Fragments of eternal youth
Divided loyalties
Jingex was feeling their age. Over the past 10 or 15 yahn cycles, they’d grown and grown and grown, until they were no longer spry and youthful: inclined more towards reclining and relaxing than striding out and exploring. It’s what happened, they knew, when their people were exposed to a life of abundance. They got bigger, contented and sluggish. It was in the genes to expand. Except, it wasn’t what Jingex wanted. Not all that many cycles ago, they’d danced over mountaintops, wave-skimmed the inland seas and rolled without care on grassy slopes.
The expansion had started with their brain. From the time their species began emerging as dominant on their planet, it was the brain that was first to expand — slowly, to begin with, as it gained knowledge and experience, then more rapidly as its capabilities mounted. Other species expanded differently, but for Jingex’s species it always started with the brain. Which was how their ancestors managed not just to survive but to thrive in a world in which other species were stronger, bigger, faster and hellbent on eating anything they could catch.
Later, the same process allowed their brains to expand as they absorbed knowledge from any source, whether it be the mundane skills of normal life or the intense joys of mountain dancing, ocean skimming and grassy rolling.
In ancient times, that was crucial to survival. Each time one of Jingex’s ancestors didn’t get eaten, its brain grew and it became smarter and more adept at not getting eaten. Even now, it was still useful, because even with the ancient predators vanquished, bigger brains were key to avoiding low-skilled jobs in which life was cheap and labour cheaper.
*****
Like all those on their planet, Jingex’s species reproduced by fragmentation. Some did so by allowing themselves to be hacked into bits by anything from a predator to a farmer’s fragmentator, which chopped remnants of this year’s crop into rootlings for next year’s planting. Some did it by budding, in which the parent split off a multitude of tiny fragments. For others, it was larger-scale fission, in which the offspring were fewer but larger, each retaining a portion of the parent’s identity — including, in the case of Jingex’s species, a fraction of its brain.
Fifteen yahn cycles ago, Jingex had massed a svelte 125 kliptos. Now, they were approaching 215.
In the old days, that would have made them too sluggish to evade predators effectively, no matter how smart and wise they had become. Today, it opened opportunities unknown even a couple of hectocycles ago.
Jingex had chosen to pursue studies in the physics of interstitial dynamics — a possible gateway to interstellar and perhaps even intergalactic travel. Along the way, they had encountered senior researchers who had continued to expand, sometimes to as much as 650 kliptos. With brains to match, they were super-geniuses … but they could not possibly climb mountains, skim across waves or roll down grassy slopes with any hope of controlling where they wound up. Not that any of them cared about such pursuits. They had moved to realms of increasingly intellectual activities.
There was, however, a limit. Eventually, their bodies would reach a point at which replication was impossible to delay.
Palaeoantiquarian research showed that in ancient times, this occurred at somewhere close to Jingex’s youthful 125 kliptos. That was optimal, apparently, for beating off the ancient carnivores but far too low for a world in which the carnivores had been replaced by predators specializing in the politics of workplace, market and academic competition.
The change happened slowly enough that evolution had time to play a role, although science played an even bigger one as high-status members of Jingex’s species sought increasingly powerful contrareplicative medications to delay their bodies — and brains — breaking into fragments to produce the next generation of start-over-from-the-beginning offspring. “That’s good enough for a plant, but intelligent beings need something better,” a super-high-brained philosopher named Ixpahu said, shortly before their meds failed and their body fragmented into 24 children, only 3 of which had the brainpower to make it through their first cycle.
But procrastination wasn’t the only option. Other, often controversial, drugs limited the number of fragments and controlled their size, making it possible to split into as few as two fragments, with one retaining the vast majority of the brainpower and the other more helpless than any of Ixpahu’s fragments. There were also ones that could make the smaller fragment so tiny it was nonviable. If you did that often enough, you could hold your main fragment’s mass just below the level that led to Ixpahu’s demise, allowing you to retain your current status (and memories) virtually forever.
None of this was what Jingex wanted. Yes, they loved the mysteries and excitement of interstitial dynamics. But they hated the way their life had contracted into nothing else, because, however exciting the prospects for being able to travel to the stars, they didn’t want it to be the only thing they did. And they missed the mountaintops, especially that one rare magical night, when they danced in the light of the triplet moons to the silent tune of the summer borealis.
Jingex thought about it for 3 cycles, as their mass expanded from 215 kliptos to 220, 230 and 245. Then, they made their decision. They resigned their research position, stopped taking their contrareplicants, and focused on finding the right drugs for something nobody they knew had ever done before: a controlled fission in which, instead of producing a large parent and one or more small offspring, each would get the same amount.
*****
Recovery from replication takes a few decicyles, but shortly afterwards, there were two Jingexes. Neither had the brainpower for interstitial dynamics, although each remembered the excitement of working towards the stars. Maybe one, or both would do it again.
Meanwhile, there were mountaintops beckoning for dancing, waves waiting to be skimmed and grassy slopes begging to be rolled.
The story behind the story
Richard A. Lovett reveals the inspiration behind Fragments of eternal youth.
I have a file on my computer called ‘Story Starts’. There is even one called ‘Unlikely Story Starts’. Between them, they have three dozen entries, ranging from as short as six words: “Daryl Jones died the hard way” — a great opening line if I ever have use for it — to several paragraphs.
Fragments of eternal youth appeared in this as far back as 2011, when I jotted down a draft of the first paragraph, then asked a friend for thoughts about what it would be like to be an intelligent being that, like a bacterium, reproduced by fission.
Nothing came of that, and the story start sat, untouched, for 12½ years. But the idea lingered. What would it be like to be an intelligent bacterium, reproducing by fission, with the commensurate reduction in brainpower? Young again, but not as wise?
The older you get, I suspect, the more interesting that idea becomes.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03731-5
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Richard A. Lovett
