3. Aches and Pains
The apartment that Callie Praxis and her daughter had moved into came with a food-grade three-dee printer in the kitchen. Callie had never tried it, or not for anything more complicated than cornflakes on the one morning they ran out. First, because she was never much of a cook and figured her skills wouldn’t improve by programming a machine. Second, because she didn’t have all the necessary cartridges. The ones labeled malt fiber, corn syrup, and fructose had already been loaded, and she guessed the previous tenant liked cornflakes, too.
Of course, she had used hardware printers—those fed by cartridges of polymers, metalized epoxies, colored dyes, and lacquer finishes—plenty of times before, both at work and at home. They were wonderful for making on the fly objects that tended to get lost at the bottom of drawers—a metric socket wrench when you needed it, pieces of the Lego set that had gone missing, and now and then a hair clip. The cartridges were always at hand, and the programmed patterns were easily available online.
By now Callie had decided that she and her daughter were eating way too much takeout. Since she had the machine, she might as well try it. But she didn’t want to jeopardize a complete meal by screwing up with something complicated and involuted, like a casserole or a steak. She felt adventurous enough to leave dessert to the machine, because it was the part of a meal she could field with ice cream from the freezer if something went disastrously wrong.
Callie decided on a lemon meringue pie, because it was made in simple layers and shouldn’t be too taxing. Pie was also really hard to make from scratch, with all those separate operations for the crust, filling, and topping. So she downloaded the program, listed out the necessary cartridges—gluten paste, starch, unsaturated lipids, gelatin, citrus oil, albumen, and more fructose—and brought them home with the rest of the meal to be cooked in the old-fashioned way. While she was boiling the pasta and heating packets of Bolognese sauce for their dinner, she loaded the cartridges and punched in the program.
When it came time for dessert, she brought out the finished pie. Rafaella cooed appreciatively. And, in fact, it looked good: the crust around the edges was properly flaky, and the puffs of meringue were brown on top shading to white lower down. It cut cleanly, and bits of crust even fell off the fork. But it was not a complete success. The crust and the lemon filling tasted okay, not too soggy, not too oily, if a bit bland. But the meringue—because of those convoluted swirls, or so Callie guessed—was crunchy all the way through instead of just crisp on the outside.
Rafaella ate her piece but she declined a second.
“You don’t like it, sweetheart?” Callie asked.
“It’s good, mama.” But she was making a face. “Just not like we got back home.” By which she meant back in Italy.
“Few things are,” Callie agreed.
* * *
John Praxis had learned that growing old—he was entering his late seventies, practically knocking on the door of his eightieth birthday—was not a simple or a straight-line process. Not like watching your hair go white or suddenly wanting to take naps in the afternoon. Aside from the big-ticket, life-threatening events—like a failing heart or kidney disease, which stem cell technology could now fix by growing new organs in a bottle and surgically implanting them—the body continued to suffer at first dozens and then hundreds of small hurts and insults on almost a daily basis.
Cartilage wore away at the joints until bone rubbed on bone.
Tendons thinned and strained, and muscles grew flaccid.
The endocrine system shut down; the sex drive failed.
Corneas clouded up while retinas became detached.
Nerve sheaths failed and palsy shook the hands.
Gums became inflamed and the teeth fell out.
The stomach and bowels grew constricted.
The immune system just went haywire.
The body loaded up with new toxins.
And every day brought more pain.
Although none of these age-related conditions was lethal by itself, collectively they made life not worth living. But he was also discovering that, while molecular biologists and genetic engineers had been building single organs from stem cells, the body’s own repair kit, other medical researchers had used these tools to address the more intrusive, systemic failures. In time almost any part of the body that might wear out, become inflamed and infected, go wrong through auto-immune disorders and degenerative diseases, or simply deteriorate under a lifetime load of unfiltered heavy metals and molecular litter—all of this damage could be repaired and replaced, while the underlying systems could be made stronger and supplemented to last longer.
Since the Treaty of Louisville, under which the Federated Republic officially defunded California’s socialized meddling in the health care market, Praxis had signed up for a half dozen of these procedures. He had his joints refinished, his gums abraded and resurfaced, three decayed and metal-filled teeth replaced with budding implants, his eyeballs totally regrown, his stomach and small intestine relined, and his large intestine replaced. He shied away from the purely cosmetic procedures, like hair regrowth and skin replacement, but those were available, too, for the vain and body conscious.
After two years of replacement therapies, John Praxis looked and felt younger than he had in a decade. He was even running again, now that his knees and ankles no longer hurt him.
Of course, the social pundits and medical ethicists moaned and sighed over the cost of all this medical care for the elderly. People on the leading edge of this new wave of the “wellderly” or “fountain of youthers” or “extended lifers”—as Praxis’s cohort were coming to be called—usually paid more for their procedures and occasionally suffered from imperfect techniques that had to be salvaged and redone. He might spend overnight for observation in the hospital after a procedure that could readily have been done on an outpatient basis. But as these techniques improved and became more widespread, they were offered by licensed medical technicians bearing associate degrees instead of board-certified doctors with nine years of college, med school, internship, and residency behind them. The established techniques were also supported by automated processes and assembly-line approaches. They were rapidly becoming common and cheap.
Youth, health, and beauty were now accepted as ordinary, in the same way that the cars and smartphones had been accepted in Praxis’s middle years. And he had to remind everyone who grumbled about the cost of his procedures that in their earliest incarnations the automobile, personal computer, and cellular telephone service had all been dismissed as “rich men’s toys.” Now they were the necessities of everyday life, available at vastly reduced cost.
Formerly, the mantra among his cohort—the men and women in their sixties and seventies who were rapidly approaching what had once been thought the end of life—was “You’re only as old as you feel.” Now the truism was “You’re only as old as you want to be.” Or, for those who were heedless and neglected to take care of their bodies, “as you allow yourself to be.”
But still, about every six months the morning would bring a new ache or infirmity as something else sputtered and offered warning signs of giving out. Chasing these maladies around his body was like chasing a mouse around the kitchen with a hammer. It was time consuming and demoralizing, and he wondered where it would all end.
It was only after his fourth trip to the bathroom each night for two months, and urging his urine to flow even then, that he took up the problem with his current doctor, Virginia Mills.
After a backdoor digital inspection that he did not at all appreciate and the return of blood work from the lab, she was ready with a diagnosis. “You have prostatic hyperplasia,” she said.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked, meaning “cancer.”
“Probably not. The condition is usually benign. Your prostate gland is simply enlarged, and that obstructs the urethral canal, making it harder for you to urinate. I’m surprised you haven’t had this problem before.”
“Yeah,” Praxis said, thinking that he’d been getting up in the night for years. But only recently had he been unable to void his bladder, not even a dribble, or not without pain. “What can we do about it?” he asked.
“You can manage the condition,” Dr. Mills said. “Don’t drink water before bedtime, and avoid alcohol and caffeine entirely. Don’t take decongestants or—well, I can give you a list of medications to avoid.”
“What about treatment?”
“We can give you an alpha blocker, which relaxes the smooth muscle in there and lets the urine flow. Or you can take a hormone inhibitor, which treats the cause of the enlargement in the first place—but that can also damage your sex drive.”
“And what else can you do?”
“We can grow you a new gland, of course.”
“Of course,” he said, thinking of his old pal the Tin Woodman, whose body was slowly taken over by replacement parts.
“That’ll take a couple of weeks,” Mills said. “Maybe less, because we already have samples of your stem cells on ice and your genome programmed in the cooker.”
“I suppose the replacement surgery will hurt?”
“Oh, like a son of a bitch,” she agreed.
* * *
After her most recent late-evening call to Uncle Matteo, Callie Praxis sat up in bed for a couple of hours, cradling the now-disconnected phone handset, staring at the bedroom wall, and thinking bad thoughts. If she were still a smoker—a vice she gave up in her twenties when she was just out of college—she would have been halfway through a pack by now.
The old man was actually out when she called, off on some early morning errand, and she had to talk with his son Carlo. She then made the mistake of trying to do her business through him. But really, she reasoned after her third imaginary cigarette, it wouldn’t have gone any better with Matteo himself.
She had tried to be reasonable. “Given the amount of trouble your Ms. Kunstler has sown around here—” And when Carlo didn’t grasp the word sown, she had to interrupt herself and try again with spread and scattered. “—I think it’s best we cool our business relationship for a little while.”
“She was working for you, Contessa,” he insisted, repeating his father’s line. “Certainly, if you did not have adequate controls …”
“I thought she was honest. I thought your father and I had an honest relationship, an understanding. I was merely pointing out business opportunities—”
“For which you were collecting a finder’s fees, yes?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “But that was—”
“Over and above the value in construction work that our investments enabled your company to obtain. Is this not one hand washing the other?”
“Well, technically, but you—”
“With us, it is no different. We cannot survive simply on the percentage returns from those investments. On the interest paid. There must also be incentives, gratuities—what do the English say? ‘Emoluments.’ Mariene was our agent to arrange and collect those emoluments.”
“But in the United States—excuse me, the Federated Republic—such incentives are called ‘graft.’ They make everyone nervous. They involve the police and the courts. The head of my Legal Department is now investigating, and she’s a straight-arrow type, squeaky clean—not at all Italian in her outlook. So I need you to back off on the entitlements. And I need to stop bird-dogging your investments. I can’t take any more finder’s fees, because—well, because it looks bad.”
The cell signal was quiet for a moment. The younger man’s face appeared frozen on her screen. “It is too late to put the genie back in the bottle, Contessa.”
“You must trust me on this. We have to cool it while Mariene’s little stunt at bid rigging goes to trial and gets resolved.”
“You don’t understand,” Carlo said. “Things are already in motion. We have hooks set all over the West Coast. You are merely the bait fish. You can’t swim away now. We own a piece of you.” With that, the carrier cut off and her earpiece went dead.
So Callie sat up brooding and stubbing out imaginary cigarette butts, wondering how she could extricate herself from her dealings with the di Rienzis, or at least shield her company from the toxic side effects.
* * *
Antigone Wells was following her morning makeup routine at the dressing table. After carefully dabbing on foundation and powder, smoothing in blusher, lining her eyelids, brushing in shadow, and applying mascara to her lashes, she leaned in toward the mirror, turned her lips out in a tiny pout, and dabbed on her favorite hot-pink lip gloss. On the third pass with the applicator stick, her face suddenly changed before her eyes.
The familiar, everyday face she knew and had been cleaning, moisturizing, and cherishing for years disappeared as if a mist had melted away. Her real face, the everyday face she wore to the public, the skin she was wearing now, became stunningly apparent. It started with the area around her mouth. Her lips radiated a network of tiny wrinkles. The corners of her mouth disappeared against two deep folds that started up around and along either side of her nose. Her eyes looked out of deep pockets whose underside failed of being lined and livid only because of the concealer and powder she used. Her cheeks sagged. Her jawline slumped into the beginnings of a double chin.
Age has finally caught up with me, she thought sadly.
Wells had known for years—really, for a couple of decades—that she could no longer pass for a fresh-faced girl of twenty or even thirty. But still she had accounted herself a handsome woman, needing only a touch or two of color and gloss to bring back the image of the girl she once was. Now all that greasepaint and powder looked thick and garish, hiding nothing and instead calling attention to itself, like a mask, like a clown’s makeup.
It was true that John seemed to like her face well enough. When he looked into her eyes, she saw no hint of speculation, disappointment, or remorse. But would this present face be enough to hold him? She remembered that, at the beginning of their relationship, he would occasionally by mistake call her “Tippi”—confusing her with a film actress popular in the nineteen-sixties, during his own childhood. When Wells had looked up that woman online, she saw the resemblance immediately. She also noticed that the actress had perfect, flawless skin. One day John would wake up to her real face—an aging, sagging face, just as she was seeing it now. And what would he do then?
She knew many women her age—and even a decade or two younger—who had turned to medical solutions to retain their beauty. They smoothed the wrinkles with botulinum toxin and collagen injections. They tightened sagging eyelids, cheeks, jaws, and throats with cosmetic surgery. They let the doctors trim, stretch, and pull at what was left of cheekbones and noses. But Wells could always spot these women and describe for herself exactly which procedures they had bought. To Wells, they didn’t look young and girlish but instead seemed pinched and severe, with faces pulled ever so slightly out of alignment, with narrowed eyes and tight, angry mouths. Witchlike, if not indeed simply frozen and lifeless. She wanted none of that.
But now she was also going to be a mother, for the first time, and at almost seventy years of age. True, the boy would come from her body only through reference to her DNA, and not even from one of her own eggs. But he would know Antigone Wells as his mother, gaze up into her face, and call her “Mama,” while everyone looked on and tried to smile.
“And I will look more like his grandmother,” she whispered to the mirror. “Not good, Antigone. Not good at all.”
* * *
On one of his rare visits to the Sansome Street headquarters, Brandon Praxis stopped by the cubicle where Penny Winston ran the technical end of the business from three console screens, a keyboard, and a microphone headset that clamped down on her curly brown hair. When she turned away from work to answer his knock he saw that, wonder of wonders, she was not wearing her usual jeans and vaguely subversive tee shirt. This morning—and maybe for a while now—she wore a navy-blue, polka-dot dress with a high neckline, a little white belt, and flouncy skirt. She also wore nylon stockings and matching, dark-blue pumps. She looked like an Iowa teenager heading off to church.
Her eyes brightened and she smiled when she saw him.
“Do you want to go get lunch?” he asked.
“Gosh, is it noon already?”
“Just about.”
“Sure!”
She took off the headset, ruffled her hair with her fingertips, and stood up from her desk chair. The dress swirled around her knees. She picked up a light jacket—one without camouflage—and joined him in the hallway. He noticed she didn’t bother to close down any applications or switch off any devices. Then he remembered that she did not actually run the computer system so much as collaborate with it.
“Where do we eat?” she asked.
“By now, you know this neighborhood better than I do.”
“Okay. Um … do you like vegetarian Chinese?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Are you a vegan?”
“Not normally.” She grinned. “But it’s the only kind where they don’t chop up the meat with the bones still inside.”
Brandon grinned in return. That summed up his feelings about truly ethnic Chinese cooking—the only kind you could get this close to Chinatown. “You lead,” he said.
As they had settled into the booth at the Jade Garden, Brandon suggested Penny order for both of them. Instead, she discussed choices from the menu and gave him veto power, which he found the most satisfactory solution. When the waiter brought a pot of black tea, she picked up a plastic chopstick, opened the lid, and stirred at the leaves inside.
“You know …” she said, then pinched her lips together.
“What?” he asked. She seemed suddenly shy.
“Never mind. It’s not your concern.”
“No, you started to say …?”
“Well, I guess you should know, as head of security.”
“Are you having trouble? Is someone harassing you?”
“Nothing like that. Just … I think you’ve got a ghost.”
“I don’t understand. You mean, in the building?”
“No, in your computer. Kind of a presence.”
“What does it, um, look like?” he asked.
“I haven’t actually seen it!” she said.
“How do you know it’s there?”
“Because Rover says so.”
“Does he … tell you … what it looks like?”
“He hasn’t actually seen it, either. But he senses something. Sometimes bits of data will appear in a database and then, when he tries to run a trace, they suddenly go missing. It’s as if he’s growing a little … forgetful.”
“Can that happen to an intelligence?” Brandon wondered.
“Not with the six terabytes of extra capacity we built into him.”
“Then could it be another intelligence? Maybe one playing games?”
“Not in the same system. That would be … oh, schizophrenic.”
“Well, I’m not sure what I can do about this. Have you talked to Callie?”
“Not yet. I don’t have more than a notion—just Rover’s suspicions.”
“Please tell me when you’ve got something solid. I work better with a target.”
“And you’re good at cleaning up things,” she said with a grin.
“Hush, Penny!” he whispered. “That’s gotta be our secret.”
Still grinning, she twisted her fingers in front of her lips and then brushed them off—locking her mouth and throwing away the key—just as the waiter came to take their order.
* * *
After the required nine months, plus or minus two weeks, Antigone Wells returned with John to collect their new son. They were met at Parthenotics, Inc.’s offices by their first counselor—now their case worker—Ashley Benedict. She had a folder of paperwork for them to sign and final payments to arrange.
Among other things, Benedict produced a certificate from the City and County of San Francisco attesting that Alexander Wells Praxis—they had settled on the first name to honor John’s immigrant grandfather, the other two so that their family names were conjoined—was “the biological offspring and adopted child of one Ioannis Mixalis Praxis, a widowed man, and Antigone Leigh Wells, an unmarried woman,” that the baby had been born within geographic confines of the county, and that he thus had full citizenship rights in the State of California, Federated Republic of America. He was as legal as could be.
When they were done with the business end of the transaction, a female attendant in hospital whites brought in an articulated crèche/carrier basket and set it on the conference table.
Wells stood up and peered into the carrier’s recesses. A pale, chubby face nestled among the folds of a light-blue blanket shifted and looked up into the shadow that her head was casting. She stared into his eyes—they were dark blue and quite self-aware. She studied his nose. She opened his blanket to count fingers and toes. She even pulled the tabs on his diaper and examined his tiny penis, which had already been circumcised.
“He’s perfect,” the attendant said happily.
It seemed so. All the parts were there. Everything had the correct form, for a newborn. Wells didn’t know exactly what she had expected. Talons? Cloven hooves? But still … She was haunted by those thousand other embryos—or “parthenotes”—tiny proto-Alexanders, down to his pearly, shell-like fingernails, who had failed to survive, who had not made “the first cull.”
“Is anything wrong?” John asked. “You’re frowning, like you’re worried.”
“No. No. … He’s perfect,” she answered, consciously echoing the attendant.
John bent his head over the carrier. “Hello, baby boy. Welcome to the family.”