Misspent Youth

8. DREAM ON

IT WAS A WARM, hazy summer day, with a strange orange-tinted sky as if twilight had started at lunch. They were on one of the manor’s big lawns, just Timmy and himself. Kicking a soccer ball about. Sweaters on the grass marked the goalposts. Timmy was about ten years old, skinny legs sticking out of baggy blue shorts. He ran back and forth, nudging the ball with his toe, swerving around imaginary opponents.

Jeff wanted to run after him. Tackle him. Lose the ball back to him again. As it should be between father and son. But all he could do was stand in the goal, his joints aching from arthritis, too ancient and wizened to move.

Timmy ran toward him, feet pounding, the ball bouncing along in front. He took a mighty kick, and the ball sailed past Jeff as feeble claw hands waved about uselessly in the air.

“Gooooal!” Timmy shrieked. He danced about on the spot, his arms raised high.

Jeff clapped delightedly. “Well done, son. Jolly well done.”

“Let’s play again. Play with me this time, Dad, please, I want us to play together.”

“I can’t, son.” The tears were rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Why, Dad, why?”

And all Jeff could do was stand there, just as he always did at this moment, hands reaching out while Timmy frowned and sulked. Every time the same. Every time he failed his son.

“Jeff?” It was a female voice, disembodied. “Jeff, can you hear me?”

Jeff moaned as the manor and its grounds wavered and darkened. This wasn’t part of the dream. Never before, anyway.

“Jeff?”

There was only the darkness of a foggy moonless night. And pain. An all-over sharp prickling that grew and grew, as if his skin was igniting. A thin wail escaped from his mouth. He could barely hear it.

“That’s it, Jeff, focus now, please. Focus on me.”

The darkness was fading out, as swirls of bright light emerged from all over. Jeff blinked furiously. He’d been dreaming, so this must be waking, he realized. Damn, it hurt. His skin was still inflamed, and now he could feel a deeper ache in every limb warning him not to move any muscle.

“What?” he gasped feebly.

His one simple word was greeted by a lot of people cheering. Idiots, couldn’t they see he needed help?

“Jeff, don’t try to move. Just keep calm. You’re fine. The suppressants are going to take a while to wear off.”

Soft tissues dabbed at his eyes, soaking up the moisture. The world resolved around him. Unsurprisingly, he was in some kind of hospital room, with a bank of equipment at one side of his bed. Two people dressed in medical smocks were bending over him, electronic instruments in their hands. More people stood at the end of the bed. He frowned, and concentrated on one of them.

“Timmy?” For some reason his lovely son was different. Older. His face was wound up with nervous apprehension.

Memories began to seep into Jeff’s sluggish thoughts.

“Hiya, Dad.” Tim’s voice was choked up with emotion.

“Hello, Jeff,” Sue said politely. She was standing next to Tim.

“Uh… what happened?” He worried he’d had some kind of accident.

“Can you tell us?” one of the medical people asked. His voice had a German accent. “Do you remember the treatment you were scheduled?”

The memories were welling up now. The meetings, endlessly sitting around conference tables with oh-so-serious doctors and geneticists. The agonizing week they gave him to make up his mind, the indecision and fear. He found some of them frightening. Back in the public eye again after so long in modest obscurity, reporters from every news stream pounding incessant questions at him. Politicians, hordes of the bastards wanting to be associated with the project. Slick spin doctors circling in vulture flocks. He wanted to stop remembering, to keep the bright images and sounds sealed away, but the torrent had begun now.

“Jesus wept,” he moaned. His hands were shaking uncontrollably as realization swept him along. Judging from Timmy’s age, he must have been in the tank for months, more than a year. That must mean it was over, complete.

“It’s okay, Dad,” Tim promised anxiously. “It worked. You’re fine. You look great.”

Jeff tried to raise his head. Both of the medical staff pressed him down again.

“Mirror,” Jeff said. “Give me a mirror.”

Sue nodded at Tim, who moved closer. The lad held up a mirror.

THE EUROHEALTH COUNCIL originally began the research project back in 2023, dispensing grants to universities across the continent, then tying in various corporate laboratories as well. It was exactly the kind of forward-thinking, benefits-the-people endeavor that Europe’s ruling classes were keen to pursue, and even keener to publicize. Officially, the Eurohealth Council called the project “multilevel synchronous replacement vectoring.” To the news streams it was simply rejuvenation. The concept took genoprotein treatments several stages past organ enhancement and cosmetic improvement. Researchers were aiming for the ability to vector new and complete DNA strands into every component of the human body. It was DNA copied from the patient, then engineered back to the state of late adolescence, before they began losing telomeres and suffering replication errors. Young DNA.

In theory, the next generation of cells reproduced within the body would be those of an adolescent. The patient’s entire body would grow progressively younger. But there are billions upon billions of cells in the human body. To produce a new, and perfect, gene for every single one and insert it correctly was immensely difficult, and fabulously expensive. By 2036, when the project leaders announced it had reached fruition, and that they were ready for their first human subject, the dedicated Eurohealth Council budget for rejuvenation was larger than that of the European Space Agency. With such generous resources distributed among seventy universities and over nine thousand biomedical subcontractor companies, it was possible for the project to rejuvenate one European citizen every eighteen months.

Before Jeff went into the suspension womb, the Brussels University Medical Centre had stopped him from taking the genoprotein treatments that kept his bones thick and strong, and maintained his glossy skin. They extracted his ceramic teeth, withdrew his retinal implants, and canceled the vectors that helped sustain his major organs. The cold turkey purged his body of the alien biochemicals and aptamers that had kept him fit and active. His true seventy-seven years of age had crept up on him in less than a fortnight, terrifying in its humbling. He had come to know the wintertime grip of wheezy asthmatic lungs, stiff painful joints, labored arthritic movements, the degradation of soiled pants and misty vision. He had watched his skin dry and shrivel, veins protrude, liver spots bloom like invading bacteria cultures; seen virile silver hair fade to gray and fall as dead and desiccated as autumn pine needles to contaminate his collar.

Jeff had discovered then exactly how much he hated old age. It frightened him badly. The incontinence, the weakness, the frailty, all reminding him he was mortal, a reality from which a great many of his generation had successfully hidden themselves away.

He could quite clearly remember the last sight of his wrinkled, decrepit face before he went into the suspension womb; but he had to swim back through decades of compacted and jumbled memories to reach the face in the mirror, and even that didn’t fit perfectly. When he had been twenty, his mouse-brown hair had reached fashionably down to his shoulders. Now he looked at this foreign youth’s firm jaw, small pale lips, shocked gray eyes, baby-smooth skin, downy stubble, and a short punky fuzz of hair.

Nonetheless, this face belonged to him.

He was afraid to reach up and paw at the mirror in case its mirage shattered; it seemed fairground trickery. Rejuvenation treatment was a modern alchemy: Close your eyes, a long blank second while the wizard waves his staff, open your eyes, and you’ve been reborn.

Then his personality began to pull together, skittish thoughts calming. This young face, he noted, had slightly thinner cheeks than he recalled himself having fifty-eight years ago. That must be due to diet; the suspension womb would have fed him a perfectly balanced nutrient supply rather than the junk food and bar snacks he lived off during his student days.

Jeff Baker grinned at himself, revealing teeth that were perfectly straight and white. Then he started to laugh, despite the pain.