It was never my desire to live forever. Just not something that I hoped for myself. I lived through the seed war and the solar war and barely through the fashion war. How we came to fight over fashion after almost starving and burning ourselves off the earth is a feat uniquely possible only for us humans.
It’s not that fashion wars had never happened before . there were historical references. Red for the 8th Parallel, blue for the Yellowcabs . green for the 45th street saints, pink if you were unaffiliated which became your affiliation of course. I don’t think the people of that time would see it as a fashion war, but I have the benefit of time and distance and no one left who could argue with me about it.
The things that we do to each other. All of us thinking that we are special. all of us thinking that our individual survival means the survival of the human race. hundreds of thousands of years of humans birthing and dying and still we persist in the mistaken belief that god is watching for what one individual did or didn’t do.
why it matters is that even if forever isn’t for me, the techies figured out how to make it happen for those who wanted it. It started out pretty altruistic as these things often do. A scientist who had been working on a solution of long distance space travel wanted more time. she was so sure she was closest to solving the riddle and with a little more time she would work it out. she couldn’t just pass her information on. she was so single-minded about it that she didn’t think she could bear her death if the person who took over decided to take any path other than the one she had laid out.
She was right of course. The year after she reportedly died, The consortium that came into possession of her work, discovered several of the things in her lab could make them billions. right then and there, they stopped working on her space travel riddle and began marketing a half dozen of her accidental discoveries. She had created artificial heart and lungs sets that could withstand a number of diseases and were recyclable. She’d managed to build organic lungs that could switch from air breathing to water breathing along with the process to transplant them into a living person. She had also created moldable organics that could replace muscles and nerve groupings making it possible to replace limbs by plug and play into a special titanium spinal cord sheathe. They say she never tried to recreate the brain.
She was fair minded, according to reports from the people who worked closest to her. Years of honing her work allowed her to eliminate the standard business concerns that kept lifesaving ideas out of the hands of the people who needed them most. She whittled a way at each solution until it could be created with organics you could grow. You could walk into a hospital with your own replacement parts. This was of course the basis for the seed war.
This work of fiction belongs to me.