Eureka

He lived alone away from family and didn't bother looking for a woman to settle down with so he was lonely. There were no distractions. Absolutely none until has was 120 years old.

The Hayflick limit was estimated to be somewhere beyond 120 years. He was about to die soon. People don't usually die from old age. To be precise, they die from the health complications that have a higher rate of happening because of a weak body at an old age.

While many older people suffer from health issues, illness does not accompany aging inherently. Just as youth does not guarantee good health, poor health is not assured by old age.

There is indeed a finite life span in living cells, but that does not mean that the organism merely dies because the cells are aged. Instead, a particular illness or disease may be cultivated by genetic abnormalities, pathogens, and damaging environmental effects.

Their cells just don't function as well as people grow older, and can't walk away from illness as quickly or recover as well as they once did. As a result, older people can die from accidents or illnesses that would be easily handled by a younger person.

Lazarus used his finances to keep himself alive for as long as possible. He was hooked up in a variety of machines on a mechanical remote-controlled bed. He even had a trained personal doctor and nurse looking after him. That said, his contract with them was expiring as he didn't have enough money to last. The rest was used to fund his research.

He has reaching aids, gripping aids, a duress button hanging around his neck. His liver failed recently so he had an organ transplant. Many of his internal organs had failed him. His liver was transplanted twice. His lungs failed so he was using a mechanical ventilator.

The sound of the breathing machine pumping air while deflating and inflating in each of its chambers was played along with the beeping from the electrocardiogram (EKG) monitor like a medical orchestra.

He had catheters inserted to various parts of his body. A few IVs with different medication and one in his urethra and a new rectum catheter for excretion. Gone were the days when he pooped in the bedpan.

He was about to be the first Reticulan to purely die from cellular death as a result of his cells unable to divide any further.

He stared at the lab refrigerator in the corner.

It contained cell cultures of himself from when he was young. They were taken every year and frozen.

Perfectly preserved. At least for a thousand years before they completely degrade.

He fell into a deep sleep. The voices of his friends, family, the public and scientific community all berated him.

"Sleep Galen! Sleep and never wake up!"

"You wasted your whole life!"

"At least get married for goodness sake! Look at you! I don't even know you anymore. You are not my son!"

Lazarus was about to surrender but then a white light blinded him. His eyes snapped open wide.

He had a eureka moment.

Lazarus could not keep conning rich people his whole life. Most of the money he earned since his 50s was from an invention and discovery he made.

He had been able to translate the nerve impulses of the brain into electronic data. This got him the first Noble Prize. Although, he didn't really care about it because it was only a milestone to his real goal.

No, he wasn't going to transfer his mind into a robot.

He practically made robotic clones of himself but they weren't able to compute properly. The mind of a living organism had trouble understanding and navigating cyberspace.

All of his clones went mentally insane. Most of the time they complained that they couldn't see or feel anything. That they were trapped in darkness.

Also, they couldn't move in their metal shells either.

Lazarus once questioned if it was because they didn't have a soul.

Naturally, that topic popped up. Consciousness and souls were naturally synonymous with each other. Well, they either were the same thing or they weren't.

Countless debates have sparked throughout the ages. He had to study it as it related to transfer of the consciousness/soul.

He was an atheist. He didn't believe in God. But if he was to guess why the clones couldn't move their vessels. It was probably because they didn't have a soul.

They had ideas of moving their fingers and standing up, but there was no impulse to act upon. No "true" will.

However, he scrapped that idea away and figured it's because the organic mind couldn't navigate electronics instinctively. They weren't programmed for that. They lived in a three-dimensional world. Actually, the fourth dimension if one counted time. 3D=space, 4D= spacetime. However, they could only perceive the world in three dimensions.

An ant for example, when crawling on a big ball, it would look flat instead of spherical. Much like how some fanatics thought that Ratuka was flat. Similarly, a human consciousness trapped in a metal body might see things differently or not at all because they are unable to perceive their new sensory signals properly (electricity, binary).

The neuropathways in an organic brain are different from the circuitry in an electronic chip after all.

He forced himself up from his bed onto the wheelchair with the last of his strength.

*Snap*

His wrist broke.

He looked at his arm that was now handless. His hand had dropped to the ground and the surface of it crumbled. Where the wrist was bisected, its edge and surface were red but there was no blood. So dry...

Many days ago, the first of his cells have reached the Hayflick limit. As time went on, the number of cells that couldn't divide anymore increased until the conversion was 100%. Then, when the last of the cells reached senescence, the first wave of weak cells began to die from age. The proportion of dead cells were exponentially increasing.