It's fun to watch numbers go up and down, until you actually think deeply about what those numbers represent. Numbers, it must be remembered, are mental abstractions of our own creation to convey details of reality. They are shallower, less than the actual, physical world. And still, we are obsessed with them.
There are two more dishes to come. They may take a little while. The chef is busy with other things.
The Pantheon is written and produced by Joshua White.
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I’ve been assigned to another of the Savan, under strict remonstrances from above to not trigger any apocalyptic seizures in this one under any conditions, no matter what information such an experiment might deride. Seems a bit too uptight, if you ask me. We might finally be carving through their number, but we’ve got a good lot to go through. Five hundred, now. Their decimation seems to be correlated with a corresponding decline in the quality of the local environment, but we’ve already got a team wrestling up as much of this world’s biodiversity as possible, so I don’t feel as though we should be shackling ourselves. Have we forgotten our mission? We might just be the most important humans to ever live, yes, more important than the primitive homo sapiens who first took to capturing fire, more important than the blood drenched nobility of the first fall, even more important than the brave gladiators who fought Her first incarnation, or those who today combat the followers of the stillborne god. We’ve nearly got all the sequences lined up. With a proper radioactive treatment setup and just a bit more precision, we might be able to instill a power in ourselves and our fellow man akin to that enjoyed by the gods of myth. We will not die, and, unlike the wasteland barons of old, we will not be driven insane in the process. The treatment shall be available to all, and so all will be able to transcend.
How much of the suffering of humanity has been forged by death? How much grander could the economy scale if retirement was a thing of the past? How far would our expertise skyrocket when no master of a profession must pass on their mantle to their student? The possibilities are endless. Almost literally.
Thoughts on 799 specifically: the specimen is a female, of about five hundred years of age. There is already considerable scarring along her lower abdomen, only half of which might be attributed to the species’ breeding process. The rest appear to have been inflicted by weapons, albeit those of a highly primitive fashion. Considering that there is record of brief human settlement on the world, we’ve got a good general idea of where those scars came from.