penthius | Entries tagged with immortality

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Caves ran in the runnels of melted flesh, places where the waxlike slow drip of her features created caverns. They lived there. Some of them remembered her; some of them didn't. *None* of them worshiped her. She was dead; she didn't care. But wars were fought along her skin, and children born, and other good things. The caves ran deeper, near to her bone, and the population grew, and generations lived and died inside her...and she became less dead even as her flesh stretched out to tenuous unrecognizability. Some shred of less-than-conscious--

Inspiration: The way the wax ran inside my desktop candle.
Story Potential: Er, high?
Notes: This is interesting, but I don't know where (if anywhere) it might go.

It was tithe day, and the overlord's collector sighed as he approached the Valle estate. Always there was more work there, though also more profit, and it could not be said that they did not abide by the tax rules. People who lived there died a little younger than elsewhere, but they did not have to fear being taken on tithe day, or losing their children. A child was a simple enough thing to take with him, however, and the Valle had an arrangement that was far from simple. Behind the tax collector a huge wagon filled with glass globes trundled along.

Inspiration: Pondering taxes. The taxman cometh. Thinking about tithes other than money.
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: Neat set-up, but only a set-up.

Codify working until retirement, where one can retire at any time and live at a bare minimum (dole, but for apartments, food, trips, etc). Choose a living level? Can always go back to work at any time--but might need to have a rejuvenatory surgery to get done. Is this a terraforming situation?

Inspiration: From "Let's Build a World" panel at Wiscon.
Potential: High.
Notes: This is more worldbuilding babble than anything else. Probably main character would be person who has chosen to work his entire life, getting him up to a pretty damn elevated level of society. What sorts of dissociation would result from the culture shock?

She was the oldest person in the room, the one who would die, and the only one that was mortal. When she was a little girl, she'd enjoyed reading fairytales. After hundreds of years of infinitesimal aging, she sometimes felt like she had lived into one when she looked around her. Everywhere were eternally young, vibrant bodies, housing ancient souls (though not as ancient as she). There were some that looked older, yes--it had been the fashion that century, perhaps, or perhaps they really were old enough to have been past the age of ideal attractiveness when the antigerone had been completed. The second antigerone, the one that actually worked 100%.

Inspiration: Grooming the Roomba. Busy hands, idle mind--that's one of the ways that stories happen.
Story Potential: High, but not as it is. Aging cannot be the main plot, only the framework. Aging, mortality, and antigerone treatments have been thoroughly explored. Kids and population growth, mortality bequeathing the right to procreate, maybe? Nah, still not enough.
Notes: See, the antigerone was a successful leukemia, or cancer, treatment for kids. And she was the researchers daughter. And he was desperate. So she's been aging very very slowly for a very very long time.

They were having a surprise 3,864th birthday party for her. It was supposed to be a secret, but one of the servants had let it slip while she'd been torturing him, and she was so surprised and pleased that she'd actually let him live. Crippled, yes, but alive. Why, nobody had tried a surprise birthday party for her in--six hundred years? Had it been that long? And now her distant descendants, or rather the more recent descendants of this body, had decided to surprise her. She was amazed. It was still well-documented how the last "surprise" birthday party had turned out--she thought the mummified bodies of the attackers were still in storage somewhere. So they *knew* that any attempt to kill her must inevitably fail. The body would die, yes, but the essence of her would simply pass on to the next in--

Inspiration: Phil's grandmother's surprise 80th birthday party. However, she is not an evil bodysnatcher. I think.
Story Potential: High, surprisingly enough. ::groan::
Notes: No, really, I'm a bit intrigued by this.

Turns out the Philosopher's Stone was a terrible catch-22, which I could have told anybody who asked. How do you make a lot of money, infallibly? Well, live a long time and keep it in savings, something where it returns a little every year. How do you get the best life-extension technology? Well, be rich. So I figured that out pretty young, watching the old men who sat in bars and wasted away their days in drink and reminiscing and complaining about how the dole wasn't enough to live on anymore, and hadn't they pitched into taxes their whole working lives and what was this for a reward? I saved. I saved so much that bums who lived in cardboard boxes felt sorry for me when they saw how I lived. And by the time I was old enough to need tech, I was wealthy enough to afford it. Barely. I could--

Inspiration: "Philosopher's Stone"
Story Potential: low
Notes: There's something there, in the connections between the philosopher's stone, wealth, and immortality--but this ain't it.

The machine whirred noisily in the background of the room. She tried to pretend that it wasn't there, but that would have been impossible. The guests, certainly, could not ignore its presence, as it was entirely noticeable. *She* might ignore the lines of the IVs that wove their way across the room and buried themselves in her veins, the steady mechanical hiss of the iron lung that did her breathing for her, the medicinal reek--to tell the truth, she couldn't smell it any more, though she knew that others could--but her guests, not having had two hundred years to accustom themselves to the spectacle that was her very existence, could not. That was the point. She had used enough power behind the scenes; it was time for these ingrates to see just what it was that she truly had become, to understand just how far removed from their petty humanity she was. Above them, in the ceiling, hundreds of images flickered in continuous replay--

Inspiration: My Roomba whirring in the background.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: hmm.

After a hundred years, it's time to move on, to pull up those roots that run so deep through the community that you know exactly why everybody does even the slightest little thing, from Liz hanging her laundry out to dry only on cloudy days because her grandmother taught her that was the best way to gt dry, soft laundry, to Ila worshiping a pagan god by killing one of his children--he's been a sneaky one from the day he was born and you weren't too surprised when you read about it in the paper. You know everybody, and everybody's great-grandparents, and it's difficult, sometimes, not to use the wrong name when they look so alike. Everybody knows you. They know who and what and where and with whom. It's not even a --

Inspiration: "Bubbles" by Tricky
Story Potential: High-ish
Notes: Because all vamp/immortal stories with a truly old protag have him with deep roots and all kinds of power and connections, I kind of like the idea of a start-fresh policy, and the way the culture shock would affect them.

We knew the unsealed, and they knew that they were known, though they knew it not. We walked among them. We saw each other, the glowing marks of the god we were sealed to, and we saw them passing almost unawares around us. Some of them knew us, some only suspected. All knew that there were those that the gods sealed, but only the priesthood saw the sheer numbers of us. In some towns, there was only one. In a city, there were hundreds. In a country, usually thousands. There were rules passed down between the gods that limited how many of us could be created, but there was also a loophole. Each god had no doubt thought--

Inspiration: "sealed"
Story Potential: High.
Notes: And then what? War between the gods is too straightforward. Needs something else....

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penthius

January 2025

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