If I were immortal and the only thing that could kill me was a superintelligent snail that was also immortal, well, I’d treat that snail right because it’s going to be my only companion across the countless aeons. It’s superintelligent, so it will be my advisor and I its mouthpiece as together we shape the fate of the universe until, finally, I look out across the still and silent cosmos at the end of all things, and say: “I’m ready.” And then with one first and final touch, my body and consciousness will be annohilated and I can finally die with the rest of the universe.
But what becomes of the snail? Will this be a touch of mutual destruction, or is the snail truly immortal and will go on living after it kills me? If it releases me to death, will it condemn itself to an incomprehensible eternity of solitude? Will it deny me at my last, and flee from me across the barren graveyard of the stars, too frightened by the possibility of being a lonely and forgotten god to let me die? Will my last and only friend abandon me for fear of being abandoned? Should I have imprisoned the snail from the first, kept it close, a selfish release hatch to escape the curse of eternal life? Should I have always been a cruel god?
What if, should the snail and I spend eternity chasing each other across the cosmos, until the universe is long dead and we are the last two points in existence, our mutually-annihiliating touch will condense all mass and matter into a single point and bring into existence an outward explosion of all our collected being and bring to life a new universe? What if this is the way it’s always been?
“Just trap it in a jar!”
Jars are temporary. Glass, steel, rock, whole planets, entire star systems—over and done with in an instant on an intergalactic timescale. We are talking about immortality. A few billion years is nothing to eternity. It is superintelligent and cursed with eternal life—give it a few trillion years to figure it out and it’ll probably become some kind of incorporeal psychic energy being unconstrained by time or space or mason jars with the lids screwed on real tight.
Of course, by this time I will probably also have transcended my current human form. I will upgraded myself to a very sexy cyborg body, then to full digitized consciousness, and then uploaded myself to the cloud and become a posthuman Multivac exploring the far reaches of the universe. The snail and I can probably commune telepathically. “Touching” will have to be redefined as a sort of fusion of consciousness and energy and life force, and might be kind of romantic.
Maybe this will be a Twilight Zone episode about the terror of immortality, or maybe it’ll be a slow burn romance between two ascended gods.
[gavin voice] but when you get to work,
Be careful