Uma história em analógico sobre pessoas imortais

Embora a história tenha muito mais que apenas os dois pontos que você mencionou, esses pontos correspondem de perto The Computer Connection de Alfred Best .

Sobre os imortais:

• Eles são seres humanos comuns que, em algum momento, entraram em uma situação na qual estava claro que iriam morrer (só para ser salvo in extremis )

• Eles vêm de todas as idades (existe até um neandertal).

• Eles apenas não envelhecem e metabolizam qualquer coisa (então nenhum veneno / tóxico os afeta); na verdade, o protagonista se refere ao grupo como Homol para significar que eles podem metabolizar qualquer coisa. Mas eles podem ser mortos por lesão física.

A configuração

A quite dystopian society, when poor people living whenever they can, no discernible social order (but there is a working social society), "Pure" white men are almost non-existing and the ones who are still seem to be just mindless drug addicts. Nonetheless, some traditional groups (for example, Native Americans) are doing pretty well (in the case of the indians, because they discovered a way to produce a new drug from a plant).

Agora, para o enredo:

Narrated in first person by Grand Guignol (or Guig), an immortal that goes around trying to create new immortals by putting "worthy" people in mortal danger (in the end, he usually ends just killing them because he cannot save them in time). At the beggining, he is hiding from police and is sent back in time to give some money to a destitute Victorian poet before he suicides (he does not arrive in time).

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The main plot starts when a prospective "member", a Cherokee named Sequoia (Guig already was trying to stage a situation to "kill" him) collapses when he founds that 3 astronauts are missing from a capsule that has spent a long time in orbit. The collapse is enough to make him an Homol, but at the same time, while he collapsed, his brain stablished a connection with the central computer of the main title.

finalmente

The story becomes more and more complicated, the biggest points being the wedding of Guig to Sequoia's sister, the death of Guig's foster daughter (in the Spanish version, Chca Chino-5), the involment of a renegade Homol (the Rajah) and the fact that the three missing astrounauts did in fact involution to a fetal status and are "growing" again but as hermafrodites.

Se nenhuma das opções acima tocar, então não é o livro que você está procurando.

Você pode estar pensando na conexão do computador do Alfred Best. ISFDB parece que foi primeiro serializado na revista Analog a partir de novembro de 1974, sob o (dolorosamente não-PC) título de O doador indiano .

Do link da Amazon:

A band of immortals - as charming a bunch of eccentrics as you'll ever come across - recruit a new member, the brilliant Cherokee physicist Sequoya Guess. Dr. Guess, with group's help, gain control of Extro, the supercomputer that controls all mechanical activity on Earth. They plan to rid Earth of political repression and to further Guess's researches-which may lead to a great leap in human evolution to produce a race of supermen. But Extro takes over Guess instead and turns malevolent. The task of the merry band suddenly becomes a fight in deadly earnest for the future of Earth.

No primeiro capítulo, o personagem principal explica como eles obtiveram a imortalidade:

But our Group has proven that death doesn’t have to be inevitable. Of course we did it the hard way.
Each of us knew we were going to die and received a psychogalvanic shock that wiped out our lethal cell products and turned us into Molecular Men; Molemen for short. I’ll explain that later. It’s a sort of updating of Cuvier’s “Catastrophism” theory of evolution. In case you’ve forgotten, he argued that periodic catastrophes destroyed all life and God started it all over again on a higher level. He was wrong about the God bit, of course, but catastrophes do alter creatures.
As described in each case (with the exception of Hic-Haec-Hoc, who can’t describe anything) the circumstances were almost identical. We were trapped in some natural or man-made catastrophe that gave us no chance of survival; we were aware of it; a psychogalvanic charge ripped through us as we toppled into extinction; then some miracle aborted the death and so here the Group is forever. The odds against this sort of freak are fantastic, but the Greek Syndicate says that even the longest odds are bound to come in sooner or later. The Greek ought to know. He’s been a professional gambler ever since Aristotle kicked him out of the Peripatetic School in Athens.