“Downloading the brain’s patterns isn’t enough. Everything you know and think is embedded in your neurons, but your consciousness is in the cells of your entire body. Your mind is really a complex of brains, with major contributions from the nervous and immune systems. The flesh is intelligent, all flesh, and all of it contributes to your personality at one level or another. Take the body away, and you become near-beer, bitter without the kick.”
Montoya chuckled and looked away, rubbing one hand on his breast. “Why not capture the state of each cell, each neuron, in a computer? A super MRI machine could do something like that, right?”
“Each one of our cells is like a huge factory with thousands of machines and workers. What the cells do, the decisions they make, how they live, contributes to what you think and how you behave. We won’t capture that much detail in any artificial memory in our lifetime. Even if we could, one human being would probably fill all the computer capacity on Earth.”
Montoya nodded. “What about Castler—sending in nanomachines and cleaning up an aging body?”
Easy questions so far. “It’s a good scheme, quite possible, but how old are you, Owen?”
“Forty-five,” he said.
“You’ll be ninety before nanotech is proven and safe. Fifty years creeps up awfully fast.”
I was playing down the prospect of Phil’s success a little; thirty years was not unlikely.
“You’re not just saying that to get me to fund you?”
“I think Gus and Phil are brilliant. I encourage you to fund them both. But their ideas are longer-term.”
“They hate being told that,” Montoya said. He looked at me squarely. “How are your theories any more convincing?”
“I won’t turn you into a corpsicle and hope somebody knows how to fix you in a hundred years. I won’t shave you down neuron by neuron, then upload you into some memory bank no one has even begun to design. I can begin to increase our life span in the next few years, with minimal intervention. If you and I want to stay young and healthy longer,” I said, closing in, “our only hope is medical maintenance, keeping our bodies vigorous. Specifically, mitochondrial chromosome adjustment.”
“Beck turned red when I told him I was meeting with you,” Montoya said. “He said you were insufferably arrogant. He said you were rehashing theories proven wrong back in the 1920s. I thought about asking Betty to fetch him a spit-cup.”
“There’s a lot of passion there,” I said. Gus and Phil were my rivals and might have called me a fool once or twice, but they deserved a modicum of respect, even from a man as wealthy as Montoya.
“I agree, they’re way off track,” Montoya said. “They’ll never see the promised land. I’ve read your papers. I like them. Tell me more.”
6
“That’s new,” Dave said, swiveling the DSV and shining our upper bank of floods on a clump of tube worms. Beyond the worms, the sub’s lights shimmered through white clouds like old, chalky paint: a bacteria-rich spring, small in diameter but productive.
“Let’s see.” He sidled the sub in a few meters. I pulled down my data glove, feeling the plastic limiter box click into place, guided a sensor-laden mechanical arm, and pushed a probe into the spring outflow.
“Shove it, shove that old rectal thermometer right into the Earth’s fundament,” Dave said with another leer. He wasn’t funny. “Eighty-six degrees Celsius,” he said.
“Congratulations.”
“I’m just the pilot,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’re the researcher. You’ll get the credit.”
7
Montoya listened to my presentation for two hours. We broke for a quick dinner—crab cakes and stir-fried vegetables, served with an excellent Oregon pinot gris. We were studying each other, and neither of us was willing to reveal too much. Looking a little glazed, he called a break at 10:00 p.m. Betty Shun appeared to take me on a tour of the house while Montoya fielded some phone calls.
The glass wall fronted the east wing. The west wing ended in a boat launch built into the native rock of another cove. It easily doubled what had at first seemed merely huge. The floor plan of Montoya’s Fortress of Solitude had to total a hundred thousand square feet—two and a third acres, topped by wind-winnowed forest, the air-conditioner vents camouflaged as tree stumps and the condensers as moss-covered boulders.
“Don’t try to take this tour on your own, Dr. Cousins,” Shun warned me on the clay floor of an indoor tennis court. “Without a permission wand, you’ll be locked in the first room you enter.” She held up a tiny plastic bar. “Security will have to come and save you.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Owen doesn’t need a wand. The house recognizes him on sight. His steps, his voice—”
“His DNA?”
She smiled and tapped her watch. “Owen should be ready now. We are exactly 115 feet from him, as the laser flies.” She gave me a look that might have spoken volumes, but I was unable to open, much less read, any of them. “Why were you let go from your last research job?”
“At Stanford?”
She nodded.
“Money ran out in my department. I was junior.”
“Wasn’t there some dispute?”
“A few of the faculty disagreed with my work. But my papers still get published, Ms. Shun. I am still a reputable scientist.”
“Owen is fond of oddball thinking, and even fonder of tweaking academic whiskers. But I hate to see him disappointed, Dr. Cousins.”
“Hal.”
She shook her head politely; keep it business. “Owen needs something to commit to. Something solid.”
Betty Shun left me with Montoya on the west wing’s biggest porch, overlooking the boat cove. It was eleven-thirty. We talked pleasantries for a while and listened to the splash of the waves, blankets over our legs, sipping from chilled glasses of draft beer, our heads warmed by radiant heaters. Did I like baseball? Montoya owned a baseball team in Minneapolis. I conversed as much about baseball as I could, having read USA Today in the Hotel W that afternoon.
Then Montoya drew back to our main topic.
“You don’t say much about reduced caloric intake,” he said. “According to most experts, that’s the only antiaging technique proven to work.”
“It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” I said.
“You haven’t sunk your harpoon yet, Hal. I need to know more—much more.” He smiled wearily. Make or break.
