function must not be allowed to transform into harmful forms, but must rather be targeted by suicide genes and immune response undamaged mitochondria are introduced into cells suffering mitochondrial mutations lipofuscin is one kind of accumulated junk inside our cells that can’t be carried away by the immune system. Amyloid plaques are another. Enzymes adapted from bacteria and molds that completely digest animal bodies will upon introduction flourish until their nutrient runs out, and this absence activates inserted suicide genes in the enzymes. Extracellular aggregates are removed by vaccinations that stimulate immune responses, including a state of enhanced phagocytosis. Complications include random extracellular cross-linking of cells makes for stiffness, but the links have been successfully broken with enzymes designed to the manipulation of telomerase has proved to be a very difficult balancing act in certain cell types: telomeres too long and you get a cancerous immortality, telomeres too short and you quickly hit the Hayflick limit and replication is no longer successful while DNA repair involves a DNA polymerase with an exonuclease-proofreading capability, resulting in high-fidelity DNA repair, RNA polymerases do not have this and therefore make many more mistakes during gene transcription; this is a potent driver of evolution pleiotropy is the phenomenon of a gene causing good effects in the young organism that turn into bad effects in the same organism when aged. It is very often the source of the problems that bisexual hormone treatments are designed to hormesis (eagerness) is an eventually advantageous biological response to low exposures of toxins or stressors. This process, sometimes called eustress, and related to Mithridatism (after King Mithridates, who ate small amounts of poison so that a larger amount would not kill him), has been put forth as explaining in principle why the Earth sabbatical might help maximize longevity strongest correlations to longevity include smaller body size and exposure to both androgens and estrogens; these two are also multipliers of each other, to the extent that no small androgyn or gynandromorph has yet been known to die of natural causes. The oldest are over 210 years old, and their potential life span cannot be calculated at this time. There are likely to be more such subjects to study as this finding becomes better known actuarial escape velocity is defined as occurring when a year of medical research adds more than a year’s worth of longevity to the total population. Nothing even close to this has ever been achieved, and emerging signs of an asymptotic curve in progress suggest this velocity may never premature declaration of huge longevity gains has been called kyriasis or Dorian Gray syndrome or simply the hope for immortality lengthen the telomeres in certain cells by temporary increase of telomerase in these cells. As different cells lose telomeres at different rates, drug treatments have to be tagged to certain kinds of cells only, and inadvertent cancers biogerontology, humbled time and again by unexpected the famous calorie-restricted vitamin- enhanced diet acted to feminize gene expression in many ways that proved decisive for the longevity effect, so now gender hormone therapy is tailored to create this feminizing effect without the necessity of the caloric restriction, which never caught on if you recall the old comparison of the human body to a Havana Chevolet, with all moving parts replaced when they broke, then the problem could be compared to metal fatigue in the chassis and axles. In other words, the “seven deadly sins” of senescence are not the only sins. Unrepaired DNA damage, noncancerous mutation, the drift of chromatin states-all these eventually create “aging damage” hard to detect or counteract. None are currently amenable to repair. This probably explains the take skin cells from people, turn them into pluripotent stem cells, put these in a protein bath of the right kind and they form a neural tube, which is the start of the nervous system that will grow the spinal cord from one end and the brain from the other. Take slices of neural tube and direct them with other protein stimulants to become cells of different parts of the brain, like cortex cells. Test for firing. arrhythmia, stroke, sudden collapse, quick decline, immune loophole, brain wave irregularity, superinfection, heart attack, apparently causeless instantaneous death (ACID), etc.
KIRAN IN VINMARA
Kiran’s new work unit began regularly driving a rover back and forth from one of Lakshmi’s locked compounds in Cleopatra to the new town Vinmara, always passing Stupid Harbor on the way. Vinmara was still growing like a mussel bed around its shallow empty bay, and off to the south through the drifting snowfall they could see the silver glitter of the dry ice sea.
After one of these runs, when they were back in Cleopatra, Kiran ran into Kexue in a game bar they both frequented, and the voluble small said, “Come meet a friend of mine. You’ll like him.”
It turned out to be Shukra, beard and hair long and gray; he looked like a wandering mendicant. Kexue grinned as Kiran recognized the man. “I told you you’d like him.”
Kiran mumbled something awkward.
“It’s all right,” Shukra said, staring hard at him. “You were bait, I told you that. And you got taken. So now I’m here to tell you what to do next. Lakshmi’s got you on the route between her compound here and that coastal town, right?”
“That’s right,” Kiran said. He could see how he probably still owed his first Venusian contact his services, but it was becoming all too clear to him how dangerous it was to play both sides. He didn’t want to cross Lakshmi in any way; on the other hand, this man did not seem like someone to be trifled with either. Indeed at the moment there was no way to deny him. “There’s shipments going both directions, but we don’t see what gets loaded.”
“I want you to find out what it is. Insinuate yourself further into the situation, and then let me know what you find.”
“How will I contact you?”
“You won’t. I’ll contact you.”
So after that, feeling deeply uneasy, Kiran kept his eye out when they were making the Vinmara run. It became clearer than ever to him that the transport crew was not intended to know the contents of their rovers; there were guards on every run, and the office in central Vinmara was as closed to outsiders as the various facilities in Cleopatra. The rovers backed up to a loading dock and interfaced with the building, and after a while drove away, and that was it. Once, when an exceptionally deep snowfall delayed them mid-route, Kiran listened without watching as the guard in their cab had a phone conversation that seemed to be with people in the storage compartment of the rover; they spoke Chinese, and later Kiran had his translation spectacles translate the recording it had made:
“Are you okay back there?”
“We’re fine. They’re fine.”
They? Anyway, it was something to tell Shukra, if he reappeared.
A s it happened, they were down in Vinmara when the big blizzard finally stopped. The skies cleared; the stars in all their glory punctured the black dome of the sky. Naturally they joined the whole town in suiting up and going out the city gates onto the bare hills above the town. The continuous deluge of snow and sleet and hail and rain had gone on for three years and three months. Now everyone wanted to see what things looked like under the stars.
Almost all the landscape they could see was covered by snow, gleaming in the starlight. Many spiky points of black rock broke through this gleaming white-the land surrounding the town must have been a devil’s golf course of aa or something like it-and the result was that over their heads the black sky spangled with brilliant stars, while under their feet the white hills were spattered by spiky black outcroppings, so that the two together looked like photographic negatives of each other.
And now they could breathe the open air. It was screamingly cold, of course, so as people pulled off their helmets they did scream, casting brief plumes of frost from their open mouths. Breathable air-a nitrogen-argon- oxygen mix, at seven hundred millibars, and ten degrees below. It was like breathing vodka.
The snow underfoot was too hard to dig out snowballs, and people were falling as they skidded this way and that. Out on the hilltop above the town they could see for huge distances in all directions.
It was around noon, and among the stars overhead hung the black circle of the eclipsed sun. A black cutout in the sky-the sunshield, letting through no sunlight-except for today, when there was a scheduled uneclipse. These uneclipses had been happening once a month for a while now, to help heat things back up to a more human-friendly level, but no one on the planet had been able to see them because the rain and snow had blocked the view. Now there would be one they would be able to see.
Many people were putting their helmets back on; the reality of the cold was setting in. Kiran’s nose was numb, while his ears were still burning as they froze. People said you could break frozen ears right off, and now he believed it. Music was playing from loudspeakers down in the town, something clangorous with cymbals and bells,
