Authors: Joshua Wright
Idempotency
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2015
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To Harper, find a happy life and stick with that one.
Prologue
i·dem·po·tent
[AHY-duhm-POHT-nt, ID-uhm-], adjective
unchanged when multiplied by itself.
—
Dictionary.com
Idempotence
(pronounced/ˌaɪdɨmˈpoʊtəns/
EYE-d
ə
m-POH-t
ə
ns
) is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science that can be applied multiple times without changing the result.
—
Wikipedia.com
For Garrett Hawpe, turning 201 years old was an inescapable accomplishment; another checked box in an unending list of “accomplishments” that now arrived on a yearly cadence. On this day, in this palindromic year of 2112, as would occur every year for the rest of years, Garrett Hawpe would be reaffirmed as the oldest living human being in recorded history.
In reality, Garrett’s only true accomplishment had been a unique ability to stumble over dumb luck. For it was luck that allowed Garrett to live a naturally long life of one hundred years prior to requiring unnatural assistance. It was luck that continued to favor Garrett when he was chosen as the oldest subject in the first successful trials to engineer custom organs. One hundred humans on the brink of varying organ failure had their lives extended, thanks to humanity’s ability to invent.
Stemgineering
, the media had dubbed it. It was a modern miracle. Hearts, livers, kidneys, gonads—made to order, while you wait. Your way, right away.
Stemgineering a healthier life!
Garrett had just celebrated his centennial birthday at the time of those initial trials. Aside from the fact that he was dying from numerous ailments—including time—he had otherwise been in good spirits. Of course, at one hundred, good spirits came simply from not being dead. Garrett could still get around with his walker, and in his own judicious opinion, he could have driven better than most of the damn fools on the roadways—if only the state had allowed it. Unfortunately, his spry demeanor was merely a mirage, for Garrett had pancreatic cancer, a diseased heart, and a liver that had seen its share of too many liquid libations. He had been given two months to live, if he was lucky. And lucky he was—a few stem cells, a sterile Petri dish, less than ten thousand lines of breakthrough code, a few hours of baking, and Garrett Hawpe’s internals would be all patched up. Good as new.
New he did not appear, however. While his made-to-order, just-off-the-factory-line-perfected pancreas, and, later, matching heart and liver were now stronger than a teenager’s, as the decades rolled by the old man’s bones turned feebly frangible, his muscles atrophied into limp twigs too easily, giving way to a dusting of snow, and his skin flicked off like paint from atop a rusting pole. A few people older than Garrett received their custom stemgineered organs in the next round of trials, but they died from either the simple agony of cracked skin—a new extended-aging illness, termed dermatrophy—or the failure of muscle and bone to provide even the fragile grip to hold a cup of coffee, let alone the frame to allow one’s lungs to intake oxygen.
Cell regeneration was discovered just in the nick of time for Garrett; lucky once more! Garrett was whisked into a new set of trials, cell regeneration
within
the living tissue of a human body, again utilizing stem cells and complex computer code.
Stemgineering 2.0,
the media termed this next-generation breakthrough—and it was wildly successful. Within a year’s time, Garrett’s skin was ironed to perfection, his nascent muscles rippled once more, his eyesight sharpened, and his bones calcified to the consistency of steel. The corporation behind the breakthroughs (and the patents) became the largest on earth, and Garrett became the oldest human around the time of his 150th birthday. He would never again look a day over thirty.
His two hundredth birthday had provided the entirety of Earth a reason to celebrate—rather, those classes who could afford such luxuries as extended life. Lavish parties were thrown across the globe. Governments showered adulation upon their trueElderly—those born before the stemgineering to revolutions, one hundred years ago. Those born after the stemgineering revolution became known as the foreverYoung.
Seventy-three trueElderly from the initial stemgineering trial had lived on, and in honor of Garrett’s two hundredth birthday, the group of seventy-three were gathered together at the White House to meet the then ninety-seven-year-old president; the oldest sitting president in the history of the Union (he didn’t look a day over forty). The group would become known as the First Seventy-Three.
One year had passed since that wondrous celebration, and on this day Garrett was turning 201. As he sat atop Olympus Mons, looking out across the drafty crimson landscape of Mars, Garrett reflected on the various vagaries and serendipities—otherwise known as luck—that had brought him to this point in his life; a simple man who had only ever wanted for simple happiness had instead been granted fame, fortune, and
life
.
And yet . . . He sighed deeply. Luck be damned—Garrett Hawpe was terribly, terribly depressed.
It was only natural to expect a letdown on his 201st birthday. Still, Garrett had hoped at least a few dozen people would show up: some portion of the First Seventy-Three, his extended family (for that was all he had left), maybe a few of his more recent virtual friends, and possibly, just possibly, Ellie. Garrett had even gone so far as to post his virt location, Olympus Mons, across some of the darkNets; he figured his fame would draw a few interested stragglers. As it was, however, he sat alone atop the mighty Martian mountainside on this dusky day.
A few passersby had appeared briefly, virtTripping in and out—they hadn’t even recognized Garrett. Their eyes would stray toward him briefly as they possibly wondered why he was wearing a Martian atmospheric suit within the safety of a virtual projection of a realWorld location. But the passersby quickly decided they didn’t care enough to know the answer, so they went about their way, virtTripping to their next exotic destination.
The small sun was setting now, begrudgingly. Soon, as the sun touched the multiple tips of Martian terra, the typically muted orange hue of the planet would momentarily spin the planet’s color wheel into a conflagration of fierce oranges, reds, and browns. The flash would be over quickly, but the sun was persistent. The dust in the atmosphere was already starting to capture the sun’s rays; it would rain those rays back down to the surface for the next several hours, until at last the sun would acquiesce to the spinning planet and the brilliance of the Martian night sky would be restrained no longer.
“Hey Jimmy,” Garrett uttered to no one. A moment later, Garrett’s oldest friend and fellow member of the First Seventy-Three, James “Jimmy” Santos, materialized next to Garrett. Jimmy was holding a caipirinha and was wearing a darkly colored, floral print shirt that flashed moving iconography subtly across its front. He had short black hair and the perfect amount of stubble on his sharp chin. He looked taller and more muscular than the last time Garrett had seen him, but this was merely a virt representation of Jimmy—he could appear as a dragon if he so desired, though most people chose to appear as slightly better versions of their realWorld selves within virts, more or less.
VirtTripping to realWorld locations was becoming more and more popular to the underground technorati. The anonymity was enticing; within a realWorld virt, the traveler could see all realWorld people at that location in real time, but the virtual traveler was a mere ghost to the unsuspecting public. With the proliferation of microdetailed satellites and ubiquitous video monitoring, realWorld public locations that were off limits to virtTrips were becoming few and far between, even atop the tallest mountain on Mars.
“Garrett? That you in there?” Jimmy asked, referring to the Martian atmospheric suit that Garrett was wearing.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Uh, what’s with the virt atmo-suit avatar, buddy?”
“I’ve been thinking about taking a realWorld trip out here. Wanted to know what it would feel like. I’ve even got my virt environmentals dialed in to replicate the temperature, pressure, and gravity.”
“Wow. Cool, man. I heard about those new Mars cruise liners. I think that’s one of ’em out there.” Jimmy pointed out toward the blinding horizon in front of them. “EGC corp, right? When are you thinking of doing that?”
