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By Root 1672 0

it was not involved in the first conspicuous breakthrough in life extension. The development of nanotechnological tissue-repair systems was pioneered by the Institute of Algeny, which was subsequently absorbed by the most powerful of the late twenty-second century cosmicorporations, PicoCon. In a sense, this might be regarded as a fortunate failure. Had the breakthrough in question been made by Ahasuerus, it would undoubtedly have suffered the same fate, being swallowed up by a much larger institution and effectively digested. As things stood, the Foundation was allowed to retain much of its independence, following its own agenda in the slipstream of progress. The trustees were undoubtedly subject to considerable pressure from the Cartel of Cosmicorporations, which exercised a right of veto over its publications and products, but it was never formally taken over.

By the time the Ahasuerus Foundation did achieve a crucial breakthrough in longevity technology, the political climate in which it was operating had changed considerably, becoming far more benign. The Cartel had become far less combative internally, and far less assertive in its dealings with the democratic agencies of world government, having long settled into the comfortable routines of what its critics still called “invisible despotism.”

The central institution of the new world older was the New Charter of Human Rights, which sought to establish a right of emortality for everyone. Some historians have asserted that the Cartel only allowed the establishment of the charter because they knew that nanotechnological repair systems had reached the limit of effective achievement and the end of their natural lifetime as a generator of core profits, but this is unnecessarily cynical. What is certain, however, is that the granting of the charter placed a new responsibility on democratic institutions, which could only be discharged with the assistance and good will of the corporations, further enhancing the authority that commerce already exercised over the political apparatus.

Whatever the reasons may have been for its establishment, the New Charter provided the ideal context for purely biotechnological methods of life extension to move from the periphery to the heart of humankind’s progressive endeavours. The quest for “true” emortality — the promise of supportive Internal Technology having stopped some way short of that goal — was rapidly rewarded by the Foundation’s development of the Zaman Transformation.

In an earlier era Ali Zaman and his coworkers might have been coopted by the Cosmicorporations, but the twenty-fifth century was a more relaxed period, when a spirit of laissez faire — symbolized, albeit rather uneasily, by the Great Exhibition of 2405 — was not merely permitted but encouraged by the Earth’s economic directors. Rumors that the Foundation had actually discovered the relevant transformative techniques before Ali Zaman had even been born, but had obligingly kept them secret until the Cartel was fully prepared for their release, are probably false, being merely the latest in a long sequence of absurdly overcomplicated conspiracy theories.

The income flow generated by the increasingly effective and widely customized Zaman Transformations revived the stagnant finances of the Ahasuerus Foundation. Although Adam Zimmerman’s fortune had been considerable by twenty-first-century standards and the expenses of the Foundation were almost entirely met from income rather than capital, it had not been able to match the growth of the world economy. Now, placed firmly in the driving seat of progress, it began to grow richer at a rapid rate. The income available to its trustees increased massively, allowing them to diversify the Foundation’s holdings and researches on and off Earth. The trustees grew exceedingly rich in their own right.

As generation followed generation the custodians of Adam Zimmerman’s frozen body fought off a series of attempts to have him revived, on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe. Again, cynics who contended that their principal