“Wow…”
A Skyan, a Rethan and a Thraki sat on the awkwardly small sofa, waiting for Arkadin to finish what he was doing. The three of them had been sitting there for at least an hour, occasionally glancing at each other but mostly just staring at the floor. No one had said a word, not even the Thantophor. In fact, Arkadin had forgotten why they were there.
“Why did you say wow?” Teekay quietly asked.
Arkadin turned around. “Oh. Piss. You know you could have all left, right?”
“I wanted to know what you were doing…” Elkay muttered. “But I did not know when would be a good time to ask… I did not know you were… a bioengineer…”
The Thantophor smiled weakly. “I’m not.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“When you’re a god, you don’t know everything. That’s impossible. One’s brain would just explode. So we get around it by knowing things as we need to know them. I’m not normally an expert on genetic engineering and mutations, but now that I need to know this stuff, I know it. Doesn’t work all the time though.”
Elkay glanced at Teekay. Teekay gave an awkward look that suggested he just go with it.
“Fair enough. So why did you say ‘wow’ of all things?”
Arkadin suddenly grinned. “Because I think my idiot sister might have accidentally done it.”
“Done what?”
“Made something that lives for a very, very long time.”
The three mortals stared blankly at the Thantophor. Arkadin sighed and tried to explain.
“Okay basically, Yisini has been trying to create immortality for mortals. That’s not possible, because of various laws like entropy and thermodynamics and the fact that cells just can’t reproduce perfectly forever most of the time. The closest things we have that CAN live for more than twenty thousand years are microorganisms and some very lucky plants. Even Kronospasts, with their technology, simply die at the 15k mark because they end up filled with cancer from bad cell splitting…”
Phovos, the awkward-looking Thraki, had clearly already gotten confused, but Teekay and Elkay seemed to still be following.
“Yisini’s experiments never really worked because she never managed to fix the core problem, or one of them at least. DNA and RNA eventually forget how to duplicate properly. So a cell will split but it won’t have a perfect piece of DNA in both sides. You get happy DNA and sad, broken DNA. Eventually these small differences build up and the creature dies.
“But Elkay here, well, there’s something different. I mean, Yisini hasn’t managed to completely solve the problem but she’s nearly there… Most of Elkay’s DNA is very, very happy.”
Teekay and Elkay both looked at each other. They were as confused as Phovos was now.
“Elkay, you are going to live a long life. Like, really long. Assuming we can keep your weird new adaptation powers under control.”
Elkay blinked. “What?”
“You’re not immortal but you’re getting there.”
Elkay blinked some more. “Really?”
“Sort of, yes.”
Elkay blinked even more, this time in disbelief. “Are you… sure about that?”
“Yes…” Arkadin sighed. “But there’s a cost. I mean, apart from watching all your loved ones die. As much as I’d like to tell Yisini about all of this… if she found out, she would capture you and spend the next thousand years slowly dissecting you and eventually accidentally killing you, trying to work out how to replicate her work because she’s a dumbass who doesn’t keep notes.”
“So I have to… stay here?” Elkay asked.
“For the moment, yes…” Arkadin sighed again. “It’s just until I can work out how to, uh, leak your discoveries without alerting Yisini to your existence. I’ve done this before, it just takes… time…”
Arkadin trailed off, then grinned at the three mortals. “In the mean time, do you guys want something to eat? I’m starving.”