Best Friends Forever
If an individual is immortal and no one else is, he faces the very serious problem of outliving everyone else. After a while, is it worth it to make new acquaintances? Could a person survive the inevitable pain of constant loss? I circumvented this problem when I designed my immortal character, Matthew Sella. He was engineered for equanimity, his emotional depth capped to ensure psychological endurance. Otherwise, if he were trapped in these emotional depths for centuries, his sanity would be lost.
Although Matt had adjusted to this reality, there came a time in human civilization when AI entities, which I called Quantum Lives (QLs), came into being. They had lifespans of thousands of years, and even though Matt had become accustomed to all his relationships checking out well under a century, he now had the unique opportunity to bond with someone for millennia. Finally, he encountered someone who sees time the way he does: an endless horizon accommodating a gentle, predictable flow of future events. Even though the QL will perish in a couple of millennia, Matt is very grateful that he can get to know someone so well.
So, what does a 3,000-year friendship look like? Matt’s QL friend, Cil, is such a friend to him. I am sure they felt like the only adults in the room. In contrast, to them, everyone they meet must have the experience of a child. After all, Matt and Cil have "been there, done that" an uncountable number of times. When they relate to those trapped in "life segments" measured in decades, they will have to guard against condescension. Yet, there is a curious irony at play; since they have become set in their ways, their younger colleagues' constant bombardment of inventions and innovations spanning decades, appearing almost instantaneous to an immortal, would keep them "young."
Such a friendship would build its own world. Since language is a living thing, chances are they would invent a language different from everyone else’s. Imagine as they reminisce over old times over some yet-to-be-invented, mind-altering beverage: "Remember that trip 1,700 years ago when we went to South America, you know, three civilizations ago?" Perhaps they could go twenty years without saying a word to each other. Just their constant, uninterrupted millennial presence provides all the comfort they need, away from the distracting noise of the ephemerals.
One major advantage would be to commune with the more permanent aspects of existence. The day-to-day noise (such as today’s social media) would cease to make an impression on them, allowing them to see what matters. In a 3,000-year friendship, physical appearance would take on a new meaning. They would not see each other's faces as they are; they would see them as a composite of every face they’ve had over the eras. To the immortal, the friend becomes a "fixed point" in a blurry world.
I suspect their most common activity would be long-form debate, not about petty facts, but about existence itself, topics the ephemerals find boring. They would argue about whether one century felt "brighter" than another seven hundred years later, or if the music of Cil’s Dasperian era truly captured the soul better than the primitive strings of the Enlightenment. Their friendship would not be built on "doing things," but on synthesizing the meaning of time itself.
But three thousand years is a short time compared to eternity, eventually bringing about Cil’s inevitable demise. In my book, I avoided the pathos of Cil’s death by jumping the narrative to a new era thousands of years later. For an immortal to lose a friend he has known for so long would truly stress the built-in "equanimity" of his psychology. Sadly, Matt had to prepare to become a solo traveler again, while his friend faced the void, knowing he was leaving the immortal behind in an empty universe.
