CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A Pleasant Surmise
Dicky Baudgew felt like he was ten years old again. His father, his dull, dumb father who, despite his nearly absolute lack of mental gifts, hated to lose, once again had swept the checkerboard from the kitchen table rather than admit defeat.
Dicky stared at the notebook that nestled in his hands. He had spent hours reading through Roan Winslow’s notes and formulas. He had made sense of much of it, but rather than feeling triumphant, the information he had decoded had only made him hungrier. The notebook, a small consolation prize after the morning’s rather dramatic activities, contained some of the science Trinity had developed to extend life, but certainly not all, nor even most. The puzzle remained.
Eternal life had been a multi-millennial dream. What Trinity had created did not achieve that dream, but it did triple a person’s lifespan. When Fflowers had first told him about the Centsurety project, Dicky Baudgew had wondered what better dreams could be dreamed with two hundred more years to dream them. However, when the original life extension science that Trinity had developed, while still critically imperfect, had been hi-jacked by Joshua Fflowers, who had made a gift of it to favored few, Dicky had seen how dreams could turn to nightmares. Fortunately, Dicky Baudgew was not among the cursed select. For that snub, he was grateful because Joshua Fflowers’ generosity had proven to be a bit of a Trojan gift. The lucky ones, the Chosen Few, had been given decades more years of life but at the price of even more decades of a crab-like crippling. The Ugly Dwarf and his friends grew uglier.
By the time of the explosion, Trinity had already gone far beyond the imperfect version which Fflowers had misused. Exceptional scientists that they were, the members of Trinity had analyzed their errors and corrected them. The notes indicated that. Trinity was sure that it had found the answers. The secret of long life, centuries’ long life and all the puzzles that might bring. By studying Roan Winslow’s notes, which his people had found in the girl’s apartment while the father was off watching over her at the hospital, Dicky could decode enough to surmise that the solution involved the FOXO3A gene. He remembered that the FOX gene had been identified early in the century with clusters of long-lived Japanese Americans in Hawaii. Some of the sketches Dicky found led him to believe that Trinity had found a way to wrap a complicated prion-derived architecture around the FOX gene. What that structure was, and, more importantly, how is had been built, Dicky didn’t know because what Dicky held in his hand was an expurgated, a seriously expurgated, version of Trinity’s work. Dicky thought how, like Leonardo and so many other scientists before her, Roan Winslow must have been a non-trusting soul. Her notes were in code. Code was fine with Dicky Baudgew. After all, there had been many reasons at Centsurety for mistrust. And, Dicky, of course, liked a puzzle. But, a puzzle, to be fair, had to have all of the pieces necessary to solve it. The pages torn from Roan Winslow’s note book suggested that this puzzle wasn’t fair. Dicky got angry when things weren’t fair.
Dicky’s fingers ran along the chad that remained from where pages had been ripped from the back of the book before he flicked the notebook onto his escritoire.
To dampen his anger, the little geri took a shallow breath.
If offered the chance to add two hundred more years of life, would he take it? He let his breath out. For once, he didn’t know. It suddenly hit him that longer life to a jade like himself might not be a gift. At the odd, self-pitying moment, he had sometimes wondered whether the twenty extra years the gods curiously had already allowed him were meant as Olympian gift or gag. What he did know for certain was that billions of people would exercise the option of to extend their lives if given the choice. There also was no doubt in Dicky Baudgew’s mind that every government on earth would do what it had to keep its citizens from getting that chance. Long life might be a tremendous good for an individual, but it would bring nothing but trouble for a society.
Dicky stood in front of his full-length rococo gilt mirror. He extended his tiny pink fleshy hands to his twin.
“Would you like to live to be three hundred years old?”
Dicky sucked his ancient bee-stung lips, another work of art he had acquired during his oriental exile, inside his mouth and opened his eyes ingénue-wide. In a high simpering voice he exclaimed, “I would! I would!”
Relaxing his face back to that of an old man, he asked, “Would you be willing to go to work for another two hundred years so that your longevity does not become a burden to your family, community or nation?”
The ingénue returned to the mirror, but she seemed somewhat hesitant, indecisive and, from Dicky’s viewpoint, angry at the injustice that the responsibility for her longer life should devolve onto her.
When there was no response, Dicky asked a follow-up question, “Would you be willing to be neutered, or if you already have had children, would you be willing to have those children neutered, so that Dear Mother Earth is not destroyed by over-population?”
The ingénue’s mouth twitched.
“Are your children, if you have children, going to be happy if, either you outlive them, or if they must wait two hundred years longer for their inheritance?”
The ingénue disappeared and old, clever Dicky Baudgew was staring at his laughing lovely self.
The road to hell was paved with good inventions.
Dicky’s raucous laugh skittered around his dusty, shopworn seraglio like a cockroach in a can.