Afterthought
Dec. 4th, 2010 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talonkarrdeIt's been ten years since I first heard about the procedure that would give me eternal life.
When I was young, there was a period of my life where I could do anything presented to me. Any sport, any physical activity, any challenge. I skiied down mountains and hiked up them, I rollerbladed and ice skated, I ran marathons monthly, and never felt like anything was beyond me; even if I wasn't Olympic-level, I could do it, and be good at it.
Mentally, I drank from the fountain of knowledge as if it were a firehose. I learned facts and figures and algorithms and troubleshooting, and I solved puzzles and expanded the boundaries of human knowledge and worked hard, climbing the ranks through talent and talent alone. I was alive, I was learning, and I was going to be somebody.
Most of all, I was young.
After my youth, I traded in sharpness for maturity — I had a face that people respected, a voice that was commanding, and the experience to solve problems with subtlety instead of the brute force of youth. I made clever decisions that saved wasted effort, I suggested good courses of action which were adopted, and I was respected for my position in life, for the judgment that I held, for the family I had raised.
I was happy and successful, and had achieved my dreams.
But even with all my successes, I never did find a way to escape the cruelty of time, until the twilight of my life. I was seventy when the news came of the triumph of medicine over biology, and I was already beginning to feel the fingers of the reaper, reaching from the other side. I had gone in for routine checkups where the doctors who used to greet me so cheerfully now looked at me with careful, measured expressions, where they spoke about potential issues and probable diseases.
Once upon a time, the world was mine for the taking; now I was forced to ever smaller pieces of it.
But then the breakthrough, the successful tests, the clinical trials that proved that there were effective ways to overcome time, and age, and death. In the same month, two complementary studies were completed, and the world would never be the same again. Clinical trials of a process that differentiated embryonic stem-cells correctly proved that it was possible to regrow entire organs, so that no one would ever need another donor; a specific advance in telomerase-therapy proved that it was possible to reverse the effects of aging, by preserving DNA chains across millions of replications.
The old could become young again, the news said, and for once, there was no exaggeration in their words.
I signed up for the treatment, right away, and was lucky enough to be in the first group that would get to experience the fountain of youth. And then we waited, for a week, a month, a year, and then more, as the scientists, doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians, pharmaceuticals, and religious figures tried to figure out whether it was permissible to free humanity from the bondage of death. Every major figure from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking was quoted, discussed, debated endlessly, while I and many others waited to be told if we could live.
Ten years, we waited.
Think about that for a moment. Ten years, three-thousand-six-hundred-fifty-plus days, with each year worse than the last. It's ten years of growing weak, of watching hair fall out, fingernails crack and skin become almost loose enough to slough off. It's ten years of having more and more pains which can't be helped, of having bones that might shatter if were not absolutely careful, of simply feeling wrong inside as systems start failing.
And then it was put to a vote; a vote where every single human being would be given a chance to decide an issue that affected every single one of them.
We voted, overwhelmingly, that the generation before us would be the last to die, and ours the first to live forever, and the treatments were prepared.
When I went in to receive it, there was no fanfare, no news coverage; we already knew it worked, and the systems were being put in place for widespread distribution. I sat down in the doctor’s office, received a shot from a needle, and went home; the doctor said, calmly, with tears in her eyes, that it would take a few days for the effects to become apparent.
On the first day after the treatment, there was no difference at all; on the second, I felt a bit lighter, on the third, I realized that my skin was starting to tighten back up. By the end of the first week, I was able to walk to the end of the street without losing my breath, and by the end of the first month, I remembered what it was like to be strong, to be alive.
And then, as the elixir of life was given to everyone, as the doctors reported a greater than ninety-five percent administration rate, only then did we look past the immediate future. We had conquered death — but only from natural causes. Would we fight each other? Would we expand to the stars? What would humanity become, now that we had all of eternity to become anything we desired?
Once upon a time, the world was mine for the taking. Now that it was mine, what was I to do?
When I was young, there was a period of my life where I could do anything presented to me. Any sport, any physical activity, any challenge. I skiied down mountains and hiked up them, I rollerbladed and ice skated, I ran marathons monthly, and never felt like anything was beyond me; even if I wasn't Olympic-level, I could do it, and be good at it.
Mentally, I drank from the fountain of knowledge as if it were a firehose. I learned facts and figures and algorithms and troubleshooting, and I solved puzzles and expanded the boundaries of human knowledge and worked hard, climbing the ranks through talent and talent alone. I was alive, I was learning, and I was going to be somebody.
Most of all, I was young.
After my youth, I traded in sharpness for maturity — I had a face that people respected, a voice that was commanding, and the experience to solve problems with subtlety instead of the brute force of youth. I made clever decisions that saved wasted effort, I suggested good courses of action which were adopted, and I was respected for my position in life, for the judgment that I held, for the family I had raised.
I was happy and successful, and had achieved my dreams.
But even with all my successes, I never did find a way to escape the cruelty of time, until the twilight of my life. I was seventy when the news came of the triumph of medicine over biology, and I was already beginning to feel the fingers of the reaper, reaching from the other side. I had gone in for routine checkups where the doctors who used to greet me so cheerfully now looked at me with careful, measured expressions, where they spoke about potential issues and probable diseases.
Once upon a time, the world was mine for the taking; now I was forced to ever smaller pieces of it.
But then the breakthrough, the successful tests, the clinical trials that proved that there were effective ways to overcome time, and age, and death. In the same month, two complementary studies were completed, and the world would never be the same again. Clinical trials of a process that differentiated embryonic stem-cells correctly proved that it was possible to regrow entire organs, so that no one would ever need another donor; a specific advance in telomerase-therapy proved that it was possible to reverse the effects of aging, by preserving DNA chains across millions of replications.
The old could become young again, the news said, and for once, there was no exaggeration in their words.
I signed up for the treatment, right away, and was lucky enough to be in the first group that would get to experience the fountain of youth. And then we waited, for a week, a month, a year, and then more, as the scientists, doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians, pharmaceuticals, and religious figures tried to figure out whether it was permissible to free humanity from the bondage of death. Every major figure from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking was quoted, discussed, debated endlessly, while I and many others waited to be told if we could live.
Ten years, we waited.
Think about that for a moment. Ten years, three-thousand-six-hundred-fifty-plus days, with each year worse than the last. It's ten years of growing weak, of watching hair fall out, fingernails crack and skin become almost loose enough to slough off. It's ten years of having more and more pains which can't be helped, of having bones that might shatter if were not absolutely careful, of simply feeling wrong inside as systems start failing.
And then it was put to a vote; a vote where every single human being would be given a chance to decide an issue that affected every single one of them.
We voted, overwhelmingly, that the generation before us would be the last to die, and ours the first to live forever, and the treatments were prepared.
When I went in to receive it, there was no fanfare, no news coverage; we already knew it worked, and the systems were being put in place for widespread distribution. I sat down in the doctor’s office, received a shot from a needle, and went home; the doctor said, calmly, with tears in her eyes, that it would take a few days for the effects to become apparent.
On the first day after the treatment, there was no difference at all; on the second, I felt a bit lighter, on the third, I realized that my skin was starting to tighten back up. By the end of the first week, I was able to walk to the end of the street without losing my breath, and by the end of the first month, I remembered what it was like to be strong, to be alive.
And then, as the elixir of life was given to everyone, as the doctors reported a greater than ninety-five percent administration rate, only then did we look past the immediate future. We had conquered death — but only from natural causes. Would we fight each other? Would we expand to the stars? What would humanity become, now that we had all of eternity to become anything we desired?
Once upon a time, the world was mine for the taking. Now that it was mine, what was I to do?
