Extra Time - Part One
At ninety-one, Mark has the brain of an exceptionally talented twenty-five year old...
With the new year upon us, it seemed apt to post a story about time. I hope you enjoy it.
Mark slid off the couch.
‘So, what do you think, doc? Twenty, twenty-five?’
Doctor Zimmerman was staring at the screen, and it took him a moment to answer.
‘Well, let’s not get carried away, thirty-five, maybe, but that’s still pretty awesome.’
He turned and smiled, his pale eyes like marbles behind thick lenses. The glasses were an affectation. His sight was perfect, but academics were fond of wearing these redundant twentieth century accoutrements.
Mark frowned; he was expecting better. He didn’t take all those pills to be thirty-five. Thirty-five was perilously close to forty, and his father dropped dead at forty-three.
‘Are you sure Doc? You said twenty-five last time.’
Doctor Zimmerman’s smile widened into a grin. ‘I’m just kidding with you. As far as your biological markers are concerned, you’re not a day over twenty-five.’
‘Phew, you had me going for a minute, Doc,’ Mark said relieved. ‘How long has it been now?’
The doctor checked the screen again.
‘Exactly fifty years and seven days since you started the programme. Not bad, you’re in the top one percent. Keep going and you might even break some records.’
“What about the others? How are they doing? How about Jeff?”
It wasn’t a competition, but Mark couldn’t help himself. Everything was a competition. If you weren’t competing, you might as well be dead. When a batch of new recruits joined the company, fresh out of Stanford or MIT, he told them to think of their colleagues as the enemy. To win, you had to be better, faster, more devious. You couldn’t kill them, obviously, but it was a battle of minds and, at the grand old age of ninety-one years and seven days, he had the brain of a twenty-five-year-old and an exceptionally gifted twenty-five-year-old at that.
‘You know I can’t share that information with you,’ Doctor Zimmerman said. ‘Anyway, it’s not a fair comparison, is it? Jeff was older when he started. We’re not miracle workers.’
Mark put his trainers on and tied the laces.
‘Don’t sell yourself short Doc, I’m relying on you to keep me going for another hundred years or so.’
He jogged back to the campus in the shade of the trees. It was unpleasantly hot, even hotter than usual, and the sprinklers were working overtime to keep the lawns from shrivelling. As he passed a group of female employees, he shouted encouragement, taking care not to let them see he was out of breath.
‘Great day for it, get that blood pumping girls.’
They waved, and he sped up, ignoring the ache in his right hip. However desperately he wanted to stop, it was necessary to set an example.
In the bathroom adjoining his office, his PA, Tammy, had laid out a fresh T-shirt for him to change into after his shower. He glanced in the mirror as he waited for the water to reach temperature. The face that stared back at him looked good, although the wrinkles forming at the corner of his eyes would need to be dealt with.
The health plan for senior managers included longevity. Survival of the fittest had morphed into survival of the smartest, which was no bad thing because the more smart, successful people there were in the world, the better for everyone. Now, anyone who could afford it had up to two hundred and fifty productive years to look forward to - a figure that was increasing all the time. Those who couldn’t flipped hamburgers or laboured on construction sites until they dropped dead from heart disease or diabetes. Not that they had anyone but themselves to blame, it was their choice to hand the billionaires the keys to the kingdom.
He was five minutes late for the sales meeting and slid into a chair next to Veronica, who was scrolling through figures on her screen. Initially, she had been a life extension refusenik claiming it went against nature. That was until her mental acuity score dipped. No one whose brain was biologically older than forty could work at the company and, faced with the prospect of re-joining the proletariat, she quickly changed her mind.
‘How are the Chinese?’
‘Pissed. Apparently, four people slipped through the net last month and one of them bought a train ticket to another zone.’
Mark sipped his power shake. It tasted disgusting, but as Dr Zimmerman was fond of saying, no pain, no gain. Although there was a jug of coffee on the side, almost everyone had brought their proprietary drinks, and the containers were lined up on the table like bowling pins.
‘So, what’s the plan?’
Since buying a seat on the board, the Chinese kept pushing the bar higher and everyone else followed. Not just the big players like the US and India. Dictators and despots everywhere were rushing to spend their ill-gotten gains on state-of-the-art surveillance. Admittedly, the ethics were questionable but, if they didn’t do it their competitors would and their competitors weren’t investing billions in cloning extinct species or building a colony on the moon. Mark’s conscience was clear. Net good was what they were aiming for at AGI + and one thing he had learnt over the years was you had to do bad to do good.
A disembodied female voice spoke from the other end of the table, and Veronica leapt to her feet.
‘Sorry, I forgot Amber was dialling in.’
She fiddled with the remote and Amber appeared in all her technicolour three-dimensional glory.
Mark was old enough to remember when ‘dialling in’ meant a star phone in the middle of the table and a voice so faint you could barely hear it. Now he had to keep reminding himself Amber was six hundred miles away. He was about to remark on this when he stopped himself. After his weekly staff pep talk, he’d overheard a girl in the marketing team joking that he was always going on about the good old days. She’d yawned theatrically, covering her mouth, and the boy who was with her laughed too.
He tried to remember the girl’s name, Debbie? Denise? He was sure it began with a D. Dora? Deborah? How many D’s were there? He knew she had a dog because he’d seen her walking it around the campus at lunchtime, a small yappy thing with a pink collar. Denise? Dolly? There was a time when he never forgot a name or a face. He clamped his arms to his side to hide the damp patch that was forming under his arms. What if Doctor Zimmerman was lying? What if his brain was failing? Was this the first step on the slippery slope to decrepitude?
The meeting was like thousands of meetings that had gone before. Veronica ran through the numbers and Ted – the newly appointed VP of out of the box thinking - talked at length about a tool that could predict whether a child would become a criminal based on his or her sugar consumption. The despots would like that, although Mark reminded Ted that preventing thought crime was their highest priority. At a conference in Rome, he had spoken with practiced passion about advances in AGI that would make it possible to re-programme undesirable neural pathways. As he painted a picture of a world without crime or anti-social behaviour, he felt a spark of genuine emotion, the first he’d experienced in years.
The meeting droned on for nearly three hours and his head was pounding when he got home. He ignored the hordes of caterers in the kitchen and the holographic tiger stretched out on a sofa (so far, the cloning programme had yielded three cubs, but they were much too valuable to waste on the staff party). He found Suki in the bedroom. She was wearing a figure-hugging silver all in one and her black hair cascaded down her back like lava. Despite adding three children to his collection, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on her. She was his fourth wife, and he planned to stop there. Divorce was expensive, and he didn’t have the energy to go through it again. He’d done his bit for the knowledge economy by producing ten children, none of whom had so far lived up to expectations.
He kissed Suki on the cheek. ‘Where’s the maid?’
She sighed and snapped the book she was reading shut. One of his wife’s more endearing quirks was a fondness for obsolete technologies.
‘I put her away. She was annoying me. Sometimes I miss having proper staff, real people who make mistakes and answer back.’
He nodded, although he didn’t agree; he preferred bots, compliant perfectionists programmed to please. Soon they would outnumber humans and that day couldn’t come fast enough as far as he was concerned.
‘The party’s looking good.’ He said changing the subject.
‘Yeah, it’s coming along. Although there’s some sort of problem with the food, apparently the supplier hasn’t delivered the organic micro greens, so they’re having to improvise with arugula.’
Mark rubbed his temple. The pain was located directly above his right eye, a nauseating throbbing like a balloon inflating and deflating inside his skull (did they even have balloons anymore? He hadn’t seen one for years). He yawned and yawned again, the ominous prelude to a migraine.
And, if you really, really enjoyed it… :)