The HEAVEN Project

Vladimir Scott, billionaire philanthropist, gazed at the body suspended in hydrogel. It was attached to a multitude of wires and tubes. A row of machines blinked and beeped beside the glass vat.

“You’re fortunate that we found a perfect genetic match so quickly,” the bald, bespectacled man in a white lab coat was explaining. “The GEMINI procedure allows us to sever the spinal cord using only ten Newtons of force, preserving the nerve endings for anastomosis. We’ve had great success with restoring motor function in our trials. You’ll be walking out of here a new man, Mr. Scott.”

“How quickly can you operate?” Vladimir asked. He, like the floating body, was kept alive only by the miracle of modern technology. He sat hunched in his wheelchair, an automated chest compression device pumping blood to the part of himself worth preserving: his brain.

“As soon as you approve the payment and sign the release papers,” the man replied. “I remind you, Mr. Scott, that your operation will be the first time the GEMINI procedure has been performed on a human being. We are confident it will be successful, but there is always risk involved when one is playing God.”

“I did not get where I am today without taking risks,” the billionaire retorted. “And I am dying already.”

It did not take long. The man’s phone buzzed as the GDP of a small country was transferred electronically into his account. He smiled.

“I congratulate you, Mr. Scott, on your journey to HEAVEN.”

“Heaven,” Vladimir scoffed. “I never liked the name of your project, Sergio. I’ve built the land of milk and honey for myself here on earth, and I don’t intend to lose it. The only God I worship is the dollar, and the eternal soul is a myth to keep the poor from overthrowing the rich.”

Sergio laughed as a man in blue scrubs wheeled away the brain housed in its decrepit body. “Fortunately for my project, Mr. Scott, my investors agree with you.”

***

Sergio Capaldi gazed proudly down at the body on the table before him. The operation had been a success: Vladimir Scott’s head was firmly attached to a healthy, 32-year old body. The face lift and eye transplant had left the billionaire philanthropist’s head looking like Frankenstein’s monster, but the swelling and scarring would heal rapidly with the aid of the fully resorbable electrospun fiber wound dressings that Sergio’s assistant was carefully applying.

“Put him in biostasis,” Sergio ordered. “He’ll be fully healed in a week.”

Peter Marlow, Sergio’s blue-scrubbed assistant, applied a final bandage to the thin line where Vladimir Scott’s rejuvenated face met his newly purchased body. He nodded to Sergio and began to wheel the prostrate form out of the operating room.

“Peter,” Sergio called, pointing to a red biohazard bag. “Don’t forget that.”

He watched as Peter picked up the penultimate resting place of John Doe’s discarded head, tossed it into the trash chute by the door, and wheeled its body out of the operating room and down the hallway towards the recovery room.

As he walked back to his office, Sergio’s phone buzzed. He checked it and smiled. Rumors that Sergio Capaldi had discovered the fountain of youth were spreading. He was confident that the trickle of requests to participate in the HEAVEN project would soon turn into a flood.

He made a right turn down a concrete hallway and used the retina scanner to open the heavy metal door to the holding cells. Inside were six rooms, each containing a bed, exercise equipment, TV, toilet, and shower. Three were occupied. The bodies inside (two male, one female) were in peak physical condition. Their skin glowed, their muscles were lithe and toned. They looked nothing like the filth-encrusted, malnourished, track-mark-ridden ragpickers they had been when they were first recruited.

The premise was simple: take the dregs of society and make them useful. Right now, in the building stages, recruiting new bodies relied on a handful of contacts at well-placed clinics — but one day, it could be an international network. When a high net-worth individual expressed interest in a new body, Sergio’s team performed a full medical panel to record their blood type and genetic markers. Then they scanned their database of medical records for an initial match. They were careful to choose bodies that would not be noticed missing — addicts, sex workers, childless and jobless vagrants on government assistance. Surveillance technology made it easy to track them down. Sergio’s team made a good offer: participate in a government-backed study and receive food, shelter, medical care, and a large stipend for the next three months. They just had to sign on the dotted line. Sergio smiled when he thought about A/HRC/RES/666/333. All it took was a few friends in high places — friends who were eager to make their own journeys to HEAVEN — to convince the Human Rights Council to re-word the legal language defining “bodily autonomy.” After all, these people weren’t really signing away their lives. The contract (which they never bothered to read carefully) defined their bodies as a vessel, a uterus carrying something more precious than itself. There was legal precedent; Sergio had Adriana Smith and the Georgia LIFE Act to thank for that.

Any body that entered a holding cell underwent extensive medical testing before the HEAVEN operation. There was human leukocyte antigen typing, hemoglobin crossmatch testing, and a targeted regiment of immunosupression drugs to prevent transplant rejection. If a recruit was not compatible with the client, they were released, a little healthier and none the wiser. Sergio smiled. These three were nearly ready. Vladimir Scott had been his first client, but he would not be the last.

***

Exactly one month post-surgery, Vladimir Scott lounged in the leather armchair beside the crackling fireplace that warmed the library of his baronial home. He sipped a glass of Michel Courveur Overaged Malt Whiskey over ice. Everything should have been perfect. It would have been, if not for the nagging feeling of wrongness that besieged him.

The color of the fire was not the same intoxicating yellow-orange he loved; the flickers of red were brighter and angrier than before. The snapping pop of the burning wood sent nervous twitches down his new spine. The taste of the alcohol was the same, but not the way it burned instead of settling in his stomach.

In his youth, Vladimir Scott had joked about being a floating head. He had not paid much attention to his body — it was just a tool to transport his mind. But then, his body began to fail. When he was first confined to the chair, he saw his foolishness with the clarity of loss.

He began to meditate. He would close his eyes and breathe, focusing on the feeling of air in his nose and the expanding of his diaphragm. He would find the center of calm within himself, where thoughts drifted past like tendrils of clouds in an otherwise clear sky. He would let the calm expand until it washed over him. He would imagine himself floating in a vast lake below the beautiful blue sky, and sometimes, when he let go of himself, he was the lake, and the sky, and the tendrils of cloud.

Meditation was the middle path. It grounded him. He began to savor every sensation: the brightness of wine and the chew of oysters; the thickness of a page and the smell of the fire; the sultry echo of jazz piano and the touch of a beautiful woman.

Greedily, he wanted more. It seemed like a cruel punishment to finally be still enough to appreciate the pleasures of life only now that his was ending.

In his pre-surgery fantasies, the vitality of his new body was a blessing. He longed for the clarity of movement and the revitalizing ache of a deep stretch. Trapped in his decaying body, he indulged in the imagined feeling of leaves crunching beneath his feet as he strolled the wooded paths of his palatial château. He would take up sports he had never had time for in his working youth: rock climbing, skiing, surfing. He would finally break 80 on his favorite golf course. He would write without feeling the ache of arthritis. He would make love with the vigor of his youth, thrusting fresh hips to a powerful climax.

Reality never lives up to its ideal. In the weeks since Vladimir Scott left the HEAVEN compound, calm had eluded him. His new heart was restless; he was uncomfortably aware of it pumping thick, hot blood through stolen veins.

The body he had bought would not allow him to be still. Every time he closed his eyes to imagine the lake, foreign energy buzzed inside him, like his entire body had fallen asleep and was waking up in the tingling agony of pins and needles. He had flown his private jet to Lake Annecy and kayaked out into her blue vastness, but when he jumped into the cool water and floated there, his body kept his mind trapped. He could not merge with the universe while his nerves flamed. It angered him. That was the other feeling he could not escape: hot, burning rage that tightened his chest and tensed his muscles. He had never been an angry man, and he wondered where the emotion came from. Was it simply the heat of youth, a byproduct of his newly elevated testosterone levels? He would ask Dr. Capaldi.

***

“Physically, you’re in excellent health,” Sergio Capaldi said. He was sitting at his desk, across from Vladimir Scott, who was reclining in a black leather armchair. “It’s only been a month, so it’s not unexpected to undergo a period of adjustment to your new body.”

Despite his patient’s complaints, Sergio was delighted with the results before him. The man had the ageless look of adulthood; he could have been thirty or fifty — it was impossible to say. The facelift had left no visible scars, and the lithe muscles of the body were visible beneath the form-fitting black T-shirt and trousers Vladimir Scott was wearing. The results of the physical exam, which Sergio was displaying on a large monitor, were stellar: blood pressure, heart rate, VO2 max, balance and coordination, cholesterol…all the standard measurements of health had been in their ideal range. Whatever complaints Vladimir Scott was having, the before and after shots spoke for themselves. Sergio couldn’t wait to present them to his investors; the HEAVEN project was about to explode.

“Please, Mr. Scott, explain to me again. What problems have you been experiencing?” Sergio held his pen ready to take notes that he was already planning to ignore.

“It is difficult to explain,” Vladimir began. “Like I said, there is a kind of…resistance.”

“Do you mean that your limbs are not responding to you?” Sergio prodded.

“They respond,” Vladimir sighed. Sergio detected a note of irritation in his voice, as if the man’s sigh was an act of restraint.

“They respond,” Vladimir said again, “but they resist. It’s as though I am forcing them to move through willpower. I have lost the harmony of mind and body. Like…playing a duet on the piano, but one player is a beat behind.” He scowled. “That metaphor isn’t quite right.”

“I assure you, Mr. Scott,” Sergio smiled. “You are the only player seated at the piano.”

“I wonder,” Vladimir replied.

“Wonder what?”

Vladimir shrugged. “And there’s the anger,” he continued. “I have never felt anger like this. I feel it, like a crushing weight in my chest.”

“Surely, Mr. Scott, a man such as yourself has experience dealing with anger,” Sergio said.

“I meditate, and yet, I cannot center myself. I tell myself that I simply need time to practice, but…” he trailed off.

Sergio’s pen scratched the paper. Vladimir continued. “It’s like a poison. I was so excited to explore the world again, to experience whatever I was too busy to experience in my youth…”

Sergio listened idly as he wrote. The billionaire’s complaints did not interest him; they sounded like the dissatisfied ramblings of a man who had the moon and wanted the stars.

“I can’t enjoy it,” Vladimir finished. “This new life that was supposed to be mine.” He was staring at Sergio, and Sergio began to feel uncomfortable. He shifted slightly in his seat.

“Surely, Mr. Scott, you just need time to adjust?” he began.

“You do not understand, Dr. Capaldi,” Vladimir said. And as he spoke, he did an unusual thing: he lifted the solid marble bust of Aristotle from Sergio’s desk and cradled it like an infant.

“You already have many other interested clients,” he said, flatly. It was not a question.

“Naturally,” Sergio acquiesced. He felt tense. His neck, beneath his collar, felt hot and itchy.

“And what will you tell them about my experience?” Vladimir asked. His voice was cold and cutting. Sergio coughed politely.

“Ah, well,” he began. “Of course, I will share your…concerns. But, surely, Mr. Scott, you are satisfied with the HEAVEN procedure overall? I mean, look at yourself!” Sergio gestured at Vladimir’s youthful form. “You look amazing! Your test results are amazing! Once I share these results with my investors…” Sergio, nearly overcome with giddiness at the thought of his impending success, took a calming breath. “Naturally, there may be a few minor kinks to work out. But Mr. Scott, surely you will admit that even if I had shared your own concerns with you, prior to the operation, well…would you have done anything differently?”

The last thing Sergio Capaldi saw was Vladimir Scott’s snarling face as he slammed the marble bust down hard on Sergio’s head.

***

Vladimir stood, panting, looking down at the mess of blood and brains on Sergio Capaldi’s cherry oak desk. He was still holding the bloody bust. With great mental effort, one reluctant finger at a time, he released it. It landed with a soft thud on the wine-colored carpet.

His mind raced quickly to find an explanation. He had lost control. The anger flowing through him at the sight of Sergio’s smug smile had not been his own. His body had moved without his say-so. He was not a murderer. The phantom soul of John Doe had got its revenge.

Vladimir Scott closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He noticed his body, and the hot anger that had tormented him since he awoke from biostasis. It was cooling. Satisfaction soothed the frantic, buzzing energy. And yet, Vladimir noted with horror, calm still eluded him.