Luck and Death at the Edge of the World

Twelve: A Plan of Last Resort

I sit on my bike and research the company while I wait for Felon to arrive, translucent data streaming down the inside of my visor. Body Work Inc., I discover, has been operational for over twenty-five years. They look very clean. A few minor Code violations have showed up during inspections, but any vat has those, mostly inadvertent. The company’s publicly traded, so it has an obligation to publish its financial reports, making it an unlikely criminal enterprise. It would be very hard to hide any illicit profits.

The president and CEO is Lester DeLong, a biochemist and one of the pioneers of shell technology. He started out at General Genomics, where he worked his way up to VP operations. In his spare time he worked on the notion of shell farming, his hobby. When he’d nailed the details he handled it responsibly, telling the board of directors about his extracurricular work and requesting that he be allowed to start up a branch operation on a test-case basis for a year. If it paid off, he’d run the branch and take a bonus in General Genomics stock that would put him into the richest percentile in Cali. If it went bust, as most predicted it would, he’d return to his old duties, no hard feelings. It was a bit of a gamble for General, but DeLong had the credentials and had worked up an impressive presentation, not just scientific stuff, but a whole business plan. It seems DeLong had an entrepreneurial side, he just hadn’t chosen to show it until then. If worse came to worst, General could always claim the loss on their taxes.

By the time the year was up, though, Body Work Inc. was a cash cow. The scientific work had already been done long before the business started, but DeLong brought in some of the best spin artists around to make sure the public bought into the scheme.

DeLong had also been at work on decanting, the sensitive process of extracting  neural patterns from a human brain – a package of jellied meat soaked in chemicals and animated by electrical impulses – encoding them in a transitional program that ensured redundant backups for safety, and then instantiating them into a fresh brain.

The pioneering work in that area had been done years before by Watts and Sweet at CaliARPI, then revolutionized by Bennett and Hai at T.T. Genomics, but until DeLong got involved it was an artisanal process that depended entirely on a surgeon with a rare and expensive set of skills. DeLong had taken the work of disparate researchers, knit it together into a single procedure, worked out the bugs, and then focused on routinizing – and often automating – the complex details of the decanting process until it was not only cost-effective, but also demonstrably safe.

Next thing you knew rickety old rich folk with saggy jowls and too much money were walking in, looking ready for the undertaker. When they left again they were substantially less rich but they didn’t care because they were young, healthy, and beautiful. No more lung and heart transplants, with all the risks of rejection and infection, not to mention the dangers that come with general anesthesia. Now you just dropped by Body Work and got a whole new shell. Hell, you didn’t even have to go under a general. A local anesthetic for the scalp was enough to let DeLong into your head – the brain can’t sense pain, after all. Bit by bit your memories, sensations, and thoughts were scanned and transferred from your old body to the new shell until voilà, you were ready for another sixty years of life. Not that anyone was likely to wait that long. With enough money you could show up the moment your shell hit the equivalent of fifty, fifty-five, whatever, and just download again into another twenty­-year-old shell. As far as anyone knew you could live forever, and that prospect is what’s put Body Works and other places like it into the stratosphere fiscally.

All told there’s little reason to think that Body Works would involve itself in anything criminal. For a rich outfit like this one, money wouldn’t be much of a temptation and, if it misbehaves, it risks the public’s trust. Trust is what keeps a vat going, is its lifeblood. Even now that the procedure is well established, it still arouses a visceral, even metaphysical, fear in most people. Our bodies are such a big part of our history, our appearance is so fundamentally a part of our identities, that to give up the body you’re born into takes a big leap of faith, believe me. It’s hard to imagine Body Works squandering their image, their ability to inspire that kind of faith, for the price of three retreads, or even for a substantial bribe.