A Stand-In for Dying Page 7

  Just ten weeks after the wedding, Corinne discovered that she was pregnant. She was overjoyed. Marcus had to hide the consternation that lurked behind his pleasure at having a child on the way. This would be another human being from whom he would have to keep terrible secrets and whom he would someday suddenly and inexplicably desert.

  He was worried, too, about the clock that continued to tick away. The Conversion could not be executed while pregnant. This was once attempted with disastrous consequences. The immortal cell lines crossed the placenta and infiltrated the fetus, completing arresting its development. While it remained in perfect health, the fetus never matured and the pregnancy became interminable. The parents eventually had to make the decision to terminate, which was particularly difficult in the presence of a baby that was otherwise perfect. Broaching the issue with Corinne had suddenly turned urgent.

  “We need to talk,” Marcus said one day in the middle of Corinne’s fifth month.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Corinne.

  “No, not exactly,” said Marcus, “but I want to talk about our future with our daughter.” They had learned the child’s gender when her genome was sequenced soon after they found out that Corinne was pregnant. Her name was going to be Natasha.

  “What about?”

  “She...Natasha...is likely to live a very long time. By the time she’s an adult, I expect that most of her generation will have access to the Ambrosia Conversion.”

  “So how does that affect us?”

  “I was thinking that we would want to be there for her.”

  “And...?”

  “And we could only live long enough if we were also to undergo the Conversion.” Marcus held his breath as he waited for Corinne’s response.

  She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “No, Marcus. That’s completely out of the question. You know how I feel about that.”

  He did know. The Conversion had become a sore point between them since he first raised it soon after the wedding. It was one of the privileges that distinguished the haves and the have nots. She felt that it was unfair for some people to have the opportunity for immortality just because of wealth while others never would. She felt strongly enough about this that she’d decided long ago that she wouldn’t use their wealth to obtain it. She was willing to die for her principles. Given Marcus’s shared beliefs about social justice, she could never understand why he differed from her in this matter and continued to try to talk her into it.

  “But it’s different now,” Marcus said. “It’s not just about us, anymore. We’re going to be parents. Our child is going to want us to be part of her life. Death will be unfamiliar to her generation. She won’t know how to understand it or to deal with it. It’ll be terrifying. Is that what you want?”

  “So now it’s a guilt trip, Marcus?” Corinne was seething, her voice rising to shrillness. “If you’re so desperate to live forever, you go ahead. Get the Conversion for all I care, but I’m never going to do it. Immortality is overrated. I’ll just grow old without you.”

  “But sweetheart...”

  “That’s it, Marcus. The matter’s closed. I don’t ever want to talk about it again.”

  Marcus was crestfallen. Had it been at all within his power, he would have been willing to reverse the process and grow old along with the woman he adored. He even agreed in principle with her position. But he was in too deep, already. The contract was inescapable and his immortal body was one of its immutable conditions.

  As gentle and loving as Corinne could be, Marcus never forgot that it was her fire that had first attracted him to her that day at the rally. He’d only been seared by that fire a couple of times in the course of their relationship, but he’d learned quickly when it was time to back off. A certain tilt of her head combined with a subtle growling quality in her voice told him when it would be futile ever to raise an issue again. And raising her voice in anger was so rare that it carried withering power.

  Corinne had expressed similar feelings about MELD chips. They were another unfair privilege of the wealthy that magnified the imbalance of power among the social classes. She would have none of it. What’s more, she believed that knowledge gained from books and other antiquated sources of culture was in many ways superior to the reams of information imparted from the UDB. She often used Marcus’s achievements as an example of the superiority of inspiration in someone without a chip over the linear thinking of the many scientists endowed with them who’d failed to solve the same problem. Marcus had to resist the temptation to dispel her illusion.

  Marcus didn’t understand Corinne’s love of books and the many hours she spent reading. Most of her books were in the UDB and their contents integrated by his MELD chip. He was dumbfounded one day when he saw Photina curled up on the leather chair with one of Corinne’s books, smiling from time to time as she turned the pages. The database in her programming was vast. Why labor over the words with so much knowledge already in her possession? What could he be missing?

  So in these very crucial dimensions, Marcus and Corinne’s life paths diverged. He would continue to keep his secrets until someday it would be obvious to her that he, much like Photina, had not aged a day since they first met. He had no idea how he would handle that day when it came.

  11

  RAY SLEPT soundly following Lena’s return from her assignment for the first time since she’d left. When he awoke the next morning, he greeted her as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. She’d finished putting their home back together after he went to bed the night before. To the casual observer that morning, their home and their lives might have seemed normal. To Lena, things were anything but normal.

  For the next several weeks she didn’t leave the apartment. She stayed close to Ray and remained vigilant lest he lapse back into his melancholic state. Few words passed between them. Absent, too, was any physical contact. It had been months since they’d had sex, and even then it had been perfunctory. It had been far longer since they’d exchanged any expressions of affection. And now, the shadow of madness stood like a curtain between them. When she thought about touching him, the image of him sitting there soaked in urine and covered in filth repulsed her. She busied herself preparing her story, all the while wondering whether or not she dared publish it.

  *****

  Ray awoke one morning to the sound of the front door closing. He found a note in the kitchen from Lena saying only that she’d gone out for the morning. No explanation. No destination. She’d be back sometime in the afternoon. He scanned the cloud for her location, which she’d made no effort to hide. She was headed for the Mission District.

  His impulse to follow Lena collided hard with his ingrained resistance to leaving the safety of his home. He stood poised at the threshold for nearly twenty minutes before finally taking a deep breath and stepping across. Once past the inertia, he was swept up in pursuit. The car he summoned took him to within a block of her location at the far end of the Mission. By the time she was in sight, she was walking up the hillside in Dolores Park.

  During the decade that the park had been covered in a flat green layer of HibernaTurf, it had been all but abandoned by the families and couples that once played there. The birds had flown away in search of insects and worms for their food. Even the dogs had mostly disappeared from a scene so sterile and lifeless that it wasn’t even worth pissing on. Over the past several years, since the introduction of Takana Grass, the park had come alive and was again the theatre upon which played the countless little dramas that were written when hopeful people met there.

  One such drama now unfolded before Ray’s eyes. Halfway up the hill, Lena was met by someone a few inches taller than she was and perhaps a bit heavier, wearing a blue satin jacket and pants and a baseball cap. Ray couldn’t make out the person’s face. They greeted one another with a warm hug, walked hand in hand for a few minutes, then sat down on the grass.

  Ray made his way up the hill as inconspicuously as possible, winding up on
the same level as Lena and her companion while maintaining a constant distance from them. From this vantage point, her companion’s face remained in shadows. They appeared deep in conversation for the better part of an hour. After a while, the cap came off and the sun illuminated a familiar face.

  Ray recognized him from their wedding, which he’d attended with his wife. Lena had known him since college and their friendship had endured as they both pursued careers in writing. Ray recalled that one day five years earlier, Lena had told him that her friend’s wife had died in a boating accident. She’d been close to them both and could barely get the words out through her tears. She’d asked Ray to accompany her to the funeral, but that had been too far out of his comfort zone, so she’d gone alone.

  When she’d returned from the funeral, Lena was almost dancing before him as she rhapsodized about how her friend had chosen to care for his wife’s remains. He’d had her body cremated and the ashes embedded in a concrete block that was poured during the ceremony, enabling friends and family to write messages in the wet cement. The block was to become part of an offshore reef ecosystem, a fitting remembrance given her love for the sea and all the life within it. Lena had implored him to do the same thing for her if she died first. Ray had agreed, but voiced no preferences about his own burial. It mattered little to him since he didn’t plan to be in his body when it died.

  When the couple on the hillside finally stood, the man’s hands rose to cradle Lena’s face and pull her close. There followed a lingering kiss, during which Lena’s hands settled just beneath her companion’s waist, drawing their bodies closer.

  What took Ray even more by surprise than the intimate scene playing out in front of him was his own reaction to it. An initial flash of jealousy gave way almost imperceptibly to arousal and a yearning to have Lena in his arms. He had not felt a desire this intense for her in years. He imagined himself standing in the other man’s place, her hands on his buttocks, locked in embrace. He had all he could do to restrain himself from running to her and casting her friend aside.

  Now that he’d discovered her secret, why did he feel so guilty for having spied on her? Wasn’t it his right to know with whom his wife was spending her time and how? Or had he forfeited that right long ago by walling himself off in his own sterile, impregnable world? Who, after all, bore the gravest secrets? He was the one who planned to leave her behind for another life that had no place for her within it.

  Ray watched until the couple released their embrace, shared a final tender kiss, and parted ways. Lena started down the hill, glancing briefly in his direction. Had she seen him? She broke into a trot, looking straight ahead. Ray hurried back to his car so he could beat her home. He had no idea how he was going to handle this once she got there. Jealousy was starting to bubble up, but not so much anger. Mostly, he missed the intimacy that they’d once enjoyed together, however briefly it had lasted.

  He beat her home by just five minutes and settled into his favorite chair, recovering his breath just in time for her entrance.

  “Ray, I’m home,” she called as she walked in the door.

  “How was your day?” he asked.

  “Lovely,” she replied. “I went for a walk in the park. It was good to get outside for a while. It was such a gorgeous day.”

  “Glad you enjoyed yourself.” He appreciated the incomplete truth, which seemed at least more respectful than an outright lie.

  Ray rose from his chair, moved behind Lena, and encircled her waist with his arms. He felt her stiffen.

  “Please, Ray, not now,” she said, wriggling in his grasp. “I don’t feel like I know you anymore.”

  Her words stung. He flung open his arms and backed away. Her body shook with sobs. She brought her hands to her face to wipe away the tears that now flowed in rivulets down her cheeks.

  He was back in the endless tunnel. She was only an arm’s length away from him, but she seemed so lost in the darkness that he feared he might never touch her again either in this life or the next.

  12

  NATASHA CAME into the world both as bald and as exquisite as her mother. Marcus was smitten from the moment he first saw her. She was his consummate creation, a legacy both more salient and more personal than Takana Grass, a living human being who embodied his bond with Corinne. With her birth, the finite duration of his own life seemed to matter less, while the complexities of his situation mattered all the more. Someday, she would become a young adult who could hardly fail to notice when he looked no older than she did.

  The clock ticked away. By the time Natasha’s second birthday came around, Corinne had still not agreed to undergo the Conversion and the window of opportunity closed forever. The difference in their biological ages might go unnoticed for a decade or two, but at some point it would stare them in the face and he would have to answer to them both. His secrets grew more burdensome day by day. Marcus struggled to keep them crammed within the remotest recesses of his mind so he could settle into family life and be a father to his daughter. But often, in the middle of the night, they would sift into his awareness and concoct an endless variety of compromising scenarios.

  If Corinne discovered that he’d had the Conversion or that he was implanted with a MELD chip, would she also eventually find out about the contract? And if she did discover that he’d sold his future, could she ever forgive him, or would their marriage come to an abrupt end?

  Marcus also envisioned chance encounters between Corinne and Terra that would be difficult for him to explain. And he wondered whether Terra or her organization posed any danger to his family if they were to discover his secrets. He tried not to imagine Corinne’s first encounter with his double. It wouldn’t matter how angry she’d be, he told himself, if he was already dead.

  One day, soon after Natasha’s third birthday, Corinne came home brimming with excitement. She’d been driving down a country road on the outskirts of town, she told him, and became entranced with the music swelling from within a vintage stone church that had been abandoned for decades. She’d felt compelled to stop as if the notes were reaching out to her and sweeping her gently inside. Once within, the sounds of the pipe organ blending with the harmony of voices had seemed to emanate from a heavenly source and filled her with wonder. The once deserted structure was now filled to capacity with joyful singing people.

  Corinne and Marcus had both grown up in a world in which religion had gradually faded away during an age in which knowledge of science was in the ascendancy and religious faith became increasingly untenable. Neither Corinne nor Marcus had more than a passing familiarity with churches or had any inclination to learn more. Expanded life expectancy and diminished preoccupation with eternity further eroded religion as naturalism came to dominate the culture. So many places of worship like this one had fallen into disuse and disrepair. But in 2039, the spark of God was rekindled from an unexpected source.

  While seeking the purpose of the last remaining bits of “junk” DNA in the genetic code, an advanced intelligent computer discovered a pattern in the code that appeared to be the work of an intelligent entity. Sequences of base pairs found at regular intervals, when worked into a matrix, bore a message that could only have been embedded deliberately by sentient beings. The first part of the message described the origin of the universe, the Big Bang. It went on to describe the nature of the multiverse and told the story of a civilization somewhere in a parallel universe that had faced annihilation and sought a way to preserve its genetic legacy by reaching across the boundary between their reality and ours. There were no clues in the code about whether or not their civilization survived.

  There were so many new questions. If exceptional beings had written the story of their civilization into our genetic code, did they also design the rest of the genome? And after years of believing that humans emerged as part of an evolutionary process, could it be that we were created de novo after all by these extraordinary godlike beings? Could we have been created in their image? The discovery that aros
e out of scientific inquiry turned classical science on its head.

  This revelation followed not long after another remarkable discovery that had been facilitated by super-intelligent machines. While hundreds of earthlike planets had been identified by the early 2020’s and evidence of microbial life had been discovered in 2025 by a space probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa, no evidence had yet been found of intelligent extraterrestrial life in our universe. Particle scientists, however, discovered in 2034 an unusual pattern of neutrinos appearing and disappearing in their detectors. The regularity of the pattern suggested that the particles were being controlled by an intelligent agent, most likely located in a parallel universe. The pattern was determined to be digital and was eventually translated into a digital image of an anthropoid being remarkably similar to us.

  These parallel discoveries provided compelling evidence that an intelligent agent, perhaps from an advanced civilization in a parallel universe, may have had something to do with the creation of life on our planet, and provided the impetus for people to come together again in the name of faith. Churches were resurrected and new liturgies evolved. Skeptics wondered, however, whether the translations were valid or whether they might have been fabricated by advanced artificial intelligences to keep us in line. Others compared the discovery to the Bible Code, a series of messages seemingly embedded in the original Aramaic scriptures that predicted events occurring in modern times. That discovery had long since been debunked as a combination of wishful imagination and faulty computation.