PAT FELT IT WAS PART OF HIS DUTY to his family, friends and associates to set about developing a survival plan, but when he stopped to think, he realised that if he lived to the age of his grandfather, he had at the most 30 or so years of life ahead of him, half of what he had already lived. Most mortal men would have been satisfied with that, but not Pat. What would all his wealth be worth to him if he was dead, as he surely would be if nature ran its unforgiving course?
He remembered his visit to Xi’an, the capital of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a united China, who with his vast wealth and power had built a tomb guarded by the now famous life-sized Terracotta Army, a city from which he planned to rule in the afterlife.
In the meantime, to forestall the risk that the afterlife was just a dream, Qin sought the elixir of eternal life, a concoction invented by his wise men, mercury pills, which unfortunately for him only hastened the end of his mortal existence.
Immortality was an age old dream, but in 2020 there was a glimmer of hope and certain scientists thought the key to longevity lay in the genes that controlled our biological clock.
Though brought up a Catholic in Ireland, Pat was not a believer, superstitious, but definitely not a believer, as for Chinese elixirs he had about as much faith in them as in the holy water his mother brought home from Lourdes. But he did believe in science, and the progress medical science had made during his life time was remarkable by any measure.
Pat had everything a man could want, he was a citizen of the world, he had power and wealth, he had a family—an elegant Chinese wife and two beautiful children, he owned homes in Hong Kong, London, Paris, New York and the Caribbean, he was the owner of a mega-yacht and a transcontinental jet or two, and above all robust health, but now as he approached the age of 60, and his good health seemed less certain, the thought of his own mortality cast a sombre shadow on his otherwise extraordinary rise to success—one day in the not very distant future he would die.
He with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, had two things in common—they were immensely rich … and they would die.
What was the point of being rich, or surviving the disasters that were taking shape of the horizons, if he was to die of age and decrepitude like the many nameless down and outs he saw sleeping in the doorways on the streets of London.
What was the point of saving the planet, restoring it to its once pristine state, if he was not there to enjoy it?
Was death inevitable when he controlled such vast wealth?
The two things went together, survival and longevity, longevity and survival, in the kind of conditions that permitted him to enjoy life with the trappings of wealth and far from danger.
Through his bank, INI Hong Kong, he was the majority shareholder in LifeGen, a biological research institute based in Sophia Antipolis, a science and technology park that lay in the South of France, between Nice and Cannes. LifeGen’s principal field of research was molecular biology and genetics and more precisely research into the biological clock, the mechanism that controlled the ageing process in the human body.
Understanding the underlying cause of ageing was essential if the clock was to be reset, reversed, restoring characteristics of youth to aged cells and tissues. Pat was told two factors influenced the ageing process—epigenetics and genetics, and defining their functioning was essential if they were to be opened to reprogramming.
The idea that those who persons who would live to two hundred or more had already been born, convinced Pat to invest, like Alphabet’s life-science company, Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences, in life extending research.
LifeGen’s goal was to slow and even reverse the aging process, through technology, big data, genomics and by applied regenerative medicine to replace or regenerate human cells, tissues and organs.
Life extension research was a field that governments and intellectuals disapproved, that was understandable, philosophers had spent 2,500 years explaining and justifying death, religions had invested big in their afterlife beliefs, as for pension funds long life was anathema.
Pat had sufficient proof that life could be extended through techniques to rejuvenate the human body by increasing science’s understanding of the biology that regulated the duration of life, his ambition was to control it by the development of new technologies.
It was a serious advantage to commence life with a good set of genes, which he believed he had, and to be far from the horribly polluted environment of Hong Kong and China, far away, perhaps in Ireland, or on the Altiplano of Colombia, which was of course in the realms of the possible.
He was the captain of INI, a leading multinational investment bank and financial services institution, headquartered in Hong Kong, a well-oiled machine, providing services to countless clients—for the most part businesses, caring for the wealth of their owners and shareholders, privileged high worth individuals through the group's private banking arm, investing in the future through a network of branches spread across Asia, Europe and the Americas.