Old Yru Academy of Medicine and Healing, Auditorium | 10:18 AM | First Day

“Thank you, headmaster,” she said, bowing her head respectfully. Her voice was high and gentle, with a refined accent. “And thank you to all who have come here today in recognition of the humble efforts of our class. I cannot express how much of an honour it is to both myself and the others.”

Gods above, I thought. They’re like two peas in a pod.

Kam was the de-facto leader of our group, and the most academically esteemed member who wasn’t either insufferable to be around or only in attendance once in a blue moon. Accordingly, she headed what few public affairs we participated in. She also acted as a sort of liaison between our class and the university board when it came to facilitating projects, or sometimes publishing papers.

And boy, did she revel in it. It was bizarre; like she had a fetish for even this ridiculously petty amount of power. When she graduated, she was probably going to be a hell of a social climber.

I didn’t dislike her in the way that I disliked the headmaster, though, because when we weren’t doing something public, she wasn't a completely insufferable person. Unlike him, who lost all interest in us when we couldn't be used for some publicity-fishing spectacle, and was outright contemptful when stepped out of our assigned role of little-geniuses-in-a-bottle.

Her speciality in the Power was Chronomancy, the knowledge of which was tightly controlled by a Rhunbardic order famed for its extreme traditionalism and byzantine leadership structure. I didn’t know too much about the specifics, but apparently she was considered one of the most prodigious students they’d had in decades, both in her talent for the art itself, and her ability to navigate the complex social framework of the organization with enough deftness to access teachings that other disciples wouldn’t for over a century.

“I don’t want to take up too much time, but all of us are immensely proud to be representing the academy and its values today for this unprecedented meeting with Order of the Universal Panacea,” she continued, referring to the group that ran the conclave. “We are looking forward to not only this incredible opportunity to expand our knowledge of the arcane with the help of some of its greatest practitioners, but also but also to demonstrate the extent of the skills we have refined here over the course of the past two years.”

Gods. Had it really been two years? The world was relentless.

“For the sake of future classes, and, well, a little bit for my own sake, too,” she shrugged mirthfully at this point, prompting some chuckles from the crowd, “I hope this is the beginning of a long-term relationship of cooperation. As we depart the era of law-enforced acceptance of a half-millennia as the upper limit in achievable human longevity, it is imperative that institutions like ours form strong bonds with those who have, in the past, been forced to confide their efforts in overcoming mortality to the shadows. Though much has been lost, death is at least an enemy that we can hope to overcome. But only if all arcanists and scholars of medicine unite in the labour together. ”

The headmaster smiled and there was a little more applause, but I could also see looks of diquiet among the audience.

That had been a little bit of an extreme way to phrase it, almost uncharacteristic of her. I knew that she was one of the most enthusiastic of the class about this idea, but while it was one thing to talk about delaying it, suggesting your goal was defeating death tended to make people uneasy, for a whole number of complicated reasons.

Still, she seemed undeterred. “This afternoon at two o’clock, we will be setting out on our journey to their private sanctuary, and tomorrow, beginning at twelve noon, we shall be presenting our achievements to the inner circle of the Order. If all goes as planned, this will also be viewable via logic bridge. I hope that all of you shall be observing, and that we manage to make our instructors, to whom we owe a tremendous debt, proud. ...Or, failing that, we at least manage to not to make complete fools of ourselves.” She allowed for some more tasteful laughter. “I hope you'll look forward to it!”

The crowd applauded one final time, and Kam stood to the side, headmaster Ishkibal once again at the podium. “Uh, thank you, Kamrusepa. Very well said.” He turned to address the crowd. “Well then, as that made clear enough, our students will have a busy few days ahead of them, and I’m inclined to give them some time to clear their heads prior to the anointed hour. However, I’d be happy to take a few queries from any scholars or members in the press in attendance.”

There were a few murmurs from the crowd, and a handful of people rose their hands.

The headmaster pointed to a somewhat aged woman – probably Viraaki, with medium-brown skin and strong features – dressed in a dark reddish-brown robe. “Alright, let’s start with you, ma'am,” he said.

“My thanks, headmaster,” the woman said formally, rising to her feet and clearing her throat. “As I'm sure you know, since they revealed themselves to the world, the meeting place of the Order has been the subject of much speculation, since they were able to avoid detection by the censors and the Grand Alliance's Oathkeepers for hundreds of years since their founding. Now that they have reached out to you, is there anything you could tell us about it?”

“Mm, I think Kamruespa would be more qualified to answer that question than me.” He turned back to her. “Kam, if you wouldn’t mind?”

She nodded, speaking up again. “This’ll likely disappoint you, but as it stands, we still know just as little about the sanctuary of the Order as you do. From what we’ve been told, it’s probably an arcane refuge, but all we’ve been given beyond that is a loose description of what to expect in terms of accommodation, and a location from which their agents will escort us to the site.”

This was a half truth, though not in the sense that they actually had told us where their sanctuary was located. Instead, she was whitewashing the information we’d received on how we’d get there, or more specifically, how the process of the 'escort' would go down. To say the least, even now, the Order was paranoid beyond people’s expectations.

“I see,” the woman replied, nodding. “Have you been sworn to secrecy, for after you do attend?”

“Not in the least!” Kam replied, her tone cheery. “We’ll be happy to share whatever we learn after the fact, at least assuming we’re not instructed to do otherwise. Afterall, it would be a pity to compromise the prospect of future cooperation for what amounts to gossip.” She smiled. “Everyone is, after all, entitled to their privacy.”

“Now then, who next?” The headmaster said, scanning the crowd, before pointing to a slim-looking man, with fair skin and dark blonde hair, towards the back. “You sir.”

"Thank you,” he said. His voice was a bit high for a man. “I’m Alexandros of Myrh, Representing the Knoron Society of Physicians.”

Alexandros of Myrh. I'd heard of him before; he was an infamous skeptic in the sphere of arcane healing. Every time someone published a discovery they claimed to be revolutionary, he'd be there to pick it to bits in some snarky fact-checking article. I was pretty sure the entire academic community fantasized about strangling him.

He looked over some notes he was carrying, brushing a little hair away from his eyes. “Despite the pursuit now being legal, what would you say to the many scholars who currently hold that the further extension of the human lifespan is undesireable and will only lead to unnecessary suffering, considering the untreatable nature of associative collapse-type dementia?”

“Personally, I must disagree entirely,” Kam said unprompted, in a I'm-taking-this-personally voice. I saw the headmaster react with slight surprise, and perhaps just a hint of annoyance. “There is no decisive evidence to prove that associative collapse will always be beyond treatment, especially with recent advances in Neuromancy... And even if it remains so, the argument is still lacking. After all, people don’t just suddenly start showing the symptoms the second they hit 500; there’s a near-250 year range for when it can emerge, and no single case develops at the same speed. Even if it is the one obstacle to immortality that is truly insurmountable, there are still countless people dying from physical degeneration that could otherwise continue to live healthy, productive lives for well over a century. That's a tragedy, regardless of what else you might think.”

The man nodded impassively, making a few notes. “Headmaster Ishkibal, could you tell me your opinion?”

Kamrusepa frowned, appearing slighted by this sidelining.

“My opinion is that the frontier always looks unclaimable until the day it is claimed,” the headmaster said, his tone confident. “Can dementia be cured? I cannot say. But I can tell you that in the days of the Old Kingdoms, people believed that no man could live beyond the age of 70-- That such was the will of the gods, and that to conceive otherwise was mere fantasy. Yet today, that age is scarcely considered more than the end of young adulthood, and you could scour the Mimikos and not find a single human being of that many years who looked anything close to elderly.” He smiled. “We will test boundaries, and see if they break. As has ever been the nature of progress for mankind. A forward march into the unknown, together.”

Some of the audience applauded a little more at this, some even looking like they might’ve just had their point of view somewhat converted.

I imagined most of them weren’t experts. Personally, I found myself pretty skeptical of that argument.

The extension of the human lifespan was less like a march and more like climbing a mountain with no clear peak that grew steeper exponentially the higher you went. Sure, back when civilization was mostly confined to hillforts and everyone was still smacking each others heads open with axes, people had lived and died in under a century.

But when scholars had finally begun approaching the problem during the New Kingdoms era, there was a lot of low hanging fruit. Just by killing mutated cells and fixing a few quirks in their structures, it could easily be doubled. Slightly more complex endeavours like designing new breeds of helpful bacteria and rewriting the anima script altogether pushed it forward by another hundred, and though there were setbacks at the end of the Imperial Era, the advent of the Power had almost made up for them.

The trouble, however, is that the longer you try to preserve a system well into a length of time it is utterly not designed (well, evolved, in this case) for, the more strange and complicated problems appear. Take cancer, humanity’s oldest companion. For a young person with a body that's still running according to program, it's an easy problem to solve. Stick a scepter in their business, cast the Life-Slaying Arcana with an incantation specifically for its treatment – which identifies and eliminates around the 10,000 most common types – and that's all it takes. No problem! A monkey could do it.

But the body isn’t a thing unto itself, a inherently stable entity that just gets worn down or sometimes infected with nasty things. And cancer cells aren’t just malevolent little sprites that hop out of the netherworld. They’re one of innumerable quasi-autonomous components that are themselves important to the survival of the body, but just happen to be doing their job slightly wrong. So even the act of killing them causes disruption. Maybe not major disruption, but disruption all the same. Which will cause little stressors on other components, which in turn might cause them to become cancerous, maybe in a more 'interesting' way that’s a little harder to detect. And if you stop that...

Or hell, forget even cancer. Cells mutate all the time just by nature, the anima script becoming warped slightly in the process of reproduction. Most of the time, it's harmless. But live for a while, and by sheer mathematics, you'll get a mutation that isn't. And if you live a really long time, you'll get a lot of them, and unless you can detect them perfectly, they'll build up, with, again, interesting results.

At a deep enough level, the problem wasn't biology. It was physics.

“Thank you, headmaster. Another question,” the man continued, snapping me back into the moment. “In spite of their achievements in the past when they were publishing their work anonymously, I’m sure you are aware that the Order of the Universal Panacea has made none of note since they revealed themselves to the public two decades ago, and arguably in the past half-century entirely..." He adjusted his spectacles. "In addition, the organization has become subject to some degree of critique for its continuing secrecy and other behaviour contrary to modern academic values, despite the prohibition on its research being lifted. Some have come to view it as a fringe organization with something of a cult-like quality. What would you say to that?”

Geez, I thought. He's really going for it, huh?

The headmaster spoke a little quickly in response to this – perhaps worried about what Kam might’ve cut in with if he didn’t. “I’d like to make clear,” he said, his tone more serious than before, “that despite being honoured by this invitation, our academy does not share the outlook of the Order on all issues, nor agree with the specifics of how they choose to manage themselves. As you say, there doubtlessly elements worthy of criticism. However,” he lowered his gaze, “the fact remains its membership contains some of the most esteemed arcanists in the world. Even if one were to ignore their work concerning the extension of human longevity altogether, almost all of them are academic titans in their own right. For that reason alone, I would consider this an opportunity far too good to pass up.”

It was a well-crafted answer. I wondered sometimes if the headmaster had missed his calling as a politician. It had superficially addressed the content of the question and pivoted the subject away while at the same time ignoring the content, and offering no real new information.

The real explanation, though of course not one he could admit, was that publicity was more important than professional standards.

The Order was popular. They had a mystique that had invited speculation from the public for decades, even laymen, to the point that people had even published books about it. The closely-guarded secret of their meeting place, the ridiculous grandeaur of their stated objective, the “publishing” of their findings via encoded dead drop at university doorsteps, signed only with an illusive symbol. Actual scholars might roll their eyes, but the average pleb still loved that sort of crap. They romanticized the stereotypical image of arcanists from the dark centuries of the Mourning Period. Reclusive, mysterious, shut away in their towers, emerging only to work miracles only at the most auspicious of occasions.

Of all the applications of the Power, healing was arguably the least exciting. Nothing blew up, or got teleported, or transformed. But this promised to garner some attention. From the common people, the city council...

Still, I felt like it was a gambit that wouldn’t pay off in the long term. It made what was supposed to be among the most reputable institutions of medicine in the world look desperate. It would have been fine if they’d kept the affair low-key, but now, I wouldn’t be surprised if everything said in this conference aged like milk.

Not that it mattered much, in the end.

“Now then,” the headmaster said, “let’s take a couple more--”

𒊹

Old Yru Academy of Medicine and Healing, Auditorium | 10:53 AM | First Day

At some point, it had started to rain. The water fell softly against the glass roof overhead, and strange, half-shadows whirled about the floor and walls.

“Well?” Kamrusepa asked, smiling expectantly. “What, did you think, pray tell?”

The auditorium didn’t really have an expansive “backstage” in the way one normally associates with the term, since it wasn’t like plays got put on there. It was just a narrow little enclave up against the back wall, with enough space for a few tables and storage for some basic stage props – podiums, chairs, that kind of thing. Oh, and a small table with some snacks. Fruit, crackers, nuts, chocolate.

I was munching on some of the latter.

After the conference had ended, the headmaster had taken us back here for a few minutes to thank us all for showing up, to offer a few generic words of encouragement, to remind us put on our best faces while we represented the academy, etcetera. After that, we’d been given a couple hours to do what we wished with, before it was time to leave for the weekend.

Most of others had cleared out quickly for one reason or another. The only ones left were me, Ran, Kam – who had just returned from mingling with the remains of the crowd a little bit – and Theodoros of Melanthos, another boy from our class. He was somewhat short and skinny for a man, coming up to only about my height, with a kinda heart-shaped face, bushy eyebrows, lightly tan skin, and curly, dark red hair cut to a short length. At present, he was wearing a set of black, angular robes.

Like me, he wore glasses, though they were presently tucked away in his pockets.

“I think you did well,” I said, biting off another segment. “Everyone seemed to like it.”

Kam crossed her arms, looking at me flatly. “Come ooooonnn, Su.”

“What?”

“I know you’re holding back. Give it to me. Your full frontal criticism, no holds barred.”

“I’m not holding back,” I said, reservedly. “Really, that’s what I think.”

She stared at me skeptically. Up close, she had kind of a goofy and childish face that clashed with her affected persona, but perhaps reflected her inner nature a little more accurately. She had a short, button-adjacent nose, a round chin, and a very wide smile, with bright green eyes that were pretty, but also slightly bulgy.

“Su, I’ve known you for-- For...” She hesitated, biting her lip. “Ran, how long has this class been going for, now...?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said, without looking up from her book, which she’d returned to the moment the presentation had ended. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be the time expert.”

“That is not how it works, and you know that it’s not how it works," she chided her. "My sense of time passage is dreadful.”

“Two years, four months, eighteen days,” I muttered. And about 2 hours and thirteen minutes, my brain supplied, though I decided to leave that part out.

“Oh, that’s right!” Kam said, looking pleased as she turned back in my direction. “I forgot your creepy number powers extended to dates, too!”

I gave her a flat look.

“Anyway,” she continued. “Su, I’ve known you for two years, four months, and eighteen days, apparently. And not once, in all that time, can I think of us discussing something you didn’t swiftly identify a bunch of flaws of, and then proceed to pick at relentlessly. The fact is, you’re chronically opinionated.”

“I am not.”

“You are, too.”

“This is infantile,” I said.

“Ah, see,” she said, pointing at me. “That’s an opinion, right there.”

Quietly, still without looking up from her book, Ran started laughing a little to herself. I glared at her.

Like I said, I got on okay with Kamrusepa. She was a nice person at her core, mostly, and could be fun to talk to if you overlooked the ways in which she was eccentric. At some point over the course of the past 2 years, however, our dynamic had become a little peculiar. Because we were always trading the 4th and 3rd spots in performance records for the class, she’d decided that I was something of a rival to her, and that it would fun to play into that relationship by constantly teasing and challenging me about everything imaginable. Every time she outperformed me on a test or one of her research projects was better evaluated than mine, she’d come and rub it in my face. Every time I did better, she’d say things like, 'you got the better of me this time, but don’t get too confident'.

I thought it was all a bit ridiculous. We weren’t children, and I didn’t care which of us got the slightly bigger number in the academy’s dumb grading system. Moreover, the faux-antagonistic pretense was tiring, and a waste of both of our time.

Plus, she was older than me, so it wasn’t even like it was a fair “rivalry”.

...not that I cared, to be clear. I’m just providing context for the situation.

“Now,” Kam said, clasping her hands together, making a faux-serious expression. “Tell me what you thought of my speech. And for real, this time.”

I sat back in my chair, taking the last segment of the chocolate bar and depositing it in my mouth. I slowly chewed it while folding the wrapping papyrus into a little square, which I set down on the table. Finally, I looked up and met her eyes, and swallowed. “Fine,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “If you insist, I think you might’ve alienated people a little.”

She frowned. “What? When?”

“When you started talking about ‘ending mortality’ and how ‘death is an enemy we can finally defeat’. It got a little weird for a second.”

“Oh, come on, Su,” she said, lowering her brow. “This isn’t the 1300’s any more. Give the people who’d come to something like this a little credit. They’re not luddites.”

“I don't know,” I said. “It’s one thing to talk about extending people’s lives, but phrasing like that, like we want to make everyone live literally forever, it starts to sound sort of creepy and unnatural. Like the last thing someone would say in an old myth before being struck down by the gods.”

She clicked her tongue. “Ugh, I hate it when people say things like that.”

“Like what?” I asked, confused. "That it's like a myth...?"

“No! Like ‘it’s unnatural’!” she clarified, gesturing outwardly. “As if anything about the world, or modern life, is remotely natural.” She looked to me, hesitantly. “...you really think it bothered the crowd?”

“A little, yeah,” I said, nodding. “I saw some people looking kind of confused, maybe anxious...”

“But that's silly," she protested, puffing her cheeks out. "The whole thing was about a group called the ‘Order of the Universal Panacea’. Why would you come to an event like this if the concept of pursuing immortality makes you squeamish? What do they think ‘Universal Panacea’ even means?”

“Probably stuff like no one ever getting sick, or becoming infirm, or suffering from dementia--”

“That’s living forever! What you're describing is living forever,” she said, gesturing in a frustrated fashion. “People don’t just drop dead for nothing. They live until something nasty comes along and kills them. That’s how it works.”

I shrugged.

“Ugghhhh.” She put her head into her hands. “I hope I didn’t upset the headmaster.”

“I'm sure he’d have said something if it were serious,” Ran said, chiming in.

“I just don’t understand people,” Kam went on. “Why is such a ridiculous thing even a taboo? Do people want to die? Why should merely discussing the idea be seen as such a vulgar act, when they’re already onboard with everything it involves but the thing itself?”

“The average person doesn’t like imagining a world that’s fundamentally different than the one they live in, I don’t think,” I said. “A modest improvement is something that people can feel comfortable with, a revolutionary one isn’t. It’s like, uh...” I rubbed my brow, thinking. “It’s like if you invented two different medicines to help people sleep. The first would make people sleep a perfect 8 hours every time, while the second one would make it so they don't need to sleep at all. In an objective sense, the second is the better choice, but I'd bet most would choose the first."

She shook her head. "Ridiculous."

"People create narratives to make sense of the world," I went on. "You know, like... 'People have to sleep'. 'People have to work to earn a living'. 'People have to eat'. 'People have to die'. If you can’t believe in those kind of universal constants, it's hard to cope with... Well, with being a human."

“This conversation went off the pretentiousness deep-end pretty fast,” Ran commented idly.

"Oh, don't be a spoilsport, Ran." Kamrusepa said, before turning back in my direction. "Even if that's right, it doesn't make it somehow virtuous. People should be pulled out of that kind of backwards thinking."

"That's easier said than done," I said. "And besides, it's not as if there aren't social implications, too. Part of the reason the revolution even happened was because the older generations lost touch with the material circumstances of the young, because they'd lived so long and amassed so much wealth, esteem, property..."

She clicked her tongue. "I wish you wouldn't make everything so political, Su."

Everything is political, I thought, though did not say out loud. Having those kinds of discussions with Kamrusepa tended to be a mistake.

"Besides," she said, "all of that was sorted out with the reforms after the civil dispute. That's the whole reason the prohibition was lifted to begin with."

This was not exactly true. The Biological Continuity Oath was originally written, at the time when the Mourning Realms were founded, as a way of making sure that mankind did not become substantially disparate in physical form as occured in the Imperial Era, which had contributed to the civic breakdown at the end of the old world. Then, in the fundamentalist period that begun several centuries ago, anxiety about class division had led to it being reinterpreted to encompass lifespan, with the fear being that a gerontocracy could emerge.

The Summer Compromise at the end of the revolution had seen groups dominated by the older generations surrender, at least superficially, a great deal of power. One of the concessions made in return was that was that the restriction was loosened. Whether this was a good outcome, both in the short and long term, remained - to say it with as much political neutrality as possible - controversial.

"For what it's worth, I agree with Su," Ran said. "It's not difficult to understand."

"Well, of course you agree with her, Ran," Kamrusepa said. "You two always back each other up about everything."

"Not everything," she said, turning a page.

"Anyway," Kamrusepa went on, "It's not as though I disagree, now that you put it that way. I just think it's idiotic." She leaned back in her chair, resting her head against her knuckles. "You know what the problem with people is, Su? Normal people."

"Do tell," I said, dryly.

"It's that they have no sense of perspective," She explained. "The average person can only think of the problem in front of their nose. The next looming personal crisis, or social problem, or threat to their health. They're unable to step back and perceive what's truly pertinent to their own well being. I mean, what even causes social strife to begin with? At a fundamental level?"

"Dick-waving contests," Ran offered, bluntly.

"The concept of scarcity...?" I suggested, despite this obviously being a rhetorical question.

"Wrong," Kam said, and pointed her finger in my direction. "It's the fear of death. Why do you think people pursue self-interest, at the expense of society? Because they have no incentive for long-term investment. Why do people consolidate resources far in excess of what they need? Because they're afraid of being caught in a situation where they need, but don't have them." She sat back in her chair. "If you ask me, all politics, all this manoeuvering of power we've been doing since the dawn of time, is treating the symptom. Trying to merely offset the human condition in lieu of solving it."

There was much one could say about Kamrusepa, but one could never accuse her of being unambtious in her thinking.

"And in my opinion? As a healer?" She went on. "There's nothing worse than belaying a cause to merely soothe a symptom. It's unforgivable."

"You know, Kam," I said, "it's kind of surprising how idealistic you are about human nature, sometimes."

She furrowed her brow. "What's that supposed to mean?"

I idly played around with the chocolate wrapper as I spoke. "That you assume all it would take for people to act selflessly and work together for a better future would be to remove the threat of death," I said. Not to say even that seems remotely possible at the moment.

She shook her head. "You're such cynics. Both of you."

I shrugged, not denying it.

She turned to the side. “What about you, Theo?” she said to Theodoros, who had spent the last 10 or so minutes silent on a different desk to us, frantically sorting through a bunch of his luggage, apparently having a crisis about having left something behind. “Why do you think people don’t want to live forever?”

“H-Huh? What?” He said, looking towards her.

Theodoros often entered conversations in this fashion. I wouldn’t have called him scatterbrained, but he was frequently so anxious about something or another that it impeded his ability to keep abreast of what was going on. To judge him for this flaw would be a spectacular case of the pot calling the kettle black, but unlike him, I tended to internalize my anxiety into a crushing ball of self-loathing, rather than expressing it outwardly as disorganization.

“Uh, pardon. I wasn’t paying complete attention,” he went on, his tone a tad stilted.

“We’re talking about living forever, Theo,” she explained. "More specifically, why some of the lovely people in our audience today, despite appearing eminently sensible, are apparently eager to watch their bodies fall to pieces and die of old age.”

He blinked a few times. “That seems... Rather a loaded way to put it...”

“Debates are like sword fights,” she said mirthfully. “If you haven’t situated yourself on the best terrain from the start, you might as well have already lost, right?”

This is a debate? "I'm not sure that's quite how it's meant to go," I said.

"Oh, hush, Su," she said. "I'm just joking around."

He considered the quandry, looking downward. “Well, ah... I think a lot of it is probably just due to popular culture? That is, people use the concept of immortality as a device to represent hubris, and that trickles down into the public consciousness and becomes self-reinforcing.”

"Ugh, don't even get me started," Kamrusepa said, making a disgusted look. "Our entire culture is deathist to the core. It's dreadful."

He sniffed, wiping his nose. Theo was one of those people who always seemed to be suffering from some kind of allergy, regardless of the time of year. “But, um, even putting that point aside, there are social concerns--"

"Me and Su just went over that," she said.

"Uh, yes, I think I picked up a little," he said, scratching the back of his head. "T-The problem, I suppose, is getting to the utopia you described? Perhaps if death completely ceased to exist, it would invoke some fundamental change in human nature, but... If lifespan was merely increased considerably, which seems much more realistic... It would wouldn't. Which leaves the question of how society would cope with it. Namely, overpopulation..."

"Oh, don't you start with that," Kamrusepa interjected, making a dismissive gesture. It's well-established that birth rates decline naturally in accord with greater longevity. Plus, with all the lower planes still unsettled, it's not as if we're especially short of space."

"I think it's a little more complicated than that," he said, hesitantly scratching his head. "But it's not all about economics. Cultural progress slows with longer lifespans, too--"

"That's hardly proven," she interjected. "People who are still active and socially engaged are more dynamic in their outlooks. 'Progress comes one funeral at a time' is only a truism because we spend the last third of our lives in a state of perpetual decline."

I wondered to myself if Kam kept notes on all these talking points at home.

"And even it were true," she went on, "can you name another scenario where you'd advocate letting people die as a form of social engineering?"

"That's, ah, not what I'm saying," he said, trying to speak up int the face of her relentless onslaught. "I just think it's a complicated issue."

"A complicated issue. My goodness." She let out a sigh, then gave him a mock-pleading expression. "So you're against me, as well?"

"I didn't say that," Theodoros said, face flushing a bit. "I still think it's a good thing on balance-- I wouldn't be here if I didn't. But, well. I do understand people who worry about the straw that breaks the camels back?"

She gave him a furtive look.

"Please try not to kill Theo, Kam," I said. "He's fragile."

"Oh yes," he said, nodding fervently. "Another couple of minutes of this, and I think I'd be willing concede the sky was green."

Kamrusepa raised an eyebrow. "Should I take that as a compliment?"

He only laughed nervously in response.

Kamrusepa glanced at me for a moment, then sighed. "Very well, I suppose I'll ought to take what support I can get. At least you're not entirely on Su's side." She spoke in a melodramatic, theatrical tone. “Goodness gracious. So few friends have I, it seems, in this lonely battle against the gravest of foes..."

“Hey,” I said, objectionably. “I never said any of that was my own opinion. I was just trying to explain why people found the concept disquieting, too.”

“Oh?” She turned back to me, smirking, and stared at me intently with her dark, greenish-blue eyes. “Then pray tell, dear Utsushikome. What is your opinion?”

“I’ve told you as much before,” I said. “I don’t think it’s really worth thinking about how wonderful or not living far longer would be, because I don’t think it could ever happen. The body, and even more so the mind is too complicated and emergent a system. In terms of pure physics, the Power can only do so much to predict and address problems before they get out of hand."

She smirked. “Ah, of course. The pessimists escape. Very like you.”

I rolled my eyes.

"Yet--” She idly grabbed a nut from one of the small bowls on the table, tossed it into her mouth, and swallowed. “--should someone refuse to entertain a hypothetical, one is drawn to consider if perhaps the reason is that the answer makes them uncomfortable, no?”

“It’s nothing so deep,” I said. “I just don’t like to hope for the vanishingly unlikely. It’s a miserable way to live.”

And besides, I thought. I can’t imagine myself living another ten years, let alone forever.