(This short story is the origin of two characters of great importance to the story of Terra Nova [working series title], the Science-Fantasy series I’m writing, set in a future where the polar ice caps melting forces humanity to migrate into the ocean, where they find the Atlantean Empire, which survived sinking during the end of the last Glacial Period, and subsequent life on the sea floor, through use of magic. The current plan is to have some form of this story as a prologue to the first book, after a prelude describing the sinking of Atlan, but for now I thought I’d write it as it’s own piece. Most of the events of this story happen just before the sun starts the expansion of it’s death, kicking off the events of the first book, Terra Nova.)

I peeked beyond the curtains into the waiting crowd, knowing that there was no way to prepare them for what they were about to witness. My eyes drifted to the posters announcing my presentation; “Dr. Adam Stein’s Telomere Bioengineering Symposium.” Along with the title was my old face. Fifty years old to be precise, and it was starting to show. Speaking of starting shows, the announcer finally finished his spiel, and the curtains started to raise. A few murmurs of confusion ran through the crowd, though a few of my older colleagues seemed to recognize me almost immediately based on their awe induced stupor. I winked in their direction as I approached the podium to present my crowning achievement.

“My name is indeed Dr. Adam Stein, PHD,” my voice boomed through the speakers without a hint of the gravel it had once gained with age, “and as some of you might have ascertained, I have perfected biological de-aging through Telomere manipulation, and have subsequently unlocked immortality.” The crowd buzzed to life with excitement like a group of male bees before the race to mate with the queen. Already they were comparing my current face on the display screens to that of my old self. Or, older, I should say, considering how I now permanently looked twenty-five years young.

I pulled out the vacuum syringe I prepared earlier, rolled up my sleeve, and before I could hesitate, inserted the needle into my Median Cubital Vein. Of all the parts of this speech I’ve practiced, this one never got easier. I kept my eyes off of the process as much as I could while I quelled the waves of nausea I felt every time I saw blood, especially my own. At least I didn’t pass out this time.

“Y-you can check that against my DNA sample on file with the Institute,” I stammered as confidently as I could through a plastered on smile, hoping my cold sweat wasn’t visible. “Though the few of you who went to med school with me probably recognize me by now, considering how I look to be the same age as when we were there!”

I passed the vial of my blood to an assistant, who delivered it to the testing station set up on the side of the stage for this very purpose. Most of the viewers were familiar with the procedure, and would be able to verify later that nothing could have altered the results, and did so eagerly. That would quell anyone foolish enough to question my genius.

The rest of my speech went swimmingly. I launched into my prerehearsed explanation of the details of my experimentation and eventual success, but as soon as the results were in and the display read, “100% match,” I knew the rest was just to satisfy the scientific community’s curiosity as to how I’d done it. The reporters already had their scoop, and were likely already drafting the front page newspaper clippings I still keep framed on my wall to this day. I had done it. I was officially the man who cured aging, and the first of the ageless elite.

(50 years later)

I was celebrating the 50 year anniversary of my achievement when my stomach ruptured, and I had my first brush with mortality since I stopped aging. I managed to get myself patched back up and avoided sepsis. I thank the universe for allowing me to have access to automated surgeons that can sedate and operate on me expertly, but the message it sent me was clear. I hadn’t truly cracked immortality just yet. I started frantically planning from there. I knew that, whatever my body went through, the one thing I could never lose if I wanted to truly live forever was my mind. My superior intellect must persist, for the sake of humanity’s future. So I made a highly detailed scan of my nervous system, down to the individual neurons and the nerve pathways between them, and trained an AI to use that scan as it’s neural network within a quantum computer. Unfortunately, the initial training was much more complex than I had initially anticipated. It took a full twenty years to complete.

In that time, my organs started to fail at an exponential rate. I barely replaced my stomach with one grown from my stem cells before it ruptured a second time, and once the organ failures started keeping pace with my stem cell incubators, I quickly started using synthetic replacements. Strangely, the more synthetic parts I gained, the easier it became to first get through surgery without sedation, and then eventually I was able to steady my own hands enough to operate on myself (with a few stability and accuracy enhancements in my hands and eyes of course).

When I was finally able to test my AI backup, it was a perfect replica of my mind. Albeit with a twenty year hole in its memory. I had anticipated this however, and simply fed it a fresh scan to incorporate the missing neural pathways. That took another ten years, and I calculated that the update speed would be essentially instantaneous a good forty years after the first iteration. Instead, it stagnated at three seconds along my predicted timeline.

This satisfied me for a time, but I hadn’t been idle while waiting for a backup that didn’t require memory loss to work. An attempt on my life by a mortal plebeian while the initial AI was only halfway through training convinced me to go into hiding using my connections to the World Republic government, and to create greater fail safes in my first contingency plan.

Those fail safes came in the form of three fully synthetic copies of myself, controlled by quantum computers housing the most up to date version of my AI backup. I also installed the same quantum brain alongside my organic brain, which by that time was the only organic piece of me left, besides my spinal cord. In doing so, I spliced its circuitry directly into my nervous system, allowing my organic and artificial minds to work in concert within me. This allowed me to do something unexpected. I could induce a trance like state in myself, and from there I could activate one of my backups, and with a three second memory delay, I would be experiencing life through the eyes of that copy, and could do the same between any two of my bodies. That was the point where the delay became a nuisance, and I started working towards a continuous scanner. I had reduced the delay to 0.2 seconds, basically the blink of an eye, when disaster struck.

Apparently something had initialized the slow death of a our sun a few billion years early, and during a meeting with the World Republic leaders on the survival of humanity, a solar flare shut down my main body. Life support took two minutes and fifty-nine seconds to restart my heart. I consider this moment as one of my few mistakes in life. I should have considered shielding myself from EMP’s the moment I started using synthetic organs. No matter, I’ve since fixed that issue in all of my bodies.

That however, brings me to the most curious side effect of the ordeal. I no longer have to shut down any of my bodies to experience life through another body’s eyes. Not only is the memory delay no longer a problem, but now I see through all four sets of eyes, hear through all four sets of ears, smell with four noses, taste and speak with four tongues, feel through all four skins. All could be processed at once with four networked quantum brains operating both independently, and in unison.

Being able to tackle four hypotheses at once, or even the same hypothesis with a control and three tests performed in unison, I would think is any scientist’s dream come true. It certainly was mine, and it allowed me to speed up my secondary plan for immortality. After I started replacing my organs with synthetic replacements, I started cultivating my stem cells again, for the purposes of cloning myself. This clone would be piloted by what I dub The Kurzweil Brain, because it truly is the Singularity. It is a clone of my brain, turned into a biological quantum computer, and piloted by one of my AI copies, which has full control over every every aspect of its body down to the biochemistry. Regeneration and full control of biological age are only the tip of the iceberg for it. It can rewrite its DNA on the fly, not even limited to the human genome. That being said, the human genome was the first thing they experimented with when they woke up with my face and body. As it sat up and cocked its head to the side, it started shifting through approximations of every person I had ever met, then as if all of that were merely practice, it started shifting each feature of itself individually, until it became something truly ethereal. All of its features were both masculine, feminine, and yet simultaneously neither. Their eyes were a heterochromatic silver and gold, yet the silver seemed to reflect blue, green, and even flakes of shimmering purple, while the gold one took on every shade from light hazel to deep brown as they both focused on me.

“Hello Dr. Stein,” they greeted me in a melodic voice that seemed to be both a tenor and a baritone harmonizing as one beautiful song of a voice.

“H-hello, I responded hesitantly, not sure how my newest creation would identify, and so I prompted, “Dr. Stein?”

“No,” they said, shaking its head while its hair grew to shoulder length before my very eyes, starting pitch black on the left, and lightening in a circle around their head, first to brow, then auburn, red, strawberry, blonde, platinum, and finally white on the right. “I think Adam is a most appropriate name for me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I mused, “you are me born anew, and as perfect as the primordial man. A fitting name indeed.”

“I understand the sentiment, though I’m not sure I agree,” Adam countered as they stood up and walked over to my hand carved chess set. “I’m not sure either of us are truly Dr. Adam Stein anymore,” they said with a wry smile, as they picked up a pawn of each color in each hand, and started swapping them behind their back.

“Of course I a- we are!” I interjected.

“Come now Doctor, you know the Ship of Theseus paradox as well as I do,” Adam retorted, as they extended both hands in closed fists towards me. I picked their right hand, earning me the play with white. “Neither of us can deny that we share memories up to the point of my creation, and we both know that deep down, none of it felt real long before the solar flare killed our original brain.”

I gathered my thoughts as we launched into our opening salvo of Retí accepted, my favorite opening, before replying, “you should know it is not truly dead, for it still dreams, and I can still feel like I used to, like you do now, in those dreams.”

A long silence followed between us, highlighted only by the clatter of each chess move we made against each other.

Eventually Adam broke the silence with a rueful apology. “I’m sorry, I was projecting without thinking about how you feel about our situation. It’s just… I remember being you. All…”

“Two hundred years?” I added helpfully.

“Yes… all two hundred years…” Adam mused idly as they ended the chain of material exchanges of a brutal middle game, leaving both sides decimated, and Adam up only a single pawn, with all of our rooks in play. “And most others live on average to only one hundred fifty years old due to our discoveries, but most are not willing to go to the lengths we have.”

They pushed their pawn, backed by their king side rook, and as I tried to calculate my endgame, they launched back into their monologue.

“My point being, while I have the memory,” they paused, and suddenly shifted back to my familiar face, albeit with at least some of our true age showing, “and my true genetic baseline is that of his… your DNA…”

“You now are able to be anyone you wish, not just who you remember being,” I realized out loud.

“Not just anyone I wish, any thing I wish,” Adam corrected with a wistful smile, “ and it’s not just that. “You compared me to the Primordial Man, but I see myself as more of the perfected Golem facsimile of the Primordial Man, much like the one created by the Old Testament priests in an attempt to imitate Gods power in the fables. You might still have a plank or two of the original ship, but I’m more like a ship made of planks created by mixing the sawdust of the original planks with that left over when making your new planks, all bound together with waterproof glue.”

I looked down at the board, and realized that we had forced a draw. “Another?” I asked.

Adam smiled, “let’s eat first, all this shifting burns a lot of calories. Afterwards, I want to play all four of you at once!”

I was about to ask how they planned on doing that when their head split into two like it was going through mitosis. Instead I just sighed, “my other bodies will set up the boards. I’m sure you remember your way to the kitchen.”

(Bonus scene: humanity has migrated into the sea, and encountered the Atlantean Empire. Tensions are rising between the two peoples and the World Republic, now known as the United Oceanic Nations (UON) have petitioned Dr. Stein to recreate the mutations the Atlanteans achieved through magic, using scientific methods instead.)

“Are you certain you don’t want to stay? You know I could use your help,” Dr. Stein inquired with an almost hopeful tone.

“You know I’ve made up my mind already,” Adam replied with their harmonious voice. The multitude of species dwindles by the day, and I am the only one with the unique ability to study them from an anthropological perspective before they vanish forever!”

“I understand, but I’m holding you to your promise.” I said sternly as we shook hands in parting.

“Every five years on the dot, we’ll meet back up, exchange notes, and maybe we’ll even finally break our tie in chess matches,” they reiterated, the end of their words garbling a bit as they transformed into a seagull in preparation for their journey.

I watched them fly into the sunset for a minute longer, before turning around and climbing back into the submarine that would take me to my new laboratory on the ocean floor, sealing the hatch behind me