What if we were to make new memories every moment, never repeating what we’ve done in the past, expanding our perception of time, and coming close to death once a week. Fear of dying would cause our neurons to fire like mad as we tried to recognize patterns and tried to escape death, we would replay everything, all of these new memories, and we would relive lives that were longer than other, mundane lives, once a week.
What if this was all compounded at an event horizon? What if we worked on the edge of a wormhole and the alarms blared and the navigator pounded the panels before giving up and we were quickly crushed but slowly perceived this end… and as time slowed our neurons continued to look for patterns, searching endless pathways for a solution, and we would see all of these memories that we created over and over again and wondered what it all meant and came up with new schools of thought and perceptions and theories and understood the meaning of life but we would never be able to pass this knowledge on to anyone?
I’ve been working short stories on the different ways to be immortal, and the most comforting one seems to be to increase the perception of time, to extract the mundane from our existences, to make our own time seem endless and then end our time in a way that allows us to relive every new memory we created before the end.
In my story, however, my character is so obsessed with new memories that he never experiences anything worth repeating. As he relives his life over and over again, as time slows and his body is crushed to nothing he looks back at all he’s experienced and realizes it is nothing but artificial discovery. It’s all fabricated nonsense, decisions made for the sake of having something new, never finding comfort in constants.
What’s the use of being immortal if you leave nothing behind?
