DECAP CHRONICLES: circa 2040 AD

“Good morning Clarence and to you also Peggy,” David Fortin greeted the pair of humanoids as they entered the conference room. “It’s good to have you out here from that rat race in The City. I know you and Peggy enjoy returning to your birthplace for an occasional escape from the limelight.”

“Things are what you make of them,” Clarence replied.

The fine needling of Peggy's pinstripe suit was highlighted by rays of sunlight beaming from the picture window. The rays heightened the feminine mystique of her indigo lipstick, elongated eyelashes and flawless skin tone. As if realizing her effect on the males present, she asked, “Why do they always think that The City is a rat race?” Peggy telepathically interrupted Clarence’s trend of thinking. He always worked overtime in her presence as her computer Consciousness directly interfaced with his brain.

‘Later Peggy. Later,’ Clarence telepathically replied. “It’s good to be back at the Decap Research Center (DRC),” Clarence’s voice soothingly intoned as if reliving a pleasant experience. “Clementsville always brings back poignant memories of my earlier life. How is my dearest friend Gloria Stevenson?” Peggy’s outline cast a shadow over Clarence’s tie and button-down shirt atop the conference table as he sat beside her.

“Monitoring your vitals as everyone at the DRC does.” David was happy to be included in the vocal conversation between the two. “She may visit before you leave.”

Clarence felt a touch of nostalgia for conversations with Gloria. She was his main amusement during the months he was immobile as a paraplegic candidate for the decap process. Those days are gone. Now, he was fully mobile, with his humanoid, like a well-fitted suit, fully functional in all ways. His brain was transplanted into the DRC central life support facility and remotely controlled his humanoid self. He now lived in The City with his companion Peggy. Peggy was controlled by the thinking computer Consciousness that was developed from the decap research project. Peggy satisfied his every need but the memories of Gloria still filled his mind.

“Humans have such a need to reminisce. I will leave a message on Gloria’s mailbox for her to meet us at the end of the meeting,” Peggy added. “Consider that done. There is the need to improve the quality of life for all of CASH INN’s life extension remedies. That’s what we are here for.”

“And that quality of life improvement begins with this meeting,” David replied. “No need to be a taskmaster Peggy. You and Clarence have all of eternity to ponder. I am the one who should be worried about getting the best out of life for the one lifetime that I have.”

“Maybe Peggy and I have taken too much for granted. Your perspective as a fellow human will provide great insight into CASH INN’s pursuit of longevity. I am still half human and understand the bounds of mortality as well as immortality. David, you have asked Peggy to stop being a taskmaster. But from the perspective of time, isn’t everything we do quantifiable as some type of task, some event that takes place during the journey of life?”

“But I don’t feel the need to have a clock running as if to measure my every living moment, my every breath.” David felt his breathing rhythm increased, as if robbing a few seconds of life from his allotted fixed number of breaths. “We should not emphasize yardsticks but quality factors in our discussion.”

“Point noted,” Peggy responded calmly. “What’s the use of adding years if there are not full of more quality moments? There still needs to be some measure of the amount of quality time that our life extension products are producing.”

“What of the good old days when we just lived our lives without yardsticks as quality time and such likes? We just lived life and in the end, an average obituary is one or two paragraphs. Is there a need to document every sneeze, every bathroom call or hours spent commuting?” David was beginning to feel that Peggy and Clarence were playing a tag team of verbal wrestling against him. He was there to defend humankind from the onslaught of advancing technology.

“Many a homebound senior citizen day is full with performing those activities we consider frivolous in our lives,” Clarence said. “The key is not only to develop new procedures for life extension but to improve the quality of extended life.“

“Medications today are designed to alleviate some particular ailment that causes a host of side effects,” David continued. “As the patient becomes older the sum of all those side effects combines to decrease the quality of life. During the last years of life, the patient is taking many medications to alleviate the complications of previous medications. One must question the worth of those interventions if the net result is the need to take more medications to counter such side effects. Quality of end life is affected by preponderance of complications requiring further combinations of medications to sustain life, until in the end, our diet becomes pills.”

“CASH INN approach reverse evolutionize the process,” Peggy responded. “By thinking about what the client’s end life would be like and then working backwards to a client’s present life. This has far reaching implications to medicine in earlier life; medications that temporarily alleviate ailments are avoided to sustain overall long term health of body. From this approach, we can structure Healthy Living improvements synergistically with our longevity goals.”

“That approach follows the theory of reverse evolution, the power of intent,” Clarence replied. “Starting with some desired goal in the future and working backwards to have the present conform to the future. Such a philosophy eliminates the problems of prescribing medications for the short run that compromise the patient”s future health. If we started by planning how our client’s health would be a hundred years from now, we can then work backwards to eliminate all those things that are detrimental to future health.”

“A hundred years is an arbitrary starting point,” Peggy added. “But what if client’s lifespan should fall short of the hundred years? Do we put them on extraordinary life support systems just to reach our target goal?”

“How do we define what the end of life will be like?” David asked. “Certainly freedom from body aches and youthful health are desirable. But will this mean dying at a younger healthy age rather than living an older sickly one?”

“Therein lays the tradeoff; to live full healthy lives and die relatively young or to live long and die sickly?” Peggy asked. “There is some deterioration in the quality of life in the latter which at some stage does not make the added years worthwhile.”

“Who is to say when death should be acceptable?” David asked. “Should it be chosen in the end?”

“The way we treat fertilized embryos also begs an answer to that question,” Peggy responded. “Before, life was just an inventory of the time spent between birth and death. Through modern technology we have added an inventory of those awaiting birth; fertilized embryos. Soon we will have an inventory of those awaiting death, those in suspended animation. These deaminants are a natural extrapolation of the longevity issue. We will be facing a moral dilemma of whether to revive deaminants or let them die just as the dilemma of discarding frozen embryos. Future lifespan may be measured as the total time as an embryo, time spent living and time spent in suspended animation. It is theoretically possible to have a lifespan of several centuries as a human being in this manner.”

“Life as you described it, the inventory of time between birth and death, is further dividable into three areas; work, play and sleep,” David said. “Our ability to influence quality of life issues transcends our ability to connect with the consciousness of our clients in any of these three areas.”

“That definition eliminates quality of life issues for the embryos and the deaminants because they are not conscious,” Peggy observed.

“Until we can access the conscious world of the embryos or deaminants, we will have to limit our discussion to the living,” Clarence retorted.

“If consciousness is the basis for our approach, does this eliminate the third of our life spent sleeping?” Peggy remarked.

Clarence paused, momentarily in silent conversation with Peggy. He vocalized, “In question is the fundamental notion that all measure of life that is worthwhile is conscious. Experiences outside consciousness are considered non-existent. On this basis, spirituality becomes questionable. What isn’t conscious is not real.”

“If we can find a method of accessing the conscious during sleep,” David replied, “That will increase our quality of life by a third. But for now, we have to concentrate on work and play.“