THE
FIRST IMMORTAL
A Novel of the Future.
Note: If you enjoyed The First Immortal or The Truth Machine, please consider posting a review on Amazon or purchasing copies at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345421825/ref=ase_jameslhalpe or
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345412885/ref=ase_jameslhalpe
THIRTIETH DRAFT; Approximately 130,000 words
ã Copyright 1996, James L. Halperin, 6/20/98
Address: 3500 Maple Ave, Dallas, Texas 75219
Fax 214-520-7108
e-mail:
“There is but one evil, ignorance.”
— Socrates
“All that stand between us and eternal life are fear and gullibility: Dread of the unknown forges faith in the unknowable.”
— Benjamin Franklin Smith
To my family.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Observant second-time readers may recognize some changes in the text, and even a few new plot twists. All such revisions are part of an obsessive quest to make The First Immortal the most severely scrutinized — and therefore scientifically accurate — novel ever written on our potential for biological immortality. In the first hard-cover edition, I offered a bounty to each reader who was first to point out any scientific or factual inaccuracies that I subsequently corrected. The bounty, a scarce Ivy Press first edition of The Truth Machine, my first novel, was enough to attract hundreds of submissions. Fortunately for me, most were duplicates, but I did wind up awarding about two dozen books. Still, I’m sure mistakes remain, so I now repeat the offer. Should you find any such errors, please send me an e-mail at , or write to me c/o Ballantine Books, 201 East 50th Street, New York, NY 10022, and include your mailing address.
And be sure to visit The First Immortal Web site at www.firstimmortal.com to post your comments about this book and the topics and philosophies it examines. I intend to read every comment, and will continue to post responses.
— JLH, 6/15/98
PROLOGUE
June 2, 1988 – Echoes tumbled through the ambulance. Squeals, rattles, and torsion-bar sways came at him in waves, magnified and ominous. The attendants standing over him seemed blurry, even extraneous. What mattered was the beeping monitor and all-too-familiar stench of emergency medicine. And every single sensation blended with the mundane smell of the rain-soaked streets beneath him.
Benjamin Franklin Smith, my great-grandfather, knew he was about to die.
The morning had delivered Ben’s third heart attack in six years—worse than either of its predecessors. This time his chest felt vise-tight, more constricted than he’d imagined possible. His oxygen-starved muscles sagged like spent rubber, so weak he could barely feel them twitch, while a cold Novocain-like river prickled his left arm from shoulder-blade to fingertips: numb but so heavy.
Oh, Christ! he thought, remembering his first symptoms on that flight to Phoenix in 1982. He should have known better. If he hadn’t stayed on the damn airplane, they could’ve given him treatment; minimized the damage.
Now he was dying. Him, of all people. Ben snorted. Absent his pain and fear, it might have been a laugh. Well, why in hell not him? He was 63 years old.
God, just 63? Is that all I get? Please Jesus, spare me this. Not yet....
Two ambulance attendants wheeled Ben through the hospital emergency entrance, past check-in and dozens of less critical cases, sprinting straight for intensive care. All ignored them except one nurse who, recognizing the too-familiar patient, merely gaped. One of the attendants whispered to her, “Looks like myocardial infarction. Probably massive.”
Still half-conscious, Ben wondered if they realized he could hear them, or if they cared. He wondered whether these professionals tasted the same empathy for him that he had so often experienced with his own dying patients.
He also questioned his rationality.
His preparations over the previous half-decade had included an oath to himself that he would betray no ambivalence about the unusual instructions he’d left. This despite understanding that his chances of staving off death remained slight.
And that if he succeeded, he might end up envying the dead.
Before surrendering consciousness, Dr. Benjamin Smith managed to whisper: “Call Toby Fiske.” These words would set in motion all his plans—irrevocably changing the nature of his death.
Then, as the rush of unreality gathered speed and his awareness faded, his subconscious mind began to play back the most important moments of life, as if by giving these experiences a new orderliness he might somehow absolve himself of, or at least comprehend, his mistakes.
Images assaulted him of his parents, his children, and the first time he ever made love to his wife Marge. She was just a teenager then. How fiery and resilient she was. They were. Then he remembered sitting at her bedside when she was dying. For six weeks he had fed and bathed her, consoled her with stories and recollections, held her hand, and watched helplessly as the cancer consumed her body and mind.
Now would he finally rejoin her?
Ben Smith also knew the world would keep turning without him. So at the end of things, he pleaded to his God, praying that once he was dead, his only son might finally forgive him.
============O============
My great-grandfather was an only child. And despite his birth into near-poverty, his genetics and early environment favored him with certain critical advantages. But timing was not among these: He was born in 1925.
His attempt to become immortal is a tale of character, luck, and daring. Benjamin Franklin Smith’s story might have befallen any person of his time—that era when death seemed inevitable to every human being on earth. Inevitable, and drawing ever closer.
THE BENJAMIN SMITH FAMILY TREE
Gary and Susan Franklin
formerly: Giancarlo & Sophia Francheschi
_________________________________|________________________________
| | |
Charlotte Franklin Alice Franklin b. 1904 Sophie Franklin
b.1906 marries b.1901
Samuel Walter Smith b. 1902
|
Benjamin Franklin Smith b. 1925
marries
Margaret Callahan b. 1924
_______________________________|___________________________
| | | |
Gary Franklin Smith Rebecca Carol Maxine Lee Smith Janette Lois Smith
b.1947 Smith-Crane b.1951 b.1952 b.1954
marries marries marries marries
Kimber Otani Chevalier George Jacob Crane Robert Miles Swenson Noah Lewis Banks
b. 1997 b.1948 b. 1950 b. 1953
| | | |
| Katherine Franklin Justin Robert Sarah Smith Banks
| Crane, b. 1978 Swenson b.1981 b. 1982
| George Jacob marries David Smith Banks
| Crane, Jr. b. 1972 Abigail Carol Hall b. 1989
| marries b. 1983 Michael Smith Banks
| Sondra Deeds Goad | b. 1986
| b. 1977 | marries
| | | Joanne Helen Gleason
| | | b. 1986
| | | |
| George Jacob (Trip) Chloe Maya Swenson b. 2021 |
| Crane, III b. 2006 David Asia Swenson b. 2023 |
| marries Liza Caroline Swenson b. 2026 |
| Stephanie Van Winkle Molly Skylar Swenson b. 2030 |
| b. 2035 |
| |
| Erik Cornell Banks b. 2014
| Frederick Harmon Banks b. 2018 | Robert Goddard Banks b. 2022
| Alica Claire Banks b. 2008
| marries marries
| Virginia Maria Gonzalez b. 1989 Caleb Jason Harwell b. 1994
| | |
Margaret Callahan Lysa Banks Gonzalez Devon Banks Harwell
Smith b. 2084 b. 2043 b. 2060
PART ONE—THE FIRST IMMORTAL
January 14, 1925
My great-great grandmother stared into a spider-web crack spreading through the dilapidated ceiling paint, its latticed shape taunting her as if she were a fly ensnared in its grip. For several hours she’d been lying on their bed, shivering and convulsing, in that drab and tiny apartment. Now she felt a scream swelling in her chest, like a tidal wave drawing mass from the shallows. Alice Smith was only 20 years old, but she knew something was deeply, perhaps mortally wrong.
She shut her eyes, trying to focus on something, anything, other than the pain-fueled fire-storm raging inside of her. But there was only the tortured stench of her own sweltering flesh. A single tear found its way into the corner of her mouth. It tasted of pain and fear, but she was surprised to discover another flavor within it: hope and a coming of new life.
Her husband, Samuel, entered her consciousness as if to provide an outlet; a cathartic conversion of pain to anger. Like Alice, the man was a second-generation American. He was a grocer by trade, and also like herself, from Wakefield, Massachusetts. He had always been a hard worker and steadfast in his tenderness. But he was not there! She was in agony, while he was stacking cans of peaches!
Just when, she asked herself, had he judged his work more important than his wife? and soundlessly cursed him with words women of the year 1925 weren’t supposed to know.
Why did she need him there, anyway? To share her torment, or to seek the comfort of him? All Alice knew was that right then she hated and loved her husband in equal measure, and if this ordeal was to kill her, she needed to see his face one last time.
To say goodbye.
No! she decided, as if her circumstance had been caused by nothing more than a failure of will. She had to raise and love this child. She would not allow herself to die.
Alice’s membrane had ruptured 26 hours ago, yet she had not given birth. She’d once read that in prolonged labor, omnipresent bacteria threatened to migrate inside, infecting both mother and child. Even the hunched and hoary midwife, though ignorant of the danger in scientific terms, seemed well aware of peril, per se; Alice could sense a fear of disaster in the woman’s every gesture.
Where in the hell was Sam?
Even in anguish, Alice understood this rage against her husband was misplaced. It had somehow become a societal expectation that women should bear children with stoic grace. And it was absurd. A student of history, she knew that anesthetics had been used for many surgeries since the 1850s, yet had found little acceptance in obstetrics, the pain of childbirth considered by doctors to be a duty women were somehow meant to endure.
Still, it could have been worse; Alice was equally aware that her odds had improved. A hundred years earlier, doctors would often go straight from performing autopsies to delivering babies, seldom even washing their hands. No wonder it had been common back then for men to lose several wives to complications of childbirth. At least now, sterilization was practiced with some modicum of care.
Her 19-year-old sister Charlotte and the midwife stood at Alice’s bedside. The older woman’s facial expression evinced kindly resignation, as if to say, It’s all we can do for you, dear, as she held a wet towel, sponging Alice’s forehead. Charlotte Franklin’s intelligent eyes and sanguine aspect seemed to magnify the midwife’s aura of incompetence.
“Just breathe through it,” said the midwife, who’d already told them that the suffering and peril of delivery were “natural,” God’s punishment for the sins of womankind. “It’s in our Lord’s hands now,” she now added, as if these words held some sort of reassurance.
Alice felt her mind shove aside the hopeless bromide.
“You’ll be okay, Allie,” Charlotte whispered nervously, gently massaging her sister’s shoulders. “You’re doing fine.”
“Quick now, fetch the boiling water for the gloves,” the midwife ordered. “Won’t be much longer.”
Alice screamed again and Sam burst into the room. The snow storm dripped its offerings from his clothes onto the stained wooden floor. He shivered.
Thank God, Alice thought, her rage forgotten. Sam would see their child be born.
“Am I in time?” he asked stupidly.
His question went unanswered. “Head’s about through. Now push, girl!” the midwife shouted.
Alice pressed down. Slowly, painstakingly, Charlotte and the midwife managed to extract a perfect baby boy.
Though bleeding heavily, Alice rallied a wan smile of optimism and hope, qualities she intended to convey to her son, assuming she survived.
Charlotte cut the cord. The midwife spanked the infant’s bottom. They washed him with warm water. He wailed, but soon rested contentedly in his mother’s arms. His father gently stroked his back. The caresses, tentative at first, easily progressed in loving confidence.
“Benjamin Franklin Smith,” Sam declared, as if in the ritual of naming, his wife’s pain might be banished to memory.
The next few days would be difficult. Having barely survived the ordeal, Alice sustained a dangerous post partum infection of the uterus and tubes. Her fever would reach 105 degrees, often consigning her to the mad hands of delirium. She’d live through the illness, but not without loss: She would never bear another child.
August 15, 1929
Oh! Ah! The next flash card displayed a tug wearing an impish grin and belching smoke from its only funnel. As Ben saw it, he felt his cheeks puff into a smile. His first impulse was to reach for the drawing; get a good close look at the happy work-boat. But doing that would be bad. Might ruin the game.
B-O-A-T, yes, yes, yes! He could see the letters forming in his mind’s eye and was delighted. The mental picture of the vessel and the alphabetic characters defining it jumped from his cerebrum into his eyes and mouth.
“Boat! B-O-A-T, boat!”
“Wonderful.” Alice grinned. Oh, he’s so special, she thought, even knowing that her excitement was exponentially enhanced because this delightful four-year-old was her own. Although they said John Stuart Mill could translate Cicero at this age...