“生於憂患，死於安樂”  (“Strive in hard times, perish in contentment.”)
– Meng Zi (371-289 BCE)

It was in the tenth month of 2351 that I decided to die. It was a drawn out and well-considered decision, yet required almost two decades to validate with The Assembly.  Bureaucracy, it seems, remains among those ageless things, endlessly pondering itself as if to scorn the frightened bird of time’s passage.

The day of my dying arrived the same as every other. But in those years, the procedure could be carried out only at the central office of the Ministry of Bio-Data.  A microscopic tissue sample served as my physical contribution to a history, its infinitesimal record of my existence instantaneously frozen.  And then, the tiny pinprick of death, the protein that would forever seize the bio-machines that so perfectly maintained the singular repository of genetic information within each of my cells.

Those artificial molecules unique to just my DNA would be forever broken, tagged as “alien” by my own immune system.  Each of the cells that compose my body would then live and die as they had when nature prevailed over human ingenuity. Biological mechanisms evolved through eons of natural selection would continue replicating the chemistry in which was contained the blueprint of my physical existence. And they would do so with amazing accuracy.

Even so, it wouldn’t be with the unvarying precision of those proprietary bio-machines that had bestowed practical immortality upon each of the Earth’s twenty-five billion scintillating lights of humanity. Those mechanisms of nature would occasionally make mistakes, and some would accumulate. I would age in ways that would be seen. And I knew what it looked like.

The woman was with her young daughter. The little girl was perhaps a few years old, her unseasoned eyes focused upon a world where everything was still new. The energy seemed to transfer to her mother, though I knew… everybody knew that the woman was dying. Bit by bit, entropy was stealing away the very pattern of her being.

She is almost certainly long dead by now, though I still recall that moment clearly.  Leaning down to her child, she spoke and pointed into the distance.  I could see the girl’s expression change as her eyes fixed upon something that I couldn’t see.  But in that moment, it dawned on me that I was witnessing genuine immortality, a conveyance of something beyond the mere physical patterns of molecules.

Human knowledge had taken us as far as it could. Technological discoveries starting in the mid 21st-century had fundamentally altered the human condition. The struggle to survive in an over-stressed  environment had resulted in the development of cleaner and more efficient technologies.  The first practical nuclear fusion changed everything.

The cheap, clean and seemingly endless energy these compact reactors provided allowed for the entire world’s electrification.  But more importantly, they provided the energy necessary for the mass-manufacture of fertilizers, and for water desalinization. Food and clean water ceased to limit populations; but it didn’t bring equality. That would come with the development of neuro-prosthetics.

A group of mathematicians among the early adopters of computational brain implants developed “Quantum Geometry”, presenting physics and cosmology with the foundation for a single, concise description of the workings of our universe.  Technologically-enhanced intellect and its free access to information went on to become the “great equalizers”, but only among those willing to abandon the past. The last clinging vestige of distinct cultures withered as anachronisms before the pragmatic power of knowledge.  Near the end of the 21st-century, human society would first unify within an early form of what would come to be known as, “The Assembly”.

Around that time, the sciences also converged upon the lonely conclusion that humans are almost certainly the only sentient life in the universe. But by 2100, there were almost fourteen-billion of us.  Save for the few thousand adventurous spirits precariously scratching out existences on the Moon and Mars, we had spread into every corner of the planet.  And we were about to become immortal.

Lifespans had already been extended such that the vast majority of deaths were due to accidents, unusual genetic diseases, or rare cases of suicide. Nearly every organ in the human body could be easily replaced with a machine or re-grown in a lab, keeping the bulk of humanity just ahead of death by the effects of old-age.  And then in the very early years of the 22nd-century, “the last science” prevailed over even that, with the development of template DNA polymerase.

These human-made molecular machines, each version created specifically for its individual host, would replicate that person’s DNA with absolute precision. They could even counteract genetic errors inherited from birth, and repair the occasional mistakes made by a cell’s natural biological machinery.  In 2116, the first few humans ceased aging.

Within a just a few years, the process had become available to nearly anyone.  Death itself rapidly faded into anachronism.  It was around that time, in my fifty-sixth year, that I had a template created for myself.   Not long after, access became a guaranteed right to each of the more than 18-billion humans by then straining the last of those once seemingly inexhaustible resources the Earth had to offer.

The Lunar and Martian human colonies remained small, limited to their own resources as the Earth had none to spare.  Humanity had become Earth-bound, held down by the weight of its own needs.  Images of the early-mid 21st-century re-entered the public consciousness as humanity searched for a way to keep that which it had created for itself, the reassurance of a comfortable life in which nothing changed.

Still, the ponderous gears of governance churned slowly through the subsequent decades, until The Assembly eventually finalized the attachment of a responsibility to the right.  At twenty-five billion, it was agreed, humanity would have reached its earthly limit.  And thus for the fleeting wing-beat of almost two centuries, a world without the spark of youth has been the price of immortality…

And immortality, the price to bear a child.