Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

Stheno was no monster either, the poor sweet thing. After Medusa's murder, she sheared the writhing mass of hair from her head, plucked out her eyes, and stumbled into town to find and marry a boy she admired. She didn't know that doing so would render her mortal. She didn't know either that he would find her repulsive, bald and blind, and reject her. She never petrified anyone. By the time she wanted to, she'd traded in her power.

  I do not know what word best describes me. I have lived and searched for centuries now, and some days I think that that alone makes me monstrous. Yet I blend in now more than ever. The snakes of my hair lie still at my command; they tuck their faces into the ends of the dreads that cocoon them. Thousands, perhaps millions of mortals have looked upon me in my long life, and only a few—mostly deserving—have paid with their lives.

  The man in front of me didn't deserve his fate, but then it isn't my sister's fault anymore. Murder was in her eyes when her life was ended, and there it remains. And maybe that's why I hesitate, studying the stone rancher, the moonlight, the oddly lunar landscape roughly bounded with temporary fencing—anything but the patch of dirt where I expect to find Athena's shield, and embedded in it my sister's severed head. Maybe I am afraid.

  Stepping around the statue, I crouch to look into his frozen face. His eyes are nothing more than pebbles now, but in them I see the fear, the shock, the sadness. I can almost hear him whispering to me: Go on; what are you waiting for?

  I nod, wishing I had a hat to tip. I close my eyes as I turn to follow the cowboy's hand with my own. The stone is softer under my fingers than I expect, as is the dirt. Blindly, I probe the earth, feeling cool sand and rocks—and nothing else. I dig like a dog after a bone, but I find nothing. The shield is gone.

  I sit down heavily on the ground, opening my eyes. "Where is it?" I ask aloud, but Tex doesn't answer me.

  It's then I hear the crunching of footsteps toward me. A flashlight clicks on, startlingly close. I flinch, frightened, but a monster doesn't run. The light soon finds me. The glare makes it impossible to make out who carries the light (or what, I think, before remembering that I'm the last of the monsters). The guard? The wife?

  It doesn't matter who. Someone else has put the pieces together and recovered the deadly treasure I sought. I was foolish to think I'd do it first.

  When the light goes out I am struck by the illusion that it's her standing over me. Her snakes look so lifelike, animated by the moonlight. Her eyes look so wild, surprised and hurt and molten with rage.

  I cannot bring myself to look away, though I know I should. Bring the rage to my own eyes; dispatch the shield-bearer, whoever it may be; destroy my sister's image so she can never kill again.

  I feel a coldness creeping into me. I feel stiff and solid and old, old, old. I know I should look away.

  But oh, Sister, it's good to see your face again.

  ***published in Strange Horizons, October 2010

  Story notes:

  Gorgons get a bad rap, undeservedly so in my opinion. Some men are simply begging to be petrified by women’s eyes, if only more of us had the ability. Be careful who you tell to smile.

  Frozen Head #2,390

  My life as a human wasn’t my first, but it was in a very real way the start of my journey, a life that would leave an outsized mark on all subsequent lives.

  Humans have this thing where they’re born really stupid and it takes years before they’re aware enough to store memories. Things happen to them in that time, but most of them bounce off like raindrops on duckfeathers. It’s a mercy, really, because who wants to remember sucking on the dog’s squeaky toy or waking up in a bag of their own feces?

  And yet, a few early memories are formed, and they hold an outsized, mythical importance.

  Being a human was like that.

  Humans at the time had a lot of really strange beliefs and customs. They were picking up any old concept they could find and sticking it in their mouths. They had thousands of religions, all to explain what happened after death, because they feared it like a toddler fears naptime.

  We feared it. My sister and I.

  Humans are usually born in clutches of one, but ours was two. Kathleen and I had split from a single genetic source and grown up parallel. We looked the same—more even than most humans do—and we were raised doing the same things—attending the same schooling, playing the same sports, learning the same musical instruments. We joked that our parents were raising us for maximum redundancy and invented elaborate theories on what role we—or one of us anyway—were being groomed to fill. Astronaut? Politician? Spy? If it had been any of those, our parents failed. Kathleen went into neuroscience and I worked on artificial intelligence.

  When Kathleen got sick it was like a cosmic joke. Good thing there was a spare, huh?

  Remember all those religious beliefs humans had at the time? Kathleen and I held none of them. So there was nothing to give us comfort when we learned that she was dying. We thought of ourselves as scientists, rational, and there was no evidence of a life beyond death. We scoffed at the idea of heaven or hell, and derided reincarnation as a mathematical impossibility that failed to account for the geometric increase in sentient beings on our planet.

  “I’m going to freeze my head,” Kathleen told me.

  “Are you insane?” I answered. A worry about metastatic brain tumors floated through my head, though her particular cancer didn’t usually spread that way.

  “I’m perfectly rational,” she wheezed. Her cancer did spread to the lungs, filling them with tumors and fluid. “I want to live on, and this is the best chance available.”

  “But the tech isn’t ready,” I argued. “The freezing damages cells. You don’t want to come back all … freezer-burnt. Do you?”

  “Of course not. But they’re not going to unfreeze me until they can fix it.”

  “And give you a new body to go along with it?”

  “Yes,” she said, perking up. “Exactly. The company I’ve booked with promises to store me as long as it takes.”

  “But…” I stammered. I felt deep misgivings about this that I couldn’t put my finger on. “Look, I’ve read about this a little bit and I don’t think it makes sense. Even if they can fix the cell damage or recreate the structure of the brain down to the tiniest synapses, it’s no given that your memories will be intact. You might not really be you anymore.”

  “Shelby,” Kathleen said, that long-suffering tone creeping into her voice. I ignored it as usual.

  “Plus, why would they even bother to store you that long? Making a new human body is still far-future science fiction. Hundreds of years. Maybe more. Assuming they decide to store you that long, and the facility never has a power failure—”

  “They use liquid nitrogen.”

  “Even if your head is still there in the far-distant future, what makes you think they’ll actually do what they promised? There’s no way whatever you could pay them will be enough. And—”

  “Shel,” she said, this time with cold urgency. “Look at me.”

  I looked at her. At her head, which no longer looked exactly like mine. Her face was thinner, her hair gone. Her eyes were full of fear and pain. But then so were mine.

  “I’m not stupid. I know there’s only a slim chance that this will work. But I will take a slim chance over no chance. That’s just simple math.”

  And I couldn’t argue with that.

  “I paid for yours too,” she said. “Promise me you’ll use it?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

  “Not for a long time, I hope. I want you to live a full, long life first. For both of us, just like we talked about.”

  And then I was crying too hard to say anything. So when she asked me again to promise, I just nodded.

  A few weeks later, the company came to collect her head.

  And I felt as though a part of me had died too, as if we hadn’t been two beings all along but one, incomplete without the other.

  One of the mo
st logically insane yet deeply held beliefs humans of that time held was in a “soulmate,” one other human, usually a romantic partner, who was “meant” for the other. This, despite the impossibility of finding one soul among some eight billion humans alive at the time! Despite total lack of evidence for souls in the first place, let alone deficient souls in need of another to complement and complete them.

  But if there were soulmates, surely identical twins were each other’s. I thought I’d die without her, and spent months, a year, longer, in mourning her.

  There was another human cliché about time healing all wounds (though clearly not cancer!), and that one turned out to be pretty true. Somehow my life went on. I lived and worked for decades. I partnered with a human who was certainly not my soulmate and we produced offspring and they produced offspring and I died an old woman, still afraid of the permanent blackout I assumed death would be, but more or less at peace with it.

  I did not have my head frozen.

  #

  On Roptrango-B, a sunny little oceanic planet, I spent most of a 200-year life as a star drive mechanic, wielding tools with my twelve skinny tentacles. As a hobby, I restored ancient reef-houses, singing to the coral in the traditional manner. My partner was a poet from Roptrango-M and our offspring ended up living on three different planets, so we spent our blue-water years traveling between the system’s planets.

  If sometimes I felt an ache like another phantom tentacle had been ripped off and never regenerated, I didn’t think much of it.

  #

  I only lived for four cycles in the Katlas System before a rogue asteroid took out my whole station, but that was enough. Cybians were hybrid organic computers and clocked the world so fast it felt like centuries. Before my last upload I’d simulated dozens of parallel lives.

  #

  As a Ferguloid my whole lifetime was spent at war with a race of giant feathery lizards that looked like Earth dinosaurs. I remembered dinosaurs very clearly, but no one else in my platoon had spent any lifetimes on Earth and they all flapped their mandibles at me in exasperation when I joked about T-Rex arms. I died young in that life, as we all did, when our transport was blown out of the sky. We literally never knew what hit us.

  #

  And there were more, many more. Each life filled me with memories, pressing down upon the last like sedimentary layers of rock in the shifting, expanding geology of what I still thought of as a “soul.” Previous lives receded like the gentle waves on Roptrango-B’s few atolls, but some things remained.

  On a planet much like Earth, with even more striking and diverse climates and landscapes, I retired for decades to a monastery in a valley of orange and violet blooms, devoting my life to the selective breeding of ever-more-potent hallucinogenic spores.

  It was toward the end of this life that I first applied for membership in the Collective. The Collective is… well, to be honest I didn’t entirely understand it. I guess it’s similar to the old Earth concept of “heaven” or “nirvana,” except that it’s also a machine intelligence. It is ancient, and it is where souls go when they are ready to rest, and it is said to be a state of ineffable joy, incomprehensible to those on the outside.

  I brought my crumbling body into the temple, past the rooms in which I’d worshipped or labored or studied, and interfaced for the first time with the uplink. The spores were kicking in, the strain we called “dusk,” which each acolyte ingested only once, if ever. Figures danced through the candlelit room and my head spun. I sank to my foreknees.

  I felt the pressure waves of giant wings beating, my flockmates from two lives back welcoming me home from school. I saw the bulbous bobbing heads of the river cephalopods I’d hunted as a refugee in the Sauran system in the life before that. My partner’s tentacles from Roptrango-M wrapped around me, stinging for just one delicious instant before peeling away. And I heard a booming voice. The Collective?

  Entry not permitted. Application incomplete.

  I tried to stand, but four of my six legs had gone numb and I only stumbled before falling back to the stone floor. “What do you mean?”

  The words flickered in time with the candles. Was their light dimming?

  Soul incomplete.

  “How can that be?” I croaked. My throat was dry.

  You were one but now are two.

  Leave it to the interface of a mystical computer afterlife to be cryptic. But I didn’t have time to ask any more questions; the spores had done their work and dusk had turned to night for that lifetime.

  #

  In the lives following my human one, I rarely thought of my one-time sister. I never saw her again, but that wasn’t unusual—it was a big damn universe, after all, and in eons of study no one had solved the equations governing reincarnation. No one—save perhaps the Collective—knew why souls took the paths they did, why sometimes rebirth was immediate and sometimes skipped a few generations, or why young sentient species usually did not perceive the fact of reincarnation.

  If I’d thought of Kathleen at all, I assumed we’d only missed each other. I assumed her head-freezing scheme had failed and she’d been reborn, just like me, only on the other side of the galaxy. Oh well, maybe I’d see her in my next life.

  The Collective’s riddle led me back to her.

  In my next life, once I’d matured enough to recall it, I pondered the meaning of you were one but now are two until I was no longer blue in the face (just kidding; my face was blue that whole life, despite multiple moltings). I retraced my steps looking for a time my soul might have fractured. That time I tried to stop a geneplague and ended up starting one, and a billion Yusofors were mutated? When I died on Rokos Nine without completing my fourth metamorphosis? What caused a soul to split, anyway?

  I worked my way back through lives as methodically as I could. Had I been a cybian before or after the Sauran war? These things got fuzzy. But the furthest back I could recall was my human life—before that all was tooth and claw, flashes of non-sentient existence that it almost hurt to try to remember. And in that human life, there had been two of us. Two twins—but maybe with one soul?

  If that were true, did it mean I could never join the Collective? Or, did it mean that Kathleen’s soul had never been given the chance to rejoin mine?

  By the time I got that far, it was a whole ’nother life, and not a particularly philosophical one. But in the darkness between stars, over fermented tradzu root, I spilled it all to my ship’s engineer, a Roptralian named Astrill. I had a fondness for zir not only because ze was the best star-drive wizard on this side of the galaxy, but because we’d been three of the same species at one time or another. During the 1600s or 1700s—as near as we could figure—he’d been a sailor in the British Navy. Give Astrill enough distilled Kranellian snapps and ze told swashbuckling tales of conquest and cannonballs. And dysentery.

  Astrill had been through more lives than me, but never even thought about joining the Collective. “Sounds boring,” ze’d said. “But I bet you a case of snapps you’ll find your clutchmate’s head still frozen on Earth.”

  “And pigs can fly,” I replied. “Even if it wasn’t a scam in the first place, there’s no way humans kept a thing like that safe all this time.”

  “No? You got another explanation for your soul staying split?”

  I didn’t.

  “With the proper application of thrust, anything can fly,” ze went on. “Pigs, frozen heads, even this rust bucket.” Astrill patted the ship’s hull lovingly with one tentacle.

  I fluttered my tail in my best approximation of dismissive Roptralian body language.

  “Find the head, destroy it, free ol’ Kath’s soul, then you can join the snooze fest next time you die,” Astrill said, performing a complicated twining gesture with three of zir twelve tentacles. “Couldn’t be simpler!”

  Simple? It seemed impossible. And yet, I had no better answer. Plus, a case of snapps was on the line.

  #

  So that’s how I finally returned t
o Earth: on a crazy bet slash mystical quest slash legitimate interstellar trading visit to the just-opening Solar system. A couple millennia had passed since my human lifetime, and against all expectations humans were still there, slowly maturing. The quarantine of their Solar system was just beginning to be peeled back.

  Humans were still struggling with their fears of aliens, so I was lucky to be in a bipedal, mammalian, air-breathing body this time around. Chirrlings, despite being fur-covered with big bushy tails reminiscent of those of Earth squirrels, had been deemed humanoid enough not to scare the locals. A great many of the things I’d been since I’d been Shelby wouldn’t be allowed to visit Earth for at least another century, give or take a few generations.

  Earth had been through a lot since I’d been there, I learned, as my ship’s computer sucked historical documents from Earth’s archives and distilled a summary for me. Planet-wide ecological catastrophes that reduced the human population by a quarter, then by a half; nearly being wiped out by the artificial intelligences they created (whoops); treaties with those same beings, arbitrated by genetically modified ravens; expansion into neighboring planets and the asteroid belt; impressive restoration of the home planet’s biological diversity.

  One thing they hadn’t done yet was the one thing my ancient sister had been counting on: unfreezing of people’s cryogenically-stored heads.

  As soon as we’d finished offloading the tech gadgets, stasis-preserved fruit, and alcohol that constituted our cargo, I put in a request to visit the planet itself.

  When Kathleen died—and as late as when I died—her head had been stored in Scottsdale, Arizona, United States, in the southern part of a mid-sized continent in the northern hemisphere of the planet. As we orbited the blue and brown planet I tried to spot the place, but my memories of the planet’s geography were thousands of years old. Old for a memory, short for a planet. Yet nothing looked quite how I thought it should, like someone had blurred all the shorelines. Hadn’t that mid-sized northern continent had a prominent peninsula in the southeast corner before?