pookayreyeout's Friends

Fiction: Old Soldiers Never Die (part 1)
Man was not meant to know eternity. We're defined by our limits. Three million years of evolution built us around the fundamental limit that even if we managed to avoid disease, starvation, murder, and lions, we'd still grow old and die in a blink of a cosmic eyelash. When eighty years is the most time you can hope for, you must make the most of every year, every month, every week. Even a day or an hour must be treated with respect. The pace of our thoughts, our attention span, our expectations, our perceptions are built around that timescale.

It's been four hundred quadrillion years, give or take, since we solved the secret of immortality. And in all that time, we haven't fixed our brains so we could cope with this new reality. We told ourselves we were refusing to change what made us humans, but we were really refusing to acknowledge that we'd already done that a dozen times over, starting from when we left the savannah and culminating in the longevity vaccine. We insisted on keeping the instincts that served us well during the three million years on the savannah, no matter how poorly the served us during the seven thousand years we lived in the farms and cities or the untold aeons we lived among the stars.

To keep from having to cope with the changes, we reimposed artifical limits to replace the natural limits we had artificially torn away. We cured disease, starvation, and predation; but accidents, war, and murder multiplied without end. A lifetime of hurt and bitterness is bad enough in an 80-year old, weak and feeble from the ravages of time. But a thousand, ten thousand years of accumulated grudges in a man with the health and energy of a 25-year-old?

The wars were worst of all. One of the most fundamental and powerful of human drives is ambition, the desire to grow up and reach the limits of your abilities. To replace the old generation as they grow old and die. On the savannah, among a tribe of a few dozen, a man could expect (if he survived) to grow to be a strong and powerful leader in the prime of his life, then a wise and respected elder in his twilight years. But what happened when the old men stopped fading away? What happened when a few dozen people became a few thousand, then millions, then trillions upon trillions? When a man could see untold masses of humanity in line in front of him for advancement, and every single person in front of him is there to stay. The only outlet for a man's ambition becomes plotting and scheming, often culminating in assassinations, coups, and civil wars.

We told ourselves that the wars were necessary, that they were just. And in the beginning, we may even have been right. The Elohim had driven us off Earth and our first colony worlds, with only one ship escaping. Our only chance of survival as a species was to rebuild in the forgotten wastes of space and fight back the minute we had the strength to do so. I dropped with the second wave of Marines to retake Earth, to capture as much Elohim technology intact as we could before the stripped-down garrison we'd taken by surprise could destroy it. I remember the feeling of desperation in my gut those first few centuries of the Elohim war, every one of the thousands of desperate chances we took because the alternatives were worse.

But I fought in the Social Wars, too, when the Elohim were defeated and the Admirals quarrelled over the spoils because one Galaxy wasn't big enough for two dozen ambitious men to share. Our Leader's cause may have been just there, but not one of the Admirals or their cronies had any cause but his own advantage. And not even our Leader's hands were clean, for he was the one who sent the fleets to the other galaxies to find and subdue the other races. He claimed he wanted to keep us from being taken unawares as we had been by the Elohim, and perhaps over time he even convinced himself of this, but we know know from reading his diary that his first thought was for disposing of the ambition of his underlings, sending them to murder innocents millions of parsecs away rather than focusing their ambitions on taking his throne out from under him.

In the end, it only did him so much good. He was assassinated 22,831 years from the day he was born. Which actually is quite an accomplishment, seeing as so far as we can tell the median human life span since the longevity vaccine was discovered has been a mere 521 years. The most common cause of death has been executions and democides (43%), followed by combat casualties (27%), murders and duels (19%), accidents (7%), starvation and energy deprivation (2%), and disease (1%). Only a miniscule fraction of humanity has really been forced to stare into the face of the abyss that is eternity. I am one of them.

Each one of our noble brotherhood of eternal hermits has found his or her own way of coping with a lifetime that's as much greater than the natural lifepan of humanity as a planet is greater than a grain of sand. I chose a relatively simple path -- I went mad.

(to be continued if and when inspiration strikes again)

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