But I wasn’t going to let that stop me from doing everything in my power to limit his opportunities for success and manipulate the future of his company. And that meant several things.
At the forefront was our direct competition with his artificial immune system. He was quick to take several of our staff members from our own AIS department, and I was determined to tie them up in court to make sure they didn’t use any of our patented work. Regarding his cryonics, I began campaigning for an expansion of the GC Board to consider all implications of immortality – from the longer lives already beginning to influence our social and economic dynamics, to the future impact of cryonics. I suspected Lyle’s ultimate goal would be to control the technology and be as godlike as possible in doling it out, and I wanted to make sure there were heavy regulations and safeguards built in long before the first people were unfrozen.
The first success was with the Genetics and Cloning Board. Congress was impressed with our efforts, and they agreed that our scope should be expanded to consider the emerging immortality-related technologies including the extensions of life from AIS, artificial bodies, and cryonics. Lyle-2 testified against that expansion, unsuccessfully arguing that “genetics and cloning” had little to do with the issues related to the extension of life. Admittedly a compelling argument, but a slim majority, led by Senator Hillary Rodham-2, gave us till 2074 to draw up some suggested guidelines at which point a more permanent extension would be considered. In a way it was typical of government bureaucracy, keeping investigative committees around after their initial usefulness had expired by altering their mission objectives. I guess we could have studied bureaucratic immortality as well. But in this particular case, bureaucracy pleased me.
Lyle-2 and his new public relations director, our former board member Terry Fallows, organized a massive letter-writing campaign to Congress, news organizations, bloggers, and related websites. However, even if most people agreed with the logic of their arguments, there was no outpouring of emotion from the general public regarding the issue. The GC Board had developed a fairly positive reputation, and we received the benefit of the doubt when we claimed we could help ease America through a social revolution that nearly all believed would dwarf the upheaval surrounding cloning and genetic enhancements.
I had faith that we would at least do a better job of it than an unregulated Lyle-2, especially with Jack Lewis as the chairman. His fairness, integrity, and effectiveness had garnered him one of the highest approval ratings of anyone in the public eye. He was eager to get going on our latest mission, and I was eager to see him impress everyone yet again.
He kicked off our new agenda with a list of key areas requiring guidelines: Social Security, Medicare, private health insurance, requirements for brain transfers to artificial bodies (an issue that I wouldn’t vote on due to my financial stake in the decision), probate issues regarding cryonics, and “lifetime” issues such as life sentences for crimes, lifetime appointments for judges, copyright/public domain laws, etc.
As mentioned, I excused myself from the discussions regarding requirements for having your brain put into artificial bodies. The regulations they came up with were straightforward. You couldn’t do it until you were at least eighteen years old unless your physical body was failing, debilitated, or causing chronically intense, untreatable suffering. After eighteen, if you were healthy, you could pay to have the transfer done or get a government-subsidized loan, but these wouldn’t be available until at least five years after the first transfer in order to evaluate potential risks and side effects. If you needed the transfer for immediate physical reasons, health insurance companies would be required to pay for the transfer after the fifth anniversary of “patient zero.”
Estimates as to how long a person could expect to live following the transplant varied among our doctors. Barring a disastrous accident, it was expected that current AIS could keep most brains functioning fully for a minimum of 120 years, and realistically 160 years or more with our continuing advances. We split the difference and estimated that the average lifespan of those willing to transfer their brains into artificial bodies would be 140.
In 2073, only twenty percent of the population thought they would be willing to go through brain transfers to continue living, but there were many misconceptions surrounding their reluctance. Most people thought we would be putting their brains inside robotic shells. The bodies were actually designed to look, feel, and in some cases work similar to the original body, but without its associated weaknesses. The blood, muscles, tissue, and bones were synthetic, but functioned much the same way to the point where, theoretically, your conscious mind would only notice minor differences. You could increase your muscle mass by working out or cheat and have the muscle mass added when creating your body or injected artificially later on. You could still taste and eat food (and, yes, dispose of it in the same old-fashioned manner if you so chose, though there were other disposal options). But you wouldn’t necessarily need much food as the skin converted light to energy and the body was far more efficient, able to exist and keep your brain functioning on far less power and fewer nutrients.
All your five senses would work the same, although your eyes would be sharper and you could enhance your sense of smell, touch, and even modify your taste buds so that you craved Brussels sprouts. Your teeth had self-cleaners and would last centuries. You would never gain weight unless you wanted to. There would be no baldness, but your hair could continue to grow as it used to (but only in places you wanted it to grow). You could have a pumping heart for nostalgic purposes, but it wasn’t necessary as the synthetic blood was self-propelled. The same was true for lungs and breathing; an unnecessary function as oxygen was inhaled throughout your body, but one that could still be performed for the experience.
And yes, you could still have sex. Men would still create sperm in natural testes transferred from their original body, and women could still get pregnant using eggs transferred from their original body. But the birth process would be completely painless. Naturally, men could be made to have a womb and mammary glands as well – not just transsexuals who would truly be able to have a female body, but straight males as well. They would simply have to undergo a remarkably simple cesarean delivery. Finally, the body wouldn’t appear to age unless you requested it.
When details such as those were explained, more than forty percent of the population indicated they would go through a brain transfer before choosing cryonic freezing or death. The number was likely to increase as such transfers became commonplace in society. That meant more than half the current population could expect to live 140 years, double the life expectancy when my clone-father was born.
There was, clearly, much to contemplate and debate as we prepared for the impending social revolution. In the fall of 2073, Jack and his family came up to our cabin in the redwoods to go over these and some of the other big issues before we tackled them in committee.
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It wasn’t all debate and contemplation. Jack wanted to show his family the redwoods that he hadn’t seen since we first reunited as teenagers. He also wanted to discuss his latest book that would eventually be called Me, Myself, and My Clone.
“Welcome back,” I said, giving him a hug on the porch, and then moving on to greet his wife Joy and their twins, our former ring boy and flower girl, now sixteen-year-olds Edmund and Lucy.
“How are you doing?” Jack asked Evelyn as they embraced.
“I feel fantastic,” she said. And she looked fantastic. We had programmed her AIS to keep her hair healthy and black and maintain her youthful skin. At first Evelyn had chosen to let the aging process show, keeping her motivated to appreciate the heightened value of each day. But she soon backtracked, saying that Cain might find it upsetting to see his mother age so quickly. And maybe she did it for me as well. She didn’t want me to feel guilty about what was happening, or to be constantly reminded of the fading window of time we had to develop t
he technology needed to save her. Biologically speaking, Evelyn was already a seventy-year-old woman.
“Can I take Ed and Lucy to see the trees?” Cain asked.
“After everything’s in the house,” Evelyn said, leading to a three-way dash to unload the car. “And remember to grab some water!”
“Yes, Mom!”
Evelyn and I took Jack and Joy out for a hike not too long after the kids left. Jack grew excited, reminiscing about his last time up there and clearly enjoying sharing the redwoods with Joy who had never seen them.
“Isn’t it the most beautiful place in the world?”
“They’re unbelievable,” Joy said as she felt the soft bark of one.
“You guys can use the cabin up here anytime,” Evelyn offered.
“Absolutely!” I agreed. “I bet it’d make for a nice atmosphere as you finish up your book.”
Evelyn stopped at a large rock and sat down. She got winded easier than she used to. “So what’s this one about?”
“An assignment from second grade. My attempt to walk in the shoes of a clone.” Jack said, sitting down next to her. “Or several clones. Including many in your family.”
I laughed. “Great. A tell-all book. I think we’re in trouble.”
Jack shook his head. “Nothing too private. And don’t worry, there won’t be anything in there you don’t want. I’ll have you both proof it before I send it to anyone.”
“What is in it?” I asked.
He leaned back against the rock. “It’s a mixture of a lot of things. But I think the most important ones are the case studies, looking at how various clones and clone-parents have dealt with their relationships. What’s worked well and what hasn’t. Trying to let current cloners and future cloners know what issues they may have to deal with, and hopefully some effective suggestions for dealing with them.”
“Who’s all in there?” asked Evelyn.
“Well, there’s Cooper Jones-2, giving a sad example of what can happen when someone is overburdened by the life of a successful c-parent, and with some thoughts on how to help the c-child. And there’s a chapter on Jason Rendell, the boy suffering from gigantism who killed himself.”
I nodded and studied my beer bottle. Even in 2073 there were still occasional serious medical problems with clone births. Only about one in six hundred, but more than natural births. I thought about the tradeoffs I’d made at Ingeneuity, shifting much of the funds from such efforts to focus more on our efforts to merge humans with artificial bodies. There were many good arguments for the move. We would be able to help far more people than were currently suffering from new birth defects. But I wondered how I would make that argument to Jason.
“But most of the case studies revolve around you guys. You,” he said to me, “your c-father, and of course your mom. But also Lyle, Lily, and Cain.”
Cain was on the other end of the spectrum from Cooper Jones-2. We never called him Cain-2, but he is listed as so on his birth certificate despite the fact that Cain-1 was never actually born. As Jack would discuss from his interviews with our son, Cain-2 had no model to live up to or distinguish himself from, yet he was still born with the knowledge that he was a copy of an original – an original who’d been killed in his mother’s womb. The circumstances left him wondering if he was as good a person as his c-father would have been.
“So what’s your conclusion about my husband?” my wife asked, grinning at me.
Jack rolled his eyes. “Well, that’d be tough to sum up.”
“Come on, out with it,” I said, daring him with my eyes.
He studied me for moment. “Let’s just say you’ve got a lot of c-issues,” he started, and I nodded in agreement. “At times, fighting your genetic past has consumed your future. But being the first, and with all the terrible things you’ve had to deal with, I think your mom would be really proud.”
I wondered if she would. I think she would expect much more. “How will it end?” I asked. “Will my future be consumed?”
Jack shook his head. “Don’t let it.”
“You won’t,” Evelyn said to me.
Jack smiled at her. “Evelyn’s in it too.”
She sat up. “What? How’s that?”
“Well,” Jack started, “I wondered how the best friend of the first clone, who became his wife, would see her relationship with her clone-child.”
Evelyn gave Jack the evil eye. “That’s why you read my letters.”
“What’s this?” I asked. “You gave Jack the letters you wrote to your c-child?”
She looked guilty and smiled.
“You don’t even let me read those!”
Evelyn shrugged. “Hey, when the head of the GC Board asks for your c-child letters, you hand ’em over.”
Jack would end up using Evelyn’s letters as an ideal example, helping foster a symmetry and bond between clone and clone-parent, revealing her loves and dreams and inner thoughts, while urging her clone not to feel any need to share those herself – just to share them as a part of their combined heritage. She wanted the clone line of Evelyn Green to be something that all Evelyn Greens could cherish and feel good about – that together they had all lived as individuals, but as a group could forgive the others’ imperfections, atone for past mistakes, and share in their accomplishments.
Me, Myself, and My Clone: A Guide to Living With Yourselves would be published in mid-2074. In addition to the case studies, it included sample letters, scrapbooks, and holovideos. and was sprinkled with proverbs or “clonisms” in a Poor Richards Almanac style. Some of the more popular ones:
To thine old self be true, but to thine new self be even truer.
A clone is never alone.
Sometimes, through absolutely no fault of your own, you will find yourself to be your own worst enemy.
Live like you only live once, even if you live a lot more than that.
It’s okay to talk to yourselves, even if non-clones look at you funny.
What your clone doesn’t know may hurt you.
Be yourselves.
He sought to promote the idea that although we should feel connected to our past and future clones, foremost we should be individuals who live unique lives, preferably not in direct competition with those of our c-parents. And that if we were embarrassed by the lives of our c-parents, we should not take those sins upon ourselves, but should strive to do good ourselves, and thereby in a sense heal the souls of our c-parents who wanted to live on through us.
The book was dedicated to Jason Rendell and Cooper Jones-2. It was not included in the proposals we were preparing for Congress, but in the years that followed, his book would end up having a huge impact on the lives and the happiness of clones and clone-parents, credited with helping to dramatically reduce suicide rates.
Jack thought my mom would be proud of me. I think now how proud Jack’s father would have been of him. As proud as I am.
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During our week in Sequoia, we also hashed out a lot of GC stuff with some input from the families. With life expectancies expected to jump dramatically, there were many issues to consider.
For some of the drier issues, like copyrights, we would recommend setting copyrights to 99 years after the work was published, regardless of the life of the creator. For lifetime appointments like judgeships, we decided those should be limited to twenty years. It would take a Constitutional amendment for the Supreme Court to be affected by that, and as of this writing that has been approved by the U.S. Senate and is currently winding its way through the various state legislatures.
Social Security was already in jeopardy, as AIS was accelerating life spans faster than earlier models had predicted. The earliest age to begin receiving benefits had already been raised to 77, and we sought to tie that age to life expectancy. Under our formula, you would get your first check when you had reached ninety percent of expectancy, and that expectancy changed based on whether you were using AIS or had refused artifi
cial immunity. In the future, Social Security would help subsidize your purchase of an artificial body, at which point, assuming your mind was in good condition, you would cease getting Social Security until your 126th birthday.
Medicare and health insurance were fraught with issues. The government was eager for Medicare to pay for people to move to AIS, as their medical bills dropped so precipitously in the long term, and the same would be true for artificial bodies. Private health insurance companies were less enthusiastic. There wasn’t much profit in financing someone’s purchase of AIS or artificial body, as the client was likely to discontinue their insurance right afterwards. Over the strenuous objections of HMOs and other private health insurers, we recommended that the government help subsidize AIS and artificial bodies for those with financial hardship, noting that in the long run it would save the government far more money than it would cost. Health insurers would have to settle for a dwindling clientele consisting primarily of people who refused the artificial treatments. I clearly had a conflict of interest with those regulations as I’d profit enormously from them, and so excused myself from those votes. Lyle-2 would benefit as well, but he was quick to turn his attack dogs on me, accusing me of using my position on the GC Board for my personal enrichment. Society will have to judge whether we acted in the best interest of the American people.
Then there was the question as to whether insurance should help cover cryonics. Despite Lyle’s new company, cryonics was still considered crackpot science by the vast majority of the public, and although it was a possibility in light of improved nano-freezing and anti-freezing techniques combined with AIS, I’d believe it when I saw it. We took a similar approach on the Board, determining that insurance companies should only have to supplement cryonic freezing if it became a reality by virtue of someone being frozen and brought back unharmed. If that achievement was made, then we supported the idea of having private and government insurance paying for cryonic freezing when a patient’s condition was hopeless.