Bing - Immortal life: a soon to be true story

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BOOKS BY STANLEY BING

NONFICTION

Biz Words: Power Talk for Fun and Profit

Crazy Bosses

What Would Machiavelli Do?

Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up

The Big Bing: Black Holes of Time Management, Gaseous Executive Bodies, Exploding Careers, and Other Theories on the Origins of the Business Universe

Sun Tzu Was a Sissy

Rome, Inc. The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation

100 Bullshit Jobs... And How to Get Them

Executricks, or How to Retire While Youre Still Working

Bingsops Fables: Little Morals for Big Business

The Curriculum: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Master of Business Arts

NOVELS

Lloyd: What Happened

You Look Nice Today

To Craig Venter, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and all the visionary titans of tech now exploring the possibility of eternal life for those who can afford it.

When you talk to a human in 2035, youll be talking to someone thats a combination of biological and nonbiological intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil, Google

If emulation of particular brains is possible and affordable, and if concerns about individual identity can be met, such emulation would enable backup copies and digital immortality.

Nick Bostrom, Oxford University

I dont want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

Woody Allen

T he room was kept dark on purpose, a soft pin spot here and there, because at the age of 127, the creature that had once been Arthur Vogel couldnt stand bright light. It hurt his eyes, his skin, the tiny blisters that had formed at the top of his skull. Also, he couldnt tolerate being seen clearly by anybody but Sallie, not even by himself. Hence the absence of mirrors, the proscription against implements that had the capacity to record video.

A while back, at the age of 103 or so, Arthur had retired from public view almost entirely. There he nestled on his vast estate in the pastoral heart of the urban sprawl that stretched from Santa Barbara to San Diego: by day, on his vast outside patio soaking in the vitamin D that he believed would keep him alive forever; after sunset, retreating to his private study to feed the lizards, toads, and spiders that inhabited his massive assemblage of terrariums; and throughout, at all hours, constantly, incessantly doing business through the wireless communications implant that ran beneath the wafer-thin layer of his skull.

Yet as powerful a digital presence as he still might be, he had for some time not actually been seen by human or inhuman eyes; he who had once been the most visible mogul in his coterie of behemoths, the center of a prodigious entourage whose dissolute hijinks had become the stuff of legend, the subject of more ridiculous scandal than Emperor Tiberius in his prime. Orgies! Bottomless onslaughts of willing, wily gold diggers! More ex-wives than the sultan of Brunei! Yachts! Private islands steeped in unpardonable sins! And nownothing. This absence led to some speculation about his whereabouts, his health overall, and his ability to manage the enormous empire that was currently valued at $63.1 trillion in global operations aloneand that didnt count the growing hydroponic farm now being built under the surface of the planet of Musk, formerly known as Mars, where he had been first to strike water back in 2034.

Physically, he was all right, as far as it went. But it couldnt go on like this for much longer. Arthur himself knew that. There were limits to the art of life extension, and he had reached them.

He began every day the same way. At three thirty in the morning, his eyes popped open as if a starting gun had gone off inside his head, and there was no more sleep after that. This was the hard time. The vast beyond beckoned to him then: the possibility that he would not exist; that this magnificent edifice he had built would have the temerity to go on without him. It was then that he was most human; the least fortified with the armature of fame and wealth and technology. It was then that he felt the terror of what most certainly lay ahead if his plan did not succeed and he did not find a permanent solution to the problem of death.

A solution was clearly called for, that was for fucking sure.

So Arthur, who had once been known to friends and enemies alike as the Mighty Vog, faced up to the darkness that gripped his heart like a vise in the dead middle of each night and did what he had done since he was a little boy back in the lost, long-ago twentieth century: he got busy.

There was always a lot to do. First, he had to put himself together, which was no inconsiderable task. For more than a year, even Sallie had not seen him in his raw selfwhat he was before the application of implants, cyberware, and wetware, which were brought to bear each day upon the desiccated nugget of flesh that remained of his original body.

First came the eye, which was the beginning of all things. The eye was loaded with hardware and software that interfaced directly with all the original neurostructure that lay behind it and was the link between his brain and the rest of the intelligent objects that would be added on and expected to obey his unspoken commands. The communications hookups were already loaded into his head, of course, as they were with the superelite that had gotten tired, some twenty years before, of carrying around all those stupid smartphones and, without much trouble, given the limitless human and financial assets at their disposal, figured out a way to place all the necessary electronics into the hard bone that sat right behind the earlobe. Put the eye and the implant together, and you had a pretty fair operating platform suitable for just about any support function.

The thing about the eye, though, was that it was very, very delicate. The least little jostle of the tiny gelatinous orb brought down the whole mechanism. Since each new one took months to build, program, and field-test, this was a verifiable fucking pain in the neck for sure. Not that cost was any real issue, but he still got a little pang when he was forced to shell out more than $2.5 million for a backup that he knew would work 100 percent without fail, hopefully. The thing itself was pretty disgusting, too, he thought as he gently inserted it in its socket and heard the soft click that indicated it was seated correctly in position. Like tenderly placing two fingers of frog guts into your head. He would be glad when he didnt have to do it anymore. That day was coming.

The rest was a little easier. Propped by the side of his bed was the hip-and-leg assembly that made his limited mobility possible. It was very strong and supple, a welcome addition sinceWhat was it? Six? Ten years ago?they had pretty much written off the right side of his body completely. Fine, he said. Then he invented the fucking thing himself. Made the sketches. Called in Bob. Had the entire assembly printedbones, muscles, veins, arteries and capillaries, the knee and all its delicate cartilage, the joints, whatever. That was no big deal; they had been able to print just about anything for years. Implementing an installation process he could accomplish by himselfnow, that had been a real bear. That was when a guy like Bob really came in handy. Patient. Brilliant in his own way. Willing to do anything if the science of it presented a challenge to him. Very valuable guy, Bob. Key guy, really. Now more than ever. Had to watch him, though. Motherfucker could get the idea in his head that it was he who was running things.