"But what about ghosts? They are definitely things that exist, and don't need food or anything else to persist."
"They still need something to sustain them, otherwise you'd have angry specters from the dawn of humanity roaming around. Emotional bonds or something probably."
"That was the whole plot of ghost shark I think. I dunno, I didn't actually watch it."
"No one watched it."
"In that case, I can submit into evidence ghost sharks as examples of prehistoric spectral phenomena."
"If it was in a movie, then clearly it was getting attention. Shark ghosts feeding off of fear is entirely plausible, and fear of shark isn't a scarce resource, especially in environments where a shark could become a ghost. The ghost shark could have been being sustained by the raw terror of every living creature it manifested near up until it reached the point in its timeline that humanity evolved far enough to make a movie about it."
"You wanna watch ghost shark?"
"Hell no."
Today the cafeteria was serving stroganoff, and tensions were high. Specifically, they were high because of the stroganoff. Unlike soup, stroganoff was not supposed to be served on its own. It was anyway. Just a scoop of grey meat, or something approximating it, floating in a similarly grey solution of fat and who knew what, slopped onto all of the four divots in the generic plastic tray which were clearly meant to hold a variety of foodstuffs separate, but instead acted now as miniature bowls for the coagulating matter. The general mood being as it was, there was not a question of whether something was going to happen. Rather, the variables involved would be ‘who’, ‘how’, and ‘when’. ‘What’ was almost certainly going to be violence, if that needed to be spelled out.
Conversation having stalled out for the moment, one of the participants, specifically the one who remembered the existence of ghost shark, speared one of the floating chunks with their fork. Considering how finely ground those particles were, this took a good deal of effort, and only really worked a quarter of the time whenever the object was successfully pierced due to the tine breaking the entire thing into two more even smaller particles to suspend in the pseudo-liquid. Certainly it would have been easier to scoop from below, catching a lump and letting the sauce drip out through the slots of the fork, but that would mean eating more.
“Clearly something has to be able to persist forever. Matter’s pretty inert, most of the time.”
“Except that left on its own with no intelligence and infinite time, it all just clumps into various black holes that then eat each other. At that point, the universe starts over, and that’s not persisting, it’s a reboot.”
“So, with that guiding intelligence it can just not do that.”
“Yeah, the dyson sphere of golden spires of technological advancement and infinite free power where everyone is perfect and content forever. Of course. They’re immortal. Why didn’t I think of that.”
“While we’re here in a cafeteria eating liquid with a fork.”
“They have spoons you know.”
“That would just make me have it in my mouth.”
“Fair. Isn't that stuff supposed to have, like, onions or something in it? What makes the gunk turn grey? Meat color is red, brown, or black depending on how much they get cooked, none of which are light grey.”
One of the two taps on an electronic device, disconnecting entirely from the experience of the meal.
“Yo what you doing.”
“Jan 2024 had a chessbot sweep of nothing but Magnus Carlsens, and we've got that time period archived. I'm trying to beat 'Magnus Carlsen but he's actually asleep'.”
“I assume you've lost seven times.”
“Eight.”
“Making progress then.”
“The best way to learn is by failing when there are absolutely no stakes. when it starts to look like I'm gonna win, I'll switch to the 'Magnus Carlsen but he's actively skiing down a mountain' bot.”
“Have you figured out how the pieces move yet?”
“Yeah the ones in front go two spaces, but then they can't do that anymore for some reason. Well, when it's allowed. Usually he just puts his two in front of mine and then it can't go forward anymore at all. Sometimes it's the one next to that one for some reason, but then the thing can still only go forward one space.”
“Definite progress.”
“Then the bot showed off that the one with a giant cut through the top can go four diagonally, but then when I click on the piece myself the thing shows every square in that line as an available location to land on, which is much more versatile than the initial move would have made me expect, considering the limitations on the front units.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“It can't go through the front ones though, so that's a thing that it shares. The crown also moves diagonally, so it locked out most of my moves after it got diagonal to my other crown, unless the thing can get in the way of the crown-path. That meant the slashed one could move one square, but the other ones got locked out. afterward, there was only a straight path into the crown because the sleeping bot apparently can't remember that it can move things more than once.”
“I already know how to play chess, you know.”
“What, you didn't tell me anything of the like. Ah dang it accidently beat him by moving a pawn diagonal to take another pawn and revealing one of the weird laser cannon things, and that apparently put him in checkmate. Guess it just shoots forward or something.”
“While I wouldn't want to deprive you of the joy of discovering all the mechanics on your own, there's little harm in just looking up what the pieces are called and what they do at a base level.”
“Are you saying I haven't gotten most of it already?”
“No one is going to know what you're talking about when you tell them about the slash head and laser cannon movements.”
“And I'm sure that the official names are just so much better. What do they call the hornless unicorn heads that move around via teleportation in a delta x plus y equals three formula?”
“Knight.”
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
“They look nothing like knights.”
“Apparently there used to be a thing that knights would use for transportation that the piece is based on. teleporting around is useful, so having a dedicated partner for when you need to assassinate nobles was a prerequisite for being allowed the status of knighthood, in addition to their armor and weapons. and the connections to get the claim to the title recognized, of course.”
“Ah, so the current unicorn is a more powerful version of those then. That makes sense. Unicorns are a case study of immortality then, aren't they?"
"For biological immortality, maybe. But, that's not full immortality. That's still a myth."
"Is this because of the lack of sapience thing again?"
"Yeah, without that guiding intelligence, their inexorable fate is consumption in a supernova or black hole."
"Aren't they sustained by purity? There's not much more pure than cleansing fire or pure gravitational force."
"Pretty sure it's more of a metaphorical purity. Like with ghosts, they don't cleave to reality very well. You could kill them by dumping mercury and arsenic into their habitat, despite them being pure, because it 'taints' the environment with something that isn't meant to be there. That's the whole definition of corruption that they work off of, something out of place. It's not an inherent desire for goodness or anything, just adherence to status quo. Much like ghosts."
“Ghosts are a lot easier to bust than unicorns though.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“Also, don’t they have a guiding intelligence that could lead to the perpetuation of their existence? If they were formed from humans, it follows that they have the intellect of a standard sapience, and thus the ability to work toward situations that would lead to their continued ‘survival’.”
“Aside from the inherent ridiculousness of saying that the dead are the most alive actually, the fact that ghosts aren’t able to acclimate to changing circumstance is perhaps their defining feature. If there was in fact the opportunity for a ghost to take hold of the reigns of fate and bend reality to their will, it simply would not do so.”
A ripple ran through the cafeteria as someone broke. Their instance of violence was quickly quelled by the violence of every other being around them, instantly using the temporarily insane as an outlet for their own rage and frustration. Tense silence settled swiftly over the area, the knowledge that the tipping point had now been reached and at any point rapid bubbles of boiling violence would erupt and threaten to destroy everything. A few individuals took advantage of the brief lull to drag the torso and several of the limbs out of the room. Presumably whichever of those appendages were missing had already been repurposed as a more palatable food for something than the stroganoff; likely a shark.
Many of the patrons of the fine dining establishment eyed the others warily. Any could be the next to succumb to the madness dwelling within them all, and their continued presence on the physical plane could depend on being able to strike harder and faster than the initiator. That on record, it was a certainty that disassociating from the horrors around them was the closest any of them had figured to a method for abjuring the inevitable. Stress would continue to build unseen regardless, until the burst. The hope was only that it would occur in a place where it would be useful.
“Maybe this would go better with a drink.”
“Don’t bother. It’s just more of this stuff, but in a cup.”
“Diabolical. So do you think the archived artificial intelligences are actualized enough to understand the limitations of their existence? It could be argued that since we are actively maintaining them, they are benefiting of immortality via osmosis."
"Are you arguing that?"
"For the argument's sake, sure."
"Disregarding the entire question of consciousness, their theoretical immortality is predicated on the benevolence of those around them. Beyond even the nature of ghosts, or the stupidity of unicorns, a purely digital intelligence is at mercy of the environment's whims. Without backups of their code, a single electrical fault or broken plate is enough to permanently erase them from the universe. Entire swathes of media have been lost entirely due to the destruction of the only existing copies, or the malevolent withholding of it by corporate interests until it was forgotten for eternity. I'd provide examples, but that's impossible."
"Wasn't there a magical girl show that had her get hit by a truck because the toy company pulled their funding?"
"How do you even know about that kind of thing?"
"How can you not?"
“Irrelevant. What I may or may not sleep through has no bearing on the fact that lost digital media is an established phenomenon that occurs without any conscious effort, and that combined with the inability of the digital to affect the material precludes them being able to safeguard their own existence.”
“Oh, I got one. Quantum immortality of cats.”
“You mean the uncertainty principle?”
“More along the lines of that theory of infinite possibility generating the timeline where the being in question has in any particular state a branching path that leads to their survival. So, like, if a cat had the option to go into a box with fifty percent chance of survival, there’s the branching paths in which they do not go into the box and the other where they do. Any timeline in which the cat does not survive is rendered irrelevant, and only the choice that leads to survival propagates into more universes. As such, the cat in the box has a one hundred percent chance of survival, and the one that does not go into the box has some chance n that is reduced by the number of variables that could potentially kill the cat, since they only have nine lives.”
“Except that the timeline solidification of those gyrofrequency opprobrium decontaminator machines prevents any electron state that doesn’t lead to the continuation of this particular chain of events, and propagates backward through time, which led to cats being subject to traditional mortality again.”
“Too bad, they could have been nice to have still existing.”
“Instead, the city is infested with mold, mushrooms, and other plants.”
“I’m pretty sure mold and mushrooms aren’t plants.”
“They don’t move on their own, and they grow off of decomposed corpse material, which is close enough.”
“To be perfectly fair, dirt isn’t entirely corpses. Just mostly. There’s rocks and random minerals in it.”
“I refuse to be fair to those things. They’re a plague, and make everything worse for me in particular by existing.”
“Also a fairly decent candidate for being considered immortal.”
“Is this the ‘you cannot kill me in any way that matters’ meme again?”
“Yes but also shut up. Even cut off from the moisture and sugars needed to survive, mold will just go dormant, and their spores will reactivate upon once again reaching the environmental requirements for their sustained growth. Meteors with fungal spores that have laid dormant through their entire journey across the universe will have them reactivate and overtake the new planet they’ve struck. As they can asexually produce those spores, the generated mold is simply a clone of the original fungal growth, and if at any point it touches an identical mass, the lack of differentiation is complete and they can be considered a single organism again. The mold is a single being that cannot be destroyed, and only generates more of its abhorrent flesh to consume all.”
“That’s not a terrifying statement at all.”
“The same goes for the mushrooms. The flowering cap that you see above the surface is only a fruit that the actual organism produces for the purpose of spore dispersal. Below, in the dirt, the mycelium network grows regardless of the cap’s fate. If you kick a bunch of mushrooms that have sprouted up, they’ll grow again after the mycelium reabsorbs the nutrients it expended on extruding those caps in the first place. Unless they’re removed entirely, like from someone eating it, those mushrooms will simply return again, more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
“I hate everything you just said.”
“Plants, and trees more specifically, are a bit more interesting. Trees are less of a single type of plant, and more so an adaptation that many different species of plant all convergently evolved into. Carcinogenesis, but with something that isn’t crabs. That kind of thing is why morphology based taxonomy is pretty much useless. Who’s to say that the creature is related to a similar looking one, when it’s entirely plausible that they simply adapted to an environment in a similar way?”
“Horses aren’t the same family as deer, despite both being four-legged animals that lived in plain areas, but whales and deer did indeed share an order.”
“I’ll take your word on that. Anyway, the trees can independently induce senescence on their individual appendages, and prevent the same on their more important segments, leading to indeterminate growth. Millenia can pass, and the only effect it would have on the tree is that it absorbs more nutrients and grows larger and more powerful.”
“There’s a fairly easy fix for all of that. They may be immortal in the safety of their unchanging habitat, but eliminate everything in a cleansing fire and they will die. Overwhelming firepower is all you need to ensure they are erased from reality.”
“You could say that about anything.”
“Yes.”