Inherit the Earth

“How can I help you, Mr. Hart?” she asked.

“I hoped that you might be able to offer me an expert opinion,” he said. “I’m not sure that I have anything to offer in trade, but you might be interested in some of what I have to say.”

“I can’t speak on behalf of the foundation,” she was quick to say. “I’m only . . .”

“A humble data analyst,” Damon finished for her. “That’s okay. You’ve heard, I suppose, that the three men Yamanaka arrested have pleaded guilty to all the charges—kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, etcetera. They’ll be put away for at least twenty years—but I dare say that when they come out of suspended animation they’ll walk straight into jobs with PicoCon, who’ll bear the full responsibility and cost of their rehabilitation. There won’t be a full trial, of course—just a formal hearing to determine the sentence.”

“I’m sure that Inspector Yamanaka is very grateful to you,” the red-haired woman said. “If you hadn’t resisted so valiantly when they came after you a second time. . . .”

“Actually, it was all Le

“People who havecareers do have to be careful, Mr. Hart,” she pointed out.

“True—and I certainly don’t want to jeopardize yours. In fact, I rather hoped that you might be able to help me out with my own career decisions. I seem to have reached something of a crossroads.”

“The Ahasuerus Foundation isn’t interested in employing you,” she told him.

“PicoCon is.”

“In that case,” she said, “you should count yourself very fortunate.”

“I’ve heard that they have a great future ahead of them,” Damon admitted, “but I’m not sure that their optimism would be shared—at least not wholeheartedly—by an unbiased observer.”

“I’m flattered that you consider me an unbiased observer,” she assured him, “but I’m not sure that I have enough facts at my disposal to make a reasoned analysis of your career prospects with PicoCon or any other company.”

“But you do know something about the Saul family, don’t you? One of the men who financed the foundation was a Saul, wasn’t he?”

“The Ahasuerus Foundation was set up by Adam Zimmerman, entirely funded from his own resources.”

“Resources which he earned, if earnedis the right word, by masterminding a coup which turned a stock-market crash into an economic holocaust—and left a few dozen men with effective possession of two-thirds of the earth’s surface. The possession in question then made inexorable progress to the point at which those men’s heirs—who are even fewer in number than they were—are now the effective owners of the whole earth.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration,” Rachel Trehaine protested.

“I know,” Damon said. “But the point is that it’s only slight. As long as they’re united, and as long as they can keep buying up i

No reply was forthcoming to that observation, but Damon hadn’t expected one. “I looked at the background material Madoc dredged up for me,” he said. “Adam Zimmerman’s so-called confession is a remarkable document—as remarkable, in its way, as the charter he set up for the foundation. His penultimate will and testamentposes an interesting philosophical question, though. You’re supposed to bring him out of suspended animation when you have the technology available to make him young again and keep him that way forever—barring the usual accidents, of course—but what would qualify as reasonable grounds for believing that the latter criterion had been achieved? Some might argue that a man of his age—he was forty-eight, wasn’t he, when he was consigned to the freezer?—already has a good chance of riding the escalator all the way, but you’d undoubtedly take the view that he’d want the benefit of muchbetter rejuve technology than the current market standard—technology that could be guaranteedto beat the Hayflick limit and the Miller effect.”

“With all due respect,” said the red-haired woman, “the internal affairs of the foundation are none of your concern.”

“I understand that. I’m only talking hypothetically. I’m intrigued by the question of how we could ever knowthat we were in possession of a technology of rejuvenation that would stop aging permanently, preserving the mind as well as the body. How could we ever know that a particular IT suite was good for, say, two thousand years, without actually waiting two thousand years for the results of the field tests to come in? What sort of data analysis would allow us to reach a conclusion regarding the efficacy of the technology ahead of time?”

“It wouldn’t be easy,” Rachel Trehaine admitted warily. “But we now have a very detailed knowledge of the biochemistry of all the degenerative processes we lump together as aging. At present, we arrive at estimates of projected life spans by monitoring those processes over the short term in such a way as to produce an extrapolatable curve. That curve has to be adjusted for rejuvenative interruptions, but we can do medium-term experiments to monitor the effects of repeated rejuvenative treatments.”

“Do you still use mice for those experiments?” Damon asked.

“We use live animals in some trials,” she countered rather stiffly, “but most of the preliminary work can be done with tissue cultures. I assume that what you’re driving at is the impossibility of getting rid of the margin of uncertainty which arises from dealing with any kind of substitute for human subjects. You’re right, of course—we’ll never be sure that a treatment which multiplies the lifetime of a cell or a mouse by a thousand will do the same for a human being, until we’ve actually tried it.”

“As I see it,” Damon said, “we’ll neverbe able to tell the difference between a technological suite that will allow us to live for a long time and one which really will allow us to live forever. Most people, of course, don’t give a damn about that—they only want the best there is—but youhave to decide when to wake Adam Zimmerman up. You have to decide, day by day and year by year, exactly how to balance the equation of potential gain against potential risk—because you can’t leave him in there indefinitely, can you? Nor can you keep waking him up to ask his advice, because every journey in or out of susan multiplies the risks considerably, and even the nanotech you pump into him while he’s still down and out can’t fully compensate for the fact that the first susan technology he used was pre-ark.”

“You’re right,” she admitted. “For us, if for no one else, nice statistical distinctions are important. What’s your point?”

“For a long time, Ahasuerus must have been field leaders in longevity research. Your heavy investment in biotech put you on the crest of the wave—and you presumably had a healthy and mutually supportive relationship with other researchers, all the way from Morgan Miller to Conrad Helier and Surinder Nahal. You were all on the same side, all trading information like good team players. Then PicoCon and OmicronA came at the problem from a different angle, with a different attitude. They’re the field leaders now, aren’t they? While they’ve been forming their own team, yours has broken up. Nowadays, it must require serious industrial espionage to discover what the boys across the street are up to, and exactly how far they’ve got.”