The Immortality Game

“Oh, but it’s no robot. Watch the way it behaves. It’s too realistic. Have you ever seen a robot that didn’t behave like a robot?” Tyoma jumped from his chair and reached out to scratch Gosha behind his ears. The chimp’s lips pursed and tried to kiss Tyoma’s wrist. “Gosha here was our first full success of capturing the data from a chimp’s mind and layering it onto a digital interface that allows it to mimic a real brain.”

General Andreykin squinted at Tyoma. “Don’t blather at me. How does this relate to my needs?”

“You want super-soldiers. We can capture the minds of your very best men and reuse them in robot bodies…‌or eventually in clones of human bodies.”

“Clones. Human bodies. That’s what I need. When can you show me that?”

“General,” Tyoma said. “Can you imagine how difficult it is to conduct tests on human subjects? We can’t reconstitute an adult mind within an adolescent body, so we are forced to wait until a clone body reaches full maturity before we can even conduct a test. Speeding up the development of clones has thus far been a failure. And there are the questions, of course, of what to do with partial successes. Would you have us dispose of a nearly complete human? When does it become murder? Forget that—what about a full success? Any problem with having a duplicate of a living person running about? How will that work?”

The general waved a hand dismissively. “It’s only soldiers I need. They’ll belong to the army.”

“You going to supply us with test subjects?”

“What are all those crèches for that we funded? Haven’t you been aging clones already?”

“Absolutely. We’ve been working on perfecting the cloning process. It’s a different matter altogether to actually give the clones a mind. We need DNA and mind dumps from some of your men.”

Andreykin rose from his seat and towered over Tyoma. “That’s not a problem. What is a problem is that General Potkin lost his job due to lack of progress here. I don’t intend to lose mine. I want to see real progress, Doctor.”

“You know, General,” Tyoma said, “there are cures for baldness now.”

“You are not funny, little man.”

“General, let’s go down and visit the crèches. I’ll explain our progress on that part of the project. Then I have something else that is fully ready. I think you’ll like it very much.”

Tyoma led the grim-faced general to the grav tube, which whisked them down to the third basement level. The lights flicked on to show an enormous room, antiseptically clean, about half the size of a football pitch. Rows of crèches lined the floor like huge silver and glass coffins. The room smelled strongly of glass cleaner.

Neither man spoke as they approached the nearest crèche. Tyoma could never help but marvel at the features of each clone, no matter how many times he visited. The first crèche contained what looked like a naked teenage version of his friend Kostya, though hairless and with much smoother skin.

“Ah,” said General Andreykin, with the first smile Tyoma had seen on the man’s face. “It is Dr. Sakaev, yes?”

“Yes. This row here contains six of his clones, each a year apart in age. This one will be ready to test in around four more years.”

The general strolled to a different row of crèches and leaned forward to stare at the clone within.

“I’ve never seen a room this clean in my life, not even in a hospital.”

Tyoma grunted but otherwise didn’t respond.

“How can they look so healthy? I would think lying in these boxes for years would produce little more than pasty corpses.”

Tyoma slid a finger along one of the tubes that ran through the glass and into the clone’s right arm. “Look here. What do you see?”

Andreykin remained at his crèche but bent to examine one of the tubes. Tyoma was especially proud of the swarm of nearly microscopic dots he knew the general was seeing; he had programmed them himself and jokingly called them his children.

“The miracles of modern medicine. Each of us has billions of nanobots doing anything from preventing colds and other diseases to scar repair to…” He raised his eyes to the general’s bald dome. “…preventing baldness.”

“I like being bald, Dr. Grachev.”

“I’m sure. Anyhow, we have our own special nanobots here. We’ve spent decades coming up with new ones for all the problems we’ve encountered. We need them for muscle development, bones, lungs, basically anything that would typically atrophy if unexercised. The brain was the toughest. It’s critical that it develop properly. We’ve perfected it with chimp clones, and we think we are ready with humans now.”

General Andreykin walked to a new row of crèches. “Who is this? I can’t place him.”

“That was Dr. Anatoly Vorobyev. He was our psychology expert, but he died three years ago.”

“Why do you keep his clones then? I want to get started on my soldiers. We don’t need to waste space on him.”