Departure(53)
If I weren’t staring at the proof, I probably wouldn’t believe it. Incredible. They actually did it. I shake my head. “I don’t understand. You said this was your blunder?”
“Our blunder wasn’t the innovation, the immortality therapy itself. Our blunder was not accounting for human nature.”
“Human nature?”
“We didn’t know it at the time, but we had set ourselves on a collision course, started the countdown to a war that would destroy our world.
“The Titans inducted in the years after 2054 were mostly scientists and researchers, replacements of a sort. Most of the original hundred Titans had been innovators in their fields, people like Sabrina and Yul. They all chose younger versions of themselves, people who could make further advances in their field, carry the torch with new energy. Conferring Titanship required a majority vote of the Titans, with the nominating Titan abstaining—fifty votes out of ninety-nine. For almost two decades the elections were uneventful, the politicking and negotiations done in private.
“In 2071, however, we faced a crisis, and Oliver was at the center of it. By this time Grayson Shaw was eighty-eight, and in extremely poor health. He’d already had two liver transplants, and the doctors said his days were numbered. Grayson was Oliver’s one true regret, and Oliver had begun to talk about him more and more, to lament not what he had done in life, but what he’d left undone. Giving Grayson one more shot at life became Oliver’s obsession. He nominated him for Titanship, but behind closed doors, it became clear early on that the vote was doomed. Oliver called in favors, demanded this one last act as payment for all he had done. He and I cajoled, threatened, and bribed, but the Titans wouldn’t budge. They saw making Grayson Shaw a Titan as the ultimate mistake, an error that would forever poison the well. They had been sold on the idea of a meritocracy. They believed that choosing only the worthy was the only way the world would accept Titan immortality. The Titans were probably right, yet Oliver persisted, as he always did. Persistence had been the secret to our success, and we weren’t about to give up without a fight. We had remade the world, after all, so getting fifty people to agree to something seemed easy.” He shakes his head and looks away. “We were very wrong.”
“About?”
“Human nature, once again. People will fight to the death to save their own lives, but they’ll wage war to preserve their way of life for future generations. To our fellow Titans, it wasn’t a single Titanship at stake, it was the Titan way of life, their vision for the future. Grayson’s election endangered their entire belief system.”
“And it didn’t yours?”
“Very much so—but I saw it as an opportunity. I’d met someone, someone very near death. Like Oliver, I was terrified, utterly unwilling to face life without her. I had made my own proposal to save her, but it was defeated as well. Oliver and I were desperate to save our loved ones, and we made a desperate decision: to steal the immortality therapy. It was the most heavily guarded technology in the world, but we had access—in fact, we were probably the only people in the world who could pull it off. We succeeded, but again we failed to account for one thing. ”
“Human nature.”
“Exactly. The downside of employing thieves is—”
“They steal.”
“Precisely. The loot in this case was the most valuable object in the history of the world. They never showed up at the meeting point, and a week later, nations around the world announced that they had developed their own immortality therapy. Chaos ensued. Nations had long seen the Titan Foundation as the greatest threat to their continued existence. When Atlantis opened, they thought it would eventually become the first global nation-state, reducing all other governments to local authorities. They were probably right. They saw all the Titan Marvels, including Q-Net, Podway, and especially immortality, as eroding their ability to maintain power over their populations. And now they held out immortality to their citizenry, with different nations defining varying criteria for eligibility. Where they expected a new wave of nationalism and loyalty, anarchy erupted. Some populations begged for immortality to be made widely available; others demanded that it be permanently banned. Everyone blamed the Titans for the upheaval. Millions died in the unrest, including the great love of my life. Grayson Shaw died of complications of liver failure three weeks after the chaos began. The Titans convened, and we searched for an answer. We announced to the world that we would provide a solution, asked them to believe and have faith, promised that help was on the way. To some extent, we did feel responsible. But we couldn’t have predicted what happened next: a pandemic.”
“Pandemic? How?”
“A mutation. The immortality therapy Sabrina created changed somehow. The therapy uses a retrovirus to alter the genes that control aging. That retrovirus mutated in the wild, or maybe someone altered it, by accident or on purpose. We figure private labs and government facilities were doing a lot of work on the virus in the weeks after it was stolen. This mutated retrovirus was deadly. Instead of turning the genes that control aging off, it sent them into overdrive, causing a cascade of rapid aging. It was almost like the victims had a severe case of progeria, with adult onset. Those infected died quickly, some within hours, some in days, in a few weeks in rare cases.
“The casualty reports started coming in the day after our big announcement of a solution. It was a trickle at first, nothing that even made major news outlets. A couple of people died in Europe, four in America, half a dozen in Japan. Then it exploded around the world. People were dying in droves, all after aging rapidly.