Two
Mere mortal though he was, by the time Adam Zimmerman was asked to compile a definitive account of his formative experiences he had forgotten many significant details. He could not recall when he had first become aware of the central thesis of Garrett Hardins essay on The Tragedy of the Commons or when he first read Conquest of Death by Alvin Silverstein. Given that he was only ten years old when the former item was first published, it seems likely that he must have run across it at a much later date, in one of its many reprintings. It is conceivable that he had read the latter item in 1979, when it first appeared four years before his close encounter with Heidegger but had not been in a position to anticipate the significance that its central concept would eventually come to assume within his thinking.
That central concept was, of course, emortality.
The word emortality is such a commonplace item of contemporary vocabulary that it is difficult to imagine a time before it was coined, but it was almost unknown in Adam Zimmermans day. The distinction between immortality which implies an absolute immunity to death and emortality did not seem worthwhile in an era when both were out of reach. Although a condition in which individuals were immune to disease and aging, and enjoyed a greatly enhanced capacity of bodily self-repair, was imaginable in the twentieth century, it was the stuff of fantastic fiction a medium even more despised by the cultural elite of the day than the determinedly unadventurous naturalistic fiction that Adam Zimmerman considered futile. Silverstein was among the first mortals to propose, in all seriousness, that the scientific conquest of death might only be decades away, and that a term was therefore urgently required for the state of being in which human life might be extended indefinitely, although remaining permanently subject to the possibility of accidental or violent death.
Adam did recall that his interest in Silversteins thesis was, for a while, confused in his mind by another proposition, popularized by R. C. W. Ettinger, that the advancement of science might one day make it possible to revive some individuals who would be considered clinically dead by twentieth-century
standards. Ettinger proposed in the 1960s that people then alive might be able to take advantage of such future progress if only their bodies could be preserved in a state immediately following the moment of death-as-currently-defined. The method of preservation he favored was, of course, freezing. By the time Adam was forty years old, a considerable number of people had made provision for themselves to take advantage of this potential opportunity by arranging to have their bodies frozen after death and maintained indefinitely in a cryogenic facility.
Adam could never convince himself that a death once suffered could actually be reversed, but he did interest himself in the possibility that humans who were frozen down while still alive might be resuscitated at a later date, in order to take advantage of the biotechnologies that would make emortality a reality. Within a year of his divorce, perhaps because Sylvias defection had cleared way the last obstacle to the focusing of all his mental resources, Adam had decided that the only possible escape from the ravages of angst was to place himself in suspended animation, avoiding death until his frozen body could be delivered into a world where the indefinite avoidance of death had become routine.
Adam recalled that when he mentioned this possibility to his ex-wife she laughed contemptuously, having left behind the loving state of mind that would have forbidden such indelicacy. That, for him, was final proof of the fact that she had never really understood him, and it served to harden his resolve implacably. Might that bitter laugh have changed the course of history? Probably not, given that Adams resolve was already firm enough but it is heartening to think that good can sometimes be assisted, accelerated and amplified by malice. The world would be a much poorer place if it were not so.
By the time the twentieth century lurched to its inauspicious end, Adam had made his decision and formulated his plan. He was determined to avoid that tax on existence which his peers called death, and the means by which he would contrive the evasion was ice: not the kind of ice which spiced the upstate lakes in the depths of winter and suspended icicles from the ledges of the city, but the kind of ice that comprised comets and encased the satellites of distant planets; the kind of ice which could suspend all animation and preserve organic structure indefinitely.
Adam knew, of course, that neither the technology to accomplish this nor the legal apparatus to enable it was yet available, but he was an accountant by trade and vocation. He understood that the motor of technological progress was money, and that laws were made to control the poor while enabling the rich. There was a problem of timing to be solved, but that was all that was required to bring his ambitions to their consummation. He would need considerable wealth if he were to get the best of care during several centuries of inactivity, but the manipulation and redirection of wealth was his specialism and he was an accomplished practitioner of the economic arts.