Visions of the Future (41 page)

Feature Retrospective,
Lightbridge News Magazine,
August 15, 2172

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the death of the immortal Tyler Davis.

Few people actually met the original Tyler Davis during his short life. Very little is known of those years besides the few blog entries his sister wrote, the singular interview his mother gave late in her life, and the two short videos taken in his final year.

Only two recordings of Tyler have survived. The first is five minutes from his fifteenth birthday party. The second is from seven months later, in the hospital, just 32 hours before Tyler died.

The first video, the “birthday party” footage, is the most often viewed and repeated in news segments. His party didn’t include the standard fare of birthday cakes, friends, or presents. Tyler hated frosting. Tyler had no friends. Tyler had asked for only one thing. Alongside Tyler, there were three other people in attendance: Tyler’s mother Kathy Davis, his sister Kristina Velmont, and an astronomer. It was at night in northern California at the Fremont Peak State Park Observatory. His mother had rented the entire observatory out for the occasion.

Tyler, a tall boy, is restless during most of the video. His blond hair is stark and bright and cut in a tight bowl cut. Tyler keeps his left hand firmly on his toy model of the
Sovereign
, a spaceship from the video game series
Sol Set.
The video is scratchy but the curved fuselage tapering to the doughnut engine core is distinct even from the 640x480 resolution. The video footage focuses on Tyler as he walks around the primary telescope, a two- to three-foot lens unit. He inspects every side, joint, and edge of the red and black telescope. Finally, beyond a little whispering and talking between Tyler’s mom and sister, the astronomer breaks the silence. “It’s ready.”

Tyler’s face lights up and he walks over to the astronomer, who positions him next to the eyepiece. The eyepiece is positioned halfway on the main tube and requires the viewer to stand. Tyler is tall and doesn’t use the stool off to the side.

Tyler peers in the telescope. The astronomer mutters, “Oops, let me adjust one thing.” He turns a small focusing knob.

As Saturn is brought into focus, Tyler giggles.

His mom, Kathy stands behind the camera and asks, “What is it?”

Tyler’s monotone voice says, “Saturn. Second largest in the solar system. Radius is 36,184 miles. 890,700,000 miles from the sun. 95 times the mass of…”

His mother sighs. “What’s it look like?”

Tyler’s eye is pressed against the eyepiece and he doesn’t turn away. “Looks like marbles. And candy.”

His sister laughs and walks behind him, her dark hair a sharp contrast to his.

The first video cuts out after his mom whispers, “Happy birthday.”

The second video is shorter but no less insightful into the mind of fifteen-year-old autistic Tyler Davis. Tyler is now confined to a wheelchair as he’s pushed into a new hospital room by his mother. It’s assumed his sister is behind the camera.

Tyler grunts, “This room is just like the last one.”

His mother and a nurse help Tyler into the hospital bed, his white and blue gown flapping around. The camera catches a glimpse of the Sovereign toy spaceship in his hand.

His sister says, “Just wait.”

Tyler grunts again and crosses his arms. “I hate this place. I want to go home.”

His mom moves around the bed, her hand running along his leg and straightening the bed sheet across from him. She looks around the window blinds until she finds the cord, pulls it and stands aside. The bed is pushed against the wall and the window.

Tyler is still staring at his feet, ignoring his mother. After a few seconds, his mom says, “Look here, Tyler.”

Tyler turns his head and his eyes widen. He sits up and pushes himself against the window looking at the night sky.

His mom smiles and sits on the edge of the bed, putting her hand on his back.

The nurse, an older, short gray-haired woman who is barely in frame, seems a bit confused and asks, “What is it?”

Tyler begins to rattle off facts again, “Constellations. Centaurus. Scorpius. And stars… Antares.”

The nurse checks a few things on the bed, “You like stars?”

Tyler’s palms are pressed to the window. “I’m going there.”

“You are?”

“Yes. Travel there. That one. 12 degrees below Antares. There. And that one.” He’s pointing now, moving his finger from star to star, the tip smushed against the glass.

“All those?” the nurse asks.

Tyler puts his fingertips against the window. “All of them.”

His mom puts her hand to her mouth as she begins to cry. The video ends.

A day and a half later, on August 17, 2022, Tyler Davis died.

Tyler was diagnosed at age five with autism. A year later, he was diagnosed with a rare disease called Timothy Syndrome. Autism, then, would have been a difficult path for a single mother to walk through. Timothy Syndrome forced a countdown timer on them. Tyler was an outlier by surviving to age fifteen. Most children with Timothy Syndrome don’t make it past age nine. The rare few who do die by age eleven.

Very little is known of the day Tyler died. His mother, Kathy, refused to speak about it when interviewed years later. All that is for certain is that Tyler’s mother allowed his brain to be donated to researchers at Stanford University in California in an attempt to further research into a cure for Timothy Syndrome. At the time of Tyler’s death, less than twenty-four children planetwide had been diagnosed with the disease. Had Tyler not had Timothy Syndrome and had his mother not had the foresight to provide Tyler’s remains for study, the future of humanity would have taken a completely different course.

Samson Chelot, a researcher at Stanford, received Tyler’s brain within hours of him being declared legally dead. Chelot had approached the family a few years before, when it was obvious that Tyler was surviving much further into adolescence than other individuals with Timothy Syndrome. The family had already been benefitting from medical care and physical therapy from the Stanford Clinic for several years before meeting Chelot. This was the first of many fortuitous circumstances in the beginning of Tyler’s legacy.

Chelot immediately began work isolating and culturing several different cell clusters from various portions of Tyler’s brain. Chelot’s goal was to create an immortalized cell line to further study Timothy Syndrome and possibly autism. An immortalized cell line is one where, if the right conditions are met, the cells continue to grow and divide, theoretically forever. At the time, they were very difficult to develop and maintain. Chelot’s first thirty-two attempts failed. His initial steps were on cells extracted from Tyler’s amygdala, an area normally enlarged in autistic individuals. None of these cells would propagate.

He finally succeeded in using generalized brain cells from the cortex. This was the first indicator that Tyler’s brain cells were different from the majority of humans. Human brain cells don’t grow well in cultures. It was assumed that except for the hippocampus and the amygdala, brain cells didn’t divide well and often—even inside of the human skull. The idea of producing an immortal cell line from general “gray matter” was so absurd that it wasn’t until he was completely desperate that Chelot even attempted it.

Within two weeks of announcing a new immortal cell line, in particular one from a victim of Timothy Syndrome and one diagnosed with autism, Dr. Chelot had more than fifteen requests for cell cultures across the globe. Timothy Syndrome was thought to be a rare juncture of multiple different diseases affecting children’s brains.

Chelot named the immortalized cell line and its offshoots as TyOne through TyFifteen. The variations of the cell lines were based upon cells gathered from the frontal lobe, the different hemispheres, and other distinctions. All fifteen cell lines responded identically in testing. This seemingly trivial point was another example of what made Tyler’s cell line so remarkable. No matter where the cells were extracted from in Tyler’s brain, they were identical. The regions of the brain in the majority of humans specialized. Tyler’s did not. Seemingly, every cell had the full capacity to perform the tasks of other cells and quite possibly might have been doing so.

Tyler’s sister, Kristina, kept a blog while he was alive. It had very little traffic and she forgot about it until near the end of her life when a reporter discovered it in the Internet Archive project. Kristina wrote about standard teenage issues. However, there were a few entries about Tyler and each provided rare insight into a boy about who very little is known. One entry describes Tyler’s incredible aptitude for learning and his even greater propensity to boredom:

“Tyler’s banging on that piano app again. He never played it until two weeks ago and now he’s hooked it into the living room TV and won’t let anyone interrupt him. Right now, it’s
Star Wars
music. Yesterday, it was
Star Trek
or something. Or
Sol Se
t. Mom thought he was downloading music at first. She took it away and he got mad and switched something on the TV so it would only play the
Weather Channel
until she gave up. I just told her to give it back to him. Like everything else, he’ll be obsessed for a few weeks, drive us nuts, then drop it and go on to something else. It’ll be just like the watercolor project, the building computers thing, the making robots thing. We have a garage full of his leftover obsessions. But he’ll be on to something new in a few days. Probably today. Hopefully.”

Was this evidence of the generalization of Tyler’s brain cells? Is it possible that the very characteristic that enabled Tyler’s cells to work as an immortal cell line provided him the capability to quickly learn, absorb and master information?

Chelot’s primary use for the cell line was to analyze the actual communication handshake within the brain cells. Chelot hypothesized that autism and Timothy Syndrome extended beyond just the “faulty wiring” theory that had long dominated. He believed that there was actually a different method by which the brain cells encoded and transferred chemicals, in particular protein chains, for communication and memory. He was wrong. Or at least his research failed to prove his hypothesis (years later, researchers at University of California at Davis would demonstrate that Chelot’s original hypothesis was correct although his research approach was not). While other researchers using Tyler’s cells were showing varying degrees of success, Chelot’s research had provided no results and by 2028, he was bringing his entire research efforts with Tyler’s cell line to a conclusion. Had he given up even a few months earlier, the history of the human race would have developed quite differently than we know it.

In June of 2028, Stanford was hosting a symposium on quantum computing and artificial intelligence. One of the keynote presenters was Zambian physicist Aurelia Nkoloso. Nkoloso was presenting a paper titled “The Missing Link: Neural Tissue as the Core of Quantum Computing.” Primitive quantum computers had been in production since the early part of the 2000s with more advanced models appearing in the 2020s.

Through the power of quantum computers, artificial intelligence by 2028 had definitely made leaps forward; however, they were nowhere near the hopes of Singularity proponents and most of the AI community. While quantum computers produced faster AI machines and enabled them to process larger and larger quantities of data, they still weren’t showing the independence of thought hoped for and what we experience in our AI fellows today.

Nkoloso was arguing that human neural tissue processed information in qubits just as quantum computers did. Human minds, at that point, were largely accepted to be binary or, a more popular opinion, analog computers. A small minority insisted that the human mind could only do what it did because it did its internal processing via qubits. As these provided no researchable hypotheses, they were excluded from the majority of effort done in brain research.

Her goal was to successfully use human neural tissue to give quantum computers the boost that other approaches had failed to provide. By the late 2020s, the proposed and in development variations of producing quantum processors numbered around 100. Very few seemed able to provide a true quantum processor. Only two of the machines developed had yet accurately run Shor’s Algorithm, the benchmark test for a true quantum computer: Extent’s QUI and Kato’s Kangaeru.

Nkoloso’s presentation was postulation only. At the time, she hadn’t been able to find a cell culture that could survive in long-term interface with the quantum computer (she was using an early prototype of the Kangaeru named Ket). She had produced connections, and the results were astounding but just not long-lived. Neural cells and quantum computers could interface but the cells would overload soon after. Her work bolstered the theory that information held in the human mind was in a quantum state.

Via chance, Nkoloso, 28 years old, ended up across from Chelot at a gathering on the second day of the Symposium. Whatever they talked about is unknown, but the end result was Chelot sharing Tyler’s cells with Nkoloso. Nkoloso was intrigued with the possibility presented in Tyler’s unique brain cells. All of her tests so far had been with neural cell cultures from non-autistic individuals and all of those were extracted from the donor’s hippocampi.

From his sister’s blog, several lines about Tyler have been quoted in nearly every piece produced about him, often out of context. Again, it’s important to note that Kristina was only writing down her perspective on her brother, and not a scientific or conclusive analysis. However, with that in mind, the blog she wrote on February 11, 2020 is haunting now: “Tyler is scary. He has everything in the house talking to each other. Seriously! He’s wired some type of speaker and other crap into everything. This morning I went to get some milk. The refrigerator said, ‘Hello Sis!’ Scared me to death! Dropped the milk and then the mop in the corner says, ‘Time to use me,’ over and over. I ran out of the room screaming. I’m sure the toaster said, ‘I’ve got waffles!’ Tyler just sat there talking back to the stuff. I swear it’s because he’s just like them. Crack that head open and all you’d see are flashing lights and wires. I have a computer for a brother.”