The Eternal World Read online

  “And you’re the only one who can do it,” Bethany said flatly.

  “Yes,” David said. “I know how arrogant it sounds. But it’s true. There’s maybe ten people in the world who are working at my level, and none of them have made the progress I have. Nobody else is even close. I could really do it. I could find the answer to everything that goes bad or rotten inside our bodies and I could actually fix it. That’s what I can do. And I will not apologize for trying.”

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic, David. I know how smart you are. I believe you could find it. But you should really think about this: You can carry all that weight on your shoulders. But do you really have to? What kind of life do you get, while you’re busy finding a solution for death?”

  David shrugged. “This is what I have to do. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “No,” she said. “I think there’s more to it. You never told me what it was, but I know there’s more.”

  David didn’t reply. He wasn’t about to open that wound again. Not here. Not now.

  Bethany was done waiting for him. “I hope you do find someone who can share this with you. But it’s not going to be me.”

  David understood, finally, that this wasn’t an argument. Bethany wasn’t asking him to fix something or fight his way back to her side. She was reporting on something that had already happened.

  He picked up the spare key to his apartment and put it in his pocket.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe when I get back, we could—”

  Bethany shook her head. “It would end the same way.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do. You know why I’m telling you this, David? Because I have to. I don’t think you would have even noticed I was gone otherwise.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said.

  She gave him a sad smile. “But is it true?”

  David looked away from her. And then couldn’t help himself. He looked at the cells on the screen again.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “You’re a good guy, David. I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.”

  Then she left.

  David checked his watch again. His flight to Miami wasn’t until later in the afternoon, and the lab was free until eight, when the first students would come in.

  He might as well work straight through.

  It wasn’t like anyone was waiting for him now.

  DAVID SAT ON THE plane in the deep leather seat in first class and reviewed the package of materials the company had sent him. Lots of glossy pictures, lots of quietly assured boasting, couched in the usual corporate terms. “Unprecedented innovation,” “world-class facilities,” “global leader in the industry,” and so on.

  Well, he thought. At least they didn’t use the phrase “fountain of youth.” That would have put them right into late-night infomercial territory.

  That was the problem with working in this field, David thought, not for the first time. People were desperate to turn back the clock, and sometimes it felt like all of the advances being offered were nothing more than twenty-first-century versions of health tonics and patent medicines. It smelled a lot like a con game.

  Which was not to say that Conquest didn’t have anything to brag about. Its research had led to Revita, a drug that did some of what David was trying to accomplish in the lab: physical rejuvenation of the human body at the cellular level.

  Aging was a hugely complicated process. It might have looked like one long, steady decline—aches and pains, wrinkles, hair loss, memory loss, slowing reflexes, weakening muscles—but it was, in reality, a combination of multiple processes all affecting the body at once.

  The search for eternal youth—the idea of holding a person at an ideal age, perfectly balancing maturity and optimum health—had been the obsession of humanity almost since Paleolithic times. The Egyptians believed in a combination of spiritual and actual physical immortality: mummies were preserved in an effort to keep them ready for the souls of their owners on the other side. Early Chinese cultures had believed something similar, to the extent that some emperors had whole courts of followers—wives, soldiers, advisers—killed and buried along with them. Christianity promised the return of the Messiah and a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth within their lifetimes. Only when Jesus failed to show up did the idea begin to morph into the resurrection of the soul.

  Every culture had its myth or legend about eternal youth and immortality. But there were some hard-and-fast obstacles to actually pulling it off in real life.

  The easiest way to increase human lifespan, of course, was to simply stop so many people from dying. And this had been the great work of the twentieth century, with advances in sanitation, food, and vaccines. Everyone was already living longer because there were fewer things in the world killing them.

  But even with outside forces more or less controlled, there were still all the things that could go wrong inside a person. Sometimes when David looked at the body, he saw nothing but millions of little betrayals—everything from genes to major organs all on the edge of failure. Everything from heart attacks to rare diseases were hidden inside people, waiting to pop out like an obscene jack-in-the-box.

  This was the undying frustration of David’s life. Every one of the problems of aging was like that, and they all had to be cured at the same time, or any one of the solutions was useless. It wasn’t much of a miracle to be a person with perfect, unwrinkled skin if you died of a massive brain tumor at forty.

  This was why the attempt to create a single cure-all for aging never worked: there was simply too much going on for a single solution. It was like trying to bring down a whole flock of birds with one bullet.

  But Revita was fairly effective at the one bird it did target: the aging of cells.

  As cells died, they divided and replaced themselves—but after a while, it was like making copies of a copy. Errors began to pile up in the DNA. The cells became filled with junk and waste as they broke down over time.

  Revita, however, fixed that. It discouraged the buildup of transcription errors and waste products in cells. Patients who took it, over time, found their overall health improved as new cells made better copies of themselves.

  There were side effects, of course. But the demand for the drug was so high that the FDA put it on the market anyway. The baby boom generation wanted to stay young even as they were facing retirement age. Sales of Revita were incredible, despite its high price tag.

  That was why David was interviewing with them, even though he’d already gotten better offers from bigger companies. The other Big Pharma players wanted him to work on the next Viagra or the next Rogaine—something that would generate billions of dollars while dealing with one small part of the aging process.

  David wasn’t really interested in helping a bunch of old men keep their hair or their erections. He wanted to save lives. For all its hype, Conquest was the only company that had been willing to let him pursue whatever research he wanted.

  At least, that had been the case up until a couple of weeks ago. The company had been in turmoil since its CEO had died of a sudden massive coronary. His son, Simon Oliver IV, took the top position.

  The younger Oliver had used his family fortune to pay for an endless series of parties around the globe while his father worked himself into an early grave. TMZ recently caught him smashing a Lamborghini into a semi, then offering the other driver all the cash in his wallet to take the blame. David felt irrationally, personally insulted at that; he didn’t like drunk drivers.

  Wall Street didn’t take the news well, either. Conquest’s stock was down twenty percent, and analysts were on the business-chat shows telling anyone who’d listen it was time to sell.

  David wasn’t sure he wanted to work for someone like Simon Oliver IV.

  But the word on Wall Street was that Simon had no i
nterest in the company as anything more than a no-limit ATM. David figured he’d never even get so much as a glimpse of the new CEO.

  “DAVID.”

  Simon Oliver called to him from baggage claim. He looked just like his paparazzi shots, which inevitably showed him falling out of a limo, a bottle in one hand, a B-list starlet or wannabe model in the other. Behind him was a full entourage, composed in equal parts of hangers-on, eye candy, and security personnel.

  Simon wore a conservatively cut dark gray suit. It made him look even younger, like a kid playing in his dad’s clothes. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but he smiled brightly.

  He offered his hand. David took it. Simon pulled him into a back-slapping man-hug. “Glad to meet you,” he said, pounding David hard between the shoulder blades.

  Before David could say anything, Simon spun him around to face the entourage. “Guys, this is David. He’s the one. He’s going to put us over the top. He’s my new MVP, so I want all of you pricks to treat him like you would me.”

  Another guy, about Simon’s age—sharp-featured, wearing a suit that could have been done by the same tailor—smirked. “So we have to pretend he’s not an asshole?”

  Simon barked a laugh. “Hilarious, Max. I nearly ruptured a bowel. Come on. Let’s get a drink in this guy’s hand.”

  Simon still had his arm around David. One of the girls peeled away from the scrum of people and produced, seemingly out of nowhere, a can of beer.

  “Beer? Light beer?” Simon said in horror. “Oh, Tiffani. Good thing I didn’t hire you for your taste.”

  Other people in the baggage claim area gawked at them. Simon’s crowd had formed an island in the stream of people trying to get to their luggage or trying to get out to the taxi stands. A few bystanders even took pictures; they didn’t know who Simon was, but anyone with that many security guards had to be famous.

  A TSA employee heaved himself from a stool at the nearest doorway and stalked over to them.

  “Sir,” he said loudly. “You’re gonna have to move along. Can’t have you blocking traffic.”

  The smile vanished from Simon’s face.

  “Or else what, McGruff? You gonna shoot me?”

  The security guards flanked their boss with practiced moves. David might have been imagining it, but they seemed annoyed and bored. Not the first time this sort of thing has happened, clearly.

  “Just move along, sir,” the TSA agent said, waving them off.

  “Are you shitting me?” Simon laughed. “I could put this whole airport on my AmEx Black just to fire your ass if I felt like it. I pay more for a decent meal than you earn in a week. In case you still don’t get it, I am the One Percent, asshole, and we own people like you.”

  The agent scowled and reached for his belt. It looked as if this conversation was about to end with Simon getting Tased. Then Simon seemed to remember David was still at his side.

  “Why are we waiting around here?” he said, the smile reappearing, the sun beaming from behind a sudden storm cloud. “We have a lot of sights and sensations to show our new boy. Come on, bro.”

  He grabbed David’s arm again and half-dragged him toward the doors.

  The entourage whooped in delight, the security guards looked slightly relieved, and the TSA agent was already lumbering back to his stool.

  Within moments, David was inside a limo, Tiffani on his lap, a drink in his hand.

  He was just able to see Simon in the farthest seat—the only light came from a video screen and neon tubing on the floor and ceiling—hoisting a glass to him.

  “Welcome to Miami, David. I think you’re going to enjoy it.”

  Then he vanished behind a very well-toned, very bleached blonde.

  This was a new experience for David. He had never been one of the guys before in his life. He was always too serious, too busy. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

  But he had to admit, this was a lot more interesting than the other job interviews so far.

  THREE HOURS LATER, DAVID’S head felt like it was made of foam rubber. He almost never drank, and the beer he’d accepted to be polite somehow led to tequila shots.

  This was their third club of the night, and like at all the others, Simon’s security had cut an effortless path through the crowd, escorting them to a booth in a prime position. Within moments, more beautiful women joined them, and the tables were covered in bottles.

  David wondered if wherever Simon went, people simply waited to meet his needs. Then he realized that was probably what being a twenty-three-year-old billionaire meant.

  In the limo, Simon had introduced him to the other young men in suits: there was Max, who sat almost as close to Simon as the girl on his thigh; Sebastian, ridiculously handsome and too bored with everything for a guy in his early twenties; and Peter, thick with gym-built muscle and whose first response to everything was an argument.

  They began to get loud enough that David could hear them, despite the thumping bass of the speakers. David was surprised they didn’t text one another like everyone else in the club. They were in some kind of political discussion.

  “I keep telling you, it’s time to get out of Afghanistan, Iraq, the whole Middle East. We’ll be lucky if there’s anything left there but corpses in the sand in a few years,” Sebastian said.

  Peter disagreed, loudly. “That’s where all the oil is, dumbass. How you going to drive that Mercedes of yours with no gasoline?”

  “Of course you’d say that,” Sebastian shot back. “You were the one who wanted us in downtown Kabul.”

  The others laughed, but Peter looked insulted. “I still say the only thing separating Afghanistan from Arizona is the right kind of investment and air-conditioning.”

  Max chose that moment to jump in: “And maybe something like Ebola to clear out the locals.”

  They all clinked glasses to that. David thought it was weird. He knew not everyone took politics as seriously as the students he’d met in Cambridge—because, really, who could?—but they talked like they were discussing investments.

  Simon watched them with a smirk, as if he’d heard this before. They finished each other’s jokes and sentences, hinted at past idiocies and embarrassments, utterly familiar with one another, as if they had been together since birth.

  David felt a pang of jealousy at that.

  Simon seemed to notice. Or, at least, he turned his attention to David. He waved, and one of the girls handed David a new drink.

  “So, how do you like the job so far?” Simon said.

  “I don’t work for you yet.”

  “Oh, come on. I bet none of your other prospects met you with girls. At least not girls like these. I mean, seriously, you should see what Tiffani can do with a banana and a martini glass.”

  David lost a moment trying to picture that, then shook it off. “I’m sure that’s impressive,” David said, “and yeah, this is fun and all, but it’s not really my world.”

  “True,” Simon said. “But it could be.”

  “I don’t think so. Nobody really gets into science expecting lap dances and body glitter. No offense, but I’ve got a serious problem I want to solve.”

  “Not having a whole lot of luck, though, are you?” Simon asked. “I understand you’re still working on telomeres. And by ‘working,’ I mean ‘failing spectacularly.’ ”

  David felt his face get hot. Telomeres were the sequences at the ends of chromosomes that kept the cells dividing properly. When the cell ran out of telomeres, it got old and eventually died. David had been trying to increase the length of telomeres and increase the life of the cells.

  Unfortunately, lengthening telomeres in a cell was also one of the first steps in the cell dividing out of control. Increasing the lifespan of a cell was also opening the door to cancer. That’s why David’s current experiments had all failed.

  Davi
d wasn’t sure how Simon knew that—his latest research wasn’t published yet—but he was more surprised that Simon even knew what a telomere was.

  Simon could see it on his face. “You weren’t expecting that question in this club, were you?”

  All right, David thought. Let’s see how much the boy billionaire learned from whoever gave him the CliffsNotes version of DNA manipulation. “Telomeres are the most efficient way to increase cell life,” he said. “Highest reward, least amount of risk. If we can increase error-free replication, the entire body lives longer.”

  “But the body will still age. Cellular breakdown and disease will still be a problem, maybe even more so,” Simon shot back. “What about other solutions? Like, say, boosting mitochondrial life, as suggested by de Grey?”

  “Altering the mitochondria?” David asked. “The problem there is the genes identified by de Grey can’t survive outside the mitochondria. Move them, and you end up killing them.”

  “Then why not decrease cell toxicity by improving the cell’s ability to remove waste products?” Simon asked, not letting up. “Engineer a tiny little DNA garbageman who takes out the trash.”

  “Where does the waste go, then? You shuffle it outside of the cell, it can build up in other places and do more damage there. You cure a guy’s wrinkles and give him amyloid plaques in the brain and Alzheimer’s.”

  “So we use specific cleansing enzymes, like hydrolases. Regular injections to go after the stuff between the cells and clean it out. You could even apply a modified variant of the same thing to clean up the extracellular cross-links and break them down before they start collecting and causing problems.”

  David shook his head. “Which could start to erode cellular material indiscriminately if the genetic delivery system mutates. It would make Ebola look like a bad flu.”