The Procedure

"The first time I heard about the procedure was in the summer of '46, and to be frank with you I didn't believe it. You hear things, collect anecdotes from posts or articles online but nothing ever seems to come of them, you know? Somebody's figured out how to turn dirt into gasoline, some schmuck achieves cold fusion in their garage, you think "wow!" and then you never hear anything about it again. This one was even less believable. We've been trying to answer that question ever since we figured out how to write shit down, probably before that too. Kings making deals with wizards, tech moguls subsisting off of rare fruit and injecting themselves with sheep plasma, every religion on earth all motivated by the promise of avoiding death and not one of them ever got it right. Can you really blame me for thinking it was nonsense?

The real irony of it all was that after centuries of asking the question, the answer was dead simple. Almost ridiculous. Hidden in among the C's, G's, A's and T's that make up our genes, there's one sequence that tells the rest of them to start decaying. The procedure simply took that sequence and removed it, like plucking an eyelash or popping a zit. That one tiny fraction of ourselves, a sliver of our code responsible for millennia of suffering, and all of a sudden you could just make it disappear. If you had the money, of course."

"When did you decide to have it done?"

"I'm not sure 'decide' is the right word. At least, it wasn't at the time. I had lymphoma. One of the rare ones. It had metastasized to my brain, my blood, I was more tumor than man."

"So you felt you didn't have a choice?"

"Have you ever seen death?"

"I'm not sure how that mat..."

"So the answer is no. Of course it is. I mean look at you; you're what, twenty five?"

"Twenty seven. Again, I'm not sure..."

"There it is. You're healthy, young, you have another fifty years or so if you take good care of yourself, and right now that feels infinite. But trust me, it isn't. You won't have to see it for a while now, but you never forget the first time. Maybe you'll be looking at the corpse of someone you knew, maybe you'll get some test results back, there's no way to know for sure how it will happen. But in that moment when you see it, you'll know."

"Know what?"

"That there's no grace or beauty in death. No poetry. No shimmering plane of paradise waiting for you after you gasp, clutch at some organ in horror and keel over. Just this existence and then an infinite nothing."

"Did the thought of that 'infinite nothing' frighten you?"

"Anyone who claims not to be afraid of infinity hasn't thought about it hard enough."

"What did it feel like?"

"To have your DNA pulled apart strand by strand and then sewn back together? Like having your skin peeled off while your guts boil. It took a year. Did you know that? A year of the treatments. A year of my blood dripping from very hole on my body, my bones bending and snapping at the slightest pressure, a whole year of sores and rashes. It seemed like the scientists had failed to account for some of the consequences of just yanking out one of the deepest roots of the human genome."

"But you still completed the treatment."

"Of course I did. I'm sitting here, aren't I?"

"I suppose. I can't see you, after all."

"That's for your benefit, as well as mine."

"Forgive me if I don't believe you. None of this seems to be for anyone's benefit but your own. You and the other three hundred people who underwent the procedure, what have your lives done for the rest of humanity? Why destroy the research, cutting off life saving treatment for billions of people? Why do all of that and then disappear into this mansion in the middle of nowhere? Why hide from justice like a coward?"

"Of those three hundred, how many of us do you think survived the procedure?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I guess that detail must have gotten lost to time. Fourteen. Fourteen of us were able to survive. Less than five percent. Cell decay or no, you put that much strain on a human body and it's not likely to keep going. Secondly, you seem to be under the impression that you're here to do something heroic. Exact some kind of justice for the proletariat against the capitalist ghoul who blocked their shot at immortality. I can't blame you for that, I guess. I have no way of knowing what kind of narratives have been woven around me and my ilk in the past four hundred years but judging by your presence, and what I suppose is some kind of gun in your hand there, I feel confident in assuming they're not very flattering."

"You insolent fuck. You damned to whole world and for what? So you and a handful of your bloodsucking buddies could have the world's most exclusive social club? You deserve worse than anything I could ever do to you. You're a monster. You're a living manifestation of everything that was wrong with the old world."

"You couldn't have it more backwards."

"And how do you figure that?"

"Immortality isn't a gift. It's not a privilege. I've watched the world fade and die a hundred times over. People, ideas, nations, I've sat powerless as everything I ever knew and loved crumbled into dust, and then I watched it happen again. And Again. And again. Have you seen the others? Have you met any of them?"

"Yes."

"Then you know that I'm not 'disappearing into my mansion' as you put it. You've seen what we turn into, if we're alive for long enough. I'm here because I can't leave. This place is just a prison with better aesthetics."

"Do you expect me to pity you?"

"No, not at all. Just pointing out a fallacy in your previous statement. A hangover from my previous career, I'm afraid. I have nothing in common with the other fourte..."

"Eight."

"Excuse me?"

"If there were only fourteen of you that survived the procedure there should be eight now, by my count. Seven after tonight."

"If that was supposed to frighten me, it didn't. I knew you were here to kill me from the moment you tripped the sensors at the edge of my property."

"What about the thought of finally being cast into that 'infinite nothing?"

"At this point I would just be trading one infinity for another. Anything you do to me here is purely for your benefit."

"You can believe that if it gives you comfort."

"Earlier you mentioned 'the world's most exclusive social club'. Is that why you think we chose to cut off access to the procedure? So we could spend eternity drinking champagne and discussing stocks in some gilded clubhouse? So we could possess something that no one else could ever own? I know it will be difficult, but try to wrestle a bit harder with your own immaturity. I'm not a villain from a cartoon, and neither were the people you've already killed. We didn't know the consequences of the procedure. There's no way we could have. You've seen the others. You know what it turns us into. We were trying to protect you."

"But if the research had been allowed to continue, if it had gone forward the procedure could have been refined. People wouldn't have had to turn into what you are. We could have had a world without sickness, without death!"

"And a planet populated by bored gods. How long do you think that would have lasted?"

"I'm not here to entertain thought experiments."

"No, I suppose you're not. But let me ask you this: what's going to happen when all the ones like me are dead? When you've pulled the trigger for the last time, what will you be left with? Will you be any closer to curing Sagittarian syndrome? The phage? Brinkmann's syndrome? The energy crisis?"

"I'll be a hero of the people. And you'll be a bloated, twisted corpse."

"No. You'll be one more obnoxious little secular zealot with blood on his hands and shit in his drawers. If people like you spent half the time fixing problems as you do looking for someone to blame for them who knows how the world would look."

"Sure, your death won't cure any diseases or stop any wars but it will free up a lot of capital. How much money have you and your people hoarded in offshore accounts again? Ten trillion? Twelve? I forget the exact figure. Your greed crashed the economies of thirty countries. Once you've faced justice all of that wealth can be redistributed. People can eat. Roads can be built. Sicknesses can be cured. You know New Eritrea has been in a state of famine for twenty years? With less than a percentage of your personal wealth I can fix that in a week. Less than two percent of your hoard and the water conflict in Francia is over. Did you know we already have the technology to stop cobalt rot? It's just expensive. So many problems that don't need to be problems. So much suffering that doesn't need to exist. And all it will cost is ending the lives of a few sociopathic freaks."

"Well. It seems I won't be able to argue you out of it. All that's left is to warn you. My house is very large, and my security system was very expensive."

"Your security system was very expensive, two hundred years ago."

"Cocky. We'll see how that works out for you. Computer: end communication."