Immortal Sin
by Jennifer Pelland

Originally published by Tales of the Unanticipated, issue 26, November 2005

(All content ©2005 by Jennifer Pelland, and may not be copied or reproduced without permission.)

It's easy to dispose of a dead body when you're a doctor.

There was no way Alex could let Cassie live after she'd humiliated him so completely. He'd even divorced his wife for her, and the penance his priest had laid on him had been steep. But when he told Cassie this, she just blinked and said, "But sir, we're not even dating."

"Alex. My name is Alex Denton. I'm a surgeon and researcher at the New England Medical College, remember?" A small whimper crept into his voice, and he hated himself for it.

She demurely bent at the knees to set his whisky sour down on his mahogany table, the small gold cross around her neck glinting as it caught the light. "I think it's kind of sweet that someone your age would have a crush on me, but I have a boyfriend already."

"Is it the divorce?" Alex asked, the plush seating beneath him suddenly feeling like shards of glass. "Because I'm getting it annulled, so our marriage won't be a sin. It's easy. We had to arrange one for my first wife, but—"

"Marriage?" Cassie's eyes widened, and her shocked expression quickly flowed into laughter. "Oh sir, that's funny. You had me going there." She wagged a finger at him and shook her head, her long, brown ponytail swishing behind her.

Alex felt the blood draining from his face. "No, I—I'm not joking. We should be married before we—" He looked down at the hands twisting in his lap. This wasn't going how he'd planned. The Church had rules for a reason. Cassie was Catholic, she should know that. Then again, when he was her age, he hadn't cared much about the rules either. But now that he was older and couldn't ignore his mortality, he'd had to work hard to make up for his earlier lapses so he could lessen his time in Purgatory and keep out of Hell. And this time, he'd get married before having sex. With Cassie.

When he looked back up at her, her elegant eyebrows were raised high, and small furrows marred the corners of her perfect red lips. "You're serious, aren't you?" she asked. "You left your wife for me? We don't even know each other."

He struggled to breathe, struggled to get words through his too-dry mouth. "But...we talk. When I told you that my wife didn't respect me, you understood. And when I said I wanted kids and she didn't, you—"

"Small talk, sir. It's part of my job." She gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Honestly, the tips are better that way. I'm trying to pay for grad school."

"But—" His hand shot out for her wrist before he realized what he was doing.

She startled back before he could connect with anything other than her cuff, shot a quick look over her shoulder, caught another waitress' eye, and edged away from his table. "I'm really sorry," she said. "I have to go bring someone else his drink. Why don't I have Marlie take over your table, okay?"

Alex watched her walk away, his porcelain-skinned angel, the woman who was supposed to bear his children, the bitch who'd misled him all this time just for tips. All this time she'd been listening to his problems, laughing at his jokes, wiping up when he spilled, and never once troubling him with her own problems—all things that sloppy, selfish Alison had refused to do. How could she treat him like that for money? What kind of a whore was she?

Alex left immediately. He never went back to the Teardrop Lounge again. Not for drinks. But two days later he hid in the shadows behind his car, a chloroform-soaked rag in his hand, waiting for her shift to end. As usual, she left ten minutes before her coworkers did so she could catch the Night Owl bus. He had her all to himself. When she passed his car, he darted forward and covered her mouth and nose with the rag, holding her tiny body tight while she briefly struggled, then sagged unconscious in his arms. Quickly, before anyone could see them, he stuffed her into a body bag with practiced motions, checked to make sure he'd left no sign of their struggle behind, carried her to the backseat of his car, then injected her with lidocane to stop her heart.

No one saw him sneak in the New England Medical loading dock door and stuff her body in the basement incinerator at two a.m. No one noticed him when he snuck back out two hours later with a paper sack. He dumped her bone chunks in Boston Harbor, then walked six blocks to St. Stanislaus Church to wait for it to open. He had one last thing to take care of and it would be over. All he had to do was make it through the next two hours without dying. He sat on a bench in the small park across the street from the church, two fingers on his pulse, two eyes keeping watch around him. He wouldn't let death sneak up on him. He was going to make it through this. That bitch wouldn't be his undoing.

At seven a.m., he crossed the street, climbed the stone stairs, and pushed open the cool wooden door. The familiar stained-glass-filtered light greeted him, a light that never changed from church to church. When he had been a boy, that light had been such a comfort. He didn't need to worry about mother's headaches and father's rages when he'd been sitting in the pews, swaddled in the dusty colored motes of light. But now that he was older and understood just how fragile a thing mortality was, the light served as yet another reminder of the penalty for not following the rules.

He ducked into a confessional and waited.

The panel slid aside. "Go ahead."

"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It's been three days since my last confession."

"Only three days? What's troubling you?"

Alex rubbed his palms together. "There was a woman. I... I loved her and I got a divorce in order to be with her."

"Oh. I see. I don't recognize your voice. Have you spoken to your parish priest about this?"

"Yes, but— No, that's not the part I'm here to confess. I loved her and she...." Alex pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. "I thought we'd be happy together, but she'd been pretending all along."

"So you left your wife for someone who didn't love you back."

"That's not it!" Alex snapped, then buried his face in his hands. "I'm sorry."

"Go on. I'll listen."

"I killed her." There. He'd said it. He'd confessed. He'd confessed to a mortal sin. Alex's chest tightened, and he pressed his hand against his sternum, his shirt sticking to his clammy flesh. No, God couldn't give him a heart attack before he got a chance for penance. God couldn't be that vengeful. God was love, right? God had to forgive him. He had to. That was the rule. Rules were important. The world ran on rules. If you took something out, you put it away when you were finished with it. If you made a mistake during surgery, you went before a board of inquiry. If you made noise when mother had one of her headaches, father spanked you. And if you sinned, God forgave you.

Finally, the priest said, "Son, I.... This is...." He let out a long sigh. "You're saying you committed murder. I can't just—"

"Please, I need to be absolved. Give me my penance, quick." Even though he knew it was a medical impossibility, Alex couldn't shake the feeling that his heart was going to pound right through his chest.

"I can't do that."

"What? But you're a priest! If you don't give me penance and forgive me, I'll go to Hell!" The palpitations quickened, and Alex found himself automatically checking to see if the beats were rhythmic, attempting to diagnose how God was trying to kill him.

There was silence from the other side of the screen. Finally, the priest said, "I can only absolve you of your sin if you're truly penitent."

"I am. I'm very, very sorry."

"Sorry that you killed her, or sorry that your soul is in danger of eternal damnation?"

Alex froze, handkerchief clutched tightly in ever-whitening fingers. "Does it matter?" he whispered.

"God can see into your heart. He knows if you're truly sorry."

"But she—"

"God knows."

Alex sank to the floor of the small booth. God had never cared if he was truly sorry before. Why did He care now? Why didn't He play by the rules like He always did? Why was God siding with that bitch?

"If you're truly penitent," the priest said, "you should start your penance by going to the authorities and confessing."

"You mean prison? I can't go to prison."

"Son, there's no other way. You killed a woman. There'll be an investigation whether or not you confess. Better to do the right thing and step forward."

"But the body. I destroyed it. They'll...they'll never find it. I don't—"

"Her family should know what happened to her. It's not fair to them to let them live with false hopes. They need to grieve. You must turn yourself in. If you're truly sorry, there's no other course."

Alex stumbled from the confessional, through the church, all the way to the curb. He had to get out of there. He couldn't sit in the house of God anymore. God didn't want him there. That was abundantly clear. Forty-one years of perfect mass attendance. Six years as an altar boy. A childhood spent praying for his grandmother's soul to hasten her time in Purgatory. A spotless record of weekly confessions for the past twelve years. He'd even stopped having sex with Alison two years ago after she'd gotten a tubal ligation so he wouldn't be committing fornication. He'd followed the rules when he could, and asked for forgiveness when he couldn't. But none of it mattered. He would die unshriven.

He crumpled onto the sidewalk, a sinner, the damned. God knew he wasn't sorry. The little bitch deserved what she got. God was going to send him to Hell. There was no way around it.

Unless he didn't die.

His head snapped up. That was it. He didn't have to die. Some of his colleagues at the school were doing promising research in human longevity by working with telomeres. Some even speculated that with constant extension of telomeres—the tips on the ends of chromosomes that wore down with age—immortality might be clinically possible.

It was time to jettison his own research and get in on their project. And he needed to get out of the OR. It was too risky there. Too many chances of accidental needle sticks, or dangerous infections, or even emergency patients brandishing knives. No, if this was going to work, he'd need to remove as many risk factors as possible from his life. No more surgery. No more alcohol. No more driving over the speed limit. No more cholesterol. No more slippery bath mats. No more long-term sun exposure. No more sugar. No more anything. These were the new rules. His rules, not God's rules.

He was going to crack the secret of medical immortality. God wasn't going to damn him that easily.

###

It took some convincing, and a glowing recommendation from the team leader, his former med school classmate Dr. Brenda Burkehart, but the college eventually let him join the telomere project and pull out of the OR. "Glad to have you on the team," Brenda said, tucking a stray lock of ash-blond hair behind her ear. "The work's a little dry, but we think it's important. I'm kind of surprised you ditched your own project, though. The field of cellular repair mechanisms seems so promising."

"Not as promising as your telomere project," Alex said.

She raised her eyebrows, one finger trailing along the lapel of her lab coat. "Oh, really? Seriously, why did you jump tracks?"

He pulled out the carefully rehearsed answer he'd used in his interview. "I honestly believe that there's no reason for people to suffer in old age when the technology to stave off cell death is within our reach."

"Oh, and I suppose you came to this conclusion because of all the old people you saw dying in the hospital and don't have a single ulterior motive."

"Well...of course." He could feel himself starting to sweat. Did she know? How could she? He'd been so careful. He'd left no forensic evidence behind. No one even knew that Cassie was dead.

He felt the weight of God's disapproval pressing down on him from above and struggled to breathe.

Brenda laughed, and he startled back, rudely jolted from his panicked thoughts. "Right. It had nothing to do with your own mortality, did it?" She playfully tapped a finger on his receding hairline.

He let out a long sigh. Good. She didn't know.

"Hey, don't worry. I switched over to this line of research when my gray hair got so bad that I had to start dying it blond instead of brown so the roots wouldn't show." Her hazel eyes twinkled, and he wondered what she was looking at that was so fascinating. He'd have to check his forehead for moles next time he used the men's room. "You're in fine company," she continued. "We're all middle aged 'fraidy cats in this department."

And so he got to work.

The research was tedious. There were cell lines to be developed, primate models to be worked out, and mouse dissections galore. Plus the solution for how to keep the telomerase enzymes from fueling cancer cell growth was still eluding them. But he plowed through. The price of failure was too high: his immortal soul. It kept him focused. It kept him hungry. He could feel God's eyes on him at all times, watching, judging. There was no way He could be happy with Alex's plan. So there was no way Alex could afford to fail.

His colleagues had to pry him away from his work to eat lunch each day. "What's with the rabbit food?" Dr. Shamkant Shetty asked. "You eat like a pathologist. Lighten up! Ham and cheese with mayonnaise won't kill you."

Fat, cholesterol, food poisoning, oh yes. It could kill him. Alex carefully assembled his soy cheese, hummus, tomato, and lettuce sandwich and set out his small assortment of carrot sticks and grapes—all organic. "I'm just trying to be healthy," he said. "I'd like to live long enough to apply our research to myself."

Sham shrugged. "Well, we haven't even started primate testing, although that's not too far off. If it goes well, and we manage to crack the cancer problem, we'll be in phase one clinical tests in five years. Best case scenario: we're done with phase three in what, eleven years? And then there's still the FDA approval process, and the long-term effects studies. Face it, none of us will be benefiting from this research any time soon."

"I know," Alex said. "So it would be a real shame to die of something preventable before we get FDA approval." He had no intention of waiting for the clinical trials to be over. If phase two went well, and his research showed the procedure to be safe, he was going to administer it to himself. Yes, it would be a risk, but it would be less risky than letting his cells continue to decay with age.

"You are so driven," Sham said. He turned to Brenda and asked, "Has he always been like this?"

She shook her head, her bobbed hair swinging. "He's never been what you'd call wild and crazy, but back in med school, he was downing pizza, beer, and Chinese with the rest of us. Alison used to come along sometimes too. She was working on a PhD in zoology, so we made her an honorary intern and let her hang out with us. It's a shame about you and Alison. You used to be such a fun couple."

Alex shrugged. "Well, we became very different people." Alison asserted that he was the only one who'd changed, and she was right. She didn't seem to care about how much time she was racking up in Purgatory, but he'd made all the right lifestyle choices to lessen his own time there. For all the good it had done him. "It's for the best," he said. "It'd be hard to spend this much time on the project if I were still married."

"Man, something lit a fire under you," Sham said. He propped his elbows on the small lunchroom table. "I'd sure like to know what that was."

Across the room, another colleague switched on the wall-mounted television. The midday news announcer said, "And in other news, the family of 23-year-old Cassie Baird is appealing to the public for any information that might help authorities locate her. Ms. Baird, a grad student at Tufts University, has been missing for two months, and was last seen leaving her night job at the Teardrop Lounge near Copley Square."

Alex gasped and sucked a chunk of carrot into his windpipe. Cassie's picture stared down at him from the television as he struggled for air, hands scrabbling at his throat. Sham grabbed him from behind and started performing the Heimlich maneuver, but even through the gagging, the suffocation, the blind panic, all Alex could focus on was Cassie's face staring down at him from Heaven, God looming behind her, arms crossed, His judgment sealed in stone.

God had orchestrated this. He knew it.

He tried to apologize to Cassie's image. Tried to mean it with all his heart. But as oxygen deprivation started squeezing his vision into a narrow field of dots, he could feel his hatred for her welling up, thick and black. Flames licked at his feet and—

With a painful crack, he was jolted back to reality. Coughing spasms racked his body, and when he tried to curl into them, a searing pain lanced into his left side. He reflexively pressed himself against the wall to keep his body straight. He could hardly breathe, hardly see through the tears of fear and pain that wouldn't stop pouring from his eyes. He needed to cough, but every time he tried to take in a deep breath, he was viciously stabbed again and ended up gasping and clutching the wall. He was alive. Broken, but alive. Satan couldn't claim him yet.

Brenda gently ran her hands over Alex's midsection, jerking them back when Alex cried out in pain. "I think you broke a rib," she said, voice soft.

"Let's get you over to the hospital," Sham said.

"No hospitals!" Alex croaked. Hospitals were full of infections, misdosages, overworked interns, aging elevators, catastrophic equipment failure—

Sham shot him an odd look. "Don't be crazy. I'm taking you and that's it."

Despite the nearly overwhelming agony, Alex triple-checked the dosage on the pain medication before he would allow the nurse to give it to him. He wouldn't let the x-ray technician take more than two plates so he could keep his radiation exposure down. And he refused the offer to stay at Brenda's apartment for the night, instead heading directly to the subway to go home. He took the subway everywhere, including to New England Medical, even though he only lived one stop away. It was safer than walking. He hadn't heard of a single fatality on the Green Line in years, but pedestrians in the Boston area were routinely struck by cars while crossing the street. His subway pass was worth every dollar.

He painstakingly made his way down the stairs to his excruciatingly tidy new basement apartment and draped his coat on the treadmill. He'd bought it so he could stay in shape without facing Boston's murderous drivers, but he wouldn't be using it for a while now. The television beckoned, but he knew the evening news would be on. Cassie would be on. His Cassie. Cassie Denton. She would have taken his last name like a proper wife. Not like his ex.

At least Alison hadn't been money-grubbing along with everything else. When she'd gotten the money from the sale of their expensive Back Bay condo, she used it to pay in full for a townhouse out in Waltham where she could sloppily scatter her paints and books and knick-knacks wherever she wanted. "Just take this and get out of my life," she'd said, handing him the leftover money from the sale. "Midlife crisis my ass. I don't know what's wrong with you, and I don't know why no one else sees it, but I just want you gone. Why I stayed with you as long as I did is beyond me." He had no idea what she'd meant, but he didn't care. He had the money now. If he invested it carefully, he'd be able to build his safe house outside route 128 in five or ten years.

But that's not what he'd wanted to do, not what he'd dreamed about. He'd wanted to get a little house out in the country with Cassie. Have a couple of beautiful children. Work in a small county hospital while she stayed home with the kids. Grow old with his beloved wife.

Cassie. Sweet Cassie. Bitch Cassie. Dead Cassie.

Thanks to her, he couldn't afford to grow old anymore.

Alex glared up at the ceiling, through all the floors of the apartment building, right up into Heaven itself.

The gates were closed and locked tight.

He stared across his apartment, breath coming in shallow gasps to keep his ribs from screaming. He had to get back to work first thing tomorrow morning. He couldn't let God win.

###

He didn't feel any different now that he was immortal. He'd expected to feel different.

The phase one and two clinical trials had been a success, Alex's secret personal trial included. Phase two had gone so well after the first year that Alex had unblinded the results and decided to administer the treatment to himself before that phase was complete. While there was no way to measure the long-term effects other than watching the test subjects over the course of decades, so far the procedure had proven an unqualified success. Alex's hairline had even stopped receding, and his grays were slowly turning brown again.

And then one of the phase three test subjects died when an undiagnosed blood clot migrated to her brain. Despite her robust chromosomes, she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. They weren't able to revive her.

Clearly, chromosomal immortality wasn't enough. Alex needed to be able to keep his body in constant repair. He turned to the nanotechnology team at New England Medical to see how their research was going.

"Human testing's still a couple of years off," Dr. Manuel Torremocha said. "But we've had some promising results in chimps. Right now, we've got 'bots scouring their bloodstreams to clean up arterial plaque. The next test is to put monitoring 'bots in them to continually scan for internal abnormalities that might indicate budding cancers or other possible health problems."

"How long until you can get them to do more major repairs?" Alex asked. "You know, helping regrow tissue, knitting broken bones, breaking up blood clots."

"Well, blood clots are next on the schedule," Dr. Torremocha said. "And we think there might be some dentistry applications as well. The rest is just not possible. Not with today's science. These little guys aren't a replacement for doctors. They're just helpers."

Alex could hear his blood thunder in his ears. He tried to calm himself, tried to bring his blood pressure down to a healthier place using the biofeedback routines he'd carefully taught himself over the past seven years, but he was too agitated. He could hear God laughing at him from above. Vengeful bastard. "You might be able to do those things in the future, though, right?" he asked, hoping the answer would bring his blood pressure down.

Dr. Torremocha shrugged. "Maybe. We have no way of knowing. I'm sure that if the tests continue to go well, we'll keep searching for new applications of nanotechnology for the human body."

"Good, good. Keep me posted, okay?"

Dr. Torremocha winced and looked pointedly down at the latex gloves on Alex's hands. "No offense, but...I've heard things about you."

Alex felt the blood drain from his face. "Oh," he said quietly. "Well."

He went back to his office, eyes focused firmly on the floor. So, those damned rumors had been spreading. He heard people murmur when they thought he couldn't hear. He's crazy, they'd say. There's something not right about him. You can see it in his eyes. He wears those gloves everywhere—even to lunch. Have you seen how he wears a bicycle helmet when he goes outside? They won't even let him lecture anymore. He's got no life outside of work. He's too single-minded about his project.

They had no idea.

He put it out of his mind and fired up his computer to see how his investments were doing. His mother had been gracious enough to die of pneumonia and leave him a substantial inheritance three months ago. It was so convenient not to have to pray for her soul. Being damned had its advantages. Now that he had her money, it was time to start searching for a suitable parcel of land, one that fit his new rules. He wanted to build in a town with a low crime rate and a nearby commuter rail stop so that if he wanted to go into Boston, he didn't need to risk his life on the Mass Pike. He also wanted to find a place that had low numbers of reported cases of Lyme disease or rabies, and that didn't suffer from basement flooding. He knew all too well all the dangerous molds that ended up in damp and flooded basements. And of course, the property needed to have a good hospital nearby, just in case the worst happened.

He hoped Cassie appreciated how much he'd had to rearrange his life for her these past seven years.

Maybe she hadn't gone to Heaven at all. Maybe she was still in Purgatory, burning off her sins. Fornication: he was sure she'd committed that with that boyfriend of hers. Lying: she'd done that to him in spades. She'd broken up his marriage—surely that had to count for something. Marriage was a sacrament. He'd still be married to Alison if it weren't for her. And married men lived longer and healthier lives. If he died prematurely, surely it would be Cassie's fault.

The building started to rumble, and Alex snapped his head up. No. It couldn't be. In Boston?

From across the hall, Brenda yelled, "Get in the doorway, you idiot!"

He leapt from his chair and braced himself in the door frame. His helmet! No, he couldn't go back to get it now. He stared helplessly at Brenda, who was standing in her own doorway.

Brenda's eyes were wide, but she managed to quip, "Act of God, eh?"

His chest tightened painfully. No. This couldn't— God wouldn't kill a whole building full of people to get at him, would He?

He heard a creak, and turned just in time to see his large wooden bookcase wobble and start to fall. Time slowed like molasses, and his guts seized up as he realized that the corner of the bookcase was going to hit him. Blunt force trauma, several hundred pounds of force, all concentrated in a sharp point of wood. He'd be torn open like wet tissue. There was no way he'd survive. Alex saw flames flickering in his peripheral vision, and his chest felt like it was ablaze. He opened his mouth to scream as the heat rose, flames slowly licking higher—

The bookcase missed him by an inch.

And then the shaking stopped.

Brenda sagged against her doorframe and tittered nervously. "Man, that was something! I knew they said Boston was due for a big earthquake some day, but I never thought I'd live to see it!"

Alex collapsed, trembling, onto the floor. It was wet. It was....

Oh God, he'd pissed and shat all over himself.

Brenda sniffed. "Pipes must have burst. Come on, we should probably get out of here."

"Just...just a minute," Alex said weakly.

She took a tentative step towards him. "Are you all right?" Then her eyes widened in understanding before narrowing again in sympathy. "Oh, God. Alex." She wrinkled her nose. "I'll be outside."

He tried to close the door behind him, but the fallen bookcase wouldn't budge. So he stood behind his door and changed into the spare set of clothes he kept in his desk, wiping the shit off of himself with his lab coat.

An act of God.

He had to get that safe house built, and fast. He was too easy a target in the city. If God wanted to kill him, He'd have to work for it.

###

Alex had to steal his nanobots and a copy of the monitoring software. Luckily, it wasn't hard.

He managed to stay at New England Medical long enough to inject himself with generation one, two, and three nanobots before he finally succumbed to the constant pressure to take early retirement. So he retreated full-time to his safe house in Wayland. It had cost a fortune, but it had been worth it. His floors were covered with mold-resistant carpet, even in the kitchen and bathroom, so he wouldn't have to worry about slipping and hitting his head. There were no sharp corners anywhere. The house ran completely on geothermal energy generated on his own property, so his power would never go out. Every room was equipped with panic buttons, so if anything happened, he could summon an ambulance immediately. He had a food irradiation system. He had a refrigerator full of every medication he'd been able to get his hands on.

Everything he needed was delivered to his doorstep, so he wouldn't have to risk getting into an accident by venturing outside. The water was heavily filtered. The house and everything in it were flame retardant. The windows were photograyed to keep out harmful UV radiation, and bulletproof to keep out projectiles. The locks and security system were keyed to his biometrics. The neighbors were all upstanding citizens. There was a fire station less than a mile away. There was a police station less than two miles away. And there was a hospital less than five miles away.

With any luck, he'd never need it. The nanobots cleaned away arterial plaque, destroyed blood clots, kept his teeth free from plaque, repaired minor damage to blood vessels, and constantly monitored his body for irregularities. Between them and the telomeric enhancements, if he was careful, he might never die. If he just followed his rules. The rules that were more important than ever.

He glared up at the ceiling. Take that, God.

The only person who ever called anymore was Brenda, and more often than not, he let the machine answer it. He couldn't stand to look at her face on the vidscreen, all wrinkles and white hair. Like so many others, she'd never taken the treatments. She'd said that she'd had an epiphany about the naturalness of mortality, whatever that meant. Every so often, he'd have an actual conversation with her—just often enough to keep his connection to the college open. Sometimes she'd ask to visit, but he always turned her down. She'd probably want to touch him. He hadn't touched anyone in nearly a decade. It kept him clean. And it kept him from wanting to be touched some more.

Still, he was going to have to figure out how to befriend a younger colleague of hers soon. She didn't look like she'd be around much longer.

The house-wide computer chimed at him as he fingered the surgical steel shunt he'd had implanted in his forearm to facilitate his weekly blood tests. There was only so far he trusted the nanobots. He liked to have a look for himself. The shunt was slightly sore to the touch. He'd need to check for infection. The computer's soothing female voice said, "News story matching your pre-programmed search parameters found."

"Display," Alex said, and turned to the nearest wall.

The living room came alive with text. "Pope Weighs in on Human Cryogenics," the headline read.

Alex felt a heady rush of adrenaline pour through his veins. This was it. The news he'd been waiting for for so many years. He sat down on his hard plastic couch and wiped his sweaty palms on his organic cotton pants, then let out a pent-up breath and started reading.

"Today, Pope Santiago I issued a papal bull on the status of the souls of cryogenically frozen humans," the article read. "'While the Church decries those who would play God in such a fashion,' he wrote, 'those who are cryogenically frozen before death in a manner that allows for revivification retain possession of their souls throughout their time in suspension. Their souls are only delivered to the afterlife upon their natural death.'"

Alex's nanobot-littered blood thundered triumphantly in his ears, and he pressed shaking fingertips to his lips. Oh, this was good news. Such good news. Cryogenics would protect him. With a sufficiently redundant power system, a well-maintained, well-armored cryogenic chamber could keep him safe from disease and disaster indefinitely. He'd need to set up his investments so they'd be crisis-proof, but that could be arranged. Perhaps he could stipulate that he be awoken every twenty years, and additionally any time there was a financial crisis. The cryogenic technology still needed a decade or two for scientists to iron out all its wrinkles, so that gave him plenty of time to work out the details. And to pump some of his savings into the most promising cryogenic research project so he'd be first in line to use it once it had been proven safe. Maybe he'd even volunteer for phase three testing.

He felt sweat trickle down his temple and patted it dry with his cuff. If only his house's heating system wouldn't keep malfunctioning. He pulled the small nanobot monitor from his hip and checked his temperature. 98.6 degrees. Exactly what it should be. And he knew he was disease-free, at least as of this morning's nanobot reports, so it clearly wasn't his body's fault that he was so hot. He'd have to see if he could get someone new to come out and fix it. The last repair person had told him everything was working fine when clearly it wasn't. "Computer," he said, "lower house temperature by another degree."

"Temperature lowered. It is now forty-one degrees Fahrenheit."

There was no way this was forty-one degrees. Alex rose and shuffled slowly towards his bedroom to change into a short-sleeved shirt, keeping one blue-fingered hand carefully on the wall railing at all times. He didn't bother to look out the frost-covered window at the beautiful sunny day, at the yard he'd once imagined Cassie and their children in. He hardly ever thought about her at all anymore. She was unimportant, a footnote. All that mattered now was keeping at least one step ahead of God at all times.

Now more than ever, Alex knew just how important it was to follow his rules. If he stayed locked in his house, if he monitored his health vigilantly, if he spent all his spare time poring through medical journals looking for new breakthroughs, if he maintained his daily low-impact exercise and blood tests, if he ate only healthy foods and kept his caloric intake low, if he moved slowly and carefully to avoid injury, if he avoided all physical contact with any living being, then he'd make it. And then he'd be able to spend eternity so safe that he wouldn't even have his worries to trouble him. Just blissful nothingness in the Heaven of his choosing.

The battle wasn't over, but it was clear that he was winning.

God couldn't touch him anymore.

If only it weren't so damned hot.

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