Jump 071: The Fountain

Jump 071: The Fountain

Location: Earth
Age: 58
Identity: Priest/Inventor/Voyager
Drawbacks: [+900] Unending Age, Naught But A Man

[100/1900]  Sense Of The Now
[400/1900]  Sense Of The Then
[Free]      All Together Now
[600/1900]  Soothing Presence
[1200/1900] Absolution
[1300/1900] Composure
[1500/1900] Subsistence
[Free]      Meditation Garden
[1900/1900] Tree Of Life Sapling

Three separate spans of time that tie together. The threads of three separate lives interwoven. It's an interesting thing, really.

Transitioning from speaking at length with Aslan to being a priest of his analogue in the renaissance era with a muted awareness of what I'd been through, that made for an interesting experience. Less pleasing that chamber pots were a thing, in retrospect, but... well, there were enough options for someone in my position to try to make the world a better place. Doable, even if I only had a few years to work with. There's a certain ideal that one in my position should have, despite many seeming to lack it, and I did my utmost to live up to it.

Five centuries later, on the other hand, I was fully cognizant trying to make the world a better place in a different way. And I did my utmost to do that with all the knowledge I had. No challenging anyone to a Mortal Kombat tournament, because there was no need (and I couldn't if I wanted to anyway); instead I provided humanity with the tools to advance, while trying to avoid anything remotely weapon-like. Which worked surprisingly well. Perhaps the local incarnation of humanity was a little less warlike than most worlds. While I certainly didn't remember absolutely everything, there was more than enough that I could make things work and introduce new alloys and materials in addition to studying and publishing papers on physics and mathematics.

In addition to the advancement of the sciences, I got to study the Tree of Life sapling and its seeds along with other scientists who were working on unlocking its secrets, and my reputation as an omnidisciplinarian preceded me. While I may not have had the augmentations to my intellect that I was accustomed to, I still had enough knowledge to use what I found there to pick apart what it could do. This was a vast improvement over what I'd seen used before. Not just a halt to aging through drugs, but this served to actively reverse aging to a certain state, essentially early adulthood, and tended to correct any cellular malfunctions - almost all cancers among them - in addition to optimizing the body, strengthening blood vessels, making the immune system surprisingly robust, and the like.

A cure to cancer, a cure to old age; clinical immortality. Novel.

For reasons unknown the effect did not work perfectly on quite everyone, but the number of people who received the benefits of clinical immortality without the age-reversing properties were quite literally one in a billion. Naturally, one of those ones was myself, but... that's all right. I'm an old man, and over the next five hundred years I helped humanity reach the stars before I myself travelled among them. Certainly I was far from the only individual working to that end, but many peoples' lives wove in and out of the sciences. I was one of the few who remained there consistently.

Priorities shifted. The world changed. The birth rates fell with the lack of death due to old age, cancer, and soon enough treatments were made available universally for other things such as heart disease and the like. The mother world soon saw a diaspora, humanity spreading among the stars.

By that time I was simply one among many, more than satisfied to enjoy obscurity and watch it all unfold. The aches and pains of old age were a small price to pay for five centuries of peace and tranquility. Those years were more than I could have hoped for, more than I ever expected, and it was wonderful to experience. The future may be chaos, but for now, I had this.