Chapter 5
“Yet this was just the revelation that you had work in progress. How did you manage the full disclosure?”
“She would ask me every few months how my research was going. I would give vague answers about some progress.
In 1985, once I was sure there would be no negative outcomes, I asked her if she would like to join the experiment. She accepted, so I took a close-up picture of her sitting on the terrace, flooded with the spring sun, and we continued our lives. From time to time I would ask her to take a beauty cream bath and then the pills. During the occasional request for an update, she would add a comment that she was not feeling any different.
Then on April 25, 1995, I took another close-up picture of her and put it next to the one taken ten years before. She stared in silence. After a while she whispered, “Wow, Louis, well you are certainly on to something. What’s next?”
“I guess we need to keep quiet and wait for a while. A very long while, in all likeliness. Do you think people are ready for this to go public?”
She immediately responded, “Not if I recall our conversations with the terrace guests, nor if I look at my patients. But we risk waiting forever.”
“True. We might have a difficult quest in front of us. Even if during the last few years, things in the world have improved a lot. We might still need to wait several years before we bring this to light. And the two of us cannot do it alone. We need to build a bigger team.”
“Build a team…with some of our friends? How would you pick them?”
“Let’s profile them first. We need to like and trust them. And they have to contribute the skills and connections we do not have, in case we have to disappear and reappear under new identities. But by this alone, the list would contain many names.
Next, they have to be absolutely committed to keeping the secret. We do not need the idealists or believers in the progression of mankind, nor those who could try to use the discovery just for their own benefit. You know that among our guests, the opportunistic crooks far outnumber the naive philanthropists.”
I continued, having this checklist memorized by heart,
“We must search for disenchanted people, yet with a very strong sense of their value so that given the right challenge they will fully commit themselves.”
“Yes, I agree. You are asking these people to form the first generation of a new mankind - if we can still even call it that. They must stay quiet until the time is right. This is the biggest secret, with the biggest reward, and the biggest risks.”
“At the end of the day, the deal is very simple. I give them immortality in exchange for their service to the organization and they are free to do whatever they want with their Telomerax, without telling anyone about the discovery.”
“But they will still depend on you to get the drug. How do you know this won’t provoke rivalry or resentment?”
“That’s why you will not find any scientist among them. I want to avoid any risk of professional competition. The team needs talents we do not have. Too much similarity brings rivalry; differences are much more manageable.
As for the drug, I will give them as much Telomerax as they want. I will never stand between them and immortality, as long as they help protect us. After all, you do not grow jealous of the doctor that heals you.”
“Ok, Louis, but how about emotional ties?
You cannot ask people to become immortal and just pretend they will be willing to leave their loved ones behind, or that they will not fall in love over the course of centuries, even if they are the most materialistic people on earth. You can handpick them with no relatives now, but what if they change ideas, get lonely and want out of the project, or fall in love and want their new significant other onboard?
Maybe somebody with the wrong characteristics?
I mean, you trust me now but can you trust me forever? You know you can’t. Even I cannot commit to that. Fifteen years together have made me sure enough to commit the rest of my life to you. Now we are talking about eternity, and honestly I do not know if I can do that. No lies, Louis.”
“I agree with you that from this standpoint, we must reduce risks. Let’s put some facts together.
The drug is not a one-time deal. If you stop taking it, aging restarts after a few weeks and you are back in the mortal ranks. So people can opt out if they want, or even opt back in. I do not want to threaten anyone with things like ‘if you are out, we will kill you.’
Violence is not my thing. I just want to make sure the secret is kept. The drug is made in such a way that you cannot deformulate it. I spent the last ten years tweaking it so that any attempt to analyze it or break down its molecular structure, would destroy it.
And it is even harder to track how it works once it is absorbed into the body. The real issue is how to discourage them from telling governments or organized crime groups about Telomerax whereabouts.
They will know that there are ten very well hidden copies of the drug formula and its manufacturing process, waiting to be released to the world if anything bad happens to me or you. They used to be stored in clunky safes, now they are kept in sleek cases with ten floppy disks inside. That way, if any one of our future team members sends me additional and unwelcomed guests, I have enough leeway to negotiate with the new entrants. And those who betrayed our trust, might soon be on the black list of the newcomers they tried to put against us.”
“I see sleeping with an analyst has taught you something, Louis,” she joked. “How about children? I was planning not to have them, but this is opening up new opportunities.”
“Children can be given immortality only when they become adults. This is due to the fact that I have not run any experimentation on them and I am afraid Telomerax could have very nasty side effects on a developing body. I do not think this is a problem. You do not want to freeze your kids at age two. Then parents have about twenty to twenty-five years to work out a way to tell them about the secret and enroll them in the program, or otherwise, let them go.”
“Back to our interview, Louis, we all know that at the end of the process only four clients of the list made it into the so-called “Olympic Circle”, with two of them being allowed to add their significant others. That makes six people in total. Do you have anything to share about the Olympic Circle that maybe the media didn’t cover?”
“Where do I start?...Well, let’s go in chronological order. One of the least known parts, is the way Dora and I recruited them. What happened after we were discovered in 2010, has been covered in several books and movies. But, just for the record, I did not invent the name “Olympic Circle”. That was made up much later by some tabloids. True secrecy requires no name.”