Phraxis’ contacts had come through. She had found him seven experts, and he had spoken to all of them, sending them fragments of the data, giving them partial access, sharing their answers between them. And he had found it.

Buried in the logs, in the data, was a flaw. An inconsistency. The way the nanotechnology had recorded the electrical impulses of his heart was provably, mathematically unsound. When it was used to reconstruct what that heart would have looked like in life it showed a structure subtly incompatible with the parallel data from nanotechnology

That was to say: because Abraham was too old when the technology was installed, it had installed badly. It had done this in a way that Chae-Won in her prime would doubtless have found fascinating and instructive; the effects had been invisible without very careful examination. Until, all at once, they weren’t. Abraham had died before the technology had predicted, and could have lived slightly longer if it had been caught.

Carlos sat, re-reading the report over and over, trying to understand it better, more fully. He tried to understand it technically - the why, the how, the devil in the details. To relish the undeniable though overwhelmed note of triumph in his roiling emotions (he had been right!), and to lose himself in unpicking the foreign language of the science. He did this frantically, mechanically, obsessively, so that he did not have to understand what his victory actually meant.

An error. A cosmic joke. What “Abraham could have lived slightly longer” meant, creeping in from the corners of Carlos’ mind: Two funerals later. Abraham would have outlived Freddie, assuming Freddie still went the way he did, and he would have outlived Juanita too. He would have spoken at Juanita’s funeral.

What would he have said? Would he have had words, a way of looking at things, that would have made that death hurt less, the way he had helped Carlos in other things? Or would it have just hurt more later, losing Abe when ‘Anita was already gone?

Or really - just a different hurt. But oh - how he yearned. More time without the hurt. More time with them both. More time to remember, now, when he had neither.

Carlos realised he had put the sheath of paper with the printed report down on the table in front of him. He picked it back up, and found his hand was shaking too much to keep the words straight. He grunted angrily, sighed. Two funerals later. Still dead now! Fuck Chae-won and her broken, unfinished technology! Blast all those who were born late enough to benefit from it! Damn the scientists who didn’t catch this. Damn it all for not mattering in the end. Still dead now, Abraham would still be. Two funerals later, but now was three.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

With a shudder, Carlos got his breathing under control. He needed to move, to walk, to get away from this desk. Rapidly, he left the room, took his coat, fumbled on his shoes, picked up his keys with numb fingers, and walked out the door. The wind slammed it behind him.

The day was blustery, the sky grey and threatening. The higher branches of the trees swayed violently in the squalls. As Carlos reached the road, he turned into the wind, and had to lean into it to keep up his pace. It was loud. Thoughts were driven from his head for a moment. Two funerals later.

Steps, steps, the chill seeping in with the gale, his ears starting to hurt as air rushed past them. He managed to force his thoughts onto the road, and, when they kept slipping off that, at least back to the solid: the technical, the concrete, the extant. Cardiac proteins: Actin. Cardiac myosin. Calcium currents. Purkinje fibres. The ways hearts worked, the way they had always worked, and the many ways they always could be broken…

Carlos stood bolt upright and was nearly bowled over by the wind. Could it be? He turned and started back, running with the wind now, his knees complaining but still carrying him back, back towards the reports and the new idea he had to know was true. He got back to his door, pulled it open into the turbulent air, let it slam again as he rushed, still in his shoes, back to the office.

He sat down and had to control the adrenaline so that he could read. “The data is consistent with failure of the delayed-integration Eterna nanotechnolgical implants to accurately measure and thus compensate for cumulative and occult inborn structural abnormalities in several proteins related to cardiac myocytes, including but not limited to…”. Inborn. Failure to measure occult inborn abnormalities. He rifled through. None of his experts seemed to comment on these terms more, but all of them said it in different ways. He’d presented them with an incomplete picture of the data, so maybe they couldn’t see it, but the conclusion was clear.

The Eterna treatment could fail.

As it stood, the “immortal” young might die.

It could probably be fixed. The problem was in the software, not the hardware; point this out to the right person and the code could be fixed without the world any the wiser. But, right now, only he knew of the error.

His thoughts, previously moving so rapidly and feeling so discordant, no felt like the huge rings of some giant bell. What would it mean, for the Eterna treatment to fail? It would surely only happen once, just once, before people looked into it and caught the flaw that he had caught here. But forever, there would then be the fear; the fear of unknown death. If it failed once, it could fail again.

People would be afraid, not just for themselves, but for their friends. Their loved ones. Everything they had, and cherished, could be gone at any moment. And in the scope of eternity, it probably would be gone at some point.

Death would return, and with it everything it brought - worry, and fear, and desire, and drive. The young would know what he had known. Death giving meaning to life.

All that meaning, for everyone, forever - and all he had to do was stay silent. To do nothing, and let probably just one person die.

He laughed - a brief, convulsive sound choked out of him. He wept. Laughing, crying, Carlos made a choice.