Chapter 27
In the cold light of the following morning, Ced’s euphoria had been replaced by an aching sense of anguish. The impact the professor’s discovery would have on his program had hit him as he awoke, groggy from too many glasses of single malt.
They had spent the night in an apartment that was part of the laboratory.
“There’s plenty of room,” Young told them, “three bedrooms, each en suite. We included it in the design because it’s so often necessary to work late. I sleep many a night here rather than trudge all the way back to the nether end of Kent in the wee small hours.”
And it had been the wee small hours before they had even thought about sleep. Following the result of the fourth test, they discussed the implications endlessly, as well as checking and rechecking the data to ensure it wasn’t flawed.
As a leader in his field, it was the professor who had the clearest grasp of their staggering discovery.
“It makes perfect sense, really,” he told them casually, as if such findings were everyday events. “Our bodies work away from the moment of conception, building and building, following the predetermined pattern of our own genetic code. We go through various stages as we grow and develop into fully mature people. This process goes on longer than most people realise: we are not fully mature with everything at its peak until sometime in our early thirties.
“Now, as we grow, things can and do go wrong. Mutations can occur; illnesses develop. But the big one is once we have stopped maturing. I suppose there might be a period where we are in balance, but pretty soon, having spent so long climbing to the dizzy heights of our maturity, we start to slide down the slippery slope of decay. The ageing process starts to take over as the myriad processes going on in our bodies begin either to fail or to become less efficient. It’s hardly noticeable at first - lines form on the face, hair might change colour, muscle tone cannot be maintained at its all-time peak. If all this can be stopped, if the processes keeping us in our prime at an age of, let me see, I think it would be early to mid-thirties – it will vary from one person to another – if these processes can be maintained, then there would be no degeneration.”
“Do you think he’s a one-off” asked Claudia.
Young shook his head. “Well, we don’t know. It could be that all the necessary factors have come together just once in this man; that he’s unique. But given that he must have inherited these alleles and passed them on to his children, there must be a chance that there are others like him. We simply don’t know enough about it yet.”
“And,” said Sally ruefully, “he’s likely to be completely resistant to providing any more material for further research.”
Ced shrugged his shoulders. “I can understand why he’s resistant – he must have spent his whole life trying to hide the fact that he’s not ageing. Imagine it. We know he is old enough to have been alive in the fifteenth century; he might be even older. But think about the problems. He’d have lived in a world where life was cheap – widespread infant mortality; diseases that we now shrug off with a quick dose of antibiotics would often have been fatal; epidemics of one thing; plagues of another. He would have remained untouched by it all, never even catching a cold. And then there would have been the realisation that he wasn’t getting older. First not looking any older and then nothing seizing up, his physical condition remaining the same. If he was religious – and he lived in early Renaissance Italy so he probably was – he would probably have thought he was possessed by the Devil. Even if he didn’t think that, others would have, and they were pretty full on with burning heretics and witches. He must have been constantly looking over his shoulder.”
“There are also families,” added Claudia. “He’s married with kids now; presumably he’s been married many times before. He could have had legions of kids. I wonder if those rather strange pale grey eyes are any indication of his situation. If they are, then his little daughter could be the same.”
“This is absolutely fascinating from so many points of view,” said the professor. “But one thing’s for certain: he must have developed quite a few coping skills – stories he tells, answers to questions, maybe ageing himself artificially when it’s necessary. After all, if he has had wives and children, he can’t just abandon them after a few years when he should be showing signs of ageing.”
“I wonder what he does about his identity,” said Sally,
“Good point,” replied Ced. “We know he’s had a number of identities. How and when does he choose them? Does he steal them? Make them up? It was probably easier a few hundred years ago, but these days it would be harder. I wonder if he stole the name John Andrews from someone.”
“You know, Mr Fisher,” said Young, nodding his head as an idea occurred to him, “you could get quite a few answers about his history from your program, especially now you have total confidence in it.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it might take a bit of processing time, but couldn’t you run your John Andrews data against every artist you have access to? That would give you a list of artists who John Andrews has been in the past. It could also tell you who he was first because before he was born, no artists would match him.”
“Unless he’s thousands of years old,” replied Ced. “I don’t have exemplars from Roman or Greek times. It’s a good idea, though, but it will take some time.”
As the conversation drifted on with each of them raising ideas and questions, they moved to the apartment where Young opened some red wine for the girls and produced a selection of single malts for Ced and himself. Ced wanted to try them all, but their sublime spell overtook him and he was soon sound asleep on the couch where he sat.
He awoke with a start four hours later as a shaft of sunlight broke through some patchy morning cloud and burned straight into his eyes. Completely disoriented and wondering why his tongue no longer fitted inside his mouth, he staggered to the kitchen and drank several glasses of cold water.
The events of the night before flooded into his consciousness in waves. It was then that the logical consequences of his program being so good hit him like a speeding train. He slumped onto a kitchen stool, his head in his hands. He was still in the same position when, half an hour later, Sally shuffled into the kitchen, also looking for water.
“God, hon, what a night! Do you think all moments of eureka-type discovery are celebrated with a hangover? You should see yourself; I’ve seen better-looking cadavers.” She gulped down a glass of water and turned to him again. “You know, for a potential Nobel Prize winner, you look awfully glum.”
Ced didn’t move.
“Hon, come on, you’ve produced something utterly amazing and you look like your pet goldfish just died. You left the doubts about your program behind last night. Remember? Come on, superstar!”
Ced shook his head and turned to her.
“It’s not as easy as that, Sal. There’s a problem.”
“How can there be a problem? Your program can reliably, accurately and with one hundred per cent confidence differentiate every artist under the sun.”
“No, Sal, it can’t.”
“Come on Ced – you’ve just woken up from a bad dream. Your program is brilliant.”
“I know it is, Sal.”
“I think you should go back to sleep, hon; you’re making no sense and this chainsaw in my head is getting louder.”
“Sal, the problem with the program is that it can’t differentiate, say, Andrews from Tommaso Perini.”
Sally was incredulous. “That’s because they’re the same person, hon. Are you suffering from short-term memory loss? That problem was solved last night.”
Ced screwed his eyes up against the sunlight. “Sal, think about it. If my program is used by anyone else – and there are people emailing me daily about it – sooner or later one of them is going to compare two or more of the artists that John Andrews has been. They’re not going to be able to differentiate them because they can’t be differen
tiated.”
“Why is that a problem?”
“Because they will think the program is faulty and come back to me with tons of questions. Questions I won’t be able to answer because, Sal, no one knows about John Andrews and it’s going to have to remain that way. Just because we’ve discovered his secret doesn’t mean we can tell the world. That would be totally irresponsible and potentially very dangerous for him. We might no longer live in the fifteenth century, but there are still plenty of prejudices out there. There is no way that his secret can become public knowledge.”
“You know, the same thoughts occurred to me, Mr Fisher.” Frank Young had walked into the kitchen and heard the end of their conversation. Ced glanced across at him, noting with irritation how perfectly fresh he looked.
“It’s a dilemma. You can’t release the program in case its apparent shortcomings are spotted, and yet if you don’t, someone else somewhere will write a very similar program eventually, and they will have the same problems.”
“That’s true,” said Sally, “but they will be working without the knowledge of Andrews’ DNA results. They will think, like Ced did, that there’s a problem in the code.”
“And never be able to resolve it,” added Ced.
“Surely,” suggested Sally, “it will be a long time before anyone starts comparing a minor fifteenth-century artist with a minor nineteenth century one, say.”
“You’d think so,” replied Ced, “but with all the hi-res images available, they are going to do exactly what the prof suggested last night and run everything against everything else, simply because they can. And then the apparent paradox will surface.”
“Then,” smiled the professor, “for any one else who decides to write their own program, it will just have to remain a paradox. But for yours, Mr Fisher, I should have thought it would be possible for you to hide some code in it that makes it give a false result whenever any of the different John Andrews personas are compared. That way it would never match an Andrews with a Perini or anyone else.”
Ced rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It would be totally dishonest,” he said.
Then he nodded slowly as his mind started working on the problem.
“It would have to be very well hidden – the program is going to be scrutinised very thoroughly.”
He paused and then grinned. “But I think it’s do-able. And it will solve things with Corrado and Lawrence. I’ll just tell them I’ve cracked the problem.”