The Immortality Game

“I came in a couple of hours ago because I had an idea and wanted to work on it. The light was on in the storage room. I couldn’t see anything wrong, so I called up the security records.” Volodya raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Computer, show us what I looked at earlier.”

The blank wall on one side of the conference table flickered and a video feed appeared, showing the inside of the storage room. The door slid open and a security guard entered. He walked around the small room tugging on drawers and cabinets, but they were all locked. He halted near one cabinet and picked up something lying on top. The man had his back to the camera at this point.

“That’s enough, computer,” Volodya said. He held up a hand to forestall any questions. “I checked the storage room. Someone left a stack of chips out on Friday. The computer says the last one in the room was Sasha. How many times have we told you to put the chips away, Sasha?”

Everyone looked at the big engineer sitting at the far end of the table. Sasha Panov was a huge man with a bushy silver mustache. He shrugged and grinned. “I knew we’d just be getting them out again Monday morning.”

“Do you know what your laziness might have cost us?” Volodya said.

Sasha shrugged and looked away.

“What was taken?” asked Anders Thomsen, the Danish molecular engineer, who at fifty-two was the baby of the group. They had added him to the team when he was seventeen due to his prodigious talent.

“The guard didn’t take them all. There were four chips left,” Volodya said. “Three combat and one recording. How many chips did you leave there, Sasha?”

Sasha shrugged again. “I dunno. Maybe a half dozen. I’m not sure.”

“Great,” Volodya said. “You didn’t log them, so we don’t even know what we lost.”

Tyoma hated how Volodya always tried to boss everyone around. “Calm down. Everyone must remember what we were working on Friday evening. We should be able to figure it out. What about the other security cameras?”

Volodya glared at Tyoma for a few moments before responding. “The guard clearly planned to rob us. He knew enough to disable security, but he didn’t know that we had the storage room on its own system. That feed was all we had, and about the only thing more it tells us is that he did it Friday night, just after eleven.”

Big Dima stood. “Okay. We’ll figure out what’s missing soon enough. If it’s just recordings then we should be fine. The only worry is if it’s military chips he took.”

“No kidding,” said Dagur Stefansson, the Icelandic geneticist. “If those fall into the wrong hands, we’re done.”

“What about the guard?” asked Little Dima, the tissue engineer.

“Can’t find him,” said Volodya. “He’s not responding. I called his supervisor and told him to track the man down.”

Arguments broke out around the table. Tyoma turned to his friend Kostya. “He may not be worried about recordings, but I am. You did an update recording of me on Friday. I don’t like the idea of someone having a copy of me out there.”

Kostya was fiddling with a lighter, clearly craving a cigarette; he’d had to give them up ages ago when real tobacco became rarer than gold. “What could they do with it? If they slot it, they’ll most likely kill themselves. The worst that can happen is they go insane, right?”

“We don’t know for sure,” Tyoma said. “That’s the problem. We can’t test it on a human yet, so we have only our theories and the chimp tests to go on. There was only that one successful test, and there was something wrong with that chimp…‌mental problems. Don’t tell me you’d be comfortable having one of your recordings out there.”

Kostya shook his head. “I don’t believe it can hurt us. It’s the military chips that worry me. It doesn’t matter who took them. Once someone tries one of those, the general will learn about it eventually. We’ve got to get those cards back.”

It was hard to think straight with all the noise in the room. Tyoma tried to imagine what would happen if the general found out they had completed the project years ago, but had been lying about it ever since in order to keep the funding going for their side project. “Kostya, why don’t we just take what we have and leave? We’re so close now. We could—”

“How? It takes billions for the equipment alone. The crèches are far too big to take with us. There’s no starting over.”

Tyoma sank his head into his hands. “What do we do? We’re all old men. We’re not fit to go after this guard, even if we use the chips. And can we even trust the other guards?”

Kostya sighed. “I don’t know. But what choice do we have?”

“Quiet, please!” said Big Dima, raising his hands. Tyoma had noticed him seeming lost in thought for the past few minutes. “I just got a call from General Andreykin. He’ll be here shortly.”

Everyone began talking at once again, but Volodya’s voice cut through the noise. “Of course he was bound to hear what happened. We could turn this in our favor, perhaps.” He turned to Tyoma. “Did you ever complete that code?”