Eternal Life Inc. (3 page)

4

Roger Morely, In Your Face

“The old fool,” Roger muttered, closing the door and brushing an imaginary piece of lint from his suit. “He insisted on staying right beside you ever since you came back, “monitoring your condition personally”, he calls it. He doesn’t trust the diagnostics, doesn’t even trust the computers. Everything’s got to be hands on, the old tried and true stethoscope and pulse reading. He thinks he’s living in some old twentieth century, Doctor Kildare movie. I think he’s getting senile.” He walked over to the bed. “I only keep him around for your sake,” he said looking down at Harry. “Otherwise I’d have gotten rid of him a long time ago.”

“Yeah, probably right after you stole his resurrection technology and turned it into the Eternal Life money machine,” Harry replied caustically.

Roger leaned over the bed and pushed his fat, florid face into Harry’s. “That’s bullshit and you know it!” he snapped. “If it wasn’t for me, his invention never would have gotten off the ground, and the scientific community would still be laughing at him.”

Roger thumped Harry on the chest with his forefinger for emphasis. “Didn’t I put together the backing that made it possible for him to develop it? Didn’t I believe in him when nobody else did? Hell, I gave him the best deal he could get. I even offered him a full partnership. Can I help it if he threw it all away?”

Roger straightened up and began pacing back and forth. “Hell, he wasn’t even going to take out a patent. If it wasn’t for me, he would have been robbed blind. Now, he’s got more money than he knows what to do with and could resurrect in a
younger body any time he wants. Instead, he walks around looking like an old, skid row bum.

“Come on, Harry! What more do you want me to do?” Roger threw his hands up in a theatrical display of despair. “He can come and go here as long as he wants. He’s even got complete access to all our research facilities. They’re the best in the world, and he never uses them. Instead, he prefers to sit out in his Long Island mansion and tinker around in his basement workshop.” Roger turned his back on Harry and walked over to the holo screen that covered the far wall. “I just don’t understand,” he muttered as he took out a gold cigarette case and snapped it open.

There was a lot Roger didn’t understand and didn’t even know he didn’t understand, Harry thought. For example, Jericho’s “basement workshop” where he just “tinkered around” was, in reality, one of the most advanced research and development centers in the Empire, but Jericho liked to keep a low profile and few people suspected its existence. Even fewer knew that he developed the Eternal Life technology, an oversight Roger was happy to promote. To the outside world, Jericho was just an eccentric old recluse whose one claim to fame was that he was friends with Harry Neuman.

Harry sighed resignedly and looked at Roger, standing with his back to him, staring at the holo screen that covered the far wall. The screen resembled a big picture window, looking out on a quiet forest glade. Two deer were drinking from a brook that bubbled in the foreground while the wind rippled through the trees. The image was as clear and sharp as digital technology and computer enhancement could make it. It was almost too real, the colors too bright, the contours too sharp, the details too clear. Once again, Harry felt the soothing subsonics beneath the sounds of bird song and burbling brooks.

Suddenly, he was sick of the whole manipulative setting, from the soft pastel colors and indirect lighting to the optimistic
stream of negative ions flowing out of the ventilators. All meant to comfort and sooth the newly resurrected as they recovered from the rebirth trauma that the glossy brochures from the marketing department forgot to mention. Some policy holders were kept here for days drugged to the eyeballs while their memories were selectively edited. Only happy, satisfied policyholders ever left these rooms. Otherwise, they stayed until they were.

Harry was thoroughly ashamed of the part he had played in making Eternal Life the greatest, most powerful money machine in the world. No matter what else he did, his name would always be synonymous with Eternal Life. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

Roger lit a cigarette and turned. “Look, Harry, let’s cut the bullshit, okay? You and I gotta talk.”

“About what, my contract?” Harry asked with a show of ironic innocence.

“Among other things,” Roger said curtly and took a long drag on his cigarette and blew a couple of smoke rings that lazily expanded towards the ceiling. “Like, for example, what happened to you when you resurrected?” Unconsciously, he fingered the angry bruise spreading across his cheek.

“I’m really sorry about that, Roger,” Harry said with feigned contriteness. The only thing he was sorry about was that he hadn’t done it years ago. “I guess I got pretty hysterical.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t know what possessed me.” He purposely used the word “possessed”, watching Roger’s reaction, probing his features for any sign of the black shapes that he’d seen before. For an instant, he thought he caught a look of startled surprise and maybe fear, but it was gone before he could be sure.

Instead, Roger laughed tolerantly, “Forget it, Harry. What’s a few bruises between friends.”

“We’ve never been friends,” Harry said coldly and noted the growing signs of dissolution that had eaten into Roger’s face.
Jesus, he looks terrible, Harry thought as he regarded the heavy pouches under Roger’s bloodshot eyes, the burst blood vessels in his nose, and the hanging jowls. Roger had always kept himself in shape. He’d had the heavy-set, powerful build of a football linebacker and been inordinately proud of it. But now, it was as if he had just given up the fight and let muscle run to fat, and even the well-tailored pinstriped suit could not conceal the roll of his stomach.

“Isn’t it about time for you to resurrect?” Harry asked. “You’ve just about run that body into the ground.”

Roger waved his cigarette in casual dismissal. “All in good time, Harry, all in good time,” he replied with a show of good-natured forbearance, but his eyes were as sharp as broken glass.

“Well, in the meantime,” Harry retorted, “stop waving that god-damned cigarette around like some fat-assed Tinkerbelle spreading fairy dust. I know you gotta show the world what a big man you are by not giving a damn about your body. Dissolution is the new status symbol of the rich and famous, the latest fashion pose for the beautiful people who can afford to change bodies as easily as other people change clothes. But I already know what a big man you are, so please spare me the cigarette smoke and other fashion props.”

“My, my, my, what a little prude we’ve become,” Roger sniggered. “What’s the matter? Worried about your health? Now that your contract’s run out, maybe you should be. Well, let me put your mind at rest, Harry. As long as I’m CEO, there will always be a monitor on your ka and a clone waiting for you here at Eternal Life. I mean your policyholder number 001, the symbol of Eternal Life. How would it look if we let you down?

“By the way,” Roger said off-handedly as he studied the large, gold, fire-opal signet ring he wore on his little finger. It was engraved with the Eternal Life logo of a rising Phoenix. The company had given it to him as a wedding present. “Susan sends her love.” He took a last drag on his cigarette and leaned over
and stubbed it out in the saucer that covered a glass of water on Harry’s night table. “She was wondering why we don’t see you anymore.” He squinted at Harry from the corner of his eye. “Why is that, Harry?”

“You son of a bitch,” Harry snarled. It surprised him every time how easily the old wounds could be torn open.

5

Losing It

Even after seven years, the nightmare memories still ripped apart his sleep and left him screaming in the dark, covered in a cold sweat. Seven years ago, he had everything a man could want. He was at the top of his career, the brightest star in the New Hollywood galaxy, rich, famous, and head over heels in love. Susan wasn’t even part of the New Hollywood dream machine. Instead, she was a law school graduate, intelligent, beautiful, and witty, and on top of that, she loved him. They were living a beautiful dream that they thought would last forever, but it took only one night to blow it all away. He didn’t want to think about it but once he started he couldn’t stop.

They went to a party at an exclusive country club. The producers of his latest film wanted to celebrate its success. As usual, he drank too much. None of these new, sophisticated designer drugs or electronic pleasure implants for Harry Neumann. No, he preferred his poison traditional, straight up, and out of a bottle. He quickly reached the stage in his drinking that gave him a loud-mouthed, belligerent belief in his own infallibility and superhuman prowess. He was ready to take on any man in the place and more than willing to let them know it.

Unfortunately, someone took him up on his challenge and suggested a cannonball run down through the Sinks, the sunken heart of old Los Angeles. It was the newest sport among the jaded New Hollywood elite, and its aura of old-time outlaw daring and macho bravado would have appealed to Harry even if he had not been drunk.

Strictly speaking, the races were illegal but the police never interfered. In fact, they tried to keep out of the coastal channels altogether. For the most part, the Sinks were a lawless, half-sunken
ruin inhabited by a witch’s brew of pirates, Slavers, Seraphim religious fanatics, and renegade Tongs. A high-speed grav-car race through the twisted, rubble-strewn waterways, even in daylight, was close to suicidal folly, and no one had ever tried it at night.

Susan begged him not to do it. He was in no condition to drive, she said. If he didn’t get killed in a crash, he’d get killed in an ambush.

But he was blind, pigheaded drunk and wouldn’t listen. Hadn’t he been a professional racing driver before going into films, he challenged, waving his whiskey glass. And didn’t he have one of the newest, fastest, best armed grav-cars on the market? Hell, he’d whip any man in the place. Racing through the Los Angeles Sinks was a piece of cake.

6

The Crash

In some ways the Sinks epitomized all the tragedies of the previous centuries. The new millennium had not been kind to humanity. The ecological destruction of the last half of the twentieth century came back to haunt the earth with a vengeance as monster storms, floods, and droughts swept across the planet.

Even the earth itself seemed to rebel as massive quakes and volcanic eruptions shook the world. The quakes had been gathering momentum for years as a brown dwarf star that had been hiding in the far reaches of the solar system swept in unannounced beneath the plane of the ecliptic and crossed the orbits of the inner planets. They called her Nibiru, and as she approached, her enormous gravitational drag raked across the earth, setting off volcanos and worldwide earthquakes that killed millions and changed ancient geographies overnight.

Panic-stricken nations went to war, fighting over dwindling resources, and millions more died in the aftermath of radiation poisoning and man-made genetic plagues that swept across the world. Civil society broke down as individuals gathered in gangs and tribes, fighting over the ruins of their once great cities.

It was as if the apocalypse predicted for the start of the new millennium had finally arrived. People looked to their bibles to give a name to their sufferings, and they found it in the “Tribulations” of the latter days. But as disaster piled on disaster, even Tribulations couldn’t cover it and, at last, it became known simply as the Crash.

In California the long awaited “big one” hit early on in the beginning of the Tribulations, and the state shattered like a dropped jigsaw puzzle. The quakes hit in a haphazard, almost capricious fashion. In some places the land rose, while in others
huge sections of the state sank into the sea. Some places were even left relatively unscathed.

When the quakes finally abated, San Francisco was gone, along with a big chunk of the northern coast that collapsed back almost into the middle of the state where the sea now pounded against the Sacramento Palisades, a line of high, jagged, cliffs guarding a shattered interior.

A long chain of volcanic islands started in what had been San Francisco bay and hooked southeast into a deep sea trench that had once been the San Joaquin Valley. The Trench extended all the way east to the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas that had been pushed up thousands of feet and now had foothills of their own. Cold, deep sea currents flowed up the Trench from the Mexican Break all the way past the Sacramento Palisades.

South of San Francisco, the coastal range sank into a long chain of tropical archipelagos that extended almost all the way down to what had once been Santa Barbara. From there they spread out into a tight, jumbled labyrinth of rubble choked channels, junkyard reefs, and tens of thousands of small, overgrown islands that became known collectively as the Skeleton Keys. The Keys flowed southward and gradually merged into the sunken ruins of Los Angeles.

The city had been luckier than most of the rest of the state. The same capricious forces that pulled San Francisco and the northern coast into the ocean pushed the Los Angeles Basin more than fifteen hundred feet into the air. It was almost as if a compassionate Gaia had lifted it up out of the way of the enormous tsunamis that swept in from across the Pacific with the collapse of the Japanese islands and the Indonesian Archipelago.

As the earth changes gradually subsided over the next fifty years, the city slowly sank back into the ocean. It did not happen all at once or in one piece, but different sections broke off and settled at different rates, leaving a cracked, haphazard jumble that rested in a shallow sea.

Parts of the Los Angeles Sinks still remained above water with whole city blocks almost untouched. In some places long spans of freeway could be seen, arching across the sky in pristine splendor only to break off abruptly where the sea washed against the concrete rubble below. In a grotesque twist of fate, much of Hollywood’s mammoth production facilities around Burbank survived almost intact on a broken stem of islands stretching to the northeast.

At the end of this stem hung an enormous kidney shaped island that became known as the Hollywood Burst. It bent east and south in a long, sweeping arc that included most of the Mohave Desert all the way down past the Salton Sea, almost to the Mexican Break. From there it swept back north in a ragged concave curve that gave the island its roughly kidney-like shape.

The same tectonic forces that lifted the Los Angeles basin also pushed the eastern back of the Burst up over a thousand feet, breaking it off from the continental landmass and tipping the whole island westward into the Pacific. The old Southern California coast down past San Diego slid into the sea, and a new coastline of long, sandy beaches and shallow coves formed the western shores of the Hollywood Burst, while hundreds of small islands that had once been coastal mountains were scattered up and down the coast, gradually fading into the Sinks to the northwest.

In contrast to its western seaboard, the eastern back of the Burst broke off into a sweeping palisade of sheer cliffs, rising almost a thousand feet and separated from the continental mainland by a fifty-mile chasm that plate tectonic had unzipped and turned into a treacherous sea that became known as the Dire Straits.

The Straits stretched all the way north into what was once Death Valley and south into the Mexican Break, where a large chunk of Baja California broke off from the subsiding Mexican landmass and rose into a towering island plateau surrounded by
rocky cliffs and broken fjords.

As the earth changes stabilized and the climate gradually rebalanced, the survivors began picking up the pieces. The weather was no longer southern California arid but lush monsoon tropical, and on the thousands of scattered islands that had once been California, geography and luck combined to kick-start the rapid development of a new civilization centered on the two great island landmasses in the south, the Hollywood Burst and the Baja Plateau.

In the first one hundred chaotic years after the Crash, pirates, Slavers, and outlaws of every kind ruled the southern seas, fighting over the ragbag remnants of a once great civilization. Out of this grew the first Slaver Empire, centered on the southwest coast of the Hollywood Burst with its lush tropical forests, deep water bays, and close proximity to the junkyard wealth of old Los Angeles. The first cities of the new era sprang up in those deep water bays around the huge shipyards that serviced the expanding Slaver Empire.

The Empire lasted almost a hundred years before it was brought down by two very different forces. As it expanded northward along the coastal archipelago, the Slaver Empire ran into a loose federation of pirates called the Tong Syndicates. They came from north of the Seattle Firewall and were led by a brilliant Chinese commander.

In the first engagement he wiped out most of the Slaver fleet. Then, he started island–hopping southward towards the Hollywood Burst and the heart of the Empire. At the same time, the Slavers were facing rebellion at home led by a charismatic leader with a belief in old-time democracy and a burning hatred of the repressive regime.

Together the Tong Syndicates and the democratic rebellion smashed the First Slaver Empire. Afterwards, they somehow managed to settle their differences and set up the Tong Relegate, a kind of constitutional monarchy, with a Tong Emperor sharing
power with a weak, democratically elected parliament.

There followed fifty years of relative peace, prosperity, and consolidation. Then, within another forty years everything changed. First, a time vault was found deep in the central highlands of the Hollywood Burst in what had once been the Mohave Desert but was now tropical jungle. The vault contained the basic tools and instructions for kick-starting an industrial revolution. It seemed that some secret government agency of the old USA had had the foresight, or more likely foreknowledge, of what was coming and tried to save what could be saved to get the survivors started again.

There were hints of more vaults buried all over the former USA, but few people ventured across the Dire Straits between the Burst and the Continental Quarantine where plague wars and radiation burn were still producing a deadly harvest of genetic damage. In a grotesque twist of fate, the early quakes that shattered California left nothing for the rest of the world to fight over, and so spared its survivors from the long term damage that resulted from the plague wars and tactical nukes that so devastated the mainland.

Within ten years of the discovery of the time vaults, scavengers digging in the ruins of the old film studios on one of the tail-end islands of the Hollywood Burst unearthed another kind of time vault. This one was not put down by secret government agencies but was Hollywood’s own contribution to the future and contained a vast film library covering the whole history of movies and all the production and projection equipment from celluloid projectors to quantum DVDs. It was probably meant to be a kind of time vault, museum, or theme park in praise of the film industry but, by a quirk of fate, the quakes buried it almost intact, although water damage and scavengers destroyed or stole most of the films from the late seventies onward.

This library was a treasure-trove beyond imagining for a
people starving for a vision of a better world, a golden age before plague wars, earth displacements, and radiation burns. Within ten years, the first spring-loaded projectors were unreeling film classics from Chaplin’s “Modern Times” to Bogart’s “Casablanca”. Portable wind-up projectors soon began to find their way into even the most remote and backward communities where they filled an insatiable hunger for the old, time-honored Hollywood formulas of love conquers all, good winning over evil, and courage triumphant against all odds.

For isolated communities digging out of the ruins of the Crash, these old movies became the touchstones for a shared, almost mythological past, a Golden Age that promised a new and better future, a shared dream of hope and faith that might once again be theirs. It was not long before New Hollywood picked up these themes and began producing movies of its own.

Forty years later, these wind-up projectors were spreading their flickering light dreams through the northern ruins of Sacramento where William Danzig was putting together the first anti-gravity engine. Like most great inventions, it was an amazingly simple, efficient device that happened almost by accident. Danzig wasn’t trying to produce an anti-gravity engine. He was just tinkering around with copper coils, old car generators, bar magnets, flywheels and an eclectic assortment of junked pre-Crash technology, scavenged from deep in the city ruins.

When he finally realized what he had, he built a larger engine, attached it to the chassis of an ancient Ford pickup that had somehow survived beneath the ruins of an old dealership parking garage, and headed south. He had been brought up on the flickering light dreams of those spring-loaded projectors. They fired his vision with a can-do optimism that produced the first anti-gravity engine, and now, he was going to return the favor and carry it down to the fabled city of New Hollywood.

When he arrived, floating across the deep water bay of New
Hollywood in his old Ford pickup, he set off an explosive technological revolution such as the world had never seen. His anti-gravity engine was the zero-point energy, perpetual-motion Holy Grail of pre-Crash energy research, producing clean, free, unlimited energy.

With Danzig spin-generators at its disposal, the twin islands of the Hollywood Burst and the Baja Plateau exploded into dynamic centers of reconstruction and development for a whole new era. The cities of New Hollywood and Baja grew and expanded upwards with shiny new skyscrapers shooting into the sky almost overnight.

But behind all the boomtown reconstruction, New Hollywood kept doing what it did best. The New Hollywood dream machine rolled on, entertaining, inspiring, giving hope, and spreading the egalitarian values of self-reliance and democracy, “with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all.

More than anything else, it was the New Hollywood dream machine coupled with the Danzig spin-generator that midwifed the birth of a new civilization. From the Mexican Break to the borders of the Oregon Quarantine, they knitted together isolated communities into one nation. These same twin forces operating a hundred years later would defeat the Seraphim Jihad and turn New Hollywood into a continent spanning empire.

Even after the city of New Hollywood became the center of culture, wealth, and power for a continental empire, its most important business still remained the Hollywood dream machine. Its actors, producers, and directors became the new nobility. They were rich, famous, powerful, and politically connected and, like all elites, they were pampered, jaded, bored, and always on the lookout for the next thrill. The cannonball runs through the LA Sinks were only the latest in a long series of fads to fill this craving.