The Road to Immortality

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Writers Cramp 2022-08-03 You've spent ten years traveling through space to find a way to become immortal - and you find it on a lesser-known planet on the other side of the galaxy. Now you're immortal! However, upon your return to Earth, you realize you're farther into the future than you planned. All of your loved ones are gone, and you begin to question choosing immortality over the people you cherished. How much time has passed? What do you do? Do you find and meet your relatives? Do you share the secret of immortality with others?

The physics of the prompt are strange--to reach the other side of the Milky Way galaxy in ten years you'd need to travel at a million times the speed of light--but I cheated and simply moved the destination much nearer. Besides, the story is not about the trip, but about the characters.

Normally, my practice is to set a time limit of 90 minutes for a Writers Cramp, and most are finished in an hour. This one took considerably longer. Hope you enjoy it.

THE ROAD TO IMMORTALITY

"Daddy, please don't die."

My three-year-old son's plea wrenched my heart. Molly crushed my hand in a desperate grip and crushed my spirit with her tears. My world was being destroyed, and so was theirs.

Only a month ago, we had been on top of the world. At the ridiculous age of twenty-three, I'd sold my dot-com startup for the ridiculous figure of seventeen billion dollars. Molly had struggled with me through the lean times, sweated with me through the growth, soared with me through to success. We had it all, and little Benjie was the best of it.

Then glioblastoma happened. A nasty, ravenous cancer in my brain that gave me four to fifteen months of decreasing capacity leading to a painful and distasteful end, with worsening headaches, nausea, and seizures.

"Oh, Paul. We can afford the best of treatment. We can beat this thing."

"One hundred percent fatal. Treatment might extend my life from ten months to twelve. But yes, maybe we can beat it. Suspended animation space flight has been around forever and--"

"You'd just go to sleep and wait for a cure?"

"No, I think there is a cure. The Swensin-Jakinta expedition last year reported contact with a humanoid civilization further along this spiral arm, some place called Iridicia, where they've apparently conquered cell death. A bunch of stuff about telomeres and caspases that got our cytologists all excited but that they can't hope to duplicate this century. But the net result is that the Iridicians could stop my glial cells from dying. Five years out and five years back at sub-light-speed. You'd only be thirty-three when I got back. Benjie would be thirteen. Would you wait for me?"

"Oh, Paul, you know I'd wait. But you wouldn't get to see Benjie grow up. You'd miss his first day of school. You'd miss every school concert, every birthday, every sports game, his first girlfriend. He'd be a teenager when you got back. He wouldn't have a father for ten whole years!"

"The alternative is that he'll have a father for another few months at the most, then he'd have a dying, pain-filled, seizing bag of barf. That's what you'll have for a husband, too. The other way, we'd have the rest of our lives together."

"We promised to stay together in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. I'm not sure which would be worse, to watch you die or to have you gone for ten years with no guarantee."

"I think it's a good gamble. Better than Rogram.com, and look how well that turned out."

"Ah, Paulie, I dunno. How will you explain it to Benjie?"

"As best I can, I guess. Look, it's my life. It's my decision. I've got the money to hire SpaceX and do the trip. Just wait for me, okay?"

"Oh, Paul, it's our life, it's our decision. You bullheaded bastard, I never could change your mind once you had it made up. Just come back to us, you hear?"

###

I'm not stupid. I knew about time dilation before I set out. I knew that the ten years I'd be gone would be a relative forty years on earth. Molly would be over sixty when I returned, Benjie over forty. But the same hard-headed decisiveness and driving ambition that had allowed a teenager to become a billionaire by twenty-three pushed me on.

What could be done to protect them during my trip, I had done. I had invested in solid blue-chip stocks, productive bonds, a few good growth stocks that would not only provide a steady income but would make them well-off throughout their lives. A lot of it had been in my own name; I'd need money when I got back. High-priced lawyers made sure they would be taken care of and also that I could access my accounts when I got back.

The rest of my wealth had gone to the trip - the best suspended animation system, the most reliable SpaceX rocket, the best AI to monitor everything there and back. Everything was planned to the twentieth decimal place. And everything went as planned. Well, mostly. There were two little glitches.

First, the Iridicians treated me, and restored my body not only to health, but, it seems, to immortality. When the cells never die, neither does the body. Apart from some body-mashing accident, I'd live virtually forever.

Second, a distant supernova gave a little gravitational tailwind to my trip, a boost in speed that brought me home two years sooner than expected. But as velocity increases, so does relative elapsed time. The faster you travel, the more time stretches. Only eight years for me, but I arrived almost two hundred years after I left. My family was dead.

To say that things had changed would be an understatement. Within a few months, I had adapted. The AI taught me to speak and read Spandarin, plus current laws, customs and mores, so that I could fit in. The World Government courteously arranged for my funds to be released; I was still a wealthy man. A government android led me to my family memorial--nobody was buried these days; land was too precious.

"Molly, Benjie, I never thought it would end like this," I whispered as my tears fell to the ground below their tiny 5 cm square memorial plaques arranged on a wall with hundreds of others. Many of the others bore my surname, presumably Benjie's children and grandchildren, lives I had never known and never would. "It's been only eight years without you, but now it's forever."

When you are immortal, you will outlive anyone you ever love.

I looked back on two centuries of regret, and forward to an eternity of loss and loneliness.

Be careful what you wish for.