Main Story
I suppose the problems could be traced back twenty years to when I decided to enlist the help of the whole world by putting up a web site called Eternal Life. I knew that this would open us up to the wrath of humanity, but I thought if we were clever we could get around much of the ensuing uproar. And, we did to a large extent. However, it takes an effort to keep the touchy stuff quiet. Building a large scientific project dealing with the manipulation of life, especially human life, is a challenge even in a country as friendly to the idea (and the money it brings in to everyone) as India. In the long run we had to build duplicate facilities in other countries. This was enormously expensive, but we are dealing with the ability to live forever, and there are lots of very rich people who would like to be in on that. Lots of very wealthy, very old people who simply don’t want to die. This is something I counted on from the very beginning. But, of course, very rich, very old people still don’t want to waste their money on some outrageous scheme without any return. And very rich people would have an organization with them keeping track that everything is going well, and those people would be in on the secret and would have to be transferred at some point. Instead of transferring one person you’re now talking about transferring a group of people at different times. And as soon as someone is transferred another person has to join the group so the group grows. And maybe before the first download is done. Maybe the first download involves everyone connected to your group even though some have been uploaded at much different times. Some just as soon as the first download is shown to work. You could keep those recent transfers in the same group for security.
Security is the biggest problem. This led us to a huge bureaucracy with annual reports and accountants, etc. And fabulously rich people also want perks and flattery. Luckily I’m not involved with that. With seemingly unending funds you can hire lots of people who have those skills. The problem I suppose is there are a surprising number of very rich, very old people who don’t think eternal life is a good thing at least not physical eternal life. As the song goes “This world is not my own, I am only passing through, my pleasures and my hopes are all beyond the blue”. That seems to be the only thing that the worlds major religions agree on. Our rewards should be in Heaven not here on earth. How else can you get the downtrodden to go along with the various religions? If Eternal Life were seen as only for the rich there would be literally Hell to pay.
All of that was foreseeable (I thought) and is constantly being dealt with by our companies and government contacts and religious contacts, but it has always been a pain.
So what did we get for our publicizing our project? Well, in the beginning, there was no method for accomplishing our project, so we needed all the suggestions and scientific research we could get. It’s impossible to know how much this speeded up our quest, but once the word got out especially at the universities around the world just about every science major wanted in, and that led the business types and the politicos. Before long all the best universities were offering majors in Eternal Life. Philosophy students wrote papers on the topic and law students wrote briefs and business students wrote business plans. And there was the spin off of the various connected businesses. All the bio companies were part of the plan. All the advances in medicine were joined to this search. At other points in history there were explosions in research like weapons production. Remember the controversy over Nuclear power weapons. And the rush that the discovery of penicillin brought. So, all in all, it balanced out. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a huge effort to keep the wolves at bay. Much of this didn’t matter until we started to get close to our objective.
During this period of fever pitch research gene therapy and stem cell research was making gains by leaps and bounds aided by the development of super duper computers and modeling programs that helped figure optimum solutions for all problems. There were of course scientific projects that suffered. Researchers turned away from astronomy, nuclear studies, and a dozen other disciplines that simply didn’t seem to add to the possibility of eternal life. Those problems could be solved later. When today’s scientists had all been assured of plenty of time to work on those problems.
The process of mind transfer was not a single step procedure. The mind had to be transferred to computer storage before bodies were available for the retransfer. Minds lay in the computers for two decades before the first transfers back were attempted and it took years to iron out the smooth transfers. That meant a huge amount of minds lay in memory storage for all that time. It was of course the rich and powerful that could get that. And then there were the rumors of the erasure of some minds to make room. And the payoffs. But what kind of payoff works except life itself?
Although I had been in on the initial push for eternal life storage, my body wore out before the process was ready, so I lay in a machine or machines for 20 years before I came out. Those I had entrusted to find an appropriate body had done well by me. Others were not so fortunate. I had problems at first. It took a while to get used to the speed at which my mind did certain things. There were definite differences in the abilities of my new mind and the old one. There were months of training, and I’m still not sure of how I like certain things in my new mind.
The process of transfer is still not worked out. My new body has more thought left over than might be ideal. There are opinions of things based on remembrances of the new body that the new mind doesn’t have access to. There is a whole period of history that should be taken into the new mind. You could get some of this by reading, but that isn’t the same thing. The physical aspects of my new body were easier to come to grips with. After all, I had endured my older worn out body for 30 years, so anything new and youngish was an improvement. No pills, no aches that wouldn’t cure, no glasses, no canes, etc. And I had come to grips with the weekly backups and the implications that followed if I were “killed” by accident. I had even found new “talents” in the new mind. An ability to “feel” poetry. An ability to learn and memorize. Of course, I was somewhat disappointed in the rational slowness of my new mind, but there’s always pills and advances in mind altering drugs. In the old sense I do see myself getting better as long as I stay connected with the mindweb. And I do retain that sense of self, but I do find myself drifting away from something that I would call my old self. That brings us back to the point and whether or not it matters if we drift too far. What would we use as a measure?
It’s been 5 years since my transplant to my new mind. I was given a 20 year old body and now it’s a relatively old 25 body. It was a moderately athletic body to begin with but never going to be Olympic. I’ll have to wait until my next clone. Maybe I’ll start with a 12 year old body. But then I’ll have to overcome not going to school and not having parents. Clearly the world will have to know by then I’m more than a first body person. How will I handle that? But I’ve got time to figure that out. Am I curious enough to want to know how many are there of us advanced creatures? Certainly I hear people talking about the ACs among us and some opinions sound dangerous to me. I’m not ready to come out yet. How many of us do there have to be before one of us will admit it? I met a girl the other day who just knew too much for a 16 year old and yet she claims to live at home with her parents. Maybe her “parents” are multibodied people.
Of course, although I made the transition to my new body, the process was not entirely worked out at the time. There are still effects though small that are yet to be worked out. My skin feels a little funny. Maybe like a faint rash. This may be a problem with the cloning process rather than the transfer or who knows? There are some strange mental ticks that make me think that some wires in my brain are not connected the same way than my original body or is this just the feeling of going from a 90 year old into a 20 year old? And, of course, by the time I felt I was really dying, I had certain organs like my kidneys and my liver that were working weakly. And my diet had been adjusted for that so who knows how that effected my moods or my outlook on life? But I did feel like the same person basically who had had a long sleep.
Also, I can’t really complain. I have plenty of time if things work out. Medical science will catch up and fix these glitches.
The most worrisome problem is security. Who can I trust? What organizations can I trust? If I have a problem, who can I go to? I need to check in once a week to three storage places to make sure my backups are there for me. And someone has got to check on me to make sure I haven’t died anonymously. Maybe my body is lying in a ditch undiscovered, so I need someone checking up on my wellbeing. And I need to trust them and have a backup for them. A lot of backup systems with the possibility that my situation may leak out. And what about these people I’m trusting? What about their lives? Do they have the same concerns. Are they ACs? Will I be alerted to their problems ahead of time. Suppose they die in a car crash, who will tell me. I tell ya things get complicated. Meanwhile, I just hope that all of this becomes acceptable in the near future and society figures out a system to take care of people from gen to gen.
Those considerations bring me to Chapter 2. The glitch in my last sign in.
Chapter 2
I’ve been out now for 3 years. I sign in once a week to three places. I’ve missed sign in twice, and immediately I began to receive messages to call codename X. Everything worked out OK which in a sense is reassuring and acts as a test of our system beyond our mandatory tests. However, the last two times I signed in, my sign ins didn’t go smoothly as if there was some glitch in new software. Everything seemed to be smoothed out, but why was there a problem and why in two different backup sites? Today is a sign in day. In a few minutes I’ll start the process. I’ll be on the net using a secure protocol, but if there’s a problem again, it will definitely be time to start asking questions. And really asking questions can be a time consuming and maybe dangerous procedure.
After my transfer process when I was adjusting to my new body, I worked in the phone room. The training for this was quite an education about the new life. While you are pretending to be the parents or employer or school secretary for hundreds of retreads you learn a lot about the whole system. This knowledge now comes in handy. I know what’s happening behind the scenes. At least I know how it used to be 5 years ago. Since I haven’t been back behind the scenes, I could be wrong about how things work. I think it’s time for me to volunteer to work back there and find out what’s going on in the system if only for my own protection. Maybe I can find out about these glitches. It pays to keep your ties to the powers.
It’s time for my sign in again. I ring up the grocery store and punch in my code. A pleasant voice answers and I ask for Norman Kandy. They ask me to spell it and I do. Then they give me the wrong question. I repeat my request and again the wrong reply. It is as though they don’t know the script. I hang up and try my other contacts. They go OK, but now I’m worried. At this point I have to contact the Group.
Chapter 3
The Group—the group is part of the support mechanism for my new life. A group of people are picked to be transferred and released about the same time. Because there is no universal language, and I don’t speak any other languages comfortably, everybody in the group came from an English speaking background. This was OK for our group but much more limiting for those people with native languages that didn’t have a huge world wide coverage. I was able to get in a group that was from all over the world and continued to live all over the world. This brings up the possibility of inter language jealousies. Could they have a reason for sabotage at least of groups that they were angry at? When we signed in, we signed in in English. Meaning that the operators had to speak fluent English. And that may have distanced us from those who didn’t speak English. A de facto separation was established with lack of communication between these groups except on a higher level. And none of us had experience with these other groups and the support organizations that were tied to them. Were the formalities the same in each group? Did the different cultural backgrounds mean that they would act differently in the same situation? Would some groups be reluctant to speak up? And if the problems were coming from another group, would we be able to find out? And the different personalities of the groups were also reflected within the groups themselves. Everybody has a different reaction to any given situation even if your language and cultural background are similar. With all these possible problems the security system is bound to have holes. That’s why duplication in security is a must and why preparation of the checking is the only way to try to guarantee that a “situation” can be safely resolved. And what confidence do we have in this guarantee? Hardly enough to not be very, very careful.
Everybody in the group knows who we are and how to contact each other. If fact, we have to contact each other just to keep up and keep the ties smooth. The group was designed for just such occasions as this. We back each other up for knowledge and trouble times. If the rest of the Group is OK, then that tells us something—but what? We’ve gone over situations like this before release, but I’m a little hazy as to what I should do. I have to consult my book. Of course, the mere existence of a book is a potential liability to the secrecy of the process. If anyone outside comes across this book, they could possibly figure out something. But the knowledge in the book is coded to look innocent. Still, there’s always the chance… But in this case it’s worth it, so I check the book and figure out how to proceed—I think.
I’ve got 10 members in my group. They’re not really much like me but I did get to know them before we came out. Five or so were really hard for me to get along with. Their values which had been built in their first life were so different than mine that I had trouble even communicating with them to say nothing of trusting them. But two or three were very close to my natural inclinations so I decided to call them first.
Jesse was 65 when he died the first time. Fortunately for him the process had been worked out enough so that he was ready for reinsertion 10 years after he died. It still meant that with his different upbringing and difference in generation we thought a whole lot differently but had so many similarities in our upbringing he was almost like my son. I felt like I could trust him even with his different ways of looking at many things in life.
The second person was Angela, a women who died about 10 years after me. She had been a social worker who had been involved in the design of the eternal life project at one of the research centers and had a good piece of money set aside for the transformation. She seemed very understanding and kind so I was very trusting with her. Maybe too trusting?
The rest of the group was very diverse. Three of them spoke English but frankly I had a hard time understanding them or their reasons for life in general. I’ll discuss them later in more detail if I have to.
My first call to Jesse got an answering machine, so I decided to give Angela call which also go an answering machine. I realized it was possible but I thought strange. Usually on our normal contacts we got through right away, but of course, those were all scheduled. Now, are they. On a date? In the park. Jesse was in a very different time zone and Angela? I decided to give them 12 hours to get back to me.
Jesse called first. It was 8 in the morning when he roused me, but he sounded coherent. He was at a loss to explain the glitches. He said he had one two sign ins ago but didn’t report them. That seemed like a mistake. He said he would try to reach Angela who he was also friendly with and get back to me.
I waited another two hours and heard from Angela. She was on a camping trip and had to get to a phone and sounded a bit disgruntled, but she sounded concerned when I explained the situation. She’d had no problems checking in, but she heard from Julie(another Groupie) that Julie had had trouble and merely reported it. I mentioned that that wasn’t quite comforting and she agreed. I seemed we needed to check with the others and get on track as to what to do in these situations. The danger as always is that if there is a problem with someone in the Group then we are alerting them as to what we are doing. An advantage might be that they might have an idea as to what’s going on. And if other people are having troubles, how the troubles are similar or different to mine.121806
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Well, it’s two days later now. This was the regular time for us to contact each other and that part seemed to work. And, as with any human interactions a number of people had had glitches and failed to report them out of sloth or stupidity. And those were just the ones that were admitted. Who knows how many more incidences there were that people were to embarrassed to talk about? So, we all sort of agreed that there might be a problem. Of course, we couldn’t decided on a solution that we all go back to Central and inquire. That might alert the badies if there are more than one. And it certainly would look suspicious if all of us requested to be brought in for training or whatever. Some were not that concerned and were content to do nothing but wait. Not so me. I was ready to get on the next flight to my center in Ireland. Three other people said they would go back and they would keep in touch. Meanwhile, we set up an alternative communication scheme that would not be reported to Central and we would keep in touch daily. We all had alternative numbers to call. That would be suspicious if any one was tracking all our phone calls. Couldn’t be helped.
I have to get back to the call center. Mine is in Ireland. I’m about 10 hours away, but it does mean driving for at least 5 hours when I get off the plane. So I start packing. How do I pack for this? Do I tell my landlord that I’ll be gone for a few days or for a few years? What to do with my stuff. I let Duffy know I’m off on a trip and should contact him in a few days. He’s pretty trustworthy and , on the other hand, there’s not much I own here that can’t be replaced. Not much in the way of nostalgia. No deep contacts. Commitments don’t come easy when you’re trying to be so secretive. I am like a spy spying on the future or the past. No one should know. Should I warn them that I’m coming? Or would this warn the bad guys or girls if there are some? Is someone screwing with the system? How am I going to avoid the bad guys if there is something bad going on? Maybe I shouldn’t be going to the center that’s screwing up but another one. Maybe one center is competing with or sabotaging one of the others. Why would they do this? Good idea. I think I’ll go to India. But then, maybe that’s where the villains are? At least I don’t know of any problems there. I’ll phone them. I try and that goes smoothly. Next I get a plane ticket to Mumbai and get ready to sleep through the plane ride. Luckily, I’m making money while I sleep. Should I call my kids and wife? Probably not a good idea until I figure this out. But I will have to hide this info somewhere. But where?
