I can’t remember who set up our last meeting, whether Doctor Kylan Merrick had reached out to me or I had chased him on some pretext or other. But I do recall he requested a video call instead of a face-to-face. He was unusually reserved when we spoke. I got him on the record for an industry trend feature I was writing, but when I asked about his company he spoke strictly on background. This by itself was nothing new. His business had always been on the verge of something big that he couldn’t talk about, and before long he would start feeding me a familiarly opaque line about upcoming breakthroughs in various unspecified lines of research. By this point, I knew him well enough to read when he was being deliberately vague. He had small but obvious tells: an exaggerated pause between sentences, the phrase “you understand?” in conspiratorial tones. But this time I noticed something else, a more deliberate evasiveness. Sensing a story, I pushed him to go into detail on the procedure his lab was working on. All I got was, “It could allow people to live forever,” a useless statement with no supporting evidence. And then Merrick had hurriedly signed off. And no word since… until now.
We sized each other up in the dim light of the quiet neighborhood café he had chosen for our meeting. Merrick, as usual, was impeccably dressed, in a light blue suit and tieless shirt. He had aged somewhat but still sported a silver-grey mane, plus a goatee that hadn’t featured in his last press photo. He seemed more at ease than he had at our last meeting. And while he wasn’t letting me quote him——“No names,” he warned, as I placed my iPhone on the table——he hadn’t told me to switch off the recording, either. At least having information on background would be better than no information at all. Something about him wanting to meet alone, without a PR hovering nearby, suggested he was keen to spill some beans. “All off the record,” I assented. “Just don’t want to miss any details.”
Merrick reached for his coffee and settled back in his chair. “Where shall we begin, then?”
I cleared my throat. “Your research? What was it? Eternal life?”
“Ah yes,” Merrick smiled. “I guess you could say that. I call it ‘returning’. Essentially a full brain transplant, allowing you to come back to life in someone else’s body. A willing body donor, shall we say.”
“Is this all since our last meeting? What happened?”
“More than you can imagine.” Merrick glanced around then leaned forward. “I couldn’t tell you last time we spoke, but we had carried out animal experiments that worked. Mice, rats, dogs, chimps. Then, just as we were about to go public with the findings, we got offered a ton of money.”
Merrick was unconsciously adjusting a leather-strapped Rolex as he said this. “Right,” I said. “And this was happening when we last met? Which is why you couldn’t say much?”
Merrick nodded. “NDAs,” he said.
“And who was your, err, benefactor?”
“See if you can guess. Dead billionaire?”
“Not Xander Riley?” I joked. The technology magnate’s passing was still fresh in the news, but judging from past spats on social media he was the last person Merrick might associate with. Merrick nodded again, however, a smile tugging at his lips.
“How come? You weren’t exactly a fan,” I said, mentally replaying some of Merrick’s attacks on Riley from a while back. “What changed?”
“Money talks,” shrugged Merrick. “And for Xander it was no big deal. He didn’t really care what people thought of him.”
It was my turn to nod. Riley’s sneering disregard for most of humanity had earned him few friends. His longstanding feud with rival mega-billionaire Konrad Lewis had been especially well documented. Now both had died, within days of each other——Riley of unspecified causes, while Lewis’s passing was reported as an assisted death in the immediate aftermath of an unexpected dementia diagnosis. The commotion over who would inherit Lewis’s fortune——he had no close relatives——was still in the papers. “Why was Xander so interested in your research?” I asked.
“He wanted it for himself. Xander was obsessed with eternal life. He had a whole portfolio of startups dedicated to life extension. My venture was folded into that. In fact, it became the star of the pack.”
Merrick grinned, clearly proud of himself.
“Xander may have been obsessed with life extension,” I countered, “but it clearly didn’t work for him, if he’s dead.”
Merrick’s smile broadened as he touched his nose, flicked his hair and took another sip of his coffee. He stayed silent, looking me in the eye.
“He is dead, isn’t he?” I asked slowly.
“Well, he is now.”
“What do you mean?”
“They haven’t said how he died, have they?”
“No….”
“Well, I guess you could call it suicide.”
“No way. Why would he do that? He was perfectly healthy.”
“Not so. About five months ago he found out he had cancer. The sort you don’t really come back from. So, he decided to try my treatment.”
“The brain transplant? And come back in a shiny new body?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘shiny new’. Our research on animals showed the procedure only worked with specimens that were very similar. Same gender, age and so on. If you’re going to come back in someone else’s skin, then I guess it needs to be like yours for your brain to adapt to it. So, we needed a body like Xander’s. And with the consent of the family, of course. No easy thing, unless the deceased has specifically asked to take part in the program.”
“And you found the right person?”
“Sort of. Close enough to be a decent match, and for Xander to sign off on the process. He didn’t really have much of a choice. But we were a bit concerned, to the point that Xander asked us to keep looking for a better specimen for as long as possible, including while we were prepping for the operation. That takes a few days, and we put the patient into an induced coma while it is happening.”
“But you never found that better option, right? That’s why he died? The operation didn’t work?”
“No, we did find someone better after Xander went under. An almost perfect match, in fact. And we used it. And the operation was a success.”
“So…?”
Merrick leaned forwards. NDAs be damned, he was relishing the chance to tell his story. “Xander regained consciousness with almost one hundred percent brain function,” he said. “No signs of rejection——essentially in perfect condition. Although we still had him on a life support system to keep the vitals going while the body finished adjusting.”
“What happened, then?”
“We brought him back to consciousness while he was still on life support. He was able to speak and asked about the operation. We figured we had to tell him there had been a last-minute change in donor. Then he asked to see himself.”
Merrick paused, swirled the remainder of his coffee and downed what was left. “After that, he asked for the life support to be switched off.”
“And you switched it off?”
“We had to. He was my boss, for a start. Plus, we had a clause in the medical paperwork that allowed the patient to discontinue the procedure at any point, entirely at their discretion. Just in case they were in pain, had ethical misgivings or that sort of thing.”
I mulled Merrick’s account. “Anyway,” he said, “now you know what’s happened to Xander. Up to you what you do with the story. But keep me out of it, right?”
I could understand Merrick’s concern. Depending on your point of view, he had either saved a life… or taken one. Or done both. But something did not add up.
“Wait,” I said. “If the operation was a success and Xander wanted it so badly, why did he end it all after waking up?”
Merrick smiled enigmatically. “Hold on,” I said. “Whose body did you use?”
“See if you can guess.”
“Not… Lewis?”
Merrick’s eyes twinkled as he pursed his lips.
“But didn’t Lewis have dementia?”
“Yes, he did, and he knew there was no going back. But his body was fine. And he was of sound mind when he donated it to the project.” Merrick paused and smoothed his hair.
“Lewis had the body of a rich person,” he continued. “Healthy, pampered, well preserved. But the only thing he cared about was his brain. When he realized he would lose that… and he was smart enough not to kid himself on this front… he didn’t want to go on. A perfect body with a damaged mind… he was ideal for our program, and he knew it.”
I shook my head, trying to take it all in. “So Xander wakes up… finds he’s in Lewis’s body… and can’t bear the thought of carrying on?”
“That pretty much sums it up,” said Merrick. “Who could have imagined he would react so dramatically to being brought back in the form of his arch-rival?” He glanced at his watch. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
He arose, brushed down his suit and offered me his hand. I took it as I stood up, my mind still buzzing. As he released me from a limp grip, a realization popped into my brain. “Wait,” I said.
Merrick had already started towards the door. He paused, turned, eyebrows arched. “I’m struggling,” I said, looking him in the eye. “See, what I don’t get is… you already had a volunteer when Xander went under. Suddenly, the option of Lewis appears after Xander is no longer able to decide for himself. The timing just seems too…” I struggled to find the word. “Coincidental?”
Merrick said nothing, poker faced.
“Unless…,” I murmured. “Lewis… the reports said he was being treated at Stanford…”
“Yes?”
“Isn’t that where you used to practice?”
“It is….”
As a reporter, there are times when you are researching a story and a single fact leads to a whole new interpretation of events, an alternative universe that simply had not existed before. This is what unfurled before me now. On one side, the story of a dedicated researcher pushing the boundaries of science, innocently caught out by unforeseeable circumstances. On the other, an egomaniac jumping at the right moment to engineer a cruel joke on an equally self-centered boss—with a deadly outcome.
“Did you… did you get Lewis’s consent just so you could both play a trick on Xander?” I stuttered.
The grin that had played over Merrick’s lips was replaced with a steely gaze. “You’ve got your story,” he said, turning to the door. “No names, remember?”
Evan Deign has been charting so-called progress on the third planet from the Sun for more than five decades. His main concern as a fiction writer is that reality could overtake imagination at any time.
