Immortal Read online

  ‘A bit like Hiram Conley,’ Lopez said. ‘He had a Minie musket ball lodged in his right femur. According to analysis the wound was around one hundred forty years old.’

  Tyler Willis grasped the edge of his desk.

  ‘You’re sure? You actually have evidence of this?’

  ‘It’s locked up,’ Lopez replied quickly, cursing inwardly at having revealed too much. ‘But our source is reliable. The main reason we’re here is to find out what the hell’s been going on with this Conley and how he could have ended up not just with that wound but with a fresh Minie ball in his shoulder.’

  Willis seemed momentarily distracted, whispering to himself.

  ‘I’ll be damned, it’s true then.’ He looked at them. ‘Conley had been shot before I met him in the pass, before the ranger arrived. Somebody else shot him with a musket, maybe one of the others.’

  ‘When you were found,’ Ethan said, ‘you told Patrol Officer Zamora that Hiram Conley was too old to die, that you didn’t want him killed. You knew that he was very old then, didn’t you?’

  Willis seemed to come back to the present. He looked at both Lopez and Ethan as though weighing them up, and then finally nodded.

  ‘I didn’t at first,’ he said simply.

  ‘What was wrong with him, exactly?’ Lopez asked.

  Willis sighed heavily.

  ‘It’s very difficult to explain,’ he said. ‘You need to think differently about life and what it is before you can understand what happened to Hiram Conley. What you need to know is that nobody ever dies of old age, ever. What happens to us, and to all other species, is that the ability of our cells to divide without generating errors decreases the more times those cells are forced to divide. The gradual building up of cellular errors eventually results in programmed cell death, apoptosis, which leads to a specific cause of death such as organ failure, cancer and so on. We die as a result of illness brought on by age, but not by age itself.’

  ‘So technically people could live forever?’ Lopez asked, ‘if their cells could divide without errors.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Willis nodded, ‘even as crazy as it sounds. But unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as that. Like everything else, aging is something that has evolved through natural selection. Most of the earliest forms of life on our planet were bacterial colonies and such like, forms which don’t necessarily suffer senescence because, as a colony, they survive for millions of years and continue the genetic heritage of the colony as a whole. However, with most forms of life aging has evolved because the longer something lives, the more likely it is to encounter a fatal incident, be it predation or an accident.’

  ‘We die just in case we have an accident?’ Lopez muttered. ‘Sounds like a bum deal.’

  ‘Not really,’ Willis said. ‘Evolution has resulted in a situation where it has become an advantage to have higher reproductive strategies at the youngest possible age, thus reducing the chances of some fatal event preventing reproduction and making a species extinct. Natural selection favors those species which can mate most effectively when they’re young and fit, and so the evolution of species has resulted in forms of life who mature early and mate young, before then growing old and passing away. There’s a resources issue too – if nothing ever died, then pretty soon all the planet’s resources would be consumed and nothing more could live. Each generation of species must thus make way for the next.’

  ‘So what was your angle on all of this?’ Lopez asked. ‘You were trying to eradicate age-related disease, but how?’

  ‘Disease generally comes about when people age,’ Tyler Willis said, ‘that much we know. What people don’t realize is that human diseases should have been eradicated by natural selection by now via inherited immunity or random mutation. The reason they haven’t been is therefore because humans mate young, and for most of our evolution have also died young. The presence of extensive age-related disease is a relatively new phenomenon because it’s only recently that people have reached their seventies and beyond on a regular basis. This means that natural selection only acts weakly against age-related disease because resilience to it hasn’t yet had the chance to evolve within us. My work involved studying how genetic manipulation might serve humanity by acting as a substitute for natural selection and creating specific genes resistant to such diseases, like Huntingdon’s or Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lopez said, ‘so how would you go about doing that?’

  ‘Well,’ Willis replied, ‘the main cause of aging in mammals is the degradation of telomeres in the nuclei of cells. Telomeres are like caps at the tips of chromosomes – you can think of them as fuel for the accurate division and replication of cells. As cells divide, telomeres become ever shorter, and eventually they are unable to support further cellular division without a build-up of errors or deleterious mutations, which cause the signs of aging such as muscle loss, degraded skin quality, organ failure and so on. If we can find a way of allowing cells to divide without losing the telomeres and building up those errors, we have a possible means of extending quality of life, if not longevity itself.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound so hard,’ Ethan said.

  ‘It’s hard,’ Willis assured him. ‘Mainly because the only kind of cells that naturally undergo this transformation into biologically immortal cells are those that cause cancer. The line between the two may be thin, but it’s the difference between curing someone and killing them.’

  ‘And you’ve figured out a way to do this?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘There are a number of potential ways,’ Willis replied, ‘to slow aging in mammals. Cell loss can be repaired via growth factors to stimulate cell division, such as stem cells, or even by simple methods such as exercise or reduced calorie intake. Senescent cells can be removed by activating the immune system against them or via gene therapy. Extracellular materials like amyloid can be eliminated by vaccination, while intracellular junk requires the introduction of new enzymes that can degrade the junk that our own natural enzymes cannot degrade. Mitochondrial mutations can be handled using gene therapy via cell nuclei. For cancer the strategy is to use gene therapy to delete the genes for telomerase and to eliminate telomerase-independent mechanisms of turning normal cells into ‘‘immortal’’ cancer cells. To compensate for the loss of telomerase in stem cells we would introduce new stem cells every decade or so.’

  ‘Has any of this actually been achieved?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘The Dana-Faber Cancer Institute managed to reverse the aging process in mice,’ Willis said, ‘by targeting the chromosomes in cellular nuclei and the telomeres. They manipulated the enzyme that regulates these tips, telomerase, turning it on and off. When they boosted the enzyme, the mice appeared rejuvenated. There was a dramatic reversal in the signs and symptoms of aging: the brains increased in size, cognition improved, coat hair regained a healthy sheen and fertility was restored. It was the equivalent of taking someone from their eightieth year and bringing them back to their forties. They had in effect undergone rejuvenation, had become young again.’

  ‘Holy crap,’ Lopez smiled. ‘That could be worth a fortune!’

  ‘It was only in mice,’ Willis cautioned, ‘and there’s a lot of work to be done, mostly in figuring out how to make elderly people more comfortable and to remove the specter of age-related disease. That said, there are people looking to make money out of this – the cosmetics industry would be severely compromised if this became a commercial product.’

  Ethan frowned.

  ‘How come Hiram Conley was an old man then? If he’d somehow avoided aging, why was he looking about sixty when he was killed?’

  Tyler Willis shook his head.

  ‘You’re getting it all wrong,’ he said. ‘Forget about your preconceptions, about some magical fountain of youth from which you drink and become forever young. These things are the stuff of science fiction, and that’s the whole point. Science has been searching for a way to modify cells in order to slow or stop aging, but we’ve b
een looking in entirely the wrong place.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Hiram Conley was not in possession of some mystical vial or potion,’ Willis replied, ‘and he wasn’t genetically altered by scientists. He was suffering from an infection.’

  11

  ASPEN CENTER FOR PRIMATE RESEARCH

  LOS ALAMOS

  The blast of the shotgun rang in Saffron’s ears as the Beretta’s powerful recoil slammed the butt into her shoulder. A cloud of choking blue smoke filled the reception area and, as the ringing in Saffron’s ears subsided, she heard the piercing screech of an alarm and the crunch of glass beneath her feet.

  She stepped forward and rammed the still smoldering barrel of the shotgun into the nearest scientist’s belly, doubling him over, then grabbed another by the collar.

  ‘The labs. Now!’

  Saffron shoved the man headfirst through the remains of the door and into the reception area, the man sprawling onto a carpet sprinkled with shattered glass.

  A hand grabbed her shoulder, and she turned to see Colin Manx’s pale features stricken with panic.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? You should have shot us out of here, not further in!’

  Gripped by a rage coursing through her veins like acid, Saffron whipped Manx’s grip aside with a swipe of her free hand and grabbed him by the throat.

  ‘You’ll leave when I fucking tell you to, Colon, understood?’

  Manx, all pretense of bravado vanishing before her wrath, nodded and backed away, the palms of his hands raised defensively toward her. Saffron turned to Ruby Lily and Bobby.

  ‘Ruby, watch out for the cops. Bobby, look for another way out of here just in case we’re cornered, okay?’ As the two teenagers nodded and dashed away she turned to Manx. ‘You, keep watch on this lot and don’t let them move. Think you can handle that without crapping your pants?’

  Saffron didn’t wait for him to respond, reaching down to grab the scientist still sprawled on the carpet beside her.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  The man reluctantly hauled himself onto his feet as Saffron jabbed the shotgun under his jaw and shoved him forward. Other employees, seeing one of their colleagues covered in blood and with a shotgun shoved under his face, melted out of their way.

  ‘You’ll never get away,’ the scientist muttered as Saffron prodded him down a corridor toward the rear of the building. ‘The police will be here in minutes.’

  Saffron nodded.

  ‘I’m counting on it. Now shut up and keep moving.’

  The corridor ended in a solid-looking glass door containing an atmospheric chamber sealed off from the rest of the building. The chamber represented the transition between the normal atmospheric pressure of the main building, and the low-pressure environment of the laboratories within, designed specifically to ensure that, in the event of a breach, air would always flow into the laboratories and not out of them. This meant that any toxic chemicals or hazardous viruses within the center’s laboratories could not leak into the outside world.

  ‘Inside, Einstein,’ Saffron said, opening the chamber and shoving her hostage inside before following him in and sealing the door. ‘Do it.’

  The scientist jabbed a couple of buttons on a panel and the air around them hissed gently for a few seconds before a small red light on the panel turned green. Saffron pushed the door to the laboratory open, striding in as a handful of scientists looked up from their test tubes and petri dishes and froze. Saffron raised the shotgun in her hand.

  ‘Anybody moves, I’ll give them an enema they won’t forget!’

  Nobody moved.

  Saffron turned toward the sound of animals, and her heart wrenched as she saw cages lining one wall of the laboratories, where half a dozen chimpanzees sat watching her with interest. Their cages were small, matted with straw and hopelessly inadequate for either comfort or movement. Two were hooked up to machines nearby, one of which was clearly for some kind of brain-manipulation of mechanical or robotic arms, coils of wiring traveling from computers directly into the animal’s brain stem in a complex tangle.

  Saffron’s throat pinched tight, and tears blurred her vision.

  ‘We’ll let them all go, if you want.’

  The voice of her captive standing beside her sent a surge of fury through Saffron. She whirled, driving the butt of the Beretta into his face like a sledgehammer. The scientist crashed backwards into a desk, smashing beakers and vials as he went before slamming onto the tiled floor.

  Saffron pointed at the nearest person, a thin-looking man in a white lab coat.

  ‘You. Where’s the main database?’

  He stared at her for a moment. ‘The what?’

  Saffron stormed across to him, kicking a chair out of her way and pushing the Beretta up under his chin with enough force to drive him backwards over a table, his legs flailing wildly.

  ‘The fucking database, the computer records, everything you’ve done. Where is it?’

  The man, terrorized to the point where he could no longer speak, pointed across the room to a large pair of computer terminals. Saffron took in the tall servers with their flashing lights and humming fans, and strode over to them. She reached into her pocket and called over her shoulder to the stricken scientists watching her.

  ‘You’ve got about sixty seconds to get every one of those animals out of here.’

  Saffron didn’t look back at them. She listened to a moment of silent disbelief followed by a sudden manic scrambling as they began grabbing cages and rushing them out of the laboratory. She studied the computer servers as she produced from her pocket two dirty-looking devices the size of large pears. MK 2 fused grenades, bought from an antique dealer near Cedar City, Utah, and refurbished to operational standard by a retired US army sergeant of questionable motives out of El Paso, Texas.

  Saffron waited until the laboratory behind her fell silent. She looked down at the grenades in her hands, gripping them tightly, and took a deep breath.

  ‘We can’t free this one.’

  The voice behind her made her whirl around in surprise. A young woman was standing beside the chimpanzee wired to the robotic arms.

  ‘What?’ Saffron stammered.

  ‘He’s hard-wired right now,’ the scientist said. ‘We can’t just unplug him like a toy.’

  Saffron’s eyes welled with tears as she shook her head.

  ‘You bastards, you just don’t know when to stop, do you.’

  The woman stood her ground.

  ‘His name’s Eric,’ she said simply. ‘He’s helping us learn how to help disabled people walk again.’

  ‘He’s a victim of your Nazi experiments!’ Saffron shouted.

  The woman closed her eyes for a second before speaking.

  ‘He broke his back in a fall in Phoenix Zoo, Arizona. When we learn how he can control these robot arms, we can fix him too.’

  Saffron choked on her tears and pointed at Eric, who watched her with intense curiosity.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ the woman said.

  Saffron cursed mentally, but could not tear her eyes away from Eric.

  ‘Do it, now!’

  Saffron turned as the woman began unplugging Eric from the machines, and she reached into her pocket and produced a slim black portable hard drive. She plugged the drive into the servers and tapped a few keys before dashing out of the laboratory, checking her watch as she ran. She burst into the reception area to see a dozen cages scattered around and a nervous-looking Colin Manx holding court with a fake pistol in his hand pointed at some thirty scientists cowering on the floor in one corner.

  ‘The cops will be here any minute,’ he wailed. ‘We’ve got the monkeys, let’s get out of here!’

  Saffron ignored him, looking at Bobby. ‘You find another way out?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Bobby said desperately. ‘The labs stand along the back wall of the building. Are we going to be arrested?’

  Saffron did
n’t reply. She strode to the glass doors of the reception area, cocking the shotgun. Without a moment’s hesitation she blasted the glass clean out of the doors, the tearing report of the gun replaced by the shrieking of the chimpanzees in their cages.

  Saffron turned to Colin and Bobby.

  ‘Bobby, get the van. Colin, get the cages out and into the van first, then let these bastards go.’ She gestured to the scientists with a jab of her thumb.

  ‘What about you?’ Manx asked in surprise.

  Saffron scowled at him.

  ‘Just do as you’re fucking told and get out of here. I’ll worry about me.’

  With that, Saffron hurried away down the corridor back to the laboratory, reaching it as the female scientist was gently lifting Eric’s limp body from his seat and folding him into her arms. She looked up as Saffron burst back in.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she demanded. ‘We’re not hurting these animals, we’re helping them.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Saffron snapped. ‘Get out, now.’

  The scientist looked at the grenades in her hands and the computer servers, her face stricken.

  ‘There are almost five years of research on those servers,’ she said. ‘Everything we’ve done.’

  Saffron turned her back to the scientist and Eric, hissing over her shoulder, ‘Get down behind the counter.’

  In the glossy black screen of the computer servers, Saffron saw the scientist stare at her for a moment longer.

  ‘You disgust me,’ she said, and then ducked out of sight. Saffron stood before the computer servers with a grenade in each hand. She glanced over her shoulder at the seat where Eric had been sitting only moments before. Tears pinched at the corner of her eyes again.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered softly.

  And then she pulled the pins on both grenades before tossing them behind the huge computer servers and diving for cover. The explosives rattled behind them for a second or two, and then the servers vanished amid a blast of vaporized metal.