“Like I said on the phone yesterday, I know a little about your condition…Your cardiologist is Jennifer Lansdowne, right?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re seeing someone from the Cardiac Support Center at the hospital.”
Covey frowned. “I was.”
“You’re not any longer?”
“A problem with the nurse they sent me. I haven’t decided if I’m going back. But that’s a whole ’nother story.”
“Well, we think you might be a good candidate for our services here, Mr. Covey. We offer a special program to patients in certain cases.”
“What kind of cases?”
“Serious cases.”
“The Lotus Foundation for Alternative Treatment,” Covey recited. “Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think ginseng and acupuncture work for serious cases.”
“That’s not what we’re about.” Farley looked him over carefully. “You a businessman, sir?”
“Was. For half a century.”
“What line?”
“Manufacturing. Then venture capital.”
“Then I imagine you generally like to get straight to the point.”
“You got that right.”
“Well, then let me ask you this, Mr. Covey. How would you like to live forever?”
“How’s that?”
In the same way that he’d learned to polish his shoes and speak in words of less than four syllables, Farley had learned how to play potential patients like trout. He knew how to pace the pitch. “I’d like to tell you about the Foundation. But first would you mind signing this?” He opened the drawer of his desk and passed a document to Covey.
He read it. “A nondisclosure agreement.”
“It’s pretty standard.”
“I know it is,” the old man said. “I’ve written ’em. Why do you want me to sign it?”
“Because what I’m going to tell you can’t be made public.”
He was intrigued now, the doctor could tell, though trying not to show it.
“If you don’t want to, I understand. But then I’m afraid we won’t be able to pursue our conversation further.”
Covey read the sheet again. “Got a pen?”
Farley handed him a Mont Blanc; Covey took the heavy barrel with a laugh suggesting he didn’t like ostentation very much. He signed and pushed the document back.
Farley put it into his desk. “Now, Dr. Lansdowne’s a good woman. And she’ll do whatever’s humanly possible to fix your heart and give you a few more years. But there’re limits to what medical science can do. After all, Mr. Covey, we all die. You, me, the children being born at this minute. Saints and sinners…we’re all going to die.”
“You got an interesting approach to medical services, Doctor. You cheer up all your patients this way?”
Dr. Farley smiled. “We hear a lot about aging nowadays.”
“Can’t turn on the TV without it.”
“And about people trying to stay young forever.”
“Second time you used that word. Keep going.”
“Mr. Covey, you ever hear about the Hayflick limit?”
“Nope. Never have.”
“Named after the man who discovered that human cells can reproduce themselves a limited number of times. At first, they make perfect reproductions of themselves. But after a while they can’t keep up that level of quality control, you could say; they become more and more inefficient.”
“Why?”
Covey, he reflected, was a sharp one. Most people he pitched sat there and nodded with stupid smiles on their faces. He continued. “There’s an important strand of DNA that gets shorter and shorter each time the cells reproduce. When it gets too short, the cells go haywire and they don’t duplicate properly. Sometimes they stop altogether.”
“I’m following you in general. But go light on the biology bullshit. Wasn’t my strong suit.”
“Fair enough, Mr. Covey. Now, there’re some ways to cheat the Hayflick limit. In the future it may be possible to extend life span significantly, dozens, maybe hundreds of years.”
“That ain’t forever.”
“No, it’s not.”
“So cut to the chase.”
“We’ll never be able to construct a human body that will last more than a few hundred years at the outside. The laws of physics and nature just don’t allow it. And even if we could we’d still have disease and illness and accidents that shorten life spans.”
“This’s getting cheerier and cheerier.”
“Now, Dr. Lansdowne’ll do what she can medically and the Cardiac Support Center will give you plenty of help.”
“Depending on the nurse,” Covey muttered. “Go on.”
“And you might have another five, ten, fifteen years…Or you can consider our program.” Farley handed Covey a business card and tapped the logo of the Lotus Foundation, a golden flower. “You know what the lotus signifies in mythology?”
“Not a clue.”
“Immortality.”
“Does it now?”
“Primitive people’d see lotuses grow up out of the water in riverbeds that’d been dry for years. They assumed the plants were immortal.”
“You said you can’t keep people from dying.”
“We can’t. You will die. What we offer is what you might call a type of reincarnation.”
Covey sneered. “I stopped going to church thirty years ago.”
“Well, Mr. Covey. I’ve never gone to church. I’m not talking about spiritual reincarnation. No, I mean scientific, provable reincarnation.”
The old man grunted. “This’s about the time you start losing people, right?”
Farley laughed hard. “That’s right. Pretty much at that sentence.”
“Well, you ain’t lost me yet. Keep going.”
“It’s very complex but I’ll give it to you in a nutshell — just a little biology.”
The old man sipped more coffee and waved his hand for the doctor to continue.
“The Foundation holds the patent on a process that’s known as neuro stem cell regenerative replication…I know, it’s a mouthful. Around here we just call it consciousness cloning.”
“Explain that.”
“What is consciousness?” Farley asked. “You look around the room, you see things, smell them, have reactions. Have thoughts. I sit in the same room, focus on different things, or focus on the same things and have different reactions. Why? Because our brains are unique.”
A slow nod. This fish was getting close to the fly.
“The Foundation’s developed a way to genetically map your brain and then program embryonic cells to grow in a way that duplicates it perfectly. After you die your identical consciousness is re-created in a fetus. You’re”—a slight smile—“born again. In a secular, biological sense, of course. The sensation you have is as if your brain were transplanted into another body.”
Farley poured more coffee, handed it to Covey, who was shaking his head.
“How the hell do you do this?” Covey whispered.
“It’s a three-step process.” The doctor was always delighted to talk about his work. “First, we plot the exact structure of your brain as it exists now — the parts where the consciousness resides. We use supercomputers and micro-MRI machines.”
“MRI. That’s like a fancy X-ray, right?”
“Magnetic resonance. We do a perfect schematic of your consciousness. Then step two: You know about genes, right? They’re the blueprints for our bodies, every cell in your body contains them. Well, genes decide not only what your hair color is and your height and susceptibility to certain diseases but also how your brain develops. After a certain age the brain development gene shuts off; your brain’s structure is determined and doesn’t change — that’s why brain tissue doesn’t regenerate if it’s destroyed. The second step is to extract and reactivate the development gene. Then we implant it into a fetus.”