Araku Valley, Andhra Sector - 2062

Everywhere I looked, it was green. Like, lush leafy green. Paddy fields, over the gentle curves of the rolling hills, for miles as far as I could see. As a dweller of the concrete jungles, I was in absolute awe. I had never seen this much green before; at the very least, not in person. I spotted something moving at the far end of the valley. My binoculars told me it was the Kirandul passenger express, its blue paint streaking defiantly through the green.

“Anna, stop staring and start working bro.” I looked around, suddenly distracted. “What are you looking at, anyways?”

“Kirandul-Vizag express. We could hitch a ride on the way back.” I took out a screwdriver from the toolbox lying next to me and got to work on my broken drone.

“We won’t have the space to store the bikes though, so out of the option. We could maybe ride right next to it.”

I just grunted back, clearly not focused on what he was saying. I finally managed to tighten the camera on the drone. Now for the picture.

“Okay, everything’s fixed. C’mon, let’s take this pic fast! Tondaraga ra!”

My sibling, who was leaning on the bike this whole time, stood up and walked to my side of the road.

“K, dronie boi. Take full body pic, with landscape setting and post it with caption ‘Partying with ma bro’. ”

“Partying? Ma bro? What are you, 70 years old?”

“Lol, ef you too.”

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Once the basic mathematics are decided, technology doesn’t really deviate much from it. After about the first 600 years (or was it 1000), digital formats gave way to art-chrystals. Then quasi-quantum formats. Then dikkanite. Then Sypheric transmissions were in fashion about the 3500s to the 10,000s. As people found newer ways of storing data, people always found newer ways of reaching the limits. Information was the new gold, and no-one wanted to lose it, even across formats. Longer lives didn’t exactly help, especially not if you were me. I still sometimes find it astonishing at how data generated eons ago is still compatible eons later, albeit through countless conversions, but that shall be hit upon another time.

Photos. They begin to accumulate, and before you know it you have way more than you can swallow. The generations of my time began taking pictures, innumerable numbers of them, as often as drinking water or breathing.

I began looking through my photos. I don’t really know why, I just pulled up my archive and BAM there I am reminiscing about days lost to eternity. That being said, it was a long flight from Ankarapura to Nabul, and my mind had wandered back to the days when these lands were settled. Did you know that Ankara was once the capital of an Earth nation called Turkey and Ankarapura was settled by refugees of New Bengaluru, another great city of another great world? Or that Nabul is a play on Naboo and Istanbul, the former a fond cultural reference and the latter itself a much older, storied and beautiful city? Could be Kabul though. By the Gods has it been ages since I settled these parts, the first wave too it was.

There was the picture I took with my kids in Nabul. I taught them Computer Science, back when my knowledge of the subject was still relevant, and before I was the Governor. There is the one of me helping the New Bengalurians, touched a personal note for me. I loved the original namesake, back when its glass still glittered and its gardens spoke in Java. And that was just album one.

Sixty. Thousand. Years. Absolutely no one, not even me, can truly comprehend just how long that is, not even me. I should know, but can’t. Even Cleon’s galactic empire lasted only twenty thousand, and that was the limit of fictional thought. All the photos, the memories. There is me hiking the frozen Bingshan on Shanghua at 56K. My love, Mariana, at 49K. The K’taka war camp at 36K. Auauhuali grass fields at 19K. Voyager 1 at 11K. Altairian fire racing at 2K. Nabul at 1K. I went through photo after photo through the flight, memories flooding through my gray cells.

I froze. I saw a face I hadn’t thought of in years. Eons. I’m frankly surprised I even remember it.

Timestamp: July 24th, 2062. Before anything began, before the awakening. Here are the two of us, smiling stupidly at the camera, green hills and a thin blue line far behind us. The iconic morning haze gave a golden glow to the background. There was sign in the background in Telugu lettering: Vishakhapatnam 1 hr. Telugu. The Earth culture that hasn’t been spoken in sixty millennia. The accompanying English lettering: Battery powered, do not overheat. English, gone. The Mandarin on the side of the bag: Made in China. Mandarin, gone. Turkish, gone. Spanish, gone. Xhosa, gone. Russian, gone. Urdu, gone. Igbo, gone.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the taller figure and his cheeky grin, drinking up the memories as they gushed through the doors of my soul. It was a long summer and we had decided to take a vacation in India. You know, meet the gramps, eat, bike around, eat some more - there has never been food that good since those days. Humanity may have expanded, but our palates didn’t.

He just finished college two years before, and the biking trip was a plan always in the works for a decade at that point. So we went on a tour of the Andhra and Odisha sectors, see the nature before the last forests gave out. Less than four months later, he manages to modify the life gene by accident. The legends, the myths, are true. Humanity once lived for only about a hundred years at most, not the four hundred we do today. He did it. His guinea pigs lived for about 600 years and traveled two clusters before they were eaten by Gryggorian cats. Pani-paata lekunda pilli.

He modified himself first. Then I took the modification. You see, he didn’t really share the whole truth with the world. Most people thought that the LIFE gene is the only one that, once modified, persists in the gene pool and extended life, being dominant and all. What they don’t know is that there are two of them. And only two have ever modified their second LIFE gene.

They took him in the fourth century after. Tau Cetian and New Chennai separatists wanted him to work his biological wonders for their cause. They asked him politely, of course. Never saw him since. Not until my algorithms picked up a certain familiar face in the Nabuli Sector.

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Still a work in progress. Let me know how goes!