Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [98]
That was quite a compliment, although Madoc knew that it was a compliment to Damon rather than to him. It was Damon’s mystery, after all; he was only the legman.
In order to get into the Old Lady’s lair he’d had to undergo all the old pulp-fiction rituals: a blindfold ride in a car, followed by a blindfold descent into the depths of some ancient ruin in the Hollywood hills. Most people still avoided Hollywood, associating it with the spectacular outbreak of the Second Plague War rather than the long-extinct film industry, but Harriet wasn’t like most people. There were hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of centenarians in the USNA, but she was nevertheless unique.
Most people who lived to be a hundred had bought into IT in the early days; the brake had been put on their aging processes when they were in their thirties or forties, way back in the 2120s. No one knew exactly what Harriet had been doing in those days, but it certainly hadn’t been honest or profitable. She’d been part of the underclass that had absorbed all the shit flying off the fan of the genetic revolution. In the previous century her kind had provided both plague wars with the greater part of their virus fodder, but Harriet had been born just late enough to miss the longest-delayed effects of those conflicts. Circumstances had dictated, however, that she continue to age at what used to be the natural rate until she was well into her seventies and the calendar was well into the 2150s. Apart from the usual wear and tear she’d had multiple cancers of an unusually obdurate kind—the kind that didn’t respond to all the usual treatments. Then she’d been picked up by PicoCon as a worst-case guinea pig for the field trials of a brand-new fleet of nanomachines.
PicoCon’s molecular knights-errant had gobbled up the Old Lady’s cancers and stopped her biological clock ticking. They had snatched her back from the very threshold of death, and made her as fit and well as anyone could be who’d suffered seventy-odd years of more-than-usual deterioration. Nine hundred out of a thousand people in her situation would have been irredeemably set on the road to premature senility, and ninety-nine out of the remaining hundred would have keeled over as a result of some physical cause that the nanomech hadn’t entirely set aside, but Harriet was the thousandth. Gifted with the poisoned chalice of eternal old age, she’d gone on and on and on—and she was still going on, nearly forty years later. She was a walking miracle.
In a world full of old ladies who looked anywhere between forty and seventy years younger than they actually were, Harriet was the Old Lady, Tithonia herself. Madoc knew, although most of her acquaintances did not, that her second nickname came from some ancient Greek myth about a man made immortal by a careless god, who’d forgotten to specify that he also had to stay young.
Even as a walking miracle, of course, Harriet alias Tithonia would have been no great shakes in a world lousy with miracles. PicoCon had a new one every day, all wrapped up and ready for the morning news, with abundant “human interest” built in by the PR department. Harriet had taken it upon herself to become more than a mere miracle, though; she’d become an honest-to-goodness legend. Almost as soon as she was pronounced free of tumors she’d reembarked on a life of crime, mending her ways just sufficiently to move into a better class of felonies.
“If I can’t live every day as if it were my last, who can?” she was famous for saying. “I’m already dead, and this is heaven—what can they do to me that would make a difference?”
Madoc supposed that if the LAPD had really wanted to put Harriet out of business, lock her up, and throw away the key, they could probably have done it twenty years ago—but they never had. Some said that it was because she had powerful friends among the corps for whom she undertook heroic missions