Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue – 2115: Orphan on the Wind1. Traveling Light

  2. Carbon Copy

  Part 1 – 2018: First You Die …1. Morning in Court

  2. The Heart Stops Beating …

  3. The Brain Explodes …

  4. … And Then You Live

  5. Afternoons on a Rooftop

  Part 2 – 2019: Run for Your Life1. Coming Home

  2. Slow-Motion Train Wreck

  3. The Twenty-Nine Points

  4. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

  5. Total Loss of Control

  6. The End of an Era

  Part 3 – 2028: Plumbing Work1. In the Ninth Year of War

  2. Sixth or Seventh Armistice

  3. Getting Into Bed

  4. Family Ties

  5. Mad Scramble

  6. The Next Generation

  Appendix 1: Praxis Family Tree Circa 2030, and Other Characters in the StoryPraxis Family Tree Circa 2030

  Characters Other Than Family

  About the Author

  COMING OF AGE

  Volume 1: Eternal Life

  By Thomas T. Thomas

  COMING OF AGE, Volume 1: Eternal Life

  Thomas T. Thomas

  Who Wants to Live Forever?

  “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” wrote British novelist Susan Ertz. So it would seem that humankind was never designed—emotionally or spiritually, let alone biologically—for long, productive lives. But new, life-extending technologies based on advanced genetics and stem-cell reprogramming are coming at us anyway.

  Construction magnate John Praxis topples over on the golf course from a massive heart attack. And the attorney who was litigating against him, Antigone Wells, succumbs to a stroke. Both have unfinished business they need to pursue. And they are among the first recipients of the new medical techniques to will rebuild failing organs—his heart, her brain—renew deteriorating tissues, and extend their lives almost indefinitely.

  Coming of Age is a novel of both ideas and action that covers the next century of American history and its probable and improbable impacts on Praxis, Wells, and their extended families through five generations beyond the traditional “three score and ten.” In that time, they will experience love and loss, civil war and geologic upheaval, the rise and fall of both personal and national fortunes, the banishment of old age, the rise of thinking machines, the end of work, and the virtual remaking of the American experience.

  COMING OF AGE

  Volume 1: Eternal Life

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction.

  Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  For more information, contact [email protected].

  Copyright 2014 Thomas T. Thomas

  Cover photo © 2008 Roberto A. Sanchez via iStockphoto®

  ISBN: 978-0-9849658-3-0

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,

  That was built in such a logical way

  It ran a hundred years to a day …

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  Prologue – 2115:

  Orphan on the Wind

  1. Traveling Light

  Three days after her aunt’s death—at the advanced age of 153 years—and with the swift execution of her living testament through the intelligences in the San Francisco Municipal Records Office, Angela Wells was evicted from their five-bedroom luxury condo on the forty-second floor of 333 Market Street. According to terms of the testament, recorded in Antigone Wells’s own voice with the dry accents of a Calvinist preacher, Angela was to be allowed one suitcase, to be packed under supervision of a Hall of Records mech, “in order that my niece may learn the virtues of traveling light.”

  The mech came programmed with a list of authorized items: three casual tops, three pairs of slacks, two pairs of shorts, one semi-formal dress—“but not the backless burgundy taffeta”—two pairs of ballet pumps, one pair of sandals, four days’ supply of fresh underwear, a week’s supply of basic toiletries. Specifically proscribed was Angela’s collection of tiny crystal animals, bought with her own money—well, money from her allowance, and with her aunt’s approval required before buying each piece. Also on the forbidden list was her musicbot with all the songs, scenarios, and player roles she had collected over the years, as well as her old tennis racket, her hockey skates and stick, and her carbon-fiber street luge with vibrafoam impact suit and helmet.

  As directed in the testament, her aunt’s estate—which included proceeds from the condo’s sale and holofax auction of all its furnishings and contents, combined with her liquid assets—had been donated to St. Brigid’s Home for Orphaned Girls in the Sunset District. So other, nameless orphans were going to benefit from a long lifetime of professional work, saving, and investment—but not the orphan who bore her aunt’s own last name. For some reason, Angela found that typical. Capricious, quixotic, callous, and cruel—but also typical of her aunt’s sometimes mysterious reasoning.

  When Angela picked up the jewelry box from the dresser in her own room, the mech took it from her with two plastic-and-steel hands and a strength of arm she could not resist. The mech then opened the box and rummaged about in its contents, picking up various brooches and necklaces—clearly in pattern-matching mode—and finally selected one: a heart-shaped silver pendant on a chain, both blackened with a hard glaze of tarnish. It was a piece Angela hadn’t worn since she was, oh, seven years old—half a lifetime ago. She remembered her aunt had called it a locket, but it had no catch or hinge. She assumed it was just solid silver without any insides.

  “Can’t I have the diamond circle?” she asked. “It wasn’t expensive.”

  “That is not permitted. All you may take is the heart.”

  Angela accepted it from the mechanical hand and put it in her pocket—which presumed she would be allowed to leave in the clothes she was wearing.

  “You will put the charm around your neck.”

  “But it’s so dirty. The tarnish will—”

  “You must put it on, please.”

  Angela knew of ways to override the mechs, even the ones that proctored for the law—her aunt had taught her all about that. But since this one was doing her aunt’s final bidding, she guessed those tricks wouldn’t work. She put the chain around her neck and tucked the heart inside her blouse.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  The mech paused. With these intelligences, a two-second pause was enough time for anything. The house butler, which had been deactivated and wiped by legal order that morning, could plan a party, order assorted hors d’oeuvres from three different South of Market shops, restock the wine cellar, and send out the invitations in that much time and still have spare capacity to balance the household checkbook and sort the laundry.

  “I have ordered your transportation,” the city’s machine said.

  “Thank you. And where do you think I’m going?”

  A pause. “I am not permitted to say.”

  The mech laid the jewelry box on the dresser and picked up her suitcase. It gestured for Angela to go out into the hall. At the side table by the front door, she picked up her purse. The mech took it—not rudely but firmly—extracted her identity card, left the cash cards, and put the purse back on the table. It triggered the front door and waited for her to leave.

  Angela walked over to the elevator. Before she could press the down arrow, the other one lit up—the mech taking control again.

  “I guess I’m supposed to go to the roof and jump off?” she sug
gested.

  No pause this time. “There is a barrier, and I will stop you.”

  “That wouldn’t be a kindness,” Angela replied.

  When they arrived at the rooftop pad, the morning fog was just beginning to burn off. An ariflect was already landing. Not one of the low-altitude town cabs, but a model equipped for supersonic, with appropriate pressure-fittings around the door, military-style belts across each seat, and explosive bolts lining the canopy. The mech stowed her suitcase in the luggage bin, turned, and walked away. Unlike the house butler, Angela knew civil-service mechs were not programmed for the courtesies, like saying good-bye.

  She belted herself in and waited.

  “I’m ready,” she told the pilot.

  The door latched itself, the cockpit pressurized, and her ears popped. The rim vanes on the wing nacelles engaged and spun up. The ’flect lifted straight into the air, then rose past the city’s skyline, through the last wisps of marine layer overcast, into hard sunlight and a view of the Bay that reminded her of a traffic satellite’s omnipresent eye. She shifted her attention to the nacelle on her right as the vanes stopped spinning, the wing slats closed and reshaped the machine into a gunmetal-gray dart, and the revs increased by several thousand rippems as the turbine became a jet engine. Where before the seat frame and cushions had been gently pressing against her thighs and bottom, the direction suddenly changed and they pushed against her spine. Pushed hard.

  In three seconds San Francisco Bay had disappeared behind her, followed by the East Bay Hills, the Livermore Valley, and Altamont Pass. She was out over the curved plate of the San Joaquin Valley, which held steady in her view for all of half a minute before the eastern edge began wrinkling up with the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

  “Can you tell me where I’m going?” she asked the pilot. Given that the Hall of Records mech had refused to tell her, Angela expected no better from the city’s chartered taxi service.

  “Tuolumne County, ma’am,” the pilot said. “To the Praxis Estate.”

  Their privatization of the former Stanislaus National Forest.

  “Why there, I wonder? I don’t know any Praxises.”

  “That’s not in my memory hole, ma’am.”

  Angela hoped the ariflect was armored and programmed for evasive tactics. From everything she had ever heard about the Praxis family, they were touchy about their privacy—and not shy about defending their airspace.

  2. Carbon Copy

  Callista Praxis watched the dark-gray flyer circle once at high altitude, cued as a bright spark in the second sight of her neural eyepatch. It was shedding speed while it negotiated landing rights with the estate’s air defense system. She followed that exchange through her patch, too, and gave the final approval. Then the dart dipped toward the earth and changed shape as its wings unfolded and sprouted daisies. It descended smoothly on vertical thrust.

  Last night her mail folder had included a bonded message from the San Francisco Attorney General’s intelligence concerning a transfer of wardship. A minor female named Angela Wells—age fifteen, no priors except three traffic citations for recklessness with a “suicide sled,” and no current wants—was being written off the municipal rolls and expelled at the request of her only living relative, an aunt, Antigone Wells, who was deceased as of sixty-seven hours prior to transmission.

  Antigone again. Disposing of another “niece.” Well, this one would be her last.

  Callie had instructed the family lawbot to accept the transfer of allegiance and assign Angela Wells provisional status as a ward—stipended but without shares—until the girl’s situation could be evaluated and her place in the family established.

  The ariflect settled with just a whisper from its fans and a tiny bounce as the hydraulic gear took its weight on the estate’s landing pad. The door popped out of its seals and swung open. A young girl in a white blouse and corduroy jumper stepped out.

  “The air’s thinner here,” she said with a little gasp.

  “We’re at forty-seven hundred feet,” Callie said, then offered her hand. “I’m Callie, by the way.”

  The girl took it, holding on for a second longer than customary, perhaps to catch her balance. “I’m Angela.”

  “Yes, I know.” Callie busied herself with retrieving a single suitcase from the ariflect’s cargo hatch. She turned quickly then, before her own face could give the game away, and led their guest through the radiating pathways of the sunken formal garden and up a flight of granite stairs to the Gate Tower of Resurrection House.

  Angela Wells was a slender girl, with as-yet unformed features and a still childish body. She had long, ash-blonde hair that was clearly used to regular shampooing and a bedtime routine of one hundred brush strokes. She was an unexceptional girl, except for her eyes, which were a pale, almost iridescent green, the color of old apothecary bottles, and seemed to glow with their own light. They were the same eyes that looked out of Callie’s vanity mirror every morning.

  * * *

  Angela followed the Praxis woman along the gravel path through a low-lying plot that was full of coniferous shrubs in geometric arrangements and long, orderly rows of roses and other flowering perennials in every imaginable color. She wondered how the garden fared when winter came to the mountains and the snow level fell to 4,700 feet of elevation. But then, her internal newsfeeds suggested, the family was rich enough that they probably could tent over this whole area, heat it all winter long, and provide a couple of mechs to maintain the flowerbeds.

  Then the name she had heard almost in passing came into focus, confirmed by her eyepatch: Callie—Callista—Praxis. There had only ever been one. Daughter of John. The most senior woman of this fabled family. And she had come out to the landing pad personally to meet Angela. What was going on?

  She couldn’t help noticing that Callie was not only beautiful, as reported, but also young looking. She moved with grace, poise, and a perfect centering, the way Angela’s yoga instructor had tried to teach her. Callie might have been only thirty or forty years old, judging by her face. Her hair was dark and luxurious, her skin still smooth and lovely, even around her eyes and mouth—the places where women, even those in regeneration, were quickest to age. By contrast, her aunt’s face had been a wreck, with wrinkles, indented creases, and the powdery look of old silk left hanging too long at the back of the closet.

  The other thing she had noticed was Callie’s eyes. They were bright, green eyes like Angela’s own. Except that where Angela’s eyes were merely strange, like insets of cold green glass stuck in a mask, Callie’s were warm and alive, full of expectation and caring and … well, wisdom. Angela hoped one day she would have eyes like that.

  From the rose garden the women climbed a short flight of steps, turned a corner, and came to a round tower. It was four stories tall, made of hard white stone, trimmed in gray granite, with a conical roof of black slate. The tower was remarkably bare of windows. All Angela could see was a single arched casement on the front of the first two upper levels, aligned directly above the door on the ground floor. But at the very top, right under the overhang of the roof, the wall was set with a series of small, black-framed windows, one every thirty degrees, like the numerals on a clock face. Angela thought they might be for lookouts—or for shooting arrows.

  Directly in front of the two women, at ground level, was an arched door of ancient-appearing oak, supposedly darkened with age, although Angela knew the whole estate could not have been built much more than thirty years ago.

  “That door’s big enough to drive a truck through,” she said in admiration.

  “If we allowed any truck to get that close,” Callie said over her shoulder.

  They walked into the Gate Tower’s central chamber, thirty feet across and empty except for a single reception desk. The receptionist—or rather, a guard with holstered side arm—recognized Callie with a nod and passed her and Angela through into the Gallery.

  During the circling descent of her ariflect, Angela
had studied the layout of the Praxis Estate and compared it with feeds from her patch. The Gate Tower stood on the northern shore of Cherry Lake, a man-made body of water at the southeastern edge of the former national forest lands. From the lake side of this tower the Gallery crossed the water on five stone piers supporting six high, rounded arches. These in turn supported two tiers of white stone arcades pierced with square windows in granite frames, while the top tier was roofed in steeply-pitched black slate with round windows set it white dormers.

  At the far end of the Gallery was the Chateau proper, built right out to the edges of a rocky island that was set deep into the lake. The building rose three stories above its foundation, a wedding cake in white and gray masonry, with rounded towers built into each corner. The top floor presented more pitched slate and white dormers with tall, peaked windows as well as chimneys topped with granite lintels. On the east side of the Chateau she had noted an anomalous structure, like a hexagonal half-dome clinging to the outer wall, which spanned the first and second floors with tall, gothic-arched windows in stained glass. Her patch had confirmed this extrusion had been designed as a chapel, although the database showed it as having no denomination or actual sanctification.

  She and Callie entered the Gallery, which was more than two hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, floored in an alternating pattern of black and white marble and brightly lit by the morning sun coming in through the line of east-facing windows. Angela did a rapid internal scan of available architectural studies. One leapt out at her.