Unfortunately, another funeral was soon to follow.
*
On November 22, 2070, at the age of 102, Aunt Louise was taken to a hospital, and then to a hospice. The illness was one we could have easily remedied. Advanced heart disease. Even at her age, and even without AIS, an artificial heart transplant would have been no more risky than an appendectomy was a hundred years before.
I sat at the side of her bed, holding her right hand in both of mine. “Let me save you.”
“No thank you,” she said.
“Please.”
“I’m tired, Adam.”
I fingered one of her favorite glass flowers that she had taken with her to the hospice. Her room was full of them. “I thought you enjoyed your life.”
A silent frown spread down her face.
“No?” I asked.
“I love you and Evelyn and Lily and Cain.” She pointed weakly to a bouquet of daisies that Lyle had sent. “And Lyle. Blue and Pierre, and my gardens. But this world’s a shadow. A shadow with pain. I want to see what’s next.”
“What if there’s nothing?”
She smiled gently. “Then I’ll welcome the quiet.”
I wasn’t ready to give up. “I could have you cloned. I’d raise her.”
“You’re a sweet boy, Adam,” she said, patting my hand like I was a young child. “I was happy to help raise you.”
“But you won’t let me clone you?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to do it again.”
Aunt Louise reached out to a glass lily.
“We did what we could,” I said. “Lily’s not your fault.”
“It’s all my fault,” she said as she turned and buried the side of her face in the pillow.
“No it’s not. You tried to keep both Lilys away from him.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said, closing her eyes.
“Lyle-2’s to blame,” I said, looking at the lilies. “You tried your best—”
“I’m not talking about Lyle-2.” Her damp, century-old eyes fixed me with an emotion I’d never seen in Aunt Louise. That I never thought I’d see. Anger. “I’m talking about the first one.”
I saw Lyle’s grinning face as the gun lay in front of me that Christmas morning. “What about him?”
“I should have said something when he shot Mom and Dad.” Her weak breath rattled in her throat. “But all I did was ask for a drink of water.”
I bowed my head and ground my teeth. Aunt Louise had asked him for water, pretending not to know he had murdered their parents. I had begged him for comfort, pretending not to know he’d killed my mother.
“You were four years old,” I told her. “You were scared. It’s not your fault.” I thought about telling her that I, too, had cowered to the murderer to save myself. But I never did. “Let me save you.”
She placed her hand on top of mine and closed her eyes peacefully. “No,” she said. “No more.”
“No more what?”
“Glasses of water.”
***
Aunt Louise died later that night.
Lyle was in charge of the funeral arrangements. We weren’t invited.
She remembered me in her will. It seemed she didn’t want her beloved pets being raised by Lyle, and she hoped I’d take them into my home along with a few of her “oldest, most favorite glass flowers.” I readily agreed, somewhat grateful I didn’t have to take her whole garden. But I would have done it.
Evelyn and Cain joined me in a small private memorial service, placing a photo of Aunt Louise sitting happily amongst her glass forest, the silver-framed portrait surrounded by several of her oldest, most favorite glass flowers.
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I was at work when the call came from Lyle. It was a couple months after Aunt Louise’s death – a loss that had grown deeper with time. Not just the emptiness of losing a loved one, but her last words about Lyle-1 haunted me
Lyle-2’s voice was the same as his.
“Yes?” I said.
His reply was unemotional. “Child Protective Services came to my house last night.”
I shifted in my seat. “Hmm. Good.”
“They inspected Lily for child abuse.”
I waited several seconds for him to continue, until it became apparent he was waiting for me. “Did they find any?”
“I told you to stay out of my life.”
I didn’t respond. After a while, Lyle ended the call.
*
When I got home, I told Evelyn about it.
“Good,” she said. The same word I’d used, but with sincerity. “Do you know what happened?”
“No, I haven’t been able to find out.”
“Well, it’s a start,” she said. “Even if we can’t get her away from him, if we can make him afraid to hurt her, maybe he won’t.”
“Evelyn, please.”
She paused, trying to read my thoughts. “Please what?”
I couldn’t think of any way to ask. But she didn’t need me to.
“You want me to stop trying to help Lily?”
I pressed my fingers against my forehead, shielding my face.
“Adam, answer me.”
I let my hands drop to my side. “You almost died. Cain already died. My mother died. Your father died.” I shook my head. “Don’t you see?”
Evelyn nodded very slowly. “I understand,” she said. “But Jack was your friend even after he knew you and your family were a threat to him and his family. Your mother gave birth to you even when—”
“And you married me even when you knew,” I interrupted. “But I’m not Jack. Or Mom. Or you. I’m…” a clone. I sat down.
Evelyn sat next to me and placed her hand on my knee. “You’re ashamed because you’re afraid of death. You think only a clone would hesitate to risk his life for others.”
I could say nothing. No one had ever verbalized my fear and cowardice. Her words made my shame more concrete than ever.
“Adam.” She paused again, staring at her hands in her lap. “What do you think I was thinking when the church bomber said he would send us all to hell? What do you think I was thinking when my father threw himself over me?”
I still said nothing, wanting her to stop, terrified that after all this time she would finally blame me for her father’s death.
She fixed her eyes on mine. They were getting glassy with tears. “Do you think I was praying for my daddy’s life? Or do you think I was praying that he’d save me?” Her chin began trembling. I brushed some of her hair back with my fingertips and held her hand. The tip of her nose was getting red. “And when the blast ripped my eardrums, and when my dad’s body dropped on top of me, and when I felt that nail from the bomb scratch me above my eye,” she touched her scar without looking up, “what do you think was my first thought? Whether my dad was still alive, or whether he’d let something cut me?”
I cradled her hand in mine. “Evelyn.”
She swallowed hard, then forced out the words. “And who stayed safe under her father’s body, too scared to see if there was anything I could do to help him, or even whisper that I loved him? Pretending he was fine when I knew he was dead with twenty nails in his back and legs and skull?”
I put my arm around her and pulled her close, kissing her forehead, resting my chin against her hair. She clutched my shirt in her first. She couldn’t say anything for a long time.
“He’s dead,” she said at last. “And now what’s the first thing that goes through my mind each time I notice my scar? How grateful and proud I am of my father, or how ashamed I am of myself?”
“No,” I whispered, kissing her again.
When she was done crying she raised her reddened eyes to meet mine. “We’ve all done things we regret, and I’ll do more before I die. We can be discouraged, or we can be inspired to be better next time we have a chance.”
I nodded. I wanted to be better.
She took my hands
in hers. “Lily is one of our chances.”
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A few months later, we learned that Evelyn was dying.
The initial warning came when Evelyn noticed several new gray hairs, but we didn’t think anything of it until she began to get hot flashes. She had only just turned thirty-seven.
The first standard tests found a moderate deviation in cell aging than would be expected at her age. It was about twenty percent the normal rate. In other words, it could be said that, at thirty-seven, Evelyn’s body was in her mid-forties. A scan for known genetic diseases turned up nothing, and such a slow acceleration in aging was rather unusual if it was the cause of some disease and not simply a natural propensity to age more quickly than others. Our top doctors suggested there was probably nothing to worry about. At that rate, and with our current average life expectancies thanks to our artificial immune system, Evelyn-2 could expect to still live to be ninety, and by then we would have long since begun putting people into completely artificial bodies and found an aging “cure” for those who didn’t want artificial bodies.
Six months later we realized the urgency of the affliction. Her hair had gone completely gray, her skin was losing its elasticity, and she was beginning to develop aches, pains, and stiffness associated with old age.
We sat together in Dr. Lisa Lopez’s office.
“I’m sorry, Evelyn,” she said slowly. “It’s not good.”
“What is it?” she asked calmly, gripping my hand.
“It looks to be some sort of genetic poisoning. A manufactured disease. The most closely related naturally occurring disease is Progeria, but both the cause and expression of this engineered malady are significantly different. And in this case, the age progression is increasing rapidly.”
“How long?”
Dr. Lopez looked over her papers as if the answer was there. She shrugged. “Your artificial immune system could keep you relatively healthy through most of the rapid aging, and it might even slow down the acceleration as the AIS is improved over the years, especially if we’re able to pinpoint how it’s working. But whoever developed this seems to have known how we would try to decipher it, and the artificial genes mutate constantly, so far preventing us from understanding their architecture or exactly how they work.”
Evelyn nodded patiently. “How long?”
“Probably five to ten years.”
She nodded, looking down at our intertwined hands. “Like Farewell Dolly,” she said quietly, more to herself than to us.
She didn’t want to tell Cain at first, not until we had a more complete grasp of what we were dealing with. But our son had already been asking about her gray hair, and I could tell he was nervous. I thought about my clone-father as he wrote about his mother’s cancer.
I remember the first glimmer that something was wrong. We were packing up to leave Baker Beach near the Golden Gate. A gust of wind blew some of my dad’s papers out of the beach bag and sent Mom’s sunbonnet tumbling to the sand. She reached up quickly to adjust her blond hair, further skewing her wig.
The wig surprised me. I’d seen her wear many wigs during her performances, but never one that so closely resembled her normal hair. And she hadn’t performed in months.
As Dad fixed her wig, Mom began to cry. He held her close.
“Adam, can you get Mommy’s hat?” he asked, his face concealed behind his wife’s, his voice shaky.
I caught up to my mom’s hat and a few of the scattered pieces of paper. When I turned back around, Dad was comforting Mom as they walked along the dirt path back to the car. I grabbed the forgotten beach bag and caught up with them in the parking lot. Nobody talked as we drove back home.
A few nights later we were watching a rerun of The Incredible Hulk. It was an episode entitled Married starring Bill Bixby as David Banner and Mariette Hartley as the terminally ill doctor he weds. Near the end, David Banner dreams that his new wife boards a bus driven by the Grim Reaper, with David vainly running to stop her.
Mom got up and ran into their bedroom. Dad followed.
I turned the TV off and knocked on the bedroom door.
“Is everything okay, Mommy?”
“Everything’s fine,” Dad answered.
But I could hear Mom sobbing.
I leaned against the closed door, not wanting to let go of something I vaguely felt that I was losing, before turning away with a knot in my stomach. That was my first memory of feeling helpless.
“I think we should tell him,” I said, describing what had happened to my c-father, and his reaction when his mother died. Evelyn agreed.
We sat him down that night at the dining room table. And we told him.
Evelyn took him by the hand and held his eyes with hers. “We went to the doctors today to find out what’s wrong with me.”
He fidgeted nervously. “What did they…” he started, but couldn’t finish.
“I don’t want you to worry too much yet, because there’s a lot they don’t really know.” She waited for him to nod before she went on. “But right now they think it’s some sort of unknown aging sickness, so I’m going to grow older faster than normal.”
“Until they find a cure?” he asked, glancing at me.
I nodded. But didn’t convince him.
“How long will you live if they don’t?”
“Maybe ten years,” she said.
He got up and gave his mom a hug. “Can I do anything to help?”
“What you just did,” I said.
That wasn’t the kind of answer he wanted. He wanted something concrete he could do to make his mom live longer. But that challenge, that obligation, was mine.
When his hug was over, he turned to me. “What are you going to do?”
“Kill Lyle,” was the first thing that popped into my head, but that wouldn’t help Evelyn. “I’m going to pull our company’s top two doctors into private practice to work solely on trying to figure out the cause of the disease, and I’m also going to devote a much larger percentage of our resources to artificial bodies. We’ll have either a cure or a new body before...”
I trailed off, not convincing either of them. Or myself.
The positive news about the disease was that, like Progeria, the aging didn’t appear to affect her central nervous system. I assumed this was either because the genetic manipulation was based on Progeria or because Lyle had wanted to ensure she would be fully lucid as the rest of her body decayed around her. But regardless, it did give us a glimmer of hope. Our project managers working with Barebots hadn’t planned on being able to successfully keep a human brain alive and functioning inside an artificial body for another fifteen to twenty years. But I knew it was possible to beat those projections. It had to be.
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The first step was to hire Drs. Lisa Lopez and Thomas Greenhall from Ingeneuity to work specifically on battling Evelyn’s disease and keeping her alive. They had been friends of mine since my Copy Boy days, and they were motivated to help my wife.
The next step was to infuse the drive towards full artificial bodies with more capital and talent. To do that we took more profits from our cloning division, pushed for investors, and gave ourselves a five-year goal to put a human brain into a completely artificial body to be completed by late 2076, replacing the long-held goal of January 1, 2090. Everyone knew the inspiration for that goal, but there was little dissent. It had long been known that this was our key to future success, and it was a wise goal regardless of the motivation.
Nor was it nearly as crazy as most thought at the time. With advanced AI taking over both the research and the surgical aspects, we were proceeding toward our goal at speeds constrained largely by advancements in computing power, which had already far surpassed the processing power of the human brain and was expected to be three times more powerful still by 2076. Machines would soon make things and do things of which humans hadn’t dreamed.
A se
cond impetus for our new corporate goals arose four months later when Lyle Gardener-2 and several of his loyalists publicly announced the formation of a new rival corporation – Rejuve, Inc. The good news was that they weren’t going to compete with us on artificial bodies. We were far ahead of the curve, and the expense to get in the game was overwhelming, thereby making the choice for them clear. They would instead compete with us on artificial immune systems while tangling with others in the field of cryonic freezing and rejuvenation.
I was a little surprised by the latter choice. There was a potential future in it, and Lyle-2 had studied the science as part of his Ph.D. work, but it was not an industry in which he had many contacts. Still, as he stated in the prospectus, there was a good case to be made that cryonics would be bigger than cloning if it could be performed successfully. If you gave people a choice between having a clone or being temporarily frozen until they could be brought back, most would have themselves frozen where, theoretically, their memories and all that makes them who they are would still be intact. If the technical hurdles could be overcome, cryonics would be the afterlife of choice. And if you were going to start a company meant to lead the way in cryonic regeneration, it made sense to also specialize in nano-based artificial immune systems, as that would certainly be necessary if anyone was ever going to be brought back from cryonic freeze.
In my opinion, his business plan had two problems. First, I believed it would take at least a couple decades before his company could freeze and rejuvenate people without harming their minds. Second, it could be a very short-term solution that would never recoup the investment. If we were able to put human brains into artificial bodies in five to ten years, then most of Lyle’s clients would be those with serious brain diseases or impairments that couldn’t be fixed with modern technology, as well as those who were philosophically opposed to the idea of having their brains transplanted into something artificial. In both the long run and the short run, his market was a niche far smaller than ours. Add to that the fact that demand for AIS would also decline with the advent of artificial bodies, and I wouldn’t have invested in his company even if he weren’t my nemesis.