A Stand-In for Dying Read online

  A Stand-in for Dying

  Book 1: Brink of Life Trilogy

  Rick Moskovitz

  Copyright © 2019 Rick Moskovitz

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7341789-3-7

  Illustration and design by Mary Verrandeaux

  FLUKE TALE PRODUCTIONS

  Preface

  As I watch the current generation of young adults assume their leadership roles in our culture, I see once again the youthful illusion of immortality and invincibility, this time with a twist. The Singularity is close upon us and with it the prospect, at least in the eyes of the young, that life everlasting is within their grasp. And I wonder, given the temptation to extend life indefinitely, how the choices will be made and at what price the reality of immortality might come.

  Rick Moskovitz

  October 2019

  We die only once, and for such a long time!

  Le Dépit Amoureux

  Molière 1656

  Prologue

  NOBODY WOULD EVER choose this death.

  The limbs of the passenger in the wreck were intertwined with the twisted carbon fiber frame of the hovercar. The human form and the vehicle looked as if they had been woven together by a cosmic pair of hands into a permanent and painful embrace.

  Nearby stood another man, much younger and more robust than the dead man. Except for the blood on his face and arms, his skin had the pristine appearance of those select few who had undergone the Ambrosia Conversion, but his musculature had the fullness and definition more often seen among the data deprived masses whose focus was on physical rather than intellectual achievement. He stood erect and tall, gazing intently at the inert form at his feet. The muscles of his face struggled with the emotions that empowered them, his eyes narrowing and the corners of his mouth trembling. His Adam’s apple rose and fell as he appeared to choke back sobs.

  The rescue team broke out the resuscitation unit, but even from the top of the hill, they could see that its use would be futile. The driver had been thrown from the car and his body shattered upon impact with the brick wall. The victim in the car was long past saving and even recovery of the body from the wreck would be a daunting, if not impossible task. They put aside the unit and made their way down the steep grade of the winding street.

  Jagged edges of the wreck had torn away some of the smooth transparent membrane that had long covered the street’s cobblestones to adapt it to hovercraft. The exposed stones evoked earlier times when wheels rumbled over uneven road, their speed constrained by a series of closely spaced switchbacks. Even a hovercar had no chance at high speed on this tortuous street. The sun was now high in the sky, reflecting brilliantly from the tranquil waters of the distant bay in stark contrast with the carnage close at hand.

  As they approached the remains of the vehicle, more details emerged. The victim was a man who had aged naturally. His skin was white, his forehead deeply ridged like the folds of loose fabric on an aging cushion, and there were tiny lines radiating from the corners of his eyes and the corners of his mouth. A scattering of small coffee-colored irregular spots appeared just under his eyes, further attesting to his age.

  The paramedics watched the young man crouch by the wreckage and reach out gently to touch the dead man’s face. His fingers rested softly on the right cheek, the tip of his middle finger just below the right earlobe and pointing inadvertently at a tiny bulge in the skin behind the ear.

  “What’s that bump?” asked one of the paramedics.

  “Microprocessor.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Long story,” said the young man. “Right now, we’ve got to get him out of here. He can’t stay here like this.”

  “Easier said than done. It’ll take some time to move the wreck. The body might have to come out in pieces.”

  “Not on my watch,” said the man. “He deserves a decent burial.”

  The lead paramedic struggled to make sense of the scene before him. The younger man seemed to know the victim, but couldn’t have been a passenger in the vehicle. It was totally destroyed, but this man was unscathed. What was he doing there at all?

  “Relative?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” said the man, rubbing at the dried blood on his own face.

  The paramedic glanced down at the twisted wreckage. At close range, the painful nature of the victim’s death screamed out at him. His last minutes or seconds of life must have been excruciating.

  What was most remarkable about this picture, however, was a single, inexplicable anomaly. The old man’s eyes were open and appeared almost to be making contact with his. And his features were relaxed, the corners of his mouth turned slightly upward. His expression was serene.

  1

  October 2041

  SHE APPEARED when Marcus was on the thirteenth mile on the Endless Park. The ache was building in the backs of his thighs and his calves were beginning to burn. The green space surrounding him remained monotonous as the miles ticked off on the holographic display projected from a tiny opening in front of the rotating patch of grass. His arms glistened from the sun reflecting off the microthin chemical film that coated his body.

  At first, the figure that appeared slightly behind him to his left, watching and studying him, escaped his notice. Her flowing red hair first caught his attention before he noticed that she was glancing back and forth between him and the sky. Her right hand poked fingers at the space just in front of her face and he realized that she was watching a display, visible only to her, that was tracking a flow of data. She was interacting with the data, entering information...about him? His performance? A bird broke the monotony of the landscape on the right and caught his attention for the blink of an eye. And when he looked back, she’d vanished.

  His breath started to slow as he sank into the silky patch of HibernaTurf at the end of his run, the sun melting beads of sweat off his skin, when her shadow cast across his body. She was looking toward the sky and poking fingers of both hands at the invisible screen before her. “Marcus Takana, born August 4, 2019, New Quest, Oregon,” she read just loud enough for him to hear. “Six foot three inches tall, 182 lbs. Disease scan clear. Drug scan clear. Cortical database 2.3 petabytes. Basic unenhanced dataset.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Ignorant and vulgar,” she mouthed silently. “I'm Terra, Mr. Takana. And I have a proposition for you.” Her body was now framed against the sky, her face in shadows, the sun directly behind her fringing her hair with light.

  “Tell me,” she said, “are you happy with your life?”

  “It could be better.” He looked up at the spectral figure, trying to make out the features of her backlit face.

  “Then are you ready for it to change?” Terra maintained the advantage of her position, towering over his outstretched form.

  “So you're the devil and you've come to buy my soul?”

  “Not your soul, Mr. Takana. You can keep that. It's no use to us at all. It's your body we want. And we’re prepared to pay you handsomely for it.”

  “What do you mean? Are you recruiting me for some sort of team?”

  “Not exactly. We want you literally to sell us your body...to part with it...permanently.”

  “You’re asking me to die?” Marcus sat up and got to his feet. With the direction this conversation was headed, it was time to be on equal ground and to see the face of his adversary. Now he had the advantage of height, his eyes level with the top of her head. As the sun struck her face, he was unprepared for her exquisite beauty. The red hair cascaded over her shoulders, framing a face of perfect symmetry, with pale unblemished skin that seemed never to have been exposed to the harsh solar rays that now penetrated an ever-thinning atmospher
e. Most striking were her eyes, an emerald green that reflected light with the intensity and sparkle of gemstones. These eyes now held his gaze.

  “Yes. In a way. Your mind would cease to exist while your body lived on with another mind within it. I represent a few wealthy individuals who are willing to pay huge sums for healthy new bodies.”

  “But what good would money do me if I no longer exist?”

  “It wouldn’t happen right away. It's a future contract to be completed at such time that your benefactor's body is ready to die. In your case, your benefactor is in his mid-40's, so that could be anywhere from 25 to 70 years. And he’s an exceedingly cautious man, so he could live for many decades to come. Meanwhile, you’d have access to everything that extraordinary wealth could buy. The years you’d have could be infinitely more rewarding than the life that faces you now. Imagine what you could accomplish.”

  Marcus remembered when he’d been young and ambitious, ready to save the world, before disaster struck his family and his dreams evaporated.

  “And there's a bonus,” Terra continued. “Few people have both the means and required youth to have the Ambrosia Conversion. By 28 or 29, cells have already aged beyond the capacity of the Conversion to help. This arrangement is only worthwhile for your benefactor with the Conversion so we will of course arrange for you to undergo it. While it will not bestow you immortality, it will enable you to avoid aging as long as you continue to...exist.”

  She had his attention. He did the math. If he rejected the offer, he could live perhaps eighty or ninety more years, but his body and mind would gradually fall into disrepair and he could be burdened with disabilities for decades. Even with cutting edge medicine, short of the Conversion, mental processes still began to slow as early as the fifth decade of life.

  What would it have been like, Marcus wondered, to have been Mozart or John Lennon or John F. Kennedy, all of whom accomplished extraordinary things and won world renown, but at the expense of dying before their time? Would it be worth it to live large and die young?

  Marcus’s adult life so far had been unremarkable. Data deprived at 22, he’d had a string of dead-end jobs in the meat growing factories, leaving him circling just beyond the edge of poverty. He was all alone and hadn’t ever had a relationship with a woman that lasted more than a few weeks. All he had going for him was his dedication to running and climbing that had honed his body to sculpted refinement. An enormous chasm separated even those with advanced education from the lifestyle and achievements of those who could afford a MELD chip. He now had a chance to live on the other side of that chasm.

  “Can I have some time to think about it?”

  “Of course. This is a life-changing proposition that deserves proper consideration. But I’ll need an answer in the next 24 hours or the offer will go to someone else.”

  “How will I find you if I decide to accept your conditions?”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll find you, just like I found you the first time. And Mr. Takana,” she added, “One of the conditions is that you must not tell anyone about our arrangement...not now or ever. Secrecy is a crucial aspect of these arrangements. Your benefactor will need to assume your identity along with your body. Until tomorrow, then.” Marcus blinked and she was gone.

  As he sped home on his motorcycle, Marcus wondered if his bizarre encounter with Terra had been an elaborate hallucination. Was what she proposed even possible? He’d not had a chance to ask how consciousness could be transferred from body to body or what would happen to his consciousness in the process.

  The bike slipped sideways toward the edge of the road, bringing his attention abruptly back to his driving. The roads had long been designed to accommodate hover vehicles and only a few aficionados and daredevils still ventured upon their slick surfaces with wheels. Motorcycles were especially risky, even with specially modified tires.

  Once home, Marcus stripped off his clothes and stepped into the cleansing pod. The short blast of water stung his skin, followed by the viscous sanitizing wash that oozed over every inch of his body. The second blast of water was mixed with air and blew off the excess chemical, leaving the surface of his body slick and dry like the membranes swimmers wore to eliminate drag. The whole process used only two ounces of water and left his body with a breathable coating that would repel contaminants for days.

  Marcus remembered the times as a small child when his mother would let him play in the bathtub and then lather his hair and body. He remembered the sweet sensation of warm water dribbling over the top of his head and down his face, neck and shoulders and the snug warmth of her wrapping him in a fluffy towel when the bath was over. Bathing became illegal when he was six. The high efficiency sanitizers and surfactants that he’d just used weren’t perfected until he was in his teens. Hygiene had been a dicey issue during the intervening decade.

  He stood naked in front of the mirror and looked approvingly at the definition of his musculature. The detail was worthy of the image he once saw of Michelangelo’s David. And like the statue, his body was hairless and smooth. Like most of his contemporaries, every bit of body hair had been permanently removed in order to optimize the power of the chemical membrane to repel pathogens and prevent contamination.

  For just an instant, a stranger’s face looked back at him from atop the perfect body that he’d so painstakingly sculpted. Then he was staring into the depths of his own sorrowful eyes, and loneliness enveloped him like a dark fog that threatened to smother him.

  The following afternoon, Marcus returned to the Endless Park and began his daily run. At the beginning of the seventh mile, he sensed a presence behind him and felt his pulse quicken a few beats beyond the usual effects of his exertion.

  “So have you considered our offer, Mr. Takana?”

  He stepped off the moving turf and turned to find his gaze once again captured by those exquisite green eyes. He’d found them almost hypnotizing on their first encounter and had to keep their effect upon him from influencing his decision. He’d spent most of the morning and afternoon considering the proposition before risking another meeting.

  “I’m in.”

  “Brilliant,” she responded. “So now you must have lots of questions.”

  “I have no idea at all how this would work.”

  Terra explained that he would first be injected with a fluid containing millions of nano scale transducers attached to molecular messengers that would bind to neuronal DNA, delivering the tiny devices throughout his brain to create a detailed map. His benefactor, or more accurately buyer, would get a similar infusion, mapping his brain. The networks of transducers could communicate with one another and information could be exchanged. In this way, the buyer’s brain would be mapped precisely to his.

  “As your counterpart approaches death, chemical signals will initiate the exchange of the maps. If death is too sudden to provide the automatic trigger, the exchange will be initiated by controllers at a central processing station that will continually monitor the biological processes of you both.”

  “Exchange of the maps? That sounds like my mind will wind up in his body.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly how it works. but by the time you get there, his brain will likely be sufficiently shut down that you’ll never be aware of dying.”

  “Is there anything else I should know.”

  “Yes, Mr. Takana, there are a lot of rules. The first and most important I told you yesterday: total secrecy. You must not ever tell anyone about this arrangement, not even your wife, should you ever marry, or your children. You will not be told the identity of your benefactor and he will not be aware of yours.”

  “Buyers...property. I guess that’s me. It sounds pretty horrible when you put it that way.”

  “It all depends on how you look at it. We also require you to take care of your body while it’s still yours. Our capacity to monitor your activities with the transducer system is extensive. We can tell if you use alcohol or other drugs or if you engage in danger
ous activities. We’ll be monitoring your location and can determine the speed and acceleration of your body in real time. We ask that you use alcohol sparingly or not at all, avoid other toxic substances, and not engage in deliberately risky behavior.”

  Marcus had already planned a series of extreme adventures with the first of the money he’d get. He’d become accustomed to breaking up his boredom with the thrill of high-risk sports. This requirement could be a deal-breaker.

  “What about the bike?”

  “That will definitely have to go, starting now. Look,” Terra said, “This is a lot to take in. I can understand your doubts, but the opportunity we’re talking about can bring monumental changes in your life. The things that will become important to you months from now are likely to be entirely different from the things that have been important to you so far within the limited scope of your experience.”