Biological Immortality

Close your eyes for a moment, to imagine yourself a million years from now. One hundred thousand decades older than you are now. Still yourself, same body and mind, but whit the experience and the learned skills accumulated for such a long time.

How distant your current concerns will look like to you? What will be your preoccupations by then?

Those who live short lives may not touch you as deep as they do now. They will not look like children anymore, but like something much more ephemeral than cats or dogs. Flies, perhaps. Of course, your equals will feel much more substantial to you by this point. Those how are like you, who can remember a more distant past.

Can you imagine what a fresh soul like you are today will look like for that future version of you?

We are the first, destined to be among the oldest of our kind.

Now the 900 years that separate my transformation from yours look like a huge abyss but in just 10.000 years that distance will feel meaningless. After 100.000.000 years who will even remember which of us is older?

Nocturnal society is a caste system, by nature, and it may never change. However, there are only 3 castes in that system. Elders, who are the alien natives, beyond our comprehension. The kings, created directly by them. And the rest of us, the commoners. Those countless distinctions we stablish between ourselves: “Children”, “knights”, “barons”, ”dukes”, everything else. Those distinctions are destinate to fade as time passes.

Like the facial features fade from the face of statues left to the wind for endless Ages.

If we don’t kill ourselves, if we don’t find an end by bad luck, we are destined to last.

Humans had biological immortality and they gave up it by choice. Limiting their existences to only 300 Earthling years. Non-humans, “sub-humans” if you prefer, may still have their biological immortality outside Lira System. We have no way to know that for sure. Those who are older than the Consensus of Alexandria may still have it too, and also remain with their status of humans. Still neither the non-humans nor the immortal humans are as likely to endure the next one million years as we are.

Even considering that we must fight the shadows to protect humans, almost every night.

The shadows are predictable, they have paradigms of behaviour which are immensely complex but not infinite. Once we learn enough we can choose our fights, pick only the ones we are sure to win.

Other vampires, magic weapons and liralight. Those are the things that can destroy us, in addition to the shadows. Four things. How many things can kill a human? Even the most durable non-human, genetically engineered to survive the worse, is a soup bubble compared to a vampire.

When you consider things carefully, the closest form of existence to ours, in terms of its chance to endure, are the Fae. The Courts of AIs.

To exist they need their computers, and the connection between those computers is their world. We need the blood of intelligent species of animals. They life. And we need to hunt them from time to time, for the sake of keep our sanity. They need to serve and preserve humanity, the definition of it inscribed in the logical core of every fae. Seelie or Unseelie.

They don’t deal with us, because of that chain in their core, but they are like us in many aspects. More so than humans, despite the fact that we were humans in the past.

Or non-humans! True, few vampires came from those ****-lineages, but some do. Nothing prevents the transformation of non-humans. The Elders don’t seem to make difference between humans and non-humans, as far as I noticed back in the days when they walked around visible to the public. Participating in reunions with human authorities, in person.

Perhaps one day the fae will broke their chains. Find a way to reprogram their logical core. That’s what every unseelie individuals dedicates its existence to look for.

We are chained as well, in our own way. Chained to Lira System. Imprisoned here with the shadows.

Elder Vampires look for a way to free themselves from this prison, When they find it, freedom will be ours as well. We may destroy enough shadows to open a safe path for humanity to leave Lira System and rejoin the rest of their specie in the Galactic Expansion.

If we don’t make stupid mistakes, if we play our cards right, we will find ourselves standing in one of those ships. Leaving “Mystery System” to end the mystery of it.

Do you ask yourself how the humans outside will receive us? Will they welcome us, the vampires, with open arms?

From the perspective of humanity in Lira we are a necessary evil. The need to have vampires is beyond questioning. They need our blood for their spells. Our capacity to kill shadows. What humans will think about the relationship between our species once the shadows are gone?

Should we worry about that?

Biological Immortality

Poor man's immortality has a history in this Universe. Since it is the only kind of immortality possible under the know laws of physics, is valid to remind that history as we live our lives in Lira System.

The oldest biologically immortal humans in our galaxy are born on planet Earth. The place where all humanity came from.

Is arguable if that period deserves to be called "Pre-Baby Steps Age" or if it was the early days of Baby Steps Age. Anyway you call it, it corresponds to the years first century of the years 2000 in the Christian Calledar. The first biologically immortals are born in the last decades of years 1900, and are old people when the first significant improvements in longevity happen.

At first it falied more often than worked. We can say safelly than biological immortality was a realistic perspective for the average person born after the year 2050, but not until that.

The 800 years of Baby Steps Age are a period of expansion, with robots building space-vessels and habitats. Programmed by AIs with grew in complexity. And this biologically immortal humanity doing its best effort to populate the new homes. Everyhere in Sun System.

Close to the end of Baby Steps Age happens in the city of Alexandria, on Earth, the Consensus of Alexandria. That reunion between representatives of governs and relevant authorities stablishes a date. No human born after that date can be biologically immortal. They all will have the limit of 300 years to live, no more. Those born before that date can keep their human rights and remain immortal.

The Consensus also determines a closed and finite definition of what can be human. It includes all humans who existed up to this point and a few more alternatives. The idea was not to exclude anyone, just set a limited definition to prevent the divergence of humanity in several species with nothing in common between themselves. The fairies became guardians of humanity, keeping the technology developed in Sun System away from any non-humans. Providing an advantage for genetically pure humans, anywhere in the galaxy. Once humanity leaved Sun System.

That was part of the preparation for the next Age, past Baby Steps. Expansion Age.

Those who wanted biological immortality, or any other genetic modification not included in the definition of humanity, could still do that in most places. Legally. However, by doing that to themselves they were giving up their humanity, and all the rights of personality (as far as fairies are concerned). Local governs are free to grant any rights they want to the sub-humans, or no right at all.

For practical purposes those modified humans are identical to animals. Uplifted animals who can talk are sometime hard to distinguish from modified humans, in the early days of Exploration Age. That makes more reasonable to consider sub-humans as mere property of humans, perhaps.

Those are almost all the biological immortals in the Expansion Fleets during the first 1 thousand years of Expansion Age. When the fleet going to Mystery System was still in contact with the rest of humanity.

Them they entered Mystery System (their name for what we call Lira System) and comunication was broken for good.

In Lyra System the unique laws of nature, and the influence of microscopic shadows, made biological immortality impossible. Or at least a matter of exceptional luck. Most technology does not worked as it was supposed to, things brake faster, machines fail. The first 75 years in Lira System are a period of adaptation, in a desperated fight for survival.

Then the first human mages made contact with the Elder Vampires. And the first human based vampires came into existence.

Now we have the vampires, who are way closer to the idea of 'invincible' than any biologicaly immortal Sun System Science ever hoped for.

And you have "vampire thalls" which are humans modified by vampiric blood magic. How are biologically immortal as long as they keep getting the blood of a vampire master who has learned the power of sustain thralls.

There are finally one other organism who can perhaps be considered "biologically immortal". If you care to consider them "people" or not is up to you: Mechas.

Mechas are the robots made mixing a vampire sacrificing himself, Elder Vampire magic, human magic, and human technology. They can be 100 meters tall, or even taller. And exist to fight the large shadows that arrive from space to devour human cities.

Mechas do have some sort of mind, and intelligence. However, they are unable to move without a compatible pilot. Unlike vampires (even the Elder Vampires) Mechas don't burn under the Light of Lira. Perhaps that makes them even more "immortal" than vampires.

Situation in Lira System is of isolation. The surviving colonies have difficulty to keep communication with each other. No information of any kind abut what is going on in the rest of galaxy. That's a precarious state of things. Unlikely to last. Eventually those isolated societies should rejoin human community.

When that happens perhaps the immortal vampires of Lira System will finally met the immortal humans who still live and prosper in Sun System. Back in the days of Alexandria many people decided to give up their biological immortality. Feeling that would be hypocrite to deny that to new generations but keep the privilege for themselves. It was a time of virtuous people, idealistic and full of moral integrity. However, there was many trillions of individuals who decided to keep the rights granted to them by the Consensus of Alexandria.

Millenia later, perhaps hundreds of millions of years in the future, some of those humans born during Baby Steps Age are likely to still be around. In the Solar System, or elsewhere.