The Man Who Cured Death
Chapter 1
The thing was, life hadn’t turned out as planned, for anyone.
2050 had come and gone and all the great inventions Silicon Valley had promised, all of the new technology that was going to CHANGE THE WORLD!!! Yeah, not so much. Sure, there were some new inventions, like cars capable of flight, but shock of all shocks, that hadn’t turned out to be such a good idea. Apparently, people didn’t drive any better in the air than they did on the road, and gravity had a way of making crashes way worse. Maybe someone should have thought of that ahead of time.
Just saying.
And AI, that amazing technology that was going to cure diseases and solve world hunger and make everyone more productive and happier and possibly take over the world by killing everyone had turned out to be just smart enough to steal a lot of jobs from people who thought their education had made them irreplaceable but not smart enough to do much else. The real benefits ended up accruing to the people who had pumped the AI hype and Wall Street bankers.
Who could have seen that coming?
And nobody was living on Mars.
But did anybody really want to live on Mars or did they just say they did to sound cool?
The reality was that cars still drove the same roads. Planes still flew the same routes. Cancer still killed but every year new medicines came out that cost more and more and did less and less. All the new inventions that we truly loved were mostly just ways to pass idle time, but the lives we lived weren’t all that different from the lives our great grandparents had lived, and whether we admitted it out loud or not, deep down inside, we all knew it.
Comics called it the age of no wonders. Scholars argued over whether this generation was less capable than previous ones or just at the reaches of human ability, and for the first time in recorded history, humans were too depressed to even wage war. The world, humanity, all 18 billion living souls, was in a rut. Then Zane Manson and his cure for death came along to save us from our collective self-loathing.
*****
Josephine Angeles stepped out of the limo. Tried not to look nervous. Good luck with that. She was about to interview the wealthiest man in the world, and she was planning on calling him a liar, more or less, to his face. Just another day at the office.
Not.
She shouldn’t even be here; she was a junior reporter. Just last week she’d been covering a city council meeting where they discussed raising the height limits on skyscrapers, and as she’d walked out of the meeting her editor had called. Zane Manson, a man she’d never met, had requested she interview him on camera, live. Coworkers were suspicious and pissed, but Zane didn’t give interviews to anyone, and his treatment, the Cure for Death as he so humbly called it, was the hottest topic in the world. So her bosses had pushed ethics aside and agreed, but not before asking her point blank if she’d ever slept with him. She was still kind of pissed about the question even though she understood that’s what everyone was thinking.
Couldn’t a woman get a break without being called a whore?
Josephine had one hope to come through this with her reputation intact. She had to make Zane admit his treatment was a fraud, but Zane had not only been the first person to take the treatment, he’d done it on stage at a multi day invite only concert on a Caribbean Island. As the needle pierced his arm, backup dancers with angel wings had descended from the rafters while a Gregorian chant blared over the loudspeakers.
One of the dancers hadn’t been properly attached to her harness and fell twenty feet to the ground. She’d lived, a broken ankle and elbow, but the concert hadn’t even stopped, they’d all just pretended it didn’t happen as Zane was pulled up by cables so he could levitate in front of the cheering crowd.
Mac, her colleague and mentor, had told her not to bring up the fallen dancer no matter what. The audience wasn’t going to care about a nobody in wings, white thong, and pasties. The woman’s name was Maria Alvarez, Josephine had said. Do you want to kick his ass or do you want to feel good about yourself? Mac had replied.
Both seemed to rarely be an option.
And the thing was, everybody wanted to believe in Zane’s treatment because everyone wanted to believe in him. Born to two MIT Biochemists, Zane had never attended a single high school or college class. Everything he’d learned had been from growing up in a lab under the tutelage of his parents and their rotating cast of graduate students.
At sixteen, he’d found a way to make cloning less expensive and less prone to mutations, a modest improvement to an existing process that he successfully sold to a multinational conglomerate for a few billion dollars. By twenty-three, Zane was the foremost expert on cloning, and he successfully cloned his first human at twenty-five. A few years later, after a conglomerate of hedge funds tried to clone the president in order to eliminate taxes, cloning was outlawed internationally by all the major economies, but not before Zane had sold off all of his patents, almost as if he had known ahead of time which way the political winds were blowing. One magazine called for an investigation of Zane’s closeness to a certain Senator who might have tipped him off to highly sensitive international negotiations. Zane called all the critics haters and losers and refocused his energy in expanding the human lifespan. Almost nobody doubted Zane’s genius and those that did were vehemently shouted down by Zane’s legion of online fans.
This was the man Josephine was supposed to expose as a fraud?
Her sister had wished her luck. Josephine needed more than luck.
She needed divine intervention.
Zane lived on three acres of prime Northern Virginia real estate. Close enough that his helicopter could have him in DC within fifteen minutes, but far enough away that the lush green trees made the location seem exotically rural. His two story mansion was set on the front third of the parcel. A row of spotlights set in the ground cast a blue light on the front of the structure. The effect was movielike, as if the building was a projection rather than an actual structure.
Josephine headed up the walkway. Marble statues of ancient gods lined the path. Osiris, his crossed arms insanely muscled. Had there been steroids in ancient Egypt? Kali. Her tongue long enough to reach her chin and lined with red rubies that looked like drops of blood. Mictlantecuhtli, the skull face oversized for his body with bright emeralds for eyes. All gods of death. All ostentatious to the point of nausea. Not that anyone would point that out to Zane.
Who was going to criticize the guy who could give you immortality?
Josephine didn’t pretend to understand the biochemistry behind the treatment. Mac had impressed on her again and again: avoid technical details, keep it to the facts, focus on results, fight bullshit with reality. It all sounded a lot simpler in the meeting. Heading up the walkway, she had her doubts about the power of reality when everyone wanted to believe the bullshit.
The doors were gold and ten feet high and lined with carvings of angels because, of course they were. Josephine looked at the camera mounted in the top right corner of the frame. She smiled. The doors swung open and Zane’s personal assistant, Penny Williams, was waiting for her.
Penny guided Josephine down a hallway, pointing out works of art as they went. Josephine nodded like she knew what Penny was talking about, but the names were all gibberish to her. One painting was an anime rendering of the moment Zane received the Cure for Death on stage.
“You must be so excited to get the chance to interview someone so extraordinary,” Penny said.
Josephine smiled. Said of course she was.
“The upstairs is Zane’s living quarters, and I must say it is quite stunning, but if you want to see that area, you’ll have to ask him,” Penny said.
“I’ll just stick to the interview,” Josephine said.
The hallway seemed to go on forever before ending in an atrium. The production team had already set up lights, cameras, and two stools. Even with the production team milling about, the view of the quarter moon through the skylight was stunning.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Josephine spun around, and there he was, Zane Manson, the man the world believed had cured death. A little over six feet tall, he had the pale white skin of a man who spent most of his time indoors but with the body of someone accustomed to hiking with a rucksack. His eyes were a light blue and intensely focused on her.
She looked back up through the skylight.
“Yes, it is truly beautiful,” Josephine said.
“People can have their suns, their bronze skins, their beaches, I’ve always been partial to the moon,” he said.
A production assistant came up. It was time.
Josephine sat on her stool and looked across at Zane. He was completely relaxed, and why wouldn’t he be? He was in his favorite room with his handpicked interviewer waiting to tell the world about his amazing success, and this was the moment when Josephine felt her power.
“I was fascinated by the statues in front of your house. They’re all-”
“Gods of Death,” Zane said.
“And you’re the man who has found the key to everlasting life.”
“Looking my enemy in the eye everyday was grand motivation.”
“Tell us more about how you ended up here.” Josephine leaned forward, big smile on her face. How had she not known that all those wasted first dates with men she knew she’d never see again had prepared her perfectly to sit here and pretend that everything coming out of his mouth was the most amazing thing she’d ever heard?
“Well, I had originally thought my work on cloning would lead to eternal life. But to be honest, even if cloning hadn’t been banned, cloning consciousness was more difficult than we anticipated,” Zane said.
“How so?”
“We can make a clone that’s fully grown, but the mind needs input. I did figure out a way to transmit, but I couldn’t resolve the inherent contradiction. Were you really immortal if your consciousness was transmitted or transferred?”
“Transferral has been all the rage recently. At least as far as venture capital is concerned,” Josephine said.
“Silicon Valley does love its computer solutions to human problems. But I would posit if your memories and actions are turned into an algorithm that is then embedded in a manufactured body, you are no longer human. Maybe people are fine with that, but those companies certainly don’t seem to be advertising their solutions that way.”
“So these issues were what pushed you to focus on biomedical engineering?” Josephine said.
“We have these amazing bodies totally capable of healing themselves but then eventually they decay. I thought there must be a way to make it so the decay doesn’t happen,” Zane said.
“You’re talking about the Treatment,” Josephine said.
“Yes, the cumulation of years of research. Of a lifetime, really. Normally things like this are the manifestation of a team of great minds, but my breakthrough came when I was working alone. Sometimes genius works best in isolation,” Zane said.
“You claim that your treatment has cured death-”
“Claim?” Zane said, his right eyebrow arched just a bit. “This is no claim. This is scientific fact. Sure, people will have accidents. Murder each other. Some diseases will still be fatal. But dying from old age will no longer exist.”
“For those who can afford the treatment,” Josephine said.
“Do you disapprove of my charging a fee?”
“A billion dollars does seem-”
“There will be special pricing for artists and other significant contributors to society,” Zane said.
“People determined by you to be worthy of immortality,” Josephine said.
“Well I’m the one who figured it out, why wouldn’t I get to choose?”
Zane tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice but failed. The idea that anyone would question the idea that he should get to price his treatment however he wants was shocking to him, and Josephine saw her lines of attack opening up just as Mac had said they would.
“How would you explain the Treatment to our audience?” Josephine said.
“It’s inordinately complex but elegantly simple,” Zane said.
“Yes, that poll tested phrase has been seen on billboards everywhere, but can you give some more details?”
“Poll tested? It’s the most accurate way to describe the treatment. But if you insist, not that you’re going to understand all the details, but I’ve learned that the best way to achieve a complex goal is to not oversimplify, so much of science is siloed, but results come from mixing different fields. Some things that extend life are natural processes, such as caloric restriction, but humans are so bad at refraining from that which feels good. But those chemical processes that are triggered by the behavior, I figured there had to be a way to mimic it without starving ourselves, but since we are complex organisms, one tactic wasn’t going to be enough, which is where the complexity comes in. The treatment targets all the main aspects of aging plus a hidden process I discovered fairly recently.”
“And what process would that be?”
“Well, if I told you, my treatment wouldn’t be very valuable anymore, would it?” Zane said.
“Your former colleague, Steven Withers, claims that your treatment is unproven and just as likely to cause death as cure it.”
Zane shifted in his chair. Crossed his arms. Bringing up Steven had infuriated him.
Josephine kept her face as neutral as possible, just an interviewer asking questions, but she knew the questions that were coming next and the excitement was building in her gut.
“Steven always lacked vision,” Zane said.
“He claims that your refusal to pursue FDA approval means that your claims are unverifiable.”
“Government bureaucrats like nothing more than to slow down progress. If I waited for their approval, I’d be dead by the time they got around to looking at the application,” Zane said.
“Yet in the last week two people who took your treatment died.”
“We are looking into those situations. Perhaps it was something in the way the treatment was stored. Perhaps there was a complex genetic disorder we are just learning about,” Zane said.
“But the two men, Xi Wei and Jared Golden, couldn’t seem to be more different, not just in nationality but also in age, size-”
“The one thing everyone notices is skin color, but skin color is determined by less than one percent of our genome, so the idea that human beings of different nationalities couldn’t share a genetic disorder because of where they are from is a little silly. I understand that for most people like yourself, understanding genetics is difficult, but trust me-”
“But didn’t your team do an in depth genetic analysis of each patient before administering the treatment?” Josephine said.
“Of course we did.”
“So shouldn’t you already know?” Jospehine said.
“The analysis can be very complicated.”
“According to the promotional materials you gave your patients, your team uses the most powerful AI available to sift through the genetic data. Only after receiving an all clear from the AI is a patient accepted for treatment,” Josephine said.
“Where did you get those materials?”
“Has the AI turned any patients down due to their genetic profile?”
“No,” Zane said, “but there are definitely certain genetic mutations that would cause a patient to be rejected. We just haven’t had an applicant yet with that profile.”
“So how can future patients be sure that your analysis is thorough?”
“There’s no reason to doubt our analysis, and our clients are very pleased with the results of the treatment,” Zane said.
“What about the other five men that died?”
Zane’s face went completely blank.
Josephine admired his ability to maintain control. He had to be wondering though, how did she know?
“You had five test candidates before you started selling the treatment. Their initial reaction to the treatment was what made you believe the treatment was safe. Do your existing and future patients know that every single one of those five men died?”
Now Zane was staring at her as if he wanted to reach across and choke her.
“You didn’t tell them, did you?” Josephine said.
“There was a flaw in that original dose. Due to the reactions of the original test subjects, I was able to fix the flaw,” Zane said.
“Did you then test this new formulation?”
“Testing wasn’t necessary. Our sophisticated computer modeling proved the effectiveness.”
“The same computer modeling that told you Xi Wei and Jared Golden would have no issues?”
Zane’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.
“So what you’re saying is that you don’t really know if it works or not, do you? We’ll just have to wait and see. Hope for the best,” Josephine said.
“You would like that, wouldn’t you? For me to be wrong. I took that treatment myself. Do you really think I would take something that I wasn’t absolutely positive about? The treatment works. I’m living proof. I’m the man who cured death.”
“Perhaps but at the moment, it’s just as likely that you’re just the man who claimed to cure death, isn’t it?” Josephine said.
Zane lost all of his composure, the rage was all over his face, and for the briefest moment, Josephine wondered what this man would be capable of if they weren’t surrounded by cameras. Then Zane did the unthinkable, he turned and stormed off but forgot to unsnap the cable for the microphone attached to his shirt, and the cord wrapped around his feet and tripped him, and the live audience of millions of people watched the world’s richest man fall flat on his face.
That moment was the beginning of the end for Zane Manson and the beginning of the rise of Josephine Angeles. While the effects of the treatment at first were encouraging, the reality was that the cure for death was actually a death sentence. No one who took the treatment lived more than twenty-eight months. Most of them died within eighteen. Firm numbers were hard to come by but more than a hundred billionaires paid for the privilege of dying early.
How could people so worldly and intelligent make such a drastic error?
When the world wanted the answer to that question, they turned to Josephine Angeles, the woman who’d put the lie to Zane’s claims. Her courage in the face of Zane’s wealth and power made her a global icon, and she became as ubiquitous as Zane had been as she turned her keen investigative eye to other false claims by the world’s supposed most accomplished people. She became the woman that billionaires feared because of her credibility and biting questions, but when they needed to convince the world of something, they agreed to an interview with Josephine, and she skewered all of them.
Zane Manson on the other hand disappeared from view, his once profitable companies sold off for pennies as he followed the trends of all formerly great men, first the butt of jokes for comics and then the subject of articles with a sad tone, and then forgotten entirely. Until three years after he’d been exposed as a fraud, when everyone had mostly forgotten about him and those that remembered were sure he was dead, Zane contacted Josephine.
Not only was he not dead, but he wanted to see her.