Immortals

Science Fiction | Immortals episode 4: Mortal Friend

"If a corpse is found drifting towards your ship in the slipstream queue, just ignore it."
Instruction from the first course on piloted sliding.

I've had many different kinds of friendships. Some with teachers and mentors while pursuing goals, some with acquaintances, some much more personal. All sorts. Some burned out quickly, some slowly faded away, and some are stuck in memories.
But there was one among them that still haunts me, even after thousands of years.
Back in the preparatory classes for information literacy, long before immortality, there was this one guy. Red-haired and handsome, he was the dream of all the gender stable girls. We were friends even before we joined the information pool as listeners. We often played the Sargasso of Space at his place, where he always had the latest tablets with game worlds.

But when the lessons started, he just forgot about me. In class, he didn't even approach or acknowledge me, even though I waved at him with all my might and earnestly argued to the other teenagers that he was my best friend. His name was Valadris. Kimko Valadris XII. Or Captain Kim, as I called him in our childhood games.

Years later, I met Kim again in the preparatory courses for piloted sliding. Our friendship took a new twist. I had the feeling that he didn't remember me at all and was making friends with some new person. But I remembered Captain Kim very well.

Yet, even that friendship ended, withering under the weight of some nonsense and accusations from him. Kim called me a liar. And although I loved to lose myself in fantasies, I didn't find anything in his accusations worth getting rid of a friend..

Then, after having become immortal, I met Kim in the Sirius creative collective. On the asteroid of the Red Crescent, there was an entire city dedicated to experimental interstellar creativity, and many immortal pre-thousanders came from all corners of the galaxy to participate in the cosmic visionary experience. Fate brought Captain Kim and me together on several innate intuition stellar cartography projects, and we won ten prizes along with our team of equally bright and talented pre-thousanders.

Out of all of us, Kim was the only one who got noticed and invited to go further, while the rest, including me, were left behind. This hurt, and I was openly jealous of him. Not long after at a party, his future wife, for some unknown reason, kissed me on the lips, and then invited me to their archaic wedding! I didn't go. I tore up the invitation for the specially organized portal to the planet of eternal sunset and stayed rotting in my dilapidated pod on the edge of the asteroid. Only years later did I realize that these were the first signs of the Endless Night.

We met a few more times after that, but the spark between us had faded. When I heard about his shady dealings with the Outs, I completely lost the desire to communicate with him, and sank deeper into depression.

Love eventually pulled me out of the darkness. But that's a story for another time. And now, here he is, standing in front of me, Captain Kim. His data from the Central Computator is on the registration desk. His face has the expression of a vegetable. Not a trace of the person I once knew. Usually, I don't meddle in personal data, but this time...

I fetched a patty-404 from the warehouse, a universal cracker for dummies like me, and dived into the Central Computator's database.

It sent a shiver down my spine. He had been hacked.

The Outs, whom Kim worked for, were all about preserving the evolutionary model of humanity and didn't resort to radical modification, and consequently, immortality. For them, cell division was sacred, and all these additional dimensions with quantum intelligence, which allowed for instant cloning of damaged particles and replacing them with preserved forms at the moment of immortality, were a cause of moral decay for humanity.

The Imprint created by the quantum intelligence recorded the human body and the so-called Soul Tail (an interface connecting to fifth-order consciousness, extending into angelic dimensions). It maintained the body in the same state, with exceptions for necessary brain, intestinal, and other organ functions, which were nourished and renewed from the "zeros" (specially expelled bubbles of micro-universes where the required membrane forms containing copies for the vibrants were born, projecting onto our world with particles necessary for replacement).

In short, the Outs believed that all this deprived life of taste, purpose, and value. They had been relocated to a distant sector of the spiral arm, where they lived as if in a bad science fiction novel, with blood, snot, planetary bombardments, and resource struggles. But, like all humans, they loved to outsmart the enemy. So, they always had work for the immortals.

Seeking thrills, Kim freelanced for them, extracting valuable technologies and the bodies of deceased high-ranking officials from conflict zones, even though illegal according to convention Nice-402 signed between the Central Computator and the Outs. In this gray zone, an enemy team reprogrammed him. The other side of the conflict hired a Soul Hacker, who connected to the captain's imprint, cutting off the soul tail from the body. Then they used poor Kim for sabotage, for which the Outs sentenced him to 900 years, of which he served 432 and was released on amnesty. Or rather, his body was released. It was unclear where Kim himself was now.

Wait a minute. Didn't I recently see a report that Soul Hackers are just another space myth? The thought snapped me back into reality.There was no Captain, no Central Computators database in front of me; instead, there was a dirty public restroom. You think this was my first time? Oh no. I constantly took revenge on Kim in my imagination. I invented scenarios where the Captain, under pressure from circumstances, turned into a speechless fish, and to save him, I kept him in an aquarium; another time he was trapped in the center of a star, ejected particle by particle into the void of space for millions of years; where the Sargassos captured him and traded him for a Precursor artifact. The story about the Outs was fresh. I even marveled at the inventiveness with which my mind fooled me.

I glanced at the paused news feed next to the urinal. A holographic image of Captain Kim was displayed on it. He had become the first immortal to descend onto a star powered by dark matter. I spat, zipped up my fly, and went back to the reception hall. There was still a lot of work to be done that day, and I had wasted my entire break in the mental prison I'd made for a relationship that had been dead for a thousand years...