The Last Mortal Generation
The good news: a simple and cheap way to become immortal has been found.
The bad news: it’s only for those who are yet to be born.
And that is very bad news.
November 13th
Scotch tape
Bread
Sausages +$1.50!? What did they add to it to make the price jump so much? The Pope’s blessing?
Eggs
Some kind of pastries
So, new diary, let’s go.
It was raining this morning. Of course, it’s November, why do I even mention it. I can’t stand it myself when books start with a description of the weather. Oh well, it’s my diary, I even wrote down my shopping list in it. It’s not like I’m going to get it published. The rain is important, though: it was leaking from the windowsill. I tried putting a rag under it and taping it up with scotch tape – useless. That’s where my powers end. I’ll have to call a handyman, but I have no money. Kate grumbles that I’ve completely neglected the house, but what can I do? If I got to decide my own salary, you can bet it wouldn’t be this. Alright, I’ll keep writing this diary, like they recommend in those self-help books. Maybe one day I’ll be the one setting salaries. So, here I am, writing.
Lucy got a C in physics. Thus the Moirai wove her pattern of fate. Kate didn’t appreciate the joke, which means it’s a good one, so I’m writing it down here.
(During dinner, I was scrolling through the news on my phone and stumbled upon a breakthrough. But unlike my window, this was a breakthrough in science. I clicked on the video because the thumbnail had a young scientist with a mustache, and who in their right mind wears a mustache these days? He was also balding. See what science does to people. But the guy in the white lab coat, paying no attention to his own appearance, was excitedly talking about something to do with immortality. A mustache like that, and he’s opening new chapters in human history. So to speak, to preemptively prevent schoolkids from drawing silly mustaches on his portrait in all future history textbooks. I was finishing my sausage sandwich and didn’t catch half of it. Not that I was trying very hard. It was probably something about extending a cell’s life by two days, and the journos, as usual, sucked out the sensation, from which they usually suck out sensations. And the mustache guy was gesticulating so wildly, you could tell he was imagining himself throwing around grant money. Immortality is the kind of far-out science fiction you find at the edge of the universe. But the news wasn’t a total waste. I found Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” on the shelf to read before bed.
And they say the rain won’t stop tomorrow.)This is where the new timeline of humanity began.
November 14th
The rain didn’t stop, as promised by the forces of evil fate. Now I’m trying to pick a river name for my windowsill and will send it to the geographical community. The rain, it seems, is the background of my entire sinful life. The background and the soundtrack. It’s hammering on the windowsill like a decorous drummer. Reminder: look up the etymology of the word “decorous”.
I finally found the handyman’s number and was about to dial, but then something in me snapped. What am I, not a man? I bought some sealant after work and filled the crack. It worked. A small victory for man over nature!
Not for long.
Lucy came home from school all excited. Not because of her grades, that ship has sailed. Her whole school was talking about only one thing. That discovery of immortality. But not for us.
The scientist with the mustache (Lucy told me they’ve already made a ton of memes about him, and his mustache didn’t save him; they’re drawing even sillier ones on top of it) explained the gist of it. Even the biology teacher spent the whole class on it. The method is some kind of monstrously complex, yet cheap, like antibiotics or vaccines, without any nanobots or uploading consciousness to the cloud. Some kind of intrauterine embryonic engineering.
Lucy was wolfing down meatballs and pasta, barely chewing, and her eyes could have powered a medium-sized car. “Dad, isn’t that cool? They won’t get sick, or grow old... It’s like superheroes,” she said.
I replied something like: “Yeah. Cool. Until they realize that we, the old folks, are taking up their space. Eating their pasta.”
I’ve forgotten how the conversation went after that.
November 17th
Kept thinking about that scientist and his damned mustache. I looked at a few memes, some were funny. The ones where the future immortals are laughing at previous generations—not so much.
At work, Vic was saying that from now on, only billionaires will have kids, so their heirs can own corporations forever. I need to get him to read some Golden Age sci-fi, otherwise his cyberpunk brain will go off the rails. And you have to go steady. Arnold was indignant, saying it’s against nature. And one lady loudly declared that it’s all a conspiracy to make people have more kids and buy more diapers. I almost burst out laughing.
The scientist with the mustache (his last name is as ridiculous as his mustache—Lansky. A name like that isn’t for starting new eons of humanity, it’s for handing muskets to duelists in a classic novel) has become a star. Now he’s ditched the lab coat for an expensive suit. He said the technology is already being tested, and in a couple of years, they might start using it in clinics. He delivered the line “overcoming biological slavery” with great pathos and didn’t even crack a smile. Now there’s a guy who needs to read some cyberpunk.
Meanwhile, in the comments section, a different reaction is brewing. Disbelief, and the question: “Won’t we, the mortals, become second-class citizens?” People have already started calling themselves mortals. What about the others? Gods?
The TV is also obsessed with the new discovery, but there’s nothing new there. Endless debates, rehashing the same information, old documentaries on vaguely related topics—people are busy. They showed some happy women who had agreed to the experiment to make their children immortal. I don’t get them. I never even buy first-generation tech, and they’re handing their lives and their unborn children over to the cold hands of science. What if there are long-term side effects that aren’t immediately noticeable? You can’t un-birth a child. Although, with our technological singularity just around the corner, maybe I shouldn’t be so categorical about anything anymore.
Lucy has already lost interest in the topic and disappeared into her phone after dinner, clearly not to cram Newton’s laws. A day has passed, who needs yesterday’s hype? And she’s right to. At her age, she already thinks she’s immortal anyway.
But no, this is real. It’s how it always happens: first, it’s all quiet, and then change comes, suddenly, in a leap, and we wake up in a new world. I have this strange feeling. As if I’m already a museum exhibit, and the world around me is preparing for something new. I tried to discuss it with Kate over dinner, but she just waved it away: “You’d be better off fixing the window, philosopher.” Maybe she’s right. Or maybe I just don’t know how to process all this.
I’m writing this from bed. Kate is crying. Nothing was taken from her, but she feels deeply wronged. And a little envious. Some kind of vile feeling has taken root in me, too. The aging mechanism is hardwired into us at a fundamental level, and it turns out you can only rewrite the code at the assembly stage. We are the last model, after which the manufacturer suddenly found a way to make perpetual motion machines. The last mortal generation, so to speak. The next batch will be different, infinitely better. The chasm between us will be wider than the Mariana Trench.
Wow. I haven’t cried about human mortality since I was a kid.
Finished the Asimov book. In it, a robot dreams of becoming human, and now it seems we dream of becoming robots. But for the sake of that dream, the robot gave up immortality. In other words, he made the most anti-human decision possible. As much as I respect Isaac, I’m giving it three star on Goodreads tomorrow.
November 18th
I opened my diary. I used to write shopping lists and complain about the rain in here. And now I’m writing a chronicle of the sunset. The sunset of our entire species in its mortal form. Listen to me, you eternal ones, and know the soil from which you grew.
The scotch tape on the window has finally come off. The crack is gaping open again. I’m not going to tape it up again. Let it leak. It doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter at all.
And tomorrow, it will rain again.
December
The WHO confirmed it. Independent labs have replicated the experiment. It works. Governments around the world are already forming commissions. And it’s not some scam for the rich; it’s dirt cheap. The pharmaceutical giants are howling—after they’ve sunk billions over decades into extending life by just a couple of years. And now some mustachioed clown has cobbled together eternal life in his garage from vitamin C and a simple plastic bottle (that’s a joke, I have no idea what he made eternal life out of).
The religions, of course, are up in arms. The Orthodox Church immediately declared that immortality without God is eternal existence without salvation—in other words, hell. Catholicism is still trying to formulate an official response, to walk that fine line and not offend anyone. Islam immediately labeled it “haram.” Buddhism perceived it as “getting stuck” in one cycle, an obstacle on the spiritual path. Some Buddhists also emphasized that this immortality is given without the embryo’s consent. But some schools of thought saw it as a “path to enlightenment through infinite experience.” Judaism responded more pragmatically: some rabbis said it’s “not according to the Torah,” but my neighbor Boris explained that “life is the greatest value, and if you can extend it, it’s a mitzvah (a good deed).” Never in human history have all the faiths been in such unanimous agreement.
What I don’t get is why all the world’s governments are just letting this happen. Who’s going to control the overpopulation, with all its delightful gifts like resource shortages, endless diseases, and psychological breakdowns? And who’s going to pay for pensions? The entire human life cycle will have to be redesigned. I doubt the authorities are happy, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Or is this the global cabal’s plan? But why?
But okay, even if the aging mechanism in your cells is removed, you can still be killed. Alright, alright, die in an accident, as painlessly as possible. Nature ought to correct for human madness. (We won’t get stuck in an unresolved equilibrium.)Ha!
January
The world has gone mad. And I’m not talking about the new cults, like “Vita Aeterna,” popping up like mushrooms after rain around the “Immortech” corporation, which seems to have opened branches even in Antarctica (without even waiting for clinical trials to finish, armed with nothing but a theory, but clearly afraid they’d be washed away by a tidal wave of customers). Nor am I talking about the equally numerous anti-cults.
I’m talking about normal humanity, if you can still call it that. A demographic explosion. Everyone who was putting it off, everyone who was on the fence—they all rushed to have children. The only chance to get a ticket to eternity for their bloodline and family name. Pregnancy tests have become a currency more valuable than gold.
A branch of Lansky’s corporation opened up here in our city. They’ve plastered all the billboards with ads, each one dumber than the last. “Eternity Begins with Us,” “A Legacy That Will Not Die,” “Embrace Infinity.” Goddamn marketing hacks.
At work, that’s all anyone talks about. Some curse their fate for being born thirty years too early. Others are happy for their children and grandchildren. My boss walks around gloomier than a thundercloud. He spent his whole life saving up for a “dignified old age” in a little house by the sea and only bought it last year. And now, he says, what’s the point? The young folks will be splashing in that sea forever, and all he’ll have time for is to build one sandcastle.
Kate’s friend, Helen, came to visit. She’s one month pregnant. With an immortal. She’s always been quiet and modest, but now she was glowing like a Christmas tree.
After she left, Kate cried in the kitchen. I silently stroked her back and looked at the tired wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, at the stray gray hair she’s always tucking behind her ear. Our generation, and all the ones before us—we’re not just some boomer-zoomer nonsense anymore. We’re mortals. Accidentally left on the roadside of evolution. The divide is going to be a profound one. Perhaps the most profound divide the universe has ever known.
Kate was silent for three days. Then tonight, while Lucy was asleep, she said, looking out the window at the swirling snow: “I’d like another one.”
I was speechless. “In these conditions? With the mortgage? You do understand it would be a different kind of person?” I breathed out. “Completely different. He will look at us like... I don’t know, like cavemen. Like something fleeting. He will know this from the cradle. It’s monstrous.”
“It will be mine,” Kate said stubbornly. “A part of me. Of us. That will remain. The only part that will remain. I’ve already signed up for the procedure.”
July
Kate won. The same Kate who, thirteen years ago, cried in the maternity ward and swore she’d never do it again, that it was too painful and scary. Now she’s infected with the idea, like a virus. And I gave in. I look at her already rounding belly and I don’t know what I feel. Not joy. Not horror. Emptiness. As if we’ve signed a contract for the delivery of an alien.
The doctors are calling them “Generation E” (for Eternal). The journalists call them “the immortals” or “the new gods.” But the nickname that stuck was “the elves,” so as not to further anger the already terminally heated religions.
August
The first of them was born today. A boy. In an Immortech clinic in Singapore. His photo, and the photo of his happy, crying parents, went viral worldwide. Obscenely healthy, the doctors report. And from my unprofessional point of view, everything seems to be in the right place. No visible side effects, so thank God for that. Given the number of women in this “humanity renovation” program, if something had gone wrong, it would have caused serious damage to our entire population.
Kate watched the report with bated breath, and I saw in her eyes the same pain and the same hope. She squeezed my hand and whispered, “Look, everything’s fine. Everything’s going to be fine.” But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching National Geographic, just without the voiceover, about a species completely abstracted from us.
September
It was bound to erupt, it just had to. I’m surprised it took this long for things to go beyond protests. I’ve already forgotten what an Immortech branch looks like without a crowd of people holding signs. But there were those who were ready to go further. There always are, just give them time.
The first strike was clearly not from a religious group, at least I don’t think so. They wouldn’t have called themselves that, unless they were some kind of Satanists, but what do they care?
A group calling themselves “The Undead.” They had clearly been preparing for this for a long time. They sent a wave of drones after Lansky’s motorcade, right on the road, in broad daylight. But the drones were jammed—the corporation had also been prepared for something like this for a long time. The drones fell onto nearby cars and the asphalt, blocking the road. Then the shooting started. “The Undead,” wearing skull masks, engaged in a firefight with Immortech’s private army, which was kitted out like special forces in fancy new exoskeletons.
I watched practically live as Lansky (who had already shaved his mustache and gotten hair restoration) was led out from under fire by his bodyguards. I even felt sorry for him. A stooped figure, covering his head with his hands, scurrying under the cover of soldiers. Fearing for his own life, even as he sells immortality. A salesman of something he himself lacks. Obviously, these weren’t the consequences he envisioned when he presented his technology to the world. Only a fervent idealist, unable to see beyond his own test tube, could be so naive.
Overturned cars, smoke, gunfire. A nightmare. I was watching this, and on the other side of the wall, Kate was listening to Mozart for pregnant women.
Later that evening, “The Undead” released their manifesto. They were adults in stature, but like all manifestos of the offended, this manifesto was the sick fantasy of infants hiding behind lofty ideals. “Death is the natural order,” “We are the last frontier of mortal humanity.” Yeah, right. Touching upon the subject of immortality has unlocked new levels of pathos in people.
That opened the gates of hell. Attacks on Lansky’s corporation’s branches began all over the globe. Fortunately, so far there have been no casualties among the newborns and mothers. What the hell is happening to the world? Just yesterday, it was insane, but a comprehensibly insane. And today, “the undead” are fighting “the elves” on the streets, and the world is confidently plunging into an era of religious wars.
Did someone slip the world government a copy of “Warhammer 40,000”? Should we be expecting a God-Emperor soon? Or has he already been born?
March
He was born. A boy. We named him Athanasius (what other name could he possibly have?). He’s no different from any other baby. He screams, he poops in his diapers, he demands attention. Kate is crying with happiness, and Lucy is thrilled too. My little mortal. And Kate is my little mortal, too. But our son... Our little, domestic, eternal elf. Ah, well, here we go again: sleepless nights, a constantly active nervous system, goodbye to entertainment.
2035
Today, we all understood what “immortality” really means. A truck lost control and crashed into a car carrying an elf—that first one, the boy from Singapore, he’s several years old now. The car was mangled, crushed against a wall. The mortal parents were killed instantly. The truck driver survived but sustained serious injuries. But the little elf didn’t have a single scratch on him. It’s not super-regeneration—you can’t regenerate from death. Not skin of steel—they weigh the same as normal children. Just luck. Incredible, absurd, sinister luck.
An old conspiracy theory got a second wind in the blink of an eye. Quantum immortality. Something about merging all your copies from parallel universes into one whole. Or reality rewriting itself to favor the “branches” where the quantum elves continue to exist. Insurance companies must be reaching for the tranquilizers, but the mortgage banks can celebrate.
This theory had been floating around since the beginning, but of course, they kept the tinfoil hat brigade away from the babies. However, a woman named Cassidy (almost Cassandra), claimed a year ago that she’d reverse-engineered the process and figured out the immortalization of the embryo was a subatomic effect, not a biochemical one. She was, naturally, laughed out of the room back then. Now, she’s probably writing a book called “I Told You So!” with a giant middle finger on the cover.
This news kicked off a new wave of escalation. But it seems to me that pity has now been added to the envy. Or rather, people found a new angle to attack Immortech from. Today, for the first time, I heard someone say that these people were “doomed to eternal life.” That’s the word they used: “doomed.” And I see the monstrous logic in it, too: something infinite, with no option to exit or change—that is the very definition of hell.
I look at Athanasius sleeping in his crib. Such a small, defenseless prisoner of reality. And I’m the one who sent him here.
2040
Oh, I forgot I was even keeping this diary. Some chronicler I am. Thanos is five. He’s a normal boy. Well, a little phlegmatic. Kate and I often wake up at night to find him staring at us. He just stands in his crib in the dark and watches. Just watches, as if to check if we’re still here.
But sometimes strange things happen to him. He might freeze in the middle of a game, stare at a single point, and start crying. Not the cranky tantrum of a child, but in a grown-up way, bitter and hopeless. He can’t explain his “visions” yet. Or he doesn’t want to. He has an adult’s gaze, and even though he plays children’s games with the family, I get the feeling he only does it out of politeness. The psychologists from Immortech (observation is mandatory with them now) say it’s a side effect of the psyche adapting to its new state. Bullshit.
The elf cults have merged into one big cult. A historic day, I suppose.
2042
Some very bad person got the idea to give an elf an assault rifle. I don’t know where exactly, but somewhere in Africa. It happened two months ago, but the footage only became available now. I watched the censored version, where almost everything is blurred out except for the dark elf himself, but an uncensored version is circulating online. It’s brutal. The bullets just went into his body, and instead of a wound, the spot just flickered, like TV static, but skin-colored—and that was it. One explosion engulfed the elf’s body up to his waist, but it didn’t harm him either. It’s definitely not AI; that’s been verified at the government level.
They say they could even survive a nuclear blast. Hell, a pulsar could hit the Earth—and they’d live. But there is good news. All conflicts only exist as long as mortals exist. Once the elves replace us, the effectiveness of weapons will drop to zero. The very logic of war is predicated on human mortality.
2045
Lucy moved out. She’s living with her boyfriend, working in some kind of archive. She rarely visits. I don’t blame her. Living in the same house with a little god is hard. Kate pretends everything is fine. She loves him with a desperate, animal love. The love of a mortal mother for her eternal child. She’s in the “Generation E” parent group chats. They don’t discuss pediatricians and schools, but how to teach a child empathy, pain, how to prepare them for future losses. Their conversations are like a conference of engineers trying to write a piece of software called “soul” for a machine that doesn’t need one.
Thanos is ten. Ten years old, and he’s never once scraped his knee, never gotten a cut. Though, maybe he’s tried. We’ve stopped telling him to “be careful.” What’s the point? The universe itself cushions all his falls.
Thanos’ visions are becoming more frequent and intense, but that’s the case with all the elves. They’re all calm and somehow adult-like, even to me. But not emotionless. My son can smile and get angry, but he always cools down quickly. I should teach him to play poker, but only with mortals.
“The Undead” lost the war. They never even met a single elf in battle, but they will definitely get their chance. Besides, Immortech has the most durable loyalty program of all. Apathy set in among their unliving ranks, and the skeletons put the flesh back on their bones and returned to the world of the temporarily living. But some decided to change the battlefield and went into politics. Raised the stakes, so to speak.
Now it’s fashionable to pity the elves. There are “right to die” movements. They don’t blow up clinics, they file lawsuits in international courts, demanding the development of a technology to reverse immortality for those elves who might want it when they grow up.
Lansky, older, gray, with the face of an eternal martyr, replies at press conferences that it’s impossible. The procedure is irreversible at a fundamental level. He’s not a god, he just accidentally opened one door while closing another, and he doesn’t have the keys. Talk about a dead end.
But a more terrifying question has surfaced: what if Cassidy wasn’t only right about the quantum immortality theory? What if she was also right about her other theory? In her book, with the rather splashy title “The Global Elite Will Kill Me for This Book,” she claims that every bit of an elf’s “stroke of luck,” every miraculous rescue, it’s not just like that. It’s the collapse of probabilities. When a bullet misses an elf’s body in our universe, his copy in another one gets hit by it. Every elf is a black hole for the multiverse. They live at the expense of an infinite number of their own dead copies. We didn’t just give birth to an immortal child, but to a devourer of realities.
The only hope is that other, smarter universes that know what they’re doing (unlike us) will send an expedition to solve our problem. And hopefully not by destroying our universe. I’ve sort of gotten used to it; it’s even grown on me.
2046
The elves are still children, but some have noticeably grown up. They are constantly inventing technologies and creating art. The technological leap between years is the widest and highest in human history. But why should I describe it, everyone already knows.
Thanos was no exception. One day he shoved a piece of paper with some symbols on it into my hands. He called it “Triumph of the Celestial Bodies.” He didn’t know musical notation (how could he?) and just gave different tones his own symbols. But an AI understood it and let us listen. It began immediately with a dramatic crescendo, then descended into a sad fading. The melody then tried to return to its initial strength but couldn’t. It struggled, fading and trying to revive, but in the end, it trailed off into a long silence. I came back to reality with wet cheeks. Not because my son had written it, but because the universe itself was speaking to me, telling me about its already lost battle with entropy. A child, or even an adult, or even a gray-haired old man, couldn’t have written something like that. You would have to live for billions of years to understand the symphony of creation so deeply.
After that, my little Mozart stopped talking about music completely, like a switch was flipped. Now he’s into science. It’s a little scary.
That year, on the second of November, I died. A common human malady. The last mortal generation is like that. Fragile. Of course, it brought great suffering into the lives of Kate and Lucy, and, I assume, Thanos. He’s just not very emotional. But he comforted my girls as best he could—he took their hands and promised to take care of them. I don’t know if by “them” he meant Kate and Lucy specifically, or all of humanity.
Further
Lansky left Immortech; his elf daughter now heads the corporation.
Cassidy died in an accident.
All the elves are somewhat distant and have strange dreams. Age is irrelevant for them: some might remain children, others are already old. Thanos is a teenager. Discoveries are not made by scientists, but by any elf, as if they simply woke up one morning with the plans already complete. The same goes for writing: a child can realistically write about the life of an old man, and a young woman can poignantly describe a group of men at war.
We mortals began to understand the elves a little better after a famous interview with one of them. Here is, approximately, what he explained, and what my mortal brain was able to grasp:
“If I can be anyone at any point in space and time, it means that all others are identical to me. I am everyone, and everyone is me. There is only the commonality of what ‘you’ call the visible universe, and individuality is merely a fluctuation of an energy field, compressed by vibration. We are like an ocean in which a wave thinks it is separate. But a wave is just a moment of water. And sometimes, a storm is born in the ocean. Every time I rule the universe in benevolence, there exists a time when I destroy it.”
Regarding the visions, he stated the following: “If a homogeneous entity influences another part of itself, then that part influences it back. Like links in a chain. In the same way the past influences the future, the future also influences the past.”
A colony is being built on Mars, a space station near Jupiter, and there are rumors of controlled wormholes on the distant frontiers. The entire solar system has been turned into shipyards for the production of a star fleet with an unknown purpose. Some say it’s for the Great Exodus. Or for the Great Encounter.
But we are not the last mortal generation. We are born, we give birth to mortals, and we die the old-fashioned way. But in the reserve arranged for us by the elves. We argue about taxes and laws, while they’re arranging ice caravans from Pluto to terraform Venus. Kate died too. Only Lucy is left, with her husband and her mortal children. Athanasius visits them often, but the children are afraid of their uncle. Once, he told the youngest, who was crying from fear: “Don’t be afraid. We will die too. When the Great Darkness comes.”
