If I live forever, can I live now?

5

When I entered the laboratory that evening, Alex was, just for an instant, my very best friend.

I had come from my office running, panting, full of a kind of excitement that seemed too foreign to be true. But it was real. The Nobel Foundation was very interested in our research. We hadn't hurt the world, even if Emma thought so, because the freaking Nobel Foundation had given us an exhilarating amount of approval.

I had expected to find Alex checking the last cell cultures she had prepared in minute detail, or rushing through her laptop, or absorbing Genetics journals with her eyes. That's why, when I found her lying on the floor and watching The Great British Bake Off, I fell to the floor myself, laughing.

"The freaking Nobel Foundation called. It's real." I said, as I picked up a handful of popcorn from the bag lying beside her.

"I know. But we are not going to win. Our work is far from complete." she replied, and she took a handful of popcorn herself. Her eyes were fixed on her laptop, and she seemed to be thoroughly analyzing every step of the recipe on the screen, as if she wasn't conscious at all of how badly she had just stabbed me.

The spell was over. She wasn't my best friend anymore.

"My results are unbelievably good. The autologous macrophage-activating pathways work. We won't have to use all those injections anymore. One first shoot will be enough. The body will keep repairing itself on its own afterwards."

"But it's the same as before. I have spent endless hours in this laboratory, and I am not pleased with our results. We have been researching for months, and haven't come up with anything new. The Nobel Foundation doesn't like that, Tess. The freaking Nobel Foundation likes efficiency. Genius. Fast pace."

I stood up. I didn't want to have a fight with her right then. It had been an overly intense day, and I had finally received good news. Her frustration was surely not going to ruin that. I wanted to celebrate it, to dance it off, to meet up with easy-going people and drink a little to much. I needed that. I needed Africa. I took my phone out to text her, and, while I did that, I answered to what Alex had said.

"I understand what you mean."

"Really?" she said, and she looked up, surprised.

"I know you don't see the genius part of it all. The ground-breaking advances." I said, and I smirked as I said it. Her face darkened as the words came out of my mouth, and I genuinely enjoyed it. "That's because they happen in my mind. What happens here, at the laboratory, where you spend so many hours, is just an approximation to the magic going on in my head." I paused and thought about how typical of David those last words had been. I was tempted to smile. "You have been part of my research for months, but I have been in it since ever. It was a latent project, taking shape, in my head. And I made it happen. I achieved the unachievable. Is there something more efficient than that? And, as for this last months, I turned from being able to maintain humans alive, to being capable of making them keep themselves alive. How is that not good enough?"

She stared at me silently, and then went back to eating popcorn and facing the screen. She looked miserable and lonely.

Unable to keep looking at her, I checked my phone, and saw that Africa had replied to my text. Before I new it, I verbalized its content:

"Africa is throwing a party at her place tonight. I'm heading there now. You should come."

I was very aware of the fact that I was acting in a shockingly bipolar way, but that contradictory behavior was a completely honest reflection of my feelings right then. My dead best friend's mother wanted to take my immortality revolution down, but the Nobel Foundation was presumably interested in worshiping it. A part of my brain looked at Alex's evident exhaustion and longed to hug her and thank her for just being there, and for being so annoyingly intellectually avaricious, but another part was about to scream at her how sick and pathetic her competitiveness was since she had ingrained it in my research.