|Sci|: You’re Invited to the Aging Rebellion |Fi|: A Singular Panda Chapter 1
Science IRL: A radical take on aging and dying + Fic: A Good Samaritan alien and an anti-aging pharmaceutical tycoon take on Earth’s big problems
|Science IRL|: You’re Invited to the Aging Rebellion
Do you trust me yet?
Good, stay on the fence.
I’ll start with a wee disclaimer: this month will be a bit different. Like the changing of the seasons here in New England, this month’s theme will be heavier than what you’ve seen so far in ScienceFictionIRL. This is a somber beckoning to a collective drifting inward–a communal examination of the skeletons underpinning the kaleidoscope of our everyday lives. But the goal is to come out the other side inspired, comforted, and I hope bolstered against the winter to come.
Ready?
Let’s dig in.
What comes to mind when you think of aging? Arthritis and Alzheimers, Bengay and bingo, crow’s feet and canes?
Death?
I bet for most of you, aging and dying are a bonded pair, like a macabre peanut butter and jelly. You probably think this doomsday duo are a “natural” part of life because, well, everyone before us went that direction. And the lucky ones got to do a thorough job of that aging part.
It’s inevitable, you say.
Yet, doesn’t it feel like the rules just don’t apply to you on a personal, daily level? Maybe you’re thinking you don’t relate since your virtual shopping carts are packed with eye cream, collagen pills, or the next best antioxidant vitamin guaranteed to extend your youth if not your life.
I hear you. I see you. I might be a version of you.
When’s the last time it really hit you, though?
Sometimes I do a type of stoic meditation to soak in the knowledge that I’ll shatter to dust one day. It’s part of a beautiful and incredibly grounding stoic practice called memento mori. It’s a dependable path to deep gratitude and to refocusing on your life’s purpose.
Recently, someone close to me died. It should have whiplashed me back to this type of meditation. Instead, I orbit around the yearning to come to rest and be at rest with loss without partaking, aware that I’m in furious motion, but going nowhere like a meteor circling this core need.
When someone we love draws that ragged last breath, we feel a bone-deep, bewildering loss. It’s like we've been betrayed by the very foundation of our lives. The fabric of reality shivers in a silent, sinister breeze. The barrier between life and death seems fluid, shape-shifting—a selectively permeable portal where defenseless souls can suddenly fall through.
What if that feeling that this can’t be real or fair—that dissonance, even though this is all we’ve ever known—is a clue? What if aging and dying really aren’t the natural, inevitable end to the story?
Allow me to collect myself and return from ethereal back to scientific. I give you the thesis of this month’s science articles:
Most diseases, at their core, are related to the aging process at the cellular level.
What would happen if we stopped looking at aging as a natural process and instead treated it like a disease? A billion year pandemic?
In this month’s story, Bridgette is caught in her own cognitive dissonance about death. It’s one thing for her to have built a pharmaceutical research company that focuses on putting an end to aging, but it’s quite another for her to begin her own course of treatment.
She is undergoing her own “Pro-Aging Trance” which is a psychological state coined by anti-aging revolutionary Aubrey de Grey that describes how humans tend to put aging and death out of their minds because it feels inevitable and unfathomable, and to defend its merits. Trancers argue that aging and death ultimately benefit society in vital ways, including managing population, focusing humans on what’s really important in life, etc.
In recent years, a philosopher wrote a fantasy allegory describing this Trance called The Fable of the Dragon -Tyrant where death is a dragon that demands ten thousand people to be delivered for its dinner as tribute every night. The obligation falls to the King to organize and manage the logistics of the tribute, and the elderly are chosen to feed the dragon. When a scientist comes up with a plan to defeat the dragon, she is met with emphatic resistance that such an undertaking would be worth the King’s time and money. The detractors call the effort futile, ultimately distracting, and somehow incompatible with living a good human life since the knowledge that you’ll one day be dragon food inspires a certain focus and value on daily life.
Ready to talk to the scientist and take on the Dragon Tyrant?
In this series of articles, I’ll provide you with what you need for the quest with these anti-aging topics that could change your life…and death:
1) Defining Aging—Who’s Holding the Pen?
2) Revolutionary Companies Fighting the Dragon Today
3) Your Shield: Daily Habits
4) Your Sword: Therapies and Treatments
5) The Realm Without the Dragon: A Day in Your Life on Your 250th birthday
|Science Fiction|: A Singular Panda Chapter 1
Thirty-five years after the alien Hypyncretnak saved Earth from her Earthlings, my tantalizing Tarra Swiftly delivers the whole story to me, even though she doesn't believe a word of it.
"Morning, dearest Bridgette," Tarra says, smirking. "Here are the files, just like I promised--the day they were declassified." She drops an adorably antiquated USB drive between us on the bed.
She presses her palms into the tousled silk sheets on either side of the memory stick, leaning toward me to display as much cleavage as possible.
"Pretty please, promise not to get obsessed with this?"
Decades of missing Hyp helps me momentarily ignore Tarra's diversionary décolletage. A frizzle of electricity rides down my spine as I fish the USB drive from the tangle of sheets. The drive's metal body is cold against my fingertips. PROPERTY OF US GVT is stamped on its side. I uncap it, revealing the ancient, rectangular junction. If I can't scare up an old converter, I'll have to deconstruct the drive and build one to extract the data. Hardware is not my long suit. Looks like I'll have to go into the office today after all. Tarra won't love that.
"You must know I won't be able to shut up about this," I say. "I’ve been waiting for this little time capsule for decades! You were just a wee White House Correspondent when we were assigned to the E.T. executive order team!"
I smooth her blond hair behind her ear. She actually doesn't look much different than she did back then. She's been looking younger by the day for weeks due to my company's nanobot gene-editing injections. Now, she's weighing her affection for me against the resentment generally reserved for the Hypyncretnak topic. It's there in a wrinkle between her brows that finds no neighbors around her eyes.
Wait, weren't her crow’s feet there just yesterday? Those bots are working fast.
Unconsciously, my gaze floats over to my nightstand where the unopened pack of my first round of gene therapy prep lurks, hiding under my journal.
"Come on, Bridge, don't tell me you still think we should publish his story?"
I don't meet her gaze, focusing instead on the curve of her breast stretching slick fabric taut. It's one thing to watch mice in the lab regain energy and youthfulness after age regression therapy. It's quite another to watch your wife's body regain its round spryness in a matter of weeks.
My gut clenches. What if she changes too fast? What if there's something wrong with the treatments our testing didn't find? Why did I let the love of my life partake in generation one of our age regression process?
Tarra snatches the memory stick from my hand and holds it to her chin like a microphone.
"Decades ago in the days of fake news, the climate crisis had become irrefutable! With the doom of our species looming..." she says, mimicking old-fashioned news anchors. "A tall, talking octopus walked out of the ocean and used a payphone to call the White House. 'What's that, Sonny?' they said, 'You can reverse climate change?! You're hired!'"
I grab the memory stick back. It's my turn to be sarcastic.
"Suddenly, all nations began cooperating, taking on major financial losses and market risks--all on the word of an 'alien' that was really an AI muppet on a hovercraft, programmed by a still-anonymous, altruistic secret society. Global leaders overhauled their power sectors, moved whole cities, switched to renewables--actually recycled!"
I level her with my best Do You Really Believe That look.
She does.
"What’s more likely? An elaborate, politically-motivated manipulation or a Good Samaritan alien."
Tarra climbs out of bed and begins her morning stretch routine.
As Tarra reaches for her toes, I know down to mine that no one could have made Hyp nor have done what Hyp did. In 2018, no one had the technology to build a convincingly organic, fully autonomous robot. Furthermore, no one had the deep ecosystem understanding to implement Hyp's solutions to the climate apocalypse.
"I did my best work with him," I mumble, knowing Tarra felt her own backbreaking work on the E.T. project had founded her career in a farce.
"Yeah, you did all the work! Your team translated his 'Ecosystem Design Revisions' into thirty languages, wrote programs to enable grids to link up like never before, even closed whole cities down. You even changed the way Americans ate, for chrissakes! When's the last time we had a burger? Do you remember burgers?"
I fight the urge to say that I myself had not done those things, my companies had. Besides, I do miss burgers. Worse, I wonder if my work with Hyp that set me on this path founding global tech companies has also led me to this Icarus finale. Who am I to be messing with the human species with my latest Human rEvolution company?
But today isn't going to be about my doubts, it's going to be about Hyp's legacy. A mad curiosity swells in my chest. All the information I've craved is right here in my hands.
"I just...want everyone to know what he did," I say.
"No, you want us both to obsess over this. You want to get absorbed in research, with me writing and marketing--using all my contacts until we publish an exposé on your alien hero."
I can only smile guiltily.
"Ugh, Bridgette." Tarra offers a truce. "You're adorable, and I'm hungry." She straightens from an enviable backbend and walks off toward the kitchen, humming tunelessly.
"Wait, is that a no on the exposé thing?" I ask, teasing. She only hums louder.
I exhale a breath I didn't know I was holding. I really don't know how to react to the changes Tarra's purchased for her body from technology I helped create. I loved how she looked when she looked her age--my age. But I want to support her, and who am I to argue when my company has made youth and vitality as accessible as the Z-Pack?
In a few more treatments, I'll be married to someone who looks, and biologically is, decades younger than I.
Worse, I know she's eagerly pro-Singularity. The moment my company markets the digi-immortality service, she'll upload herself into a computer.
She has no qualms about becoming a machine and she has no doubts that I'll be right there beside her, in spite of my strong brand about loving my body just as it is.
I didn't know I had doubts until I had the pill pack. Even hidden under my journals, the eyes of the young woman on the package seem to find me like a search light wherever I am in our bedroom. No one knows better than I—well, besides my lab team and the generations of memorialized rats—how messy the first gene therapy era will be. It’s the first necessary step that could preserve the current generation of humans until computer upload is an option. It’s a pathway to immortality. Or it will be. Today it’s a narrow, fraying rope bridge over a starving maw of river rocks. My gut clenches like I’m on that bridge clinging to shredded ropes as decayed boards crumble underfoot.
Last year my doctors estimated I have until sixty-five to start reversing my aging before I'm irreparable. Sixty-three is flying by like the morning NYC to Beijing commute.
I almost reach for the pills to just get the process started, but then I look down at my wrinkled hand gripping the memory stick.
If I go into the office, I can probably get something out of Hyp's files today. An overwhelming gravity seems to pull me out of bed, a connection back to my alien mentor finally within my grasp.
To be continued….
Author’s Note—the Autumn with the career new leaf and the funeral
For me, Autumn usually brings lovely things—me and my Dad’s birthdays, pumpkin beer, other sundry squash, and fairs. It’s my favorite season.
This one is no exception, but I am feeling more of a transition than usual. Some positive, some not so.
Positive: I recently resigned from the tremendous company I was working for to transition into a career growth opportunity at another incredible space company. I’m beyond stoked about it. I was fortunate to get some time between for R&wR: Reading and wRiting.
Not so Positive: I’m grieving the loss of my Grandmother who recently left the helm as matriarch of our large family. After decades of stunning one and all by remembering all sixty-something(?more?) grandbabies’ birthdays—she died. Alzheimer’s.
If this had happened while I was writing the last installment about spacetime and the physics of parallel universes, my Author’s note would read something like: I selfishly hope in other universes we cure this stuff in time for her—the worlds need more people who honed warmth, kindness and love like Gramma Reva did. I label my hopes selfish, because in her heart, Gram was a staunch Christian lady and she lived a life of service in her own southern Baptist version of memento mori—living well intentionally because she knew time was short before joining the roll call in Heaven. Many of us in our family would say we witness that intention firsthand, and since she died, we also discovered decades of marginalia of her Bibles logging her practice. There were many variations on the theme: “Don’t let me waste time, Lord. Help me show the people I love how much they mean to me.”
Because her death coincides instead with this installment about a rebellion on age-related diseases, the tragedy of aging and Alzheimer’s is more personal and crystalized. I struggle to square her apparent peace and readiness to go to a Heavenly rest with my atheist, and mostly silly, parallel-universe-theories’ hope that there’s a world that still has her in it.
Because her legacy is alive and well in my family, I won’t do anything so small as to say this bit of writing is dedicated to her. But I will let my Author’s notes reflect thoughts about her. Initially, I thought it would be ‘too much’. For me and maybe you.
If it is too much for you—I welcome you to skip these Author’s notes for a while.
Stay tuned, and take good care of you.