The Extended Life

It was late. The sun was coming through the window, and the old scientist could no longer postpone what was coming. They imagined it wouldn't be much different than the few hours of sleep gotten each night, but wasn't sure, and was anxious to see what was to come.

As the scientist lay there meditating, they replayed what led them to this day in their mind. In their twenties, along with several scientists, they had developed the first hospital that was built specifically to understand the soul, work on cloning and extend life to make everyone outlive even Methuselah. All the rooms and hallways were fixed with cameras to measure the entire electromagnetic spectrum from infrared to gamma rays. Patients wore hats with electrodes to record brain activity at all times. Every bed took weight measurements every hour and when hooked to an electrocardiogram would record the weight shortly after the heart or brain stopped. Stem cells were taken from placentas and held onto for those children if needed. This made healing injuries and manufacturing their organs easy for these children and they were some of the first patients whose dying organs were replaced with their own working ones as gene editing fixed whatever ailment led to the damaged organs.

By thirty-years-old the scientist and several of their fellow associates had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their first organ transplant. The scientist would go on to win three more. The first a few years later for using a mix of stem cells and gene editing to extend lives. The next one came when they were able to record chimp brains digitally and prove that they could download them into robots to act exactly like the primates including using the same mannerisms, walking with the same gaits and signing the same things they had in life. The last came when they created an enzyme that could age cells in weeks instead of months or years. They could have won three more, but the scientist allowed others on their team to claim the awards as the first frozen human brain was recorded digitally, the first chimp downloaded to a computer was given a new biological body, and some of the first cryogenically stored minds were brought back to life in eighteen-year-old bodies. Things got better for a while.

That all happened by the time the scientist was forty. By then people were living to one-hundred-and-thirty, with no signs of degradation. The scientist was flown around the world as a celebrity and interviewed by every news agency, talk show host, and even appeared on game and comedy shows. Their name had replaced Einstein when talking about the smartest person to ever live, and they won other medals of honor around the globe. Life just couldn't be better for them.

By the time the scientist hit fifty, doctors had started downloading patient's minds before surgeries. If they died on the table, they woke up in eighteen-year-old bodies with sincere apologies. This led to less lawsuits regarding malpractice. Given the fact that they woke up in better shape than they had gone under, and recovered in less time, it didn't matter if doctors made a mistake, and it was cheaper to clone a body than to get their insurance premiums raised. All new hospitals were built like their prototype with better equipment that their teams had invented and improved. They became trillionaires overnight on the patents alone and funded even more teams trying to improve their techniques and practices. This was good because some of the original cloned bodies began breaking down. The original enzyme only worked well with stem cells and since some of the first cryogenically frozen bodies and heads no longer had viable stem cells available due to the damage caused by the early freezing techniques, those individual's bodies began dying within twenty years. They could still get new bodies, but with new enzymes they could start using any cell, even multiple damaged cells, to clone a whole individual eliminating the need for them to be downloaded into extra clones every twenty years.

The first MindStorage was launched, which allowed individuals to download their own minds at will, which allowed them to record dreams, fantasies and ideas to share with others. This led to the first loss of memories during a solar storm which made them relocate the servers to underground mines to protect the data. Luckily, few of the downloaded memories lost were needed that weren't stored elsewhere or couldn't be recorded after death as the placement of neurons had been decoded thanks to minds being uploaded on computers along with magnetic resonance images of the individual's brain. It just took time to realign the neurons and make a brain to put into a new body. Some extreme sports even let you download your mind into a robot body so that you couldn't be harmed, but if its memory storage was damaged you lost the experience.

Through all of it the scientist didn't like the technology they had invented. As the scientist became sixty, the other team members and colleagues had cloned their bodies which were now all in their teens and twenties. Some even changed sex or became permanent robots. One even changed their species just to see if they could. That's when the ills of the technology began to manifest. That experiment led to the first law outlawing species transfers. For some reason their memories were intact, but they couldn't access them in a different body since the brain of the animal they chose wasn't capable of processing the information. They were eventually returned to their own body, but they were traumatized by the experience and claimed that they felt trapped in a body no one could understand. That triggered the first deletion of thoughts. Since the technology had advanced, every medical field was transformed including psychology. You no longer needed to remember bad things if they could just delete them. But this led to suicides and murders at first as those thoughts were connected to others that made the mind unravel. In those cases, new bodies were downloaded with memories from before the procedure or before their murder. These patients could sue for malpractice and some even sued the scientists. Things just got worse as time continued to pass.

On the scientist's sixty-first birthday it was announced that the MindStorage companies were selling the information of their subscribers to corporations, medical facilities and foreign governments. Although physical war was useless due to an infinite army that could be reborn every few weeks, tactical espionage was still an ongoing issue as the major nation states continued to consolidate continents, and spread their influence globally, and into space. The only violence that took place did so on the moon and Mars as their robot citizens sparked a space exodus since they didn't need to breathe, and settlements expanded allowing the nation states to clash. The wars only lasted about a decade due to limited replacement parts and once someone couldn't be brought back to life in space, they came back to life on Earth unable to return to a robot body by law to prevent infinite armies in space.

Later that year Freedom Farms were discovered globally where people either chose to be animals or were being incarcerated in animal bodies. Originally started to give freedom to anyone who wanted to live a day as an animal, they had grown into twisted fetish locals and eventual prisons in territories with no laws regarding the use of these technologies. Although things continued to get better in the medical fields, laws began to emerge as more and more deviant behavior began being committed by the global populace. Children being downloaded into motor vehicles during races who lived remembering being consumed by flames, rapists downloading their victim's minds into thumb drives so they didn't remember what happened to them, people high jacking someone's body for years to live a better life, children being given adult bodies to exploit them, adults taking the bodies of children to abuse them, companies manipulating memories to promote their products in dreams, hackers could steal ideas before they became real and many other insane things. If you could upload, download and change an individual's memories you basically owned them.

It was that year that the scientist noticed the protestors following them. They carried signs like, "My child is dead because you took too long!", "I will never know my grandparents because of you!", "My child is a robot, not a person!", "I spent 5 years as a sheep!", and blaming them for other odd notions. During one of the scientist's talks they were shot, by a Quaker because their child was now a robot, in the back and could no longer walk. The surgeons plead with the scientist to use their own inventions, but they refused. The scientist didn't even let the surgeons download their memories as they were knocked out for surgery.

For some reason it seemed like humans had changed in a bad way due to the technology. The scientist's colleagues had moved on to odd new projects like putting animals in human bodies and making fleshy robots with nerve endings. A few even spent their weekends at Freedom Farms. Some went to space to take part in the wars wanting to know what dying felt like. People were taking riskier chances and causing unknown damage to others. Some even decided to time travel to the future by leaving their minds on computers to wake up decades later in human bodies. This was briefly put on hold when it was realized they were still conscious in the computers, until a long sleep mode was added to the coding. It was theorized that until that discovery every time you downloaded your memories, they were conscious too, but they forgot once they were downloaded into a new body hours, days or weeks later instead of the years the time travelers had been digitized. But the scientist decided to remain themself for as long as possible, and after rehabilitation they decided that since everyone else wanted to live forever, they wanted to die.

The scientist was now trapped in a wheelchair and woke up in pain every day. It seemed like a good punishment given the pain they had caused others. Since that time laws have changed. Eighteen became the age that you could get a cloned body without death. Children could still have their memories downloaded, but only by physicians and parents protected by blockchains that showed if anyone else manipulated them. The only violent activities a downloaded robot can perform are sports which outperform biological sports that are mainly in high schools and colleges now, though some biological major leagues still exist with limited teams worldwide. Corporations can no longer add or remove memories even if they own the server farms that house them. Freedom Farms are now Fuzzy Farms and can no longer be used as prisons as the people who were left in them for years felt tortured. Psychologists can only remove traumatic experiences and have learned how to keep the mind from unraveling by removing one neuron at a time in three dimensional maps of the downloaded memories.

But no one has died in twenty years. Cloned meat and produce have helped with the food issues but space on Earth is limited. The number of robots in space has steadily increased and biological humans can now live on the moon, on Mars, and in orbit around Venus. Robots have advanced to working on Mercury and the moons around the gas and ice giants. Some are even harvesting water from Pluto and Charon and shipping it to the inner solar system to the space stations built to allow biological life to exist in space. Now you can record your memories continuously and as soon as your body, or robot loses function it is downloaded into a new body nearly instantaneously and you can choose whether or not to remember the experience. The total human population including human minds in robots exceeds eighteen billion, not including the billions of cloned bodies waiting for their memories to be downloaded into them. And the oldest living human is now over one-hundred-and-eighty years old. But still, the scientist wants to remain themself and see what death is actually like.

"It's about time you got up!", the nurse said entering the room. The bed had alerted them of their arousal.

This brought the scientist back to the present. "I just wanted it to last as long as possible."

"If you trusted your own technology, it could last forever.", the nurse responded.

"No.... I think this is the best thing to do. Thirty years of tremendous pain is enough of a punishment I think.", they said.

"I just hope this doesn't start a trend, or worse end us all."

"The only thing that will end us all, is a bad solar storm, but I have been assured that the servers are being protected by lead ceilings deep underground, along with the cloned bodies."

"What if something happens that only you can solve?"

"I've been teaching the last two decades, so by now there are a lot of people as smart or smarter than I. And I never did it all on my own anyway."

The nurse lifted the scientist up and put them in their wheelchair. The scientist looked around taking in the sights for one last time. The sketches, cards, photos and flowers from family too sad to see them off and the sights of the park from their window. As the nurse wheeled them out a mob of reporters and protestors were behind caution tape. Several drone cameras appeared before the scientist, and they answered a few questions. The last question, "Why have you chosen to die?", resonated for a moment and the crowd came to a hush.

"I will not be the last to die. This technology is still new. Those bodies may last 100 years or 1000. Evolution may make the enzymes and longevity serums stop working. We don't know yet. And we still don't know what happens when we die. Maybe I can help bring your lost loved ones back by doing so."

With that the crowd cheered and lowered their signs. The drone cameras buzzed off except for one which followed as the nurse pushed the scientist through the hospital. As they traveled, they could see on screens that people throughout the solar system were watching them. The scientist chuckled a little bit.

"What?", the nurse asked.

"Who knew death was so attractive."

It was the scientist's ninety-first birthday, a new beginning, so to speak. They had an intravenous needle stuck in their arm and after they were anesthetized, chemicals were sent through it to euthanize the scientist. They were cremated immediately as laid out in their will so that they would never be again. Or so they hoped.