By Lily C. Fen

Can animal life – human life – be preserved using the Forever Injection? This was proudly emblazoned on the reception wall of Dr Jimenez's underground laboratory hidden beneath the Sunken Garden.

More than 50 years had passed since the breakthrough the writing on the wall referred to; a technological phenomenon Dr Isabela Diego had studied extensively in her pre-med years at the University of the Philippines. She remembered the exciting subject on the Forever Injection when she had embarked on Plastination 101.

"It all began with a frozen rose," the introduction in their books said. "The method did not involve freezing but the term stuck since they had 'frozen' life in time."

"Imagine, a Filipino scientist – from our university – is the one who synthesizes the secret to eternal life," one of Isabela's classmates had said.

"Once plastinated, living things never decay. They are caught in the time between flourishing and falling away. Roses were the simplest things the clinic could do, at first," Isabela had read the textbook line aloud in class to oohs and ahhs.

Dr Jimenez's voice shook her out of her reverie.

"Ahem, Doctora Isabela, welcome to our facilities," smiled a bespectacled Dr Jimenez. The automatic doors to the pristine lab whooshed open for them.

Isabela looked around her. The ceiling was low, the lab cool to the skin, and a fog had risen momentarily from the doors as they entered. Parts of the lab were lit in a fluorescent white, while others had a purplish-blue hue. The lab stretched as far as the eye could see. She wanted to ask, "Gosh, how large is this place?" But she held her tongue. Instead, she said, "I can't believe that Dr Beneficio took the Gunther von Hagens technology and stretched the concept to this, to the Forever Clinic."

Dr Jimenez responded, "Silicon and drying technology that prevent decay from ravaging any specimen."

"Freezing them in time, so to speak," finished Isabela.

Dr Jimenez turned around to face Isabela.

He steepled his fingers together, bringing them to his lips. "The Forever Injection has revolutionised the pharmaceutical world. And several more breakthroughs have come out of the beauty industry once they got hold of the technology developed by Dr Beneficio."

Isabela nodded as Dr Jimenez ushered her through more of the Forever Clinic.

Dr Jimenez caught sight of her. "You've reviewed the introductory notes I sent you on Baby Berting's history?"

Dr Isabela nodded.

"Excellent. It's been two years since Baby Berting fell into our care. Here at the Forever Clinic's R&D Centre, we get to study him. And you'll have access to our confidential video archives on the child."

The two of them walked further through the lab.

Dr Jimenez continued. "The clinic has observed his motoric abilities, his vitals, his speech, and developmental capabilities, all that. But it's the first time we've been able to invite someone from neuropsychology to study the baby, see how his brain works. Are you up to the ask?"

Isabela couldn't quite pinpoint why she felt something heavy in the pit of her stomach. There was something about reading up on the child, forever doomed to be at the developmental stage of ten months. But she pushed down the feeling and nodded instead. "Yes, of course! I've got so many questions."

"I think it's time for you to meet the baby," Dr Jimenez beamed. He took her through another set of sliding doors that whooshed as he beeped them open with his ID.

The baby was cooing while locked in a white playpen. "Ooh, ahh, dah-dah," the baby said as Dr Isabela walked in with Dr Jimenez.

"You're welcome to interact with him, if you wish, Doctora Diego."

Isabela got down on her knees to intercept the child cruising on the playpen. He looked no older than a one-year-old baby, reminding her of her nephew. His cheeks were soft and rosy, his eyes glittered in the fluorescent light. He seemed a happy child.

Dr Jimenez spoke as she greeted the little one and made eye contact. "Understand, it's been more than 50 years since they developed the initial serum – the very first Forever Roses. Oh, I'm sorry, you're so young, you'd only remember it from history books on advances in medical sciences from your studies," he continued.

Isabela took a deep breath before speaking. "Uhm. How old is he, really? How long – how long has he been a baby?" she asked.

"His grandmother had elected to undergo the procedure, back when it would kill the living being in its tracks, just keeping the flesh forever young. She was the first woman to take the Forever Injection. That was back in 2015. Ten years later, this baby was born."

Isabela did a double-take. "You're – are you telling me that this baby is more than forty years old?" Her mouth was agape.

Dr Jimenez gazed at the baby in its playpen, which took up half of the lab room. He looked at the baby over the glasses on his nose. "Can you believe it? This baby is older than you, Doctora."

Dr Jimenez sighed and took off his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose as he closed his eyes. "The things you can do in Manila. They wouldn't have allowed such a thing in developed nations, you know?" He took a deep breath and put his glasses on again. "But here we are." He looked at her.  "That's why we've got you here, star of the Psychology Department in the University of the Philippines, Fulbright Scholar no less, with a specialisation in neuropsychology."  

The senior doctor paused and steadied himself on a tall table where computers whirred and blipped. "No one yet has studied the child's brain. And we have so many questions."

Dr Isabela piped in, "My mind's burning with questions. How is the child's brain structure? What do his hippocampal gyri look like now? And Broca's and Wernicke's area? What do its firing synapses look like? What kind of information has his baby brain stored, what with the Forever Injection's influence?"

Dr Jimenez chuckled. "Ah, Doctora. Those are exactly the questions we were hoping someone in your field would ask – and hopefully, with careful study and observation, be able to answer."

The baby waddled off to a colorful tower block some distance away and Dr Jimenez continued, "His parents are long gone, part of which you will learn through study of our video logs. This child has outlived them, this forever baby. What happens next? Will he outlive us all? He is the only one of his kind.

"Will you help us find out more about him, doctor?"

Dr Isabela nodded. She gazed at her new boss. He looked almost sad as he studied the baby.

Dr Isabela got to work. First, she looked at the archived footage of the Forever Baby's history. She found a video of Baby Berting's mother, the beautiful socialite Bella Trinidad-Torres.

Bella was recorded saying, "I've seen photos of my nieces and nephews. They're so cute at first, so innocent. What if, say, we kept Berting that way? Forever?"

"Are you sure you want to do this? Once the procedure is done, there is no going back. You cannot reverse it," said a young Dr Beneficio II.  

"But it's safe, right?" Bella shuffled in her seat. "It won't be like with my mother, who had to stop living to be Forever Young, I hope. I mean, if you've seen her, she's frozen in time, like a statue. Like a – like a mummy in some Egyptian tomb."

"No," the doctor said. "Plastination has improved, and we've found a way to make the subject stay sentient and mobile. Unlike before. With the caveat that the subject will be forever in the developmental stage that we capture it in."

"Oh, yes! That's what I want. Baby Berting can be my innocent little one, forever," said Bella.

Another clip was labelled "Bella Trinidad-Torres' Interview with The Philippine Paper."

"Breastfeeding forever keeps me slim. And by golly – look at my boobs! They're naturally forever larger, thanks to my forever cute baby! Without me needing to have any silicone implants, unlike some of my other celebrity peers," Bella said on video.

Then Dr Isabela found a recording of an older Dr Beneficio II in the lab's archives.

"The Forever Injection 2.0 that Baby Berting received is irreversible. His parents are getting on in age – they have been hiring nurses to care for their baby for some thirty years now. It means a great expense in the cost of baby formula and round-the-clock care of nurses. It was also taxing on the mother's body, who we had to ask to wean him from the breast a decade into the injection's effects."

The man on the camera sighed, grey circles under his eyes. "I just wish –" he stopped himself. "We were so excited to administer this drug, to show the world, and the parents, what it could do. But the repercussions of caring for a forever baby are enormous."

A clip marked "Bella Trinidad-Torres, Plastination" had Dr Beneficio II on the screen. "Though we were hopeful our adult subject would be able to walk and be animated, it seems that the newly-updated version of the Forever Injection only works on the young—somewhere around twelve months—and on smaller creatures, such as a baby under 15kg." The doctor rubbed his chin thoughtfully on camera and took a breath.

"Bella has gone the way of her mother, both in a forever state at the age her mother had received the injection. Their skin and hair appear alive, but they have lost sentience – they are, by all accounts, dead – with no heartbeat and no intake of breath."

In the next clip, Dr Beneficio II had grown into an old man, with age spots on his face and a gruff voice. "Commissioner Torres, father to our Forever Baby Berting, has sadly had a heart attack. Thanks to solid paperwork by the Forever Injection team, we have the baby in our custody, which is a far better option than leaving the child to his own devices. It would be too financially demanding to ask the next of kin to keep on caring for a creature that will forever be stunted at the ten-month mark of human development."

The clips ended there. 

Dr Isabela Diego pushed herself off the wheeled lab stool.

"It's time for me to add to Baby Berting's history," she mumbled. She gazed at the little one, who was oblivious in his playpen, cooing at building blocks.

She logged onto the lab camera and began, "I've caught up on all that the Forever Clinic has on relevant data regarding the subject, Baby Berting. Now our study into the neuropsychological state of the Forever Baby begins. For the first few days, I plan to interact with the baby. Observe him empirically – not with machines. I want to rely on the human eye, with touch and real-life interaction."

She played ball with him and spoon-fed him puree. "This baby is a joy, with eyes that convey sheer enjoyment when interacting with me." But then she'd look at him and add, "Still, sometimes I can't help but catch a touch of sadness behind his eyes."

She'd shake her head at what she was saying, wondering if she wasn't putting on the child her own emotional judgments. She added an ethnographical note, "Even doctors studying their subject aren't impervious to emotion or affecting their subjects, I know that much from Doctora Marcelino's lectures on field methodology. It is a flaw in my study."

After a week of going through the motions of the baby's daily life, she began to repeat the same things the baby was used to, but this time, she started attaching electrodes to his temples. The technology had advanced since Baby Berting's birth – electrodes were no longer attached to bulky blipping machines. Instead, the electrodes projected their findings of the baby's brain waves via Bluetooth straight to Dr Isabela's computer.

She began studying how the baby's brain waves looked during daily business – from feeding to play to rest. She watched moments of frustration, like trying to get over a fence or do more complicated things with his fingers. She'd watch what the electroencephalogram revealed about his amygdala and his anterior cingulate cortex – watching for anxiety, fear, how he regulated his emotions.

Isabela allowed a few weeks of this, giving the baby and her the chance to get used to each other and the presence of the electrodes.

Soon, she began explaining to the baby what she was doing, as if he were her student or lab assistant. His eyes lit up whenever she did so.

By the third month of doing this day in and day out, she became used to the waves of his brain – which parts meant joy or frustration.     

It got to the point that she could ask him questions and get an answer using the electrodes. The EEG was live on the monitor, and she could interpret his brain activity as if he were speaking to her. She could decode each wave, each synapse fired.

Isabela began to understand that this baby was more complex than it looked, though the Forever Injection had rendered him nearly incapable of further speech. Still, he had a way of communicating with her.

At first, she asked yes or no questions. Then questions whose answers she could decode by looking at his current brain mapping sequence on the screen.

And it was when she started asking questions about what he wanted that she became alarmed and surprised about where his interests lay.

It began when a plant in the room died, and Isabela explained to the forever baby that she'd have to chuck it out.

He cried then, his lower lip trembling, large tears welling at the bottom of his baby-brown eyes. She looked at his brain mapping sequence. "Death," she said, "The plant has died." She looked at his brain waves on the screen. "Death," his brain waves showed recognition.

"Yes, that is what it is," she said, nodding, looking at him, meeting the baby's eyes.

Then the baby grew quiet.

In a few days, the plant was replaced, and the baby started pointing to it.

"That was death," his brain activity said. "I want death, Dr Isabela." The child's mind continued, "I am trapped in this body forever. Please help me end this."

Dr Isabela sat back. "Baby Berting? Is that really what you want?" She tried to avoid leading questions.

Just then, the child knocked over a cube with a picture of a baby on it. "Nah. Nah bebe." He uttered, and Isabela's eyes grew wide, and she nearly choked on her coffee. "You speak," she said, smiling at him. "Okay. I think I get it. I shouldn't call you baby. What about I just call you Berting?" she asked, her eyes glittering.

"Ya," he said and giggled.

But she reviewed his brain mapping again, and again. Even the old ones, when she was just beginning to understand the language of his mind – the events that had given him joy, that had aroused his desire, or his frustration, or caused sadness or anger. She knew him, through and through, and had mastered how his brain waves looked like.

He seemed cheerful, he giggled a lot, but each time he looked at or touch the plant that she had replaced, his behaviour and his brain waves said the same thing repeatedly.

As she studied his latest message to her on the screen for what felt like the hundredth time, a tear rolled down one eye.

"I understand, Berting," she said to him over the fence, electrodes on his forehead as always, so he could communicate, not just with his cooing and oohs and ahhs, or finger pointing, but through his thoughts that she could interpret on the screen.

"You can't imagine what it's like to be imprisoned in this body," the baby's brain waves said as he paused his playing and met her gaze.

Dr Jimenez had given her carte blanche, rarely looking in on her and her pet project.

The Forever Clinic's R&D Centre had inherited the Sarco machine from Switzerland, a capsule that could administer a painless death within seconds. It was a relic from pandemic times.

Isabela had to work up the courage to prepare and use it. It took a few weeks. Those last days were a mixture of tender goodbyes, of last requests, sometimes Isabela trying to convince the baby that what they were planning was wrong.

"What will it be like for me when you are gone and have moved on?" Berting's brain waves blipped in colours of red, yellow, and green.

Isabela hung her head. "I have no answer for that, Berting."

"One day, you'll have a family of your own. Then become an old lady, then die. And I will still be here, in this baby's body."

Their eyes locked. They had come so far in their work together.

Isabela took a deep breath and let it out. "I wouldn't want to imagine what that future will be like for you that you've just described. That would be torture."

"You and I have become friends."

"Yes, we have, Berting," Dr Isabela smiled, caressing the child's cheeks. "For such an innocent-looking creature, your baby brain sure is wise," she said.

"Then do this for me," his brain waves said.

She nodded, though inside, her heart was breaking.

That night, she refashioned his specialised operating bed – one that was toddler-sized and used for tests and routine check-ups on Berting. She attached an oxygen mask and its long tube to the old Sarco machine. It worked as a capsule for an adult to get into, but she wanted Berting next to her, not hidden inside the pod if they were doing this.  

The mask could give Berting the gift of death by nitrogen hypoxia.

She'd been fascinated by the machine, now old and outdated in Europe, but possibly still useful in the Philippines. The training kit it came with said that when done right, the machine released a large amount of nitrogen, causing a patient's oxygen level to drop from 21% to 0.05% in fewer than 30 seconds.

"You'll start falling asleep after a couple of breaths, Berting, and you'll leave this life within five minutes. It won't be painful," she reassured Berting when she caught his eye. "Like that plant."

Berting oohed and ahhed in response.

Then she asked, "Are you sure you haven't changed your mind?"

"I am sure," his brain waves responded. He toddled towards her and took a block with a heart on it, one she had taught him could mean "love."

He gave it to her, and she smiled.

"Five minutes is just about long enough for us to play your favourite song," she said. She looked at how his brain sequencing was responding, which she'd drawn up on the biggest screen in the lab.

The brain map showed that he was thinking, "I'd like that."

"Ligaya, right? The Eraserheads song from the 1990s I played you from our music archives?"

"Because the song title means 'Happiness,' yes, that one." The boy clapped his hands together, "Ya, ah."

"It is perky and cheerful, that's true," Isabela said.

She put the song on.

She helped him up on to the child-sized medical bed – she'd dressed him in fresh clothes – a white long-sleeved shirt and cream-colored cotton leggings, a pair of light blue socks. It was cold in the lab, forever air-conditioned to keep all the machines and vials and serums safe from the sweltering Manila heat outside.

Isabela took a deep breath then said, "Goodbye, my dearest friend, Berting, the wisest baby that ever lived," she said, stroking his soft cheeks again as he lay on the child-sized operating table.

"What will you do when they find me here? You'll get in trouble," the baby's brain waves said on-screen as The Eraserheads and their electric guitar wafted out of the speakers.

"I know I will," a tear rolled down Dr Isabela's cheek. "But it's for the best. I mean, who else will grant you this kindness? Everyone else looks at you like a lab rat," she said, smiling through her tears.

"And I will be forever grateful," the baby's brain waves said, and they both chuckled at the pun.

She put the mask on him, stroked his head, and kissed him on the cheek. The child wrapped his fingers around her pointing finger and squeezed it tightly. She squeezed back with her other hand.

As the nitrogen entered his system, his brain waves changed, slowly turning blue as he began to relax under its power. She leaned over and gave him a wet kiss on his forehead. "Goodbye, baby," she said, a salty tear rolling down and plopping on his cheek.

"Bah-bah," Berting's voice said through the mask. On the screen, his brain said, "Goodbye, my dear friend. Thank you."

The machine monitoring his heart – she'd done her due diligence in recording everything – started beeping a long, steady beep. His heart had stopped. His hand around her finger slackened.

The brain waves that had danced with so much colour, with bright yellows and reds, oranges, and greens, slowly went from blue to black. His heart flatlined on the screen. Her palm was on his still-warm chest. She moved her ear to his heart, hearing nothing.

His baby shirt was soaked in her tears.

_____