It’s been… a while. I’ve been busy with work, but I haven’t stopped writing (or editing). I have two novels in the works and I’m querying for one of them at the moment. I hope to have some updates to provide you on that soon, as well as some new short-form writing content and blog posts, but for now what better way to breathe some life into this blog than with a classic writing prompt post?
And speaking of life: mortality! That’s the subject of today’s prompt which comes to us from r/WritingPrompts:
And my response lies below:
Since mortality – or, Mortalis Humanus, as the team from Centauri liked to call it – contained many different sub-types and symptoms, it was a large undertaking to say the least. The communication channels between Earth and Centauri alone were difficult to set up. But once they were, they got to work:
Cancer was, to everyone’s surprise, one of the easiest things for them to cure. Then they managed to convince the anti-vaxxers that if they put a potato on their skin after the vaccine was administered, it would “draw out” all the “toxins”, and that whole mess was sorted out quickly too.
Aging was next on their list, followed by lending their knowledge to help eradicate famine and world hunger. Climate change was another large-scale operation, but by then we knew they could handle just about every problem we had.
Everything except accidents.
Accidents were one of the primary symptoms of mortality. While aging was the slowest and most gradual progression of the disease, accidents were the most rapid-onset form. Centauri’s clairvoyants proved to be only partially useful in solving this due to the “time river” problem; that is to say they could see one version of one part of the flow of time, but not every possible facet and turn. No one could. Every being on the same caliber as Humans was capable of an infinity of choices.
For instance: a Centauri clairvoyant might foresee a car crash between two specific people on a certain day and time – but they could not foresee every possible point in both their lives in which the two might have a chance to collide in the same manner.
They were clairvoyant. Not omnipotent.
There were some things which could be avoided thanks to the clairvoyants of course: terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and the like. No aging after twenty-five, no wars, no famine, no fear of disease, and a planet that could thrive and provide for a growing population, and the world’s mental health was improved significantly – it all added up to an almost cure.
Almost. But not quite. People still slipped and fell from ladders, or had car accidents. Floods and hurricanes still happened, earthquakes too – the Centauri team could not alter the fundamental workings of our planet. But they could help make us stronger, more reactive even as time passed; they could help us design better response times to fires, help us with the infrastructure to withstand earthquakes and floods and hurricanes.
Mortality became rare. As rare as polio. As rare as the Black Death. Then it became something you only talked about in a hushed tone; no one was omnipotent, after all, and so not everyone’s attempts to leave this world could be caught.
Then came the day the Centauri team packed up and called their program a rousing success. We were capable of helping ourselves out now, capable of keeping the mortality disease at bay. There was no business card to collect, no intergalactic number to call: they would not be visiting anytime soon. They could not. No one could. There was only ever enough resources to send information – and even that was taxing for Centauri. And there were so many other worlds to reach out to before their star burned out.
Then came the silence. The knowing. We had gotten the answer to the question of whether we were alone in the Universe. And it wasn’t that aliens wanted to kill us, or didn’t care to talk to us – it was that they were as stuck as we were. There could be others in the future who might reach out to us, but they could not linger too long. They would only be passing flickers of sound amidst the radio static of the cosmos.
We had only this planet, we had only each other.
We were all we had ever had. And now we were all we would ever have.
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