Excerpt from Toward Eternity by Anton Hur, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Part 1
The Near Future

Mali

Something has happened, something so extraordinary that I cannot file it into Patient One's official medical file, which is why I am writing it here in a separate physical notebook.

Patient One, our first clinical trial patient, was found missing.

Security footage from the South African University of Science and Technology's closed-circuit cameras has him leaving a storage room and not coming out on the other side. He is in one frame and—blink—gone in the other, the door swinging into the emptiness he had occupied a moment prior.

The Cape Town Police Authority are investigating the incident, but they have little to work with. There is no indication that the footage has been doctored, although I suppose there's always that possibility. The cameras at the Singularity Lab (horribly anachronistic name, yes) are practically geriatric in terms of video technology. But if the footage is altered, why on earth would someone have altered it? Has Patient One been kidnapped? (Don't think I'm being melodramatic. You can tell the police are thinking the same thing.)

But why would anyone kidnap him? To reverse-engineer his nanodroid body? The radical version is still years and years away from clinical trials. Why not steal it when the technology is at a more advanced stage?

But above all else, where is he? How could a person simply disappear into thin air?

Not quite thin air. Apparently, he left a pile of clothes behind, the clothes he was wearing at the time. I can barely face it. I can barely face many things since my mother passed. All her research, all her genius. For it means the possible realization of my worst nightmare for our patients: spontaneous dispersal. All of his "cells"—his nanites—scattered to the winds. My mother mentioned the possibility in one of her many research notebooks, but in a musing kind of way—she had not gotten to a formal hypothesis. She called it "the possibility of Rapture." She really had a penchant for biblical terms, especially the apocalyptic ones. Anachronistic in her own distinct way.

Has Patient One been Raptured?

What the hell am I going to do?


"Found missing." What kind of an expression is that? Language is inadequate, but it's all we have. The language my mother and her team used to describe the changes that occurred in Patient One took up several very thick internal papers.

But even outside of these, there are the stacks of notebooks she left behind for me to continue her work. SATech made several offers for my mother's archive over the years—as did Harvard, Cambridge, and Tsinghua—but I've refused them all. I cannot let go of her notebooks or any part of my mother's body of work. Those notebooks, especially, have a kind of physical presence of their own, like silent monks lined up on the shelf. I can't bear to part with them. And who knows whether some random jotted-down detail will be useful in a crisis?

Which again brings us to this crisis. I've obtained a new notebook of my own, the same kind that my mother left stacks of, and started to write this down. Digital is too dangerous, too easy to leak, and while paper is only marginally safer, I need to write in order to think.


All right, Mali. Where did it all begin? Was it the scar?

A scar had reappeared on Patient One's right wrist a week ago. His scars weren't supposed to come back but Patient One's original biological body, his redundant-self, had been fighting back against the transition. Every cell in his body had been long replaced one by one with nanites through an experimental form of radical nanotherapy, curing him of the cancer that was killing him, as well as ridding him of mortality itself. Once his biological redundant body had made a complete transition into nanodroid, our team had given him the option of repainting in his old dermatological textures or waiting until the nanites figured out where he should spot or freckle. He opted to wait. I could have programmed in some scars for him—any kind of cosmetic alterations he desired, within reason—but why would he have wanted that? At least, not a burn scar on the wrist, reportedly suffered decades ago while cooking with a tiny oven when his husband and he were graduate students. But that small slit of discoloration, so slight as to be invisible to most, had returned from the past to haunt us once more. His old body, and all of its old memories, were coming back.

Excerpted from Toward Eternity by Anton Hur. Copyright © 2024 by Anton Hur. Excerpted by permission of HarperVia. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.