ONE
On New Year’s Eve, 2019, a bearded jogger, shivering visibly in orange Lycra tights, chased after a plaid fedora that a frigid night wind swirling in off the Pacific had snatched from his head. He vaulted the fence that separated the Golden Gate Bridge’s pedestrian walkway from its outbound traffic lanes, snagged one running shoe on the fence’s top rail, then sprawled into an onrushing Mercedes’ path.
Panic-braking, shrieking tires smoking, the Merc stopped inches short of crushing the man’s skull.
Behind the Mercedes, Manuel Colibri, CEO of the world’s most valuable, and arguably least public, corporation, watched the drama from his driver’s seat. But he held tight with both hands to the steaming mug beneath his nose, as his Galvani prototype stopped itself feet short of the Mercedes.
Deceleration nodded Manuel’s head forward just enough that warm liquid wet his lips with hints of clove. But not a drop of chai spilled.
Ahead, the bearded man snatched up his hat, recrossed the fence, then squinted into the headlight stream he had interrupted.
The workaholics behind those headlights now raced to escape downtown San Francisco before a phalanx of city police closed the bridge approaches.
The jogger waved his FitMitt monitor glove, which blinked red like a timer ticking toward zero as it announced his rapid pulse. “My bad, drudge-monkeys!”
The jogger backpedaled on along the walkway toward the crowd ahead of him and smacked butt-first into one of the gold-and-blue helmeted Highway Patrol officers deployed, hands on hips, every ten yards along the bridge proper.
The CHP cop scowled, caught his balance, and ignored the whole incident. Tonight, Manuel Colibri thought, hipsters ranked last on a policeman’s list of preventable evils.
Pop. Pop-pop.
Isolated raindrops rattled off the Galvani’s twenty-first-century windscreen, like sixteenth-century grapeshot.
Ping.
The car’s console weather widget lit, chimed, and announced, “Manny, a storm is arriving earlier, colder, and stronger than forecast. If you wish to know more, say ‘More.’”
Wind swirled more rain in through the car’s open side windows, and the droplets needled Manny’s neck and cheek. The wind also pricked his nostrils with the sour odor of rubber scorched off the Merc’s tires.
Manny smiled.
Not at the cold or the wet or the smell of burnt rubber, though he had come to relish piquant airborne sensations. Manny smiled at the irony. He already knew a storm was coming, but a storm that bid to change not the weather but the human race.
The jogger had delayed traffic for barely longer than it took to send a text. Nonetheless, behind and alongside the Galvani, horns bawled.
Manny shook his head.
The longer he lived, the more it amazed him that every human soul on Earth rushed toward the future’s uncertain promise, when the only certain promise that had ever awaited there was death.
The diesel Mercedes lurched forward, and the electric Galvani, silent and unbidden, glided behind it.
The outbound traffic inched toward a flashing red LED board suspended above the bridge’s deck. The closer Manny approached the board, the more densely the joggers alongside him packed the bridge’s pedestrian walkway.
The board read:
START LINE
RUN FOR EVER NEW YEAR’S 5K,
PRESENTED BY ELCIE, THE EARTH LONGEVITY COALITION
BRIDGE WILL CLOSE TO VEHICULAR TRAFFIC 11 p.m.–1 a.m.
Some of the fun run entrants jogged in place, heads bent over their phones’ screens. Others cupped hands around glowing joints, as much to warm fingers as to get high.
They wore crayon-bright tights, matched to even brighter sneakers. And bought with wages paid them by the tech and biotech employers who chauffeured them daily to cubicle farms, which sprawled south from the Golden Gate to San Jose, where ideas grew wild.
These bourgeois idea farmers were turning San Francisco’s diverse, gritty six and a half square miles as white and as hip as a designer phone, and they had gathered tonight to party, not to mount the barricades of ELCIE’s revolution. But all of them were party to that revolution, bound to it as tightly as the insurgents in any revolution in human history. They not only expected to live forever, the work they did every day was bootstrapping their own expectations toward reality.
Before 2010, serious gerontologists ridiculed predictions that the first person who would live to age 150 was already alive. Five years later, in 2015, biogerontology’s paradigm had shifted so far that Google had announced a $1.5 billion investment in its California Life Company affiliate. Suddenly, predictions that the first person who would live, not just to age 150 but to age 1,000, was already alive were debatable rather than ridiculous.
Tonight, five more years of explosive progress after Google announced Calico, immortality appeared as inevitable, at least to this visionary crowd, as the continuously accelerating fall of Isaac Newton’s apple had appeared to him.
Not that revolution immunized revolutionaries against objets bourgeois. Most of the crowd wore flashing FitMitt monitor/safety gloves, like the one the hipster jogger wore.
FitMitts were wrist candy, not miracles. But Manny’s life had taught him that, at least in the short run, candy outsold miracles.
As Cardinal Systems CEO, his last act before he’d left his office minutes earlier had been to announce a year-end bonus for every employee of Cardinal’s wildly profitable FitMitt unit. Each bonus was big enough to buy a Mercedes. Or a more-coveted Cardinal/Galvani from FitMitt’s affiliate, if one chose to endure the order backlog.
In 2019, every other Cardinal unit had been just as profitable as FitMitt and Galvani. And Manny had rewarded all his employees just as lavishly. Indeed, Carlsson had argued Manny into declaring January 2020 a paid sabbatical for all hands. Forbes reported that each day, seven of ten consumers connected to the world by their C-phones, or played with, drove, or otherwise benefited from, a Cardinal product. And that nine of ten of the world’s advanced-degreed workers rated a position at Cardinal as their dream job.
The outbound traffic lanes squeezed right into one single lane at the race start line, bottlenecked so cops could stare down into each car before releasing it to cross the bridge.
The officer who waved Manny through frowned in at him.
Not, Manny thought, because he looked like a terrorist. Like a million other bronze-complected men of indeterminate age and small stature who wore off-the-rack suits and cut their own hair, Manny Colibri just looked too ordinary to drive a Galvani.
He smiled again. He also looked too ordinary to hold the immortality revolution’s fate in his hands.
Once past the start line, the cars sped up, rain or not. The walkway stretched, nearly empty, alongside them out across the bridge’s center span.
Two khaki-vested photographers, posted to record the impending stampede, bent over cameras, sheltering them from the onrushing weather. Beyond the pair, an elite African racer warmed up, bounding like a slim, brown gazelle.
Abruptly, the sky so blackened with rain that the deluge eclipsed the light from the bridge’s street lamps.
Distant thunder boomed. Somewhere a transformer popped. The bridge lamps flickered, then quit completely.
The Galvani widened the angle and intensity of its headlights, its sensors groped forward, and it crept ahead, independent of the bridge’s feeble emergency lights.
On the bridge’s unsheltered center span, howling wind rocked the car on its suspension and drove rain in torrents through the Galvani’s windows.
Bing-bing.
The Galvani chimed and its synthetic voice warned, “Manny, it’s too wet in here. Please watch your hands and arms while I close my side glass.”
The windows hissed closed and cut out the storm.
Manny gasped as lightning, a meteorological Bay Area rarity, cracked above the Golden Gate’s north tower and lit the car’s interior like the noon sun.
Boom!
The thunderclap echoed and Manny so stiffened that his lap belt pre-tensioned itself across his thighs.
Darkness returned and Manny could see barely twenty feet in any direction. But the Galvani’s display showed that the distance to cars ahead and behind had grown.
Yet Manny wasn’t alone. Lightning flashed again, and he glimpsed the elite runner, now huddled shivering and wide-eyed, beside the walkway fence.
The next flash illuminated another man fifty yards ahead. Dressed in a jogging suit, face protected by a ski mask, he stood erect at the fence, leaning into the wind as he peered back at the traffic creeping toward him.
By the time another bolt flashed, the Galvani had closed the distance to the man to twenty yards. He was too beefy to be a racer. In one gloved hand the man cupped against his chest a dark object. A phone? Perhaps a race photographer’s camera?
The rain closed down like a drawn curtain across the Galvani’s windscreen, and Manny moved both hands onto the Galvani’s steering wheel.
A needless precaution. If the man ahead leapt into the traffic lanes, like the bearded jogger had, the Galvani would stop itself before Manny could even twitch.
Manny flicked his eyes to the rearview, remembering the nervous cops. Could the object the misfit man held be a gun?
Manny snorted softly. He had long ago conquered both naiveté and paranoia. Nonetheless, caution had always served him well, and his fingers regripped the wheel.
The Galvani reached the span’s midpoint, where the bridge’s main suspension cables curved down almost to the bridge deck. Through the rain the massive cables, just yards to Manny’s right, were just dark shadows. But ahead the flailing wipers cleared the windscreen and the car caught the man in its headlights. His eyes, dark and narrow, stared in at Manny. The object in his hand was blocky, black, the size and shape of a phone or a small camera, not a gun.
Manny’s fingers relaxed a millimeter. Once the man was behind him, Manny pursed his lips, then said, “Rear. IR. Magnify.”
The white-on-gray infrared image produced by the man’s body heat against the cold night flickered on the center console screen as Manny spoke, then swelled and sharpened.
The man spun, ran toward San Francisco, and turned his head to stare back toward the Galvani. He raised the object in his hand, as though he were dialing a phone.
Manny’s brow wrinkled. Why—?
In that moment Manny felt the explosion lift the car and saw its flash as he heard it. The car jerked and rolled over on its long axis, up and away from the bridge’s centerline.
Below him, out the side window, Manny glimpsed the gargantuan red-orange steel rope that was the bridge’s east side suspension cable, as the car spun above and beyond it.
For a heartbeat, gravity balanced the bomb blast’s upward force. The bomb blast that Manny realized, too late, a fleeing assassin had triggered with his phone. The Galvani hung in space, nothing between it and the Golden Gate Channel’s black waves but rain and wind.
The math was simple, but facts recovered from an eidetic memory boiled up quicker in Manny’s mind, and delivered the bad news accurately enough.
The blast had tossed the Galvani over the bridge’s side. The height above water of the Golden Gate’s upward-arching deck at the span’s midpoint, plus the distance the Galvani must have risen to clear the side suspension cable, had to total over three hundred feet.
A human body, or a car containing one, would take maybe four seconds to fall that far, accelerating while it fell as inevitably as Isaac Newton’s apple.
Galvanis performed industry-best when DOT crashed them at forty miles per hour. But Manny and the prototype would strike the water at seventy-five miles per hour, give or take. The car would crush under a force greater than one hundred G. Pilots blacked out at less than twelve G. An average human body suffered certain fatal damage when subjected to sixty-five G.
The Galvani tumbled through the storm.
Manuel Colibri didn’t spend his four airborne seconds wondering why or who. He didn’t spend them wishing his engineers had built some secret-agent escape mechanism into this car. He only thought it ironic that after so long it would all end for him where it had started. In the water.