The Eternity Prize

The first chapter of the book I'm currently getting ready for publication - more coming soon!

Joe always told his students and patients that science could not define ‘consciousness’, but in his heart, he could define it, in child-like words. Consciousness was what it was like to be — him. It was the feelings and thoughts that filled his heart and buzzed in his brain. It was the ‘him’ that faded when he slept and slowly returned when he woke up. It was the way of seeing that was his alone.

He defined it that way because when he was young, his world was unique, softly lit and musical.  He thought it would always be that way.

The soft lighting was due to a rare form of astigmatism that wasn't diagnosed until he was five. Joe's parents weren't sure why their baby was so clumsy, but they knew that if they wanted him to reach adulthood, they'd have to create the most heroically kid-proofed house in the Bronx's history. So they padded the whole house, the walls, the floors, and the backyard porch. His father, a frustrated musician-turned engineer, built him a form-fitting helmet with sensors that would play music by a different composer for every room and circumstance. Bach was for his bedroom, Mozart was the kitchen, Wagner was the basement. Satie was shadows. Beethoven was danger.

This left Joe free to careen recklessly through the house, bouncing off the walls, dancing on the grand piano keys, rolling down padded stairs and finally, resting on his beanbag chair, where he'd watch sailboats floating down the Hudson. They looked like marshmallows sliding down a blueberry sundae.

There was only one rule — he had to hold Mom's hand when he went outside. This was very important. Riverdale, like much of New York, was still littered with the remnants of war. The backyard was a mess of barbed wire, splintered pines, and poison ivy. It was dangerous, but being outside improved Joe's eyesight. And the yard was safer than the walk to Foodtown.

The bloody smell of rust and hazy, thorny vines set off a whole Beethoven concert in his helmet, but Joe knew, the real danger was in the shadows. The distant menace of Gnossienne No.2 warned of ghosts, of the neighbors who had kept these gardens and died defending them. He knew his helmet couldn’t protect him. Only Mom, with her strong grip and fierce love could keep them away.

One drizzly day, she brought him to the darkest corner of their yard. He clutched her hand as she knelt beside a small, longleaf pine. Dead leaves clung to her shoes, colorful lights danced on her arm. "Where are they lights coming from?" he asked.

She pointed to a glass fairy dangling from a pine branch. "Someone left this memorial to a traveler who left this earth."

"On a rocket?"

"No. She died."

Wind hissed through the pines. He leaned closer.

"Don't be scared." Mom whispered "She was a Traveler, a magical being who is alive and dead at the same time. They never die."

"Like... ghosts?"
"No, like photons. Travelers move so fast, their world seems to be standing still." She cradled the glass doll in her hand. "They’re eternal beams of life."

Joe wasn’t happy with that explanation. Mom was a physicist, she often said strange things, but these ‘Travelers’ sounded magical, and Dad said magic was silly. Photons were not magic. Their quarks may be charmed, but they weren't alive.

Also, how did she know who the memorial was for if she didn't know who put it there? 

He wanted to ask her these questions, and many more; like where did Mom get the little pink dresses she donated to the Seton Park refugees? Why did she cry when she held a baby? But he didn't dare ask — that would bring on The Grey, a sadness that made Mom lie silent in bed for days. So he kept his mouth shut, but that didn't matter. The glass fairy had already made her sad. Small gasps in her breath meant The Grey was coming.

He sat beside her on the damp ground. Before he knew what epigenesis was, before he knew that pain could change a person's chromosomes and be passed down through generations, he knew – the thing that made Mom sad was in him too.

He tried to tighten his grip on her hand, but she wasn't in the forest anymore. And neither was he. He was in a huge auditorium, surrounded by bright lights. He was seventeen, he was about to deliver his first TED talk and he wanted to puke.

His mentor, Karman, had promised the TED Talk guys that Joe, the 'Kid who cured Cancer' would deliver a speech that would inspire a generation. No pressure there.
When he stepped onstage and saw his face on the huge, wide screens, he just knew what the audience was thinking. Who is that skinny kid? Where did he get those weird glasses? His digitized, Neurolinked Gizmos helped him navigate the sharp edges of the world, but they made him look like a dork.

Karman told him he could conquer his fear by imagining the audience was naked. Yeah, right.

Karman also edited Joe's speech. Joe hated the edits, the publicity junket, the whole thing. He wanted to leave it all behind and run back to the comfort of the lab, to the simple lives of cells. They didn't have crazy human-adolescent concerns, they didn't have hormonal urges, they didn't have to prove their worth to thrive and reproduce. They just... divided.

But he wasn't doing this for Karman, the TED talk people, or women he'd never met. He was doing it for the Traveler.

He took his glasses off. Karman's words blurred and the audience faded into light and dark blobs.  He felt like he was a kid again, surrounded by safety and soft colors. He would say what he wanted to say.

He talked about how his cancer cure was inspired by nature in the form of a murmuration of birds, how he used a patient's own immune reaction and quantum-linked sensors to fight cancer without vaccines, theriac, chemotherapy, or quarantine.

At this point, Karman was frantically waving from the sidelines. The theory of natural immunity had been disproven years ago, just mentioning it could destroy a researcher's career. But Joe was on a roll, millions of people were listening to him. If it was the last thing he ever did, he was going to speak his mind. 

 “To all you kids out there” he said “Don’t listen to the gangs and the politicians who tell you what you can say and think. Don’t listen to the billionaires who say humanity will only survive if we merge our consciousness with their robots. Rick Khoury is wrong, AI is not smarter than us, it will never be. Even the most sophisticated quantum computer can't walk, talk, and chew gum at the same time.

You’re not limited. You’re not inferior. No machine will ever be as good, or as bad as you can be. Don’t listen to people who try to manipulate you.

As the wise man Freddie Mercury once said "Don't fool with fools. --Keep only good company!"

When he was finished speaking his mind, the reaction was – silence. No gasps of horror, applause, boos, thrown tomatoes … nothing. The auditorium was empty. The only sound was a faraway wheeze.

A door flew open. Red dust filled the auditorium. Delivery drones whined, Tuk-tuks blew their horns, drivers cursed in a mashup of Chinese, Arabic, Spanish. The air stank of yak shit. Joe's heart sank. He wasn't the little boy in the forest anymore, he wasn't the Wunderkind giving his first TED talk, he wasn't even on Earth. He was a thirty-year old washed-up failure who had been exiled to Mars and was now waking up on a hard, gummy surface, stinking of booze and vomit.

He opened his eyes to see the hard surface was a floor. Bokeh lights of purple and green merged and divided in the distance. Why was everything blurry, where were his glasses?  He never went anywhere without them. Unless he’d been on a – bender. Shit.

He tried to sit up. Aches from his head to his toes almost knocked him back to the floor. Should have expected that. Next would be the gastrointestinal distress, followed by vasodilation, thirst. He tried to stretch out his long legs, but when he moved, glass shards bit his skin. Broken bottle, another Roth drunk-as-a skunk specialty. 

If he squinted hard enough, he could vaguely make out the edges of the room. It was dominated by a giant, green octagonal glass window. The pricey mica floor glittered around a space suit slouched in a corner. The last time Joe wore a space suit, he was in quarantine after his flight to Mars. Only the best hotels provided them.

The Biblis Patera Outback wasn't famous for its quality accommodations. What was this place?

As a neurologist and occasional blackout drunk, Joe knew – once you reach a certain alcohol saturation point the hippocampus says screw it all and gives up.  He had the Bender app, made for every drunk in his situation, which he could use — if he hadn't lost his Gizmo.

A large blob of a butler barged into the room without knocking. "Good morning, Sunshine." He growled.

Somehow, Joe knew the butler's name was Bobo, but that offered no solace. "I didn't order room service." he said, brushing bits of glass from his hair.

Bobo snorted as he walked across the crunchy floor. With a flourish of blurred napkin, he handed Joe a glass of green goop. "Hair of dog."

Joe sniffed. "That's what it smells like."  A low boom shook the ceiling and rattled the windows. Joe crouched to the floor. "Was that an earthquake??"

"Breakfast Bomb." Bobo said. "Breakfast bombs mean funeral. Dinner bombs mean war."

He wiped green goop from his palm. "Who would bomb a funeral?"

Bobo shrugged "The CHUDs, Caliphate of Hudud. Or Malthusians. Basij -- or socialist Eco-Nationalists. Or Nationalist Eco-Socialists, Luddites, Al Mushroom…"

"Al Mushroom?"

"Muhajiroun!"

"Whatever. It's still fucked up."

"Welcome to New Beirut." Bobo said.

New Beirut, a one-yak town on the Borealis Coast. The President of Mars, Rick Khoury's hometown. After Joe had dissed Khoury in his TED talk, they’d never gotten along. The only time they spoke was when Khoury was trying to strong-arm Joe into working on the Eternity Prize, his lunatic plan to revive the dead by transferring their digitized 'consciousness' into a robot body. When Joe flatly refused to work on the project, Khoury threatened to ‘punch his lights out.’

Why did he come here?

Bobo held out a pair of Gizmo shades. "Get to work."

“Work?” Joe said as he took the glasses from Bobo's massive paw and linked to the Neuro connection above his ear. As the lens data for his astigmatism uploaded, he started to notice more details – like the floor. It wasn’t sparkling because it was mica, it was sparkling because it was covered with shards of glass, the shattered remains of lab beakers. Robot organioids were scattered beside them. Uprooted, mutated vines wound around a twisted bunsen burner and reached towards the crumpled space suit. It wasn’t an empty rental. It was occupied by one President Rick Khoury.

Joe started shaking all over, and it wasn’t just delirium tremens. This was Khoury’s lab. In Khoury’s house. Why the hell had he come here?

As he staggered towards the snoring President, shards of glass sliced his toes. Gasping with pain, feet oozing with blood, Joe gingerly raised the clouded visor. The President’s flushed face and boozy breath greeted him. Those short gasping snores indicated sleep apnea, typical of an eighty-year-old guy who drank too much the night before. Had they gone on a this bender — together?

"Get to work!" Bobo repeated.

“What work?” Joe cried. “He tried to get me to work on Eternity, didn’t he?” The giant shoved past him. “I’ve told him, time and time again, reviving the dead is an impossible goal. Science can’t determine what consciousness is, much less transfer it!”

Bobo turned to him, his thick brows knotted in exasperation. With a sigh, he lumbered out the door. As it slammed shut, memories bubbled into Joe’s brain; Bobo, shoving Joe to the ground, twisting his arm behind him, the giant’s counterpoint in a debate they'd been having about money. Then drinks, many drinks. A spinning roulette table. And the girl, Ada. Dark eyes gleaming as she laughed at his jokes. Dark eyes wet with tears as he got punched in the mouth.

Dream or a memory? He put his hand to his bristly chin. Ow. A memory.

Outside, he heard Bobo, taking a heavy breath through his oft-broken nose. The sound Joe heard in his dream. He wasn’t a guest here, and Bobo wasn’t his butler. He was his guard.

Joe crept to the locked door, pressed his face against it. Like he was in a confessional and Bobo was his priest, he whispered. "W…what happened last night?" 

No response.  He switched the Gizmo’s translator to Arabic, hoping that would help – but, what to ask? Joe’s mind raced with questions about Khoury, the ruined lab, his bruised and battered face … but only one question formed into words. "The girl I was with … yesterday. Umm… I think her name was Ada. Where is she?"

Bobo snorted.

"I have to know."

The only response was a wheeze.

Joe sighed, held his head in his hands. This activated his Bender App. A drunk AR Chibi with plus signs for eyeballs staggered towards him, holding out a menu. He gave a desultory blink on 'Replay'.

"Shtarting when?" the Chibi asked.

"When it started."

Bender supplied the replay. Joe's associative memory filled in the rest.

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