The Water Baron

Life is humanity’s most precious resource, but Time, that unseen creditor, holds its receipts in a tight fist until dispatching its tireless debt-collector, Death, to satisfy the terms of the contract. For millennia, great minds toiled, mixing alchemical elixirs and sequencing genes in desperate attempts to defy this inevitability, but all such endeavors proved fruitless until the 25th Century. The Forever Protocol was a proprietary technology, invented by The TerraNova Corporation, which used nanoscopic techno-virii to indefinitely rejuvenate cells in the body. Their eternal desire finally realized, those able to afford the cost of treatments soon found themselves with enough time to become living legends steering human progress across the solar system century after century.

A time of progress followed, seeing Mars terraformed as a second home for mankind and a springboard for humanity’s expansion across the solar system. The cost of this process had been a ravaging of Earth’s resources, leaving the once blue planet an ochre orb whose oceans had largely been transported offworld to slake the thirst of colonists on other planets and moons. Open pit mining operations visible from space had left the Earth a pockmarked shadow of its former self, a muddy ball ruled by a consortium of elites wealthy enough to afford The Forever Protocol.

Marcus Aurelius Illuminatus Bonaparte Rockefeller Carnegie wanted to believe that he was the most beloved of the Perpetuals, but as he dressed in solitude for his 1,000th birthday celebration, he was keenly aware of the risks he faced appearing in semi-public among his family. As a result, his robes were made of a blade-and-projectile-proof metallic microweave. With the cowl up, and his throat covered by a gorget featuring a drop of water, the symbol of his clan, he would be mostly protected from any who wished him harm. It saddened him that such precautions were necessary, as he saw himself as one of humanity’s saviors. Was it not he who had returned water to Earth, harvesting comets and icy moons until the planet was restored to some degree of its former majesty? The cerulean seas visible from space once again may have been devoid of life other than fish farms, but after all his efforts the continuous animosity ate at him. Even now, clan ships overseen by Marcus towed massive ice blocks mined from inhospitable environments to far-flung outposts of humanity, facilitating the continued survival of the species. Gazing out the window at the sea far below he steamed at how his benevolence was met with contempt.

On some level, he understood. Half a trillion people spread across the solar system felt disconnected from the million or so Perpetuals whose plans and schemes determined the course of human events. It was seen as unnatural to cheat death, but those who referred to Marcus and his ilk as “vampires” or “ghouls” were still reliant on the ruling class, as the inhospitable reaches of space required their industries to remain livable. Plus, despite the venomousness of their attitudes, Marcus knew the masses were jealous, and most of them toiled in the mistaken belief that if they simply worked hard enough, they could someday join the immortal ranks and start building their own clans. This was folly, of course, with perhaps one in a hundred billion able to achieve such a goal, but the promise was the carrot at the end of the stick that had kept them on task for a thousand years.

Of course, thought Marcus, they don’t grasp the enormity of sacrifice involved in dealing with TerraNova. The Forever Protocol was not for sale, it could merely be leased by a subscription service whose cost scaled with time. As one of the earliest adopters of the technology, Marcus was one of the few to reach 1,000 years. At this level of service, the price point became a trillion solar credits per quarter. This required two credits per person alive simply to sustain Marcus for 25 Earth years. The average cost to sustain a member of the clan was a hundred billion credits, and with a thousand of them, this required a hundred trillion credits per quarter simply to maintain their status quo. Fortunately every mouth needed water and Marcus controlled the market. Despite this, he could never accumulate enough credits to sleep easily.

Harsh conditions across the solar system made life dangerous with tragedies and plagues able to wipe out a billion souls before help could arrive across the vast distances of space. As a result, The Trade Federation spent billions on propaganda annually. “Humanity needs YOU to reproduce!” was broadcast across all communication channels regularly. “Mother Mary” was the iconic face of the campaign, and while her clothes and genetic makeup had changed over the centuries, her smiling visage and the host of children surrounding her had remained constant. Along with family stipends as an incentive, the operation was largely successful, and though each generation seemed to suffer a little more than the last, the fruits of indoctrination and false promises can never be underestimated.

From time to time one of the immortal clans would raise someone born from nothing into their ranks for a while. They would foster certain performative talents or run the occasional sweepstakes, offering the teeming masses the hope that they might someday find their way to eternal life. These rare examples would be bled for their aptitudes and abilities to influence, but inevitably met with a tragic end, once their usefulness had run out, for the Forever Protocol does not confer invulnerability by any means. Marcus Aurelius Illuminatus Bonaparte Rockefeller Carnegie knows this all too well, hence the protective nature of his celebration outfit. Everyone present will be similarly clad, but they dare not call their raiments “armor,” for to do so would betray the magnitude of their paranoia.

In some ways Marcus envied those shooting stars, who never knew when their end would come, whether through the rapid depressurization of their spacecraft or one of the occasional terrorist attacks that almost always seemed to claim the life of some nearly forgotten celebrity Perpetual. In this way they were no different than the mortals who plodded through life unable to hedge their existences against inevitability. Still, such demises were preferable to the alternative.

Clans who found their goods or services rendered obsolete and could no longer afford their subscriptions began to exhibit the passage of time in ways that would go unnoticed among the general population, but amid Trade Federation convocations stood out like open wounds. They would fight the process for as long as they could, using conventional anti-aging methods and eventually makeup to hide the toll of the years, but would inevitably retire to solitude to disappear forgotten by all but their mortal offspring who bore no legacy other than family names they often changed out of shame.

The Terranovas fiercely protected the walled garden of their technology, and any attempt to tamper with, hack, or reverse-engineer The Forever Protocol would lead to a clan-wide ban and blacklisting. As a result, only fools or the most arrogant even attempted such a feat. The inevitable loss of these bloodlines led to power vacuums with much scheming and opportunism among the Perpetuals.

Marcus often felt that all he did was plan, scheme, and plot. He remembered being young, when pleasures of the senses meant something to him. After a millennium of life, earthly delights felt stale as familiarity bred contempt for the mundane. Awareness of this paradigm shift had first been noticed by Marcus at his 200th birthday, when even a feast of ortolans and a mountain of presents featuring nigh-unobtainable luxuries were unable to generate even a small amount of satisfaction within him. None of the concubines, with their teeth and hands removed for his safety, could manage to elicit even a meager smile from his face. So it had continued for centuries until Marcus realized that the only thing that brought him joy was seeing the accumulation of solar credits in his accounts.

The life of a Perpetual tends to be a lonely one. Danger is omnipresent, though known terrorist organizations, lone-wolf assassins, and the machinations of rival clans present less of a threat than one’s own inner-circle. Strangers are rarely allowed access to clan members, given audience only after stringent vetting, and only then in the most secure of environments. History had proven that even heavily indoctrinated security forces and personal guards could be swayed to take part in a coup, but such events were rare. Jeopardy presented to Perpetuals mostly in the form of their families.

It is not so much that love expires, as that the human heart transmutes over time into a thing with other motivations. As monohedonia takes hold, the pressures crush a person, and like coal being squeezed into a diamond, so does the soul harden. It wasn’t that Marcus didn’t love his children, merely that he had come to see them more as a facet of his eternal legacy than anything else. Mortals had the freedom to love, but for those like Marcus it was a liability.

To show weakness was unthinkable, but one need not examine the existence of any Perpetual too closely to see that they are driven by fear. Their need to sustain the status quo is so great that it eclipses all other motivations. This stifles progress, denying humanity the future it deserves, stretching out the interminable present, which exists as a manifestation of a few elites’ dreams, with little consideration for the needs or wants of the majority. Consolidation of resources becomes a zero-sum game with capital trickling upwards as the desires of the few outpace the needs of the many. Even so, Marcus lived in terror that it could all be lost or taken away without warning. As a result, he felt he could never have enough to rest easily.

As Marcus finished dressing he watched the sunset from his window. As the blazing orb sank beneath the waves, its rays extended across the water, making it appear as if a pathway made of light extended from the horizon to the beach below the palace. He knew in another thousand years the sun would likely be encased in a Dyson Sphere, its energies diverted into fueling humanity’s expansion across the galaxy, and for just one moment he wished he could walk that shining path across the water and be swallowed by the light.