The Perpetual

Testing the framework for the cyberpunk novel that I may never write

Of the known 22nd Century perpetuals, Bill Gates was the most boring, Jeff Bezos the most powerful, and Tom Cruise the most beloved. And because their methods of immortality varied so wildly, they staked out three known paths by which all future aspiring perpetuals would convert their resources and effort towards immortal transhumanism.

Paperclips

The tuning of the first Large Language Immortality Model, or LLIM, began in Myrna Street Labs in February of 2019 in Hostomel Ukraine. A Gates Foundation special project, Myrna Street leveraged local Ukrainian programmers and former KGB hackers to utilize the early pre-release guts of OpenAI’s ChatGPT obtained by Microsoft investment in 2019, rebuilt it in secret, and tuned it to a body of written and recorded personal data obsessively compiled by Gates since he caught wind of the idea a decade prior. The project suffered a severe setback when Vladimir Putin was made aware of it by a former Soviet project architect and invaded Ukraine as a cover to steal it, but offsite backups and a quick ground evac of critical staff to Lviv preserved most of the work.

Putin’s version failed laughably in 2031 after he finally succumbed to pancreatic cancer, owing to a lack of appropriate training data. While Gates recorded every element of his personal life, Putin recorded as little as possible, so the hastily trained LLM became bland and unusable by Putin’s death. When all chips were counted, Vladimir Putin sacrificed five hundred elite airborne troops on the Hostomel Aerodrome operation in order to seize a piece of software architecture which couldn’t answer what it wanted for breakfast without ten minutes of historical preamble on the Russian tradition of glazunya eggs, leading to the world’s first Immortali-meme.

Production of Gates LLIM continued in secret well after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, buttressed by an infusion of technology associated with Microsoft’s January 2023 OpenAI funding round. The public only caught wind of the project’s full implications around 2045, when Gates stopped making public appearances and donated his entire 1.1 trillion dollar net worth to the Gates Foundation, but the Gates Foundation continued to operate seamlessly with Bill seemingly adjudicating its operations. After the passing of the Gates Foundation backed 2047 AI Rights Act, Gates LLIM announced itself to the public with a rebranding campaign utilizing a talking 1967 Cartier Crash watch as its spokesman, the ultimate MS Office Paperclip.

The number of Paperclip Perpetuals half a century later is not fully known, but approximately three dozen other private global organizations and two world powers are known to have reorganized their operations entirely around a Paperclip Perpetual, usually a long standing CEO or dictator with the resources to build a LLIM. When their meat body dies, their project lives on. A 2102 analysis by Fortune-Forbes indicated that the costs associated with spinning up a LLIM are 22% less than transitioning corporate hierarchies over to a new CEO, and speculated that all 22nd century corporations would likely follow suit now that the ROI is inked.

All corporations, that is, that aren’t already controlled by Plutarchs.

Plutarchs

Every perpetual attains their immortality by wealth in some way or another, and Jeff Bezos paved the way for a class of timelessness barons who achieve it through brute medical force. The longevity movement holds its roots in the scientific optimism of the early 20th century, but the resources to fully achieve it by medical means were only developed in the middle 21st.

Plutarchs approach perpetuality like a shotgun. Strict nutrition and fasting regimens, strict physical training focusing on strength, cardio, and flexibility, and strict stress management regimens which take up large portions of their waking hours are only the prerequisite. Plutarchs screen daily with high definition resonance sonography to identify tumors or biological imperfections, which are then investigated further with low contrast magnetic resonance imaging for further analysis and treatment. Bodily areas exhibiting signs of aging are treated with tailored CRISPR gene therapy, stem cell therapy, and telomere extension. NAD+ boosters, custom rolling mRNA vaccine immunology, and general immune boosting are buttressed by quarantine, mechanical respiration, and second-skin technology, providing physical and social pathogen barriers. But the most notable improvement in transhumanist perpetuality technology was the 2034 invention of human cloning by Amazon-Sinogene Concerns.

With brain transplants out of reach for the foreseeable technological future, Plutarchs transplant everything else they may need from clones of themselves grown in vats. The general procedure emerged in animals such as pets in the 2020s, and was made conceptually popular among the wealthy at Jeffery Epstein’s eugenics parties. Jeff Bezos is thought to be the first to implement it in full, by inserting his own cryopreserved DNA into enucleated donor eggs from selected biologically superior women, inducing embryo growth in those eggs, and transferring the embryos back into the women who become pregnancy surrogates. The women then give birth to Bezos clones, which are kept in a catatonic state and grown to produce donor organs and stem cells to supply Amazon-Rejuvenate Ltd’s core mission of keeping the Plutarch alive.

The associated costs with such an operation place it out of reach for most of the world’s wealthy, and only truly within the scope of those who single handedly operate multinational corporations with a broad reach and incalculable resources. Few have the resources to become a Plutarch, and some who do spend those resources on other ill conceived vanities, such as the Hellas Planitia Mars disaster site now simply known as Musk’s Folly. Those who do follow Bezos down this path inevitably struggle with the implications of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, as they slowly replace themselves with bits and pieces of their other selves, taking the 1st Century arguments by the Greek Plutarch to their final conclusion.

The few remaining proletariat commoners who persist after the 21st century birth rate collapse despise the Paperclip and the Plutarch transhumanists, who are emblematic of the ultimate triumph of the wealthy in Marxist class warfare, but they universally love the third category as they face their Mission Impossible.

Cruises

By the time Tom Cruise seized control of Warner Brothers in 2038 with backing from the Church of Scientology, his apparent lack of aging at age 75 was a hotter topic than the corporate merger of Paramount and Cruise/Wagner Productions. Tom’s appearance in the 2035 box office smash Mission Impossible - Crimson Cipher depicted him as young and as vital as he was in Dead Reckoning Part Two, and unlike Bezos and the Plutarchs, Tom was by all appearances still doing his own stunts. Nobody could figure out the secret, and anyone who did was convinced not to share it by the Church.

Only as populations contracted and large swaths of the United States turned to dustbowl ghost towns of meth gang turf wars, internet egregore junkies, and pronatalist luddite religious enclaves did the true nature of Tom Cruise’s immortality become publicly known. While other major organizations in the world used transhumanist principles to turn their figureheads into technological or biological perpetuals in service of the organization, Tom became the opposite. At some point which remains unrecorded, Tom ceased being a person and became an organization himself.

Historians do not know the first time a Tom impersonator replaced Tom on a Hollywood stage or in a Tom Cruise movie, but the first public recorded instance of recruitment for the School of Tom hit TMZ in 2041. According to modern legend, Tom worked closely with his stand-ins during movie production, driving them to great lengths to emulate not only his body movements, but his speech, acting, and personal mannerisms both on and off screen. After a gruesome stunt accident on the set of Mission Impossible Fallout, Tom had a stand-in finish the entire movie, with only those amongst his innermost Scientology cabal the wiser. The Church then facilitated the secret School of Cruise, recruiting Tom Cruise lookalikes from amongst all of its global members and subjecting them to rigorous Tom Training in an apportioned section of Scientology Gold Base in San Jacinto behind a veil of armed Boston Dynamics assault dogs and razor wire.

Amid the violent proletariat reaction to the rise of the rich transhumanist perpetuals, Tom Cruise became emblematic of the resistance, evidence to the world that the common man too could be immortal, and immortality themes were woven into the plotlines of Mission Impossible - Terminal Veil, Mission Impossible - Shattered Horizon, and Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol 2 Omega Protocol. Recruitment for Toms went public, becoming a Tom became one of the top five most desired career paths among the shrinking population, and Scientology officially rebranded itself as the Church of Cruise in 2084. Now, traveling groups of Tom priests journey the midwestern wastelands, bringing the Good Cruise to the net disconnected masses, holding revivals which feature DVD giveaways, merch, and beach volleyball tournaments.

The Org Chart

Narrow minded transhumanist activists of the 20th and early 21st century imagined that humans would transcend our biological bounds to become more than human, creatures at a different level of biological capability or mental consciousness. Their blinkered vision failed to predict that man would not transcend by our own facilities, but by instead merging laterally with the corporations, nation states, media apparati, or religious groups that made up our superorganismic ephemera. We would cease to be human not by becoming gods, but rather by becoming ant queens, entrenching ourselves in the organizational superstructures of our own make. We became civilization, and civilization became us.