Debatable Space (10 page)

Thus, peace came to Eastern Europe. By the year 2055, democratic governments independent of organised crime were sweeping
across the whole of Eastern Europe. Albania became a beacon of prosperity, famed for its nanotechnology and spellbinding modern
architecture.

And Anya Valentin died at the age of 104, renowned as a school principal of deadly asperity and feared wit, admired and loved
by generations of schoolchildren in the little Minnesotan town she had made her home.

I so vividly recall those squad-room days; and I still have audio tapes of the banter and the briefings which, in my later
years with the squad, I downloaded every night from the microchip in my hearing aid. Hurly-Burly had a tender side, he was
always very protective of me, and had the sweetest friendship with the stunningly unsociable and socially disconnected Blacks.
Natasha was fierce, full of rages, but learned to treat me like a maiden aunt rather than as a sexual rival. (That woman was
such
a whore . . .)

And I remember Michiyo, at our office party, singing a cappella karaoke hits from the 1970s, with an unexpectedly powerful
soul voice. I remember Rachel, the day she was shot in an abortive arrest attempt, laughing it off in her muttery casual way.
She was back at work in two weeks; she used to love taking her trousers off to show off the scar on her left buttock. And
there was Tosh, a borderline alcoholic who regularly forged interview transcripts which ended with the words, “At this point
DI Greig battered the wee fecking suspect.” Tosh had been suspended three times for tampering with official documentation,
and each time he laughed loudly and long. Tosh was, I learned many years later, a bigamist; but both his wives were bitterly
neglected. He spent his life in the office, with his team. That was his world.

I can conjure them all up with a simple thought-prompt, even without the aid of the audio tapes. I can feel their presence,
their energy, their stupid scurrilous humour. And I can still vividly recall Tom making love to me, naked and panting, orgasming,
whimpering, sleeping afterwards. Just with a thought, I can put him there again, even though it is… oh, so many years
since we last met or spoke. He died, of a stroke, at the age of ninety-two. I didn’t attend the funeral. I wasn’t, by that
point, attending funerals.

But while he lived, he had such
life
. Such zest. The stories he told… his effortless assumption that you would want to listen to whatever it was he wanted
to say. His command of a room. “This is a really good story,” he’d say calmly, and pause. And the room would hush until he
was ready to tell it.

After five years the squad was disbanded, amid murmurs of disgrace and corruption. Tom was, of course, fabulously corrupt,
and left the force a wealthy man. I resigned too and went to live with him in Dorking, England. Within six months we were
driving each other insane. So I caught a plane to Florence, to swot up on my art history.

And it was there, in the Piazza Signoria, looking towards the loggia where the stone Perseus was lopping off the Gorgon’s
head, that I felt myself becoming overwhelmed. My breath rushed into my throat. I was hyperventilating. I was in pain. For
a moment, I assumed it was Stendhal Syndrome, that I was simply overcome by too much joy.

The truth was more prosaic. I speed-dialled for an ambulance and a cardiac arrest kit. Then I hit the ground – hard. Paramedics
were with me in minutes, and certified me clinically dead.

I was put on a life-support machine. The ventilator kept my brain alive, as my heart shuddered and spasmed. I had died, but
now I was reborn.

And so began the next phase of my long long life.

Health has always fascinated me. Largely, I suppose, because of my lack of it. When I was five I had to wear glasses. When
I was nineteen, I started to suffer from hearing loss, and from the age of thirty-one I was regularly using a hearing aid.
And, of course, my skin was regularly subject to burning and scarring in the light of the sun.

So I tried to turn these weaknesses into advantages. After years of wearing chunky glasses, I was eventually able to purchase
a pair of toric multi-function soft disposable contact lenses that fully corrected my vision. These were “smart” lenses, able
to adjust on a daily and even hourly basis for the needs of the eye, and the environs. With these lenses, I could see perfectly
at night; I could read fine print that was invisible to 99 per cent of people with 20-20 vision; my eyes were never dry or
dusty; I could even, with some fiddling, amplify my vision to the level of a pair of cheap binoculars.

These lenses cost me almost six months’ salary, but I felt it was worth it. Then, when my deafness got worse, I cajoled the
university’s medical insurance department into paying for me to have a pair of inner-ear hearing aids to replace the chunky
clip-ons I’d originally been allocated. These sleek plastic tubes slipped easily into the ear itself, and moulded perfectly
to the contours of my inner ear passage. Ever since they’d first been introduced – in the early years of the twenty-first
century – these digital hearing aids were computer-adjusted and tailor-made to amplify only those frequencies that the wearer
had difficulty hearing. So the sound quality was flawless. And, with some fine tuning, I was able to improve the accuracy
of these hearing aids so that I could follow a conversation taking place at a table on the opposite side of a crowded restaurant.
I could eavesdrop both sides of someone’s mobile phone conversation. I could, literally, hear a pin drop.

Then, when the second edition of my book was published, sales went through the roof and my fortune doubled. It helped that
I was now a semi-glamorous figure – a “consultant to the UN Police Authority”. It helped, too, that by this time I had gained
a few pounds – enough to stop me looking like a starved librarian – and changed my dress style. I’d become, almost, sexy;
the book was a massive hit; and I became rich.

And I kept working on my gadgets. I was one of the first to improve the smart contact lens data-carrying capacity; and I was
a pioneer of attempts to create wireless connections between remote computers and the smart lens’s “brain”. I did the same
with the hearing aid. I purchased a massively expensive subvocaliser, which allowed me to access computer programs via signals
sent from my earpiece – by simply articulating my requests subvocally.

And I worked out at the gym. I had my breasts non-surgically boosted – not excessively, just enough to give them a sensual
curve and an exciting nipple flourish. I took a melatonin implant to shed the freckles, and acquired a pleasing all-year-long
golden glow. During the last few years of working with Tom and the team, I was no longer a pale, skinny nerd – I was a sleek,
bronzed, busty nerd. For me, the psychological difference was immense.

Then, after the squad disbanded, I had my heart attack; and when I recovered consciousness, I insisted on having a smart heart
installed, instead of a biological pig’s heart. The smart heart was made of bioplastic; it automatically regulated and monitored
buildups of deposits in the arteries, and it had a phenomenal pump capacity.

Tom came to see me in the hospital – but capriciously, cruelly, I wanted nothing more to do with him. I could tell he was
hurt – I could see the pain sag through his proud body. But I felt, you see,
different
. I was a new woman. Tom was a part of the old Lena; so I cut him out of my life.

And then, a few months after leaving hospital, I started training. I ran, I lifted weights, I did yoga to relax, I made my
body my temple. Before long I became fit; then very fit; then frighteningly fit. With this new heart, I could run a mile in
three minutes, and not be out of breath. My physical strength was increased twofold, because of the increased efficiency of
oxygen flow in my muscles.

And with my new heart, I knew that I need never fear heart attacks or strokes. Microbe-sized ionised probes in my bloodstream
were analysed each day by the heart, and any irregularities broadcast to a medical computer. Heart and artery problems could
be solved long before they actually became problems.

The new heart cost me 2 million euros. I bankrupted myself to buy it. But then, of course, I wrote another book, based on
my ideas about emergence, but now refocusing all these ideas into a self-help manual. Naturally, I wrote it just for the money;
and it made
so
much money. The book was called
You Are God 2
, and it featured photographs of me clad in Lycra, outrunning athletes.

As a result, I became a sex goddess, and an internationally famous self-help guru, the ultimate Before and After Makeover
Person.

With the money I made, I was able to fund my ongoing process of self-renewal. Some of the techniques I tried were quasi-experimental;
I became a guinea pig for the Anti-Agers. And so, at the age of fifty, I had the body of a thirty-five-year-old. At the age
of fifty-five, I looked like a thirty-year-old. And by the age of sixty-one I had the body of a gorgeous, hot, seductive twenty-five-year-old.

I became a founder member of the Nematode Society, devoted to promoting pioneering research into how to reverse the ageing
process. The trick is to realise that ageing is not a natural process;
self-renewal
is the natural process. (Think of the skin, which sloughs off layers and then grows afresh every day of our lives.) But through
a process of natural selection, which of course favours reproduction over survival, organisms have evolved mechanisms that
hinder the self-renewal and regeneration of the cell. To put it another way: as human beings, we have “death genes” that program
us to degenerate and die. It’s Nature’s method, if I may be whimsical, of clearing the garden to make way for new crops.

But if we isolate these genes, and replace them with cell-renewal genes – the Perpetuity genes, as they are now known – the
body itself becomes able to regrow limbs and even brain cells. In a perfectly regulated Universe, I always idly thought to
myself, the human being would be like a worm – so that if you cut a man in half, both halves would regrow into fully formed
human beings . . .

In practice, it doesn’t entirely work that way. If you lose a leg in an accident, it’s much easier to buy a new one from a
lab than to grow a new one of your own. There are sects that doggedly insist on doing things the Natural Way – they have ceremonies
in which they lop off fingers and even arms and then wait decades for them to regrow. But, in our busy consumer-led world,
it’s easier by far to purchase over-the-counter limbs, eyes and ears than to, as it were, do it yourself.

But the Perpetuity gene still has a vital role to play; through a series of coded messages distributed throughout the body
by RNA, the gene replenishes and regenerates internal organs, it eradicates cancer, and it keeps arteries clear.

It cures baldness in men too. And that, if I may say so, is
such
a boon.

To continue: I wasn’t, of course, the only one to be taking advantage of anti-ageing technology. Many others were doing the
same; my point here is, I was the first. Or at least, one of the first. One of the pioneers.

I am now nearly a thousand years old, subjective elapsed time. I
still
have the body of a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old. I am the third-oldest human being in the entire Universe. And the other
two, trust me, look weathered and tired.

I’m the only one. The only one to be so old, and yet look and feel so
young
.

But none of those fucking bastards ever properly acknowledged it.

It’s the same old story. It happened to me in academic life time and again. When I reorganised the university library system,
creating an online database of unique fluidity and versatility, I was thanked, curtly, for my administrative efforts. But
the creative kudos all went to the head of IT. In the official history of the university, it was his name not mine that headed
the folder on “IT Revolutions”.

When I was at school, I always came second in History. Not because my essays lacked the necessary rigour or originality. It
was because my nearest rival, Clarissa, had charisma and gorgeous hair and perfect skin. I once swapped one of my essays for
one of Clarissa’s, on line; and my essay with her name on it got a score fifteen points higher than my previous best.

Why is that? Why do some always get the credit, while others get downgraded? Do I have some special knack, some sign that
says, “Undervalue me”? How come, to get back to the matter in hand, that in the history of the Heimdall virtual bridge,
I’m
the fucking Trotsky?

Not that I’m bitter.

I admit, of course, that the scientific groundwork for Heimdall was laid down by others. I’m not the Einstein, or the Dyson,
or the Fermi, or the Lopez. I was, by that time, in my fourth or fifth major change of career, the elected President of Humanity.
For nearly a hundred years I was the most powerful person in the Human Universe. I created peace, harmony, understanding.

And Heimdall.

Heimdall is, of course, a quantum artefact. Its essential principles relate to the well established concept that a quantum
state in one part of the Universe can affect a quantum state in another part of the Universe, simultaneously and without any
passage of time.

Scientists call it – I feel you flagging here but please, bear with me, this is the very structure and essence of the Universe
we’re talking about, so if you fail to grasp this paragraph you might as well be, frankly, pond slime, or a laboratory rat
– the principle of wholeness, or entanglement. Which means that whenever two systems have at some previous moment interacted
(or entangled), their description is tied together
no matter how far apart they may subsequently be
. And a datum that is true of the one system, will be true of the other system also.