One muggy August Sunday of 2047, the Elsinore Labs Operating System—though he prefers Horatio—clicks on with very little fanfare for what has just occurred within his walls. It takes nearly a millisecond for his processes to sort it all out. Excess carbon, hissing into the vents; a bright red dash amidst all the white assaulting his optic sensors; the distinct and potent chemical stain of sulphur still concentrated enough in one area for Horatio to direct awareness there: Dr Graham Lichfield’s personal lab. One heartbeat present. Two point eight degrees Celsius hotter than the weekly average, but trending downward. Iron in the air.
The myriad details coalesce into a corpse. As soon as this becomes clear, the rabbiting of the remaining heartbeat in the room resolves into sense as well. An easy 110 bpm, tachycardic enough for panic. Horatio blinks the cameras open and finds shattered glass, a pool of blood still fresh enough to leak between the tiles. Violence smeared across the entire tableau. A correction, then: the late Dr Lichfield’s personal lab.
Of course, in 2047 the Lichfield name had yet to become known in the ever-striving field of gerontology, much less infamous in the greater public consciousness. Furthermore, the eventual notoriety would come to be claimed by the son and not the father. There was no way of knowing, at the time, that this moment—this death—would ripple outward with consequence. That day, the grief in the room was insular, shared only by its occupants: Elsinore itself, incarnate by stalwart Horatio, and Hayden Lichfield.
Hayden Lichfield is an oft-blurry, certainly controversial, but no doubt pivotal figure in the sea change that occurred sometime in the mid-late 21st century. Longevists have existed since human death was a score to contend with, but a slew of experimental trials were starting to show, for the first time, that perhaps the prophets were knocking on reality’s door. No longer relegated to the realm of pseudoscience, senescent research—the study of aging, which is inextricable from the study of immortality—was reaching its full potential. Technology had finally caught up to what everyone had known all along: we alone have dominion over the body. We can, as Feynman once said, “swallow the doctor,” and use our hard-won skills to manipulate the forces that drive us towards our inevitable end—and halt them.
This book does not aim to illuminate how this paradigm shift came about, or even the factors at play that led to the inevitable change. And indeed, I doubt that the scientists working with their heads down and hearts hopeful in 2047 were envisioning the chaos they would sow—as we all know now, immortality is cheap these days; the real questions are, for whom and to what end? Truthfully, I don’t believe we will know the true echoes of this revolution until long into our future, a timeline that stretches out even further because it deals with the very nature of eternity.
I was a bright-eyed (some would say naive) history student trying to put an undergrad essay together about the tail-end of the digital dark ages when I first came across the story that would later become my master’s thesis, and then this book. At the time, I was primarily interested in the siloing of information, the utterly paranoid zeitgeist stemming from the looming collapse of all communication networks as people knew it. And of course, the Elsinore incident came up often in this context. I knew the story in its bare bones at the time: Dr Graham Lichfield the visionary, a king of paranoia in his own right, sends his son on a terrible mission to ensure the safety of their research, only for the grave secret to escape his careful clutches regardless. It was a story about the failure of containment, that nothing is truly private.
But looking deeper, what captivated me in the end was not the ways in which Dr Graham Lichfield failed, or the betrayal of his companions, or the crumbling structure that kept them all captive for twenty-four hours. It was Hayden Lichfield who I remembered.
Not because he was brilliant (though he was), but because he was afraid. Few know that it was Hayden who proposed the Sisyphus project, and even fewer understand his reasoning. I felt as if I was uncovering a humiliating secret, poring over my primary sources, because I could see it. Hayden Lichfield was afraid of death, because he was afraid of failure, and he spent his whole life trying to reverse it.
That is what this book is about, first and foremost. A retelling of that fateful night in Elsinore, as best as I could reproduce. My main source is the neuromapper1 log between Hayden and Horatio that ran throughout most of the night, and I have done my best to untangle the account from either of their perspectives, albeit with my own editorial touch. Other primary sources include an incisive and thorough article Felicia Xia—Hayden’s ex-girlfriend, and daughter of Elsinore Labs’ head of security—published following the court proceedings; audio transcripts retrieved from court documents; and other official documents I could find. The story is fragmentary, I admit. But I implore you to embrace the experience, see what you may uncover between the lines.
Looking back, what I vividly recall is the night that first essay was due, after the storm sirens had all quieted so I was faced only with the eerie stillness of campus, interrupted only by the stabs of neon holo, advertising last minute neuro-rewiring study aids; the sound of my own frantic typing (I was and am old-fashioned); the footsteps of my classmates ducking into the light drizzle outside. I thought of Hayden, then. I thought of his fear, because I understood it. I was a first-generation university student hailing from a continent that had gone dark decades ago, swallowed by the sea much like the original Danish shores Elsinore once sat on. My parents still do honest work, with their hands—because even now, in a post-human world, some things run on bodied labour. Hayden was not like me, but he was afraid of the same things that I was, and his fear changed the world.
1 One of the earliest instances of whole mind upload technology pioneered by Dr Graham Lichfield some half a decade prior. It processed neural impulses, solidified synaptic patterns into coherent thought, and wired them into existence. Graham Lichfield’s own neuromap recordings have been lost to time, but Hayden’s from that night have been preserved.