count on, in the future.
Of course there were some golden rules in the selection process. First, newcomers would typically not be allowed to the dinner. You needed to be a regular customer. Next, invitees had to bring something interesting to the table. We were not interested in the “simply rich”. They needed to have stories, or skills, or personalities that made them unique. Lastly, all the previous rules notwithstanding, everyone at the dinner had to be liked by myself and Dr. Klettendorf.
Hans started to spend less and less time at the clinic, leaving me in charge of the terrace dinner. So I broke the rule and invited Dora to the terrace after her first visit. Let me cut it short and keep a bit of privacy here. What matters for the rest of the story is that the next year she divorced her first husband, and we married in 1983.
Beyond physical attraction, we shared a deep dissatisfaction on the way life was organized, and also a resolve to change it.
While I was engaged in my personal struggle against the deaths among my loved ones, Dora held a grudge against the lies humans constantly tell each other which, in turn, make our lives miserable. Knowing this about her, I had to tell her something about my work, yet I could not risk a full disclosure.
On the eve of our marriage, I took her to the lab and explained that I was doing more than simple cosmetics and I was actually involved in a secret research about aging. I could not tell her more, but I would in due time. She had either to trust me, or leave me. After hearing these words she froze, and for a long minute I thought she was gone. The Dr. Picard she loved had a secret he was not yet prepared to tell the world, not even his future wife.
Then she asked me, “Ok, tell me just two things. Can you promise me that you are not hurting anyone and that when the day comes I will be the first to know?”
I responded happily, “Yes! No lies.”
“And I have a further request. I would appreciate you to finance my degree in psychology and my psychoanalysis, so that I can set up my psychoanalyst practice in a private studio here at the clinic. I have a simpler goal than you, just to help people get out of their own lies.”
“That is a done deal. Frankly, your mission looks more impossible than mine.”
She kissed me, and we happily married the following day.
Chapter 5
“Yet this was just the revelation that you had work in progress. How did you manage the full disclosure?”
“She would ask me every few months how my research was going. I would give vague answers about some progress.
In 1985, once I was sure there would be no negative outcomes, I asked her if she would like to join the experime
nt. She accepted, so I took a close-up picture of her sitting on the terrace, flooded with the spring sun, and we continued our lives. From time to time I would ask her to take a beauty cream bath and then the pills. During the occasional request for an update, she would add a comment that she was not feeling any different.
Then on April 25, 1995, I took another close-up picture of her and put it next to the one taken ten years before. She stared in silence. After a while she whispered, “Wow, Louis, well you are certainly on to something. What’s next?”
“I guess we need to keep quiet and wait for a while. A very long while, in all likeliness. Do you think people are ready for this to go public?”
She immediately responded, “Not if I recall our conversations with the terrace guests, nor if I look at my patients. But we risk waiting forever.”
“True. We might have a difficult quest in front of us. Even if during the last few years, things in the world have improved a lot. We might still need to wait several years before we bring this to light. And the two of us cannot do it alone. We need to build a bigger team.”
“Build a team…with some of our friends? How would you pick them?”
“Let’s profile them first. We need to like and trust them. And they have to contribute the skills and connections we do not have, in case we have to disappear and reappear under new identities. But by this alone, the list would contain many names.
Next, they have to be absolutely committed to keeping the secret. We do not need the idealists or believers in the progression of mankind, nor those who could try to use the discovery just for their own benefit. You know that among our guests, the opportunistic crooks far outnumber the naive philanthropists.”
I continued, having this checklist memorized by heart,
“We must search for disenchanted people, yet with a very strong sense of their value so that given the right challenge they will fully commit themselves.”
“Yes, I agree. You are asking these people to form the first generation of a new mankind - if we can still even call it that. They must stay quiet until the time is right. This is the biggest secret, with the biggest reward, and the biggest risks.”
“At the end of the day, the deal is very simple. I give them immortality in exchange for their service to the organization and they are free to do whatever they want with their Telomerax, without telling anyone about the discovery.”
“But they will still depend on you to get the drug. How do you know this won’t provoke rivalry or resentment?”
“That’s why you will not find any scientist among them. I want to avoid any risk of professional competition. The team needs talents we do not have. Too much similarity brings rivalry; differences are much more manageable.
As for the drug, I will give them as much Telomerax as they want. I will never stand between them and immortality, as long as they help protect us. After all, you do not grow jealous of the doctor that heals you.”
“Ok, Louis, but how about emotional ties?
You cannot ask people to become immortal and just pretend they will be willing to leave their loved ones behind, or that they will not fall in love over the course of centuries, even if they are the most materialistic people on earth. You can handpick them with no relatives now, but what if they change ideas, get lonely and want out of the project, or fall in love and want their new significant other onboard?
Maybe somebody with the wrong characteristics?
I mean, you trust me now but can you trust me forever? You know you can’t. Even I cannot commit to that. Fifteen years together have made me sure enough to commit the rest of my life to you. Now we are talking about eternity, and honestly I do not know if I can do that. No lies, Louis.”
“I agree with you that from this standpoint, we must reduce risks. Let’s put some facts together.
The drug is not a one-time deal. If you stop taking it, aging restarts after a few weeks and you are back in the mortal ranks. So people can opt out if they want, or even opt back in. I do not want to threaten anyone with things like ‘if you are out, we will kill you.’
Violence is not my thing. I just want to make sure the secret is kept. The drug is made in such a way that you cannot deformulate it. I spent the last ten years tweaking it so that any attempt to analyze it or break down its molecular structure, would destroy it.
And it is even harder to track how it works once it is absorbed into the body. The real issue is how to discourage them from telling governments or organized crime groups about Telomerax whereabouts.
They will know that there are ten very well hidden copies of the drug formula and its manufacturing process, waiting to be released to the world if anything bad happens to me or you. They used to be stored in clunky safes, now they are kept in sleek cases with ten floppy disks inside. That way, if any one of our future team members sends me additional and unwelcomed guests, I have enough leeway to negotiate with the new entrants. And those who betrayed our trust, might soon be on the black list of the newcomers they tried to put against us.”
“I see sleeping with an analyst has taught you something, Louis,” she joked. “How about children? I was planning not to have them, but this is opening up new opportunities.”
“Children can be given immortality only when they become adults. This is due to the fact that I have not run any experimentation on them and I am afraid Telomerax could have very nasty side effects on a developing body. I do not think this is a problem. You do not want to freeze your kids at age two. Then parents have about twenty to twenty-five years to work out a way to tell them about the secret and enroll them in the program, or otherwise, let them go.”
“Back to our interview, Louis, we all know that at the end of the process only four clients of the list made it into the so-called “Olympic Circle”, with two of them being allowed to add their significant others. That makes six people in total. Do you have anything to share about the Olympic Circle that maybe the media didn’t cover?”
“Where do I start?...Well, let’s go in chronological order. One of the least known parts, is the way Dora and I recruited them. What happened after we were discovered in 2010, has been covered in several books and movies. But, just for the record, I did not invent the name “Olympic Circle”. That was made up much later by some tabloids. True secrecy requires no name.”
Chapter 6
Tarek made his first appearance at the clinic, in the spring of 1979. He was with a group of Arabian women, and his passport said he was an Egyptian Air Force officer. It turned out that he was taking care of all their needs, behaving like the perfect tourist guide. He would have gone unnoticed if he had not reappeared in 1981 and then again in 1983; each time with a different group of Middle Eastern women and mysteriously keeping a respectful distance away from them. He had earned an invitation, and when I requested his presence on the terrace, he did not object to attend the dinner alone.
During the first dinner, he introduced himself as a retired air force officer, who had served in the war of 1973 piloting Russian-made MiG jets against Israeli Mirage fighters. Then when he retired, he was allowed to keep his status of Colonel on the passport, even though he was no longer active duty. He pretended to work as a middleman in the Middle East, with a special focus on Syria and Lebanon, where the civil war was restarting in the aftermath of the Israeli occupation of 1982.
From then on, he kept returning alone and I kept inviting him. It was not until 1987, over a glass of Grand Marnier at the end of the dinner, that he talked more about his real life.
His family belonged to the inner circle of Gamal Nasser and even after the fall of the president, caused by the catastrophic defeat in the 1967 war, he and his father had managed to keep superior positions in the regime.
Being an essential part of the Air Force chief of staff, he helped design the air attacks that in 1973, put Egypt very close to winning the war. Despite the military success, the war of 1973 turned out to be an even worse experience than the one of 1967. He lost his
younger brother in the Sinai desert, where he was serving as a brigade commander, then shortly afterwards his mother died from the anguish.
Aside from these personal tragedies, Tarek believed Egypt should make peace with Israel and as soon as the Camp David Accords ended the war, he left the Air Force.
Due to his vast network, he was able to help a number of Middle Eastern regimes improve their military capabilities.
Over time, his hard work earned him the trust of his most important clients, to the extent that they would request him to escort their daughters and sisters on their trips to Europe.
“You know, back in the seventies it was much easier. It was enough just to go to Beirut to breathe some Western freedom, then the civil war destroyed everything and Europe was the only place left for the rich Arabs to catch a break.”
On October 6, 1981, Tarek suffered another blow when his father was killed by a Kalashnikov round, fired during the attack by the Muslim Brothers that left Egyptian President Anwar Sadat dead, along with eleven other elite officers.
“I was alone with my wife and two kids and felt Egypt was no longer the place for me to stay. A dark cloud was starting to loom over the whole region so I packed all my belongings and moved to the Gulf. In 1982 we moved to Bahrein, where business opportunities skyrocketed for people like me, thanks to the ongoing Iraq-Iran war.”
“Do you remember the Iran-Contra case where the CIA, with the help of Israel, sold weapons to Iran to finance their secret war against Marxist regimes in Central America? Well, it was just one of the many unorthodox trades in town. My main area of expertise was in the organization of the air defense for Iraq, where I worked a lot with French and Soviet advisers. I also dealt with negotiations between Iran and the United Arab Emirates.
The Last Enemy - A history of the present future - 1934-2084 Page 3
