The Longevity Problem by Orvan Ox

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The Longevity Problem by Orvan Ox

Anyone of any non-trivial age “knows too many dead people.” And while it’s normal, if unpleasant, to lose older relatives (great grandparents if you were even lucky enough to meet any, grandparents, parents, and various aunts/uncles etc.) it’s not just relatives. It’s friends and acquaintances. Heck, for some there were only voices heard/conversed with “over the air”…For example, I never met AA9Y, the self-described drug dealer – he was a pharmacist, but I knew his voice.

If you have an… extended… life (say, like a ShapeShifter as described in Sarah’s “Shifters” series [PLUG! PLUG! PLUG!] of books… where lifespans can be measured in centuries or even millennia…) it’s even worse. You need to quite literally reinvent yourself every few decades and catch up on current idioms/slang… though if you look old enough you can be “charmingly” out of date by a decade or three. Get into reenacting, even a bit, and you might be able to get away with more. Oh, and then language changes. Not just a new country with a new language, but things like Vowel Shifts.

And, of course it’s still disconcerting to find the answer to something that was bugging a friend… but said friend is now long dead. Or you know just who to ask, but the person to ask died years ago. Or you see this item that so & so would love, but…  you get the idea.

This kinda works the other way, too. Let’s say you figured out the key to some Great Advance… but you do NOT dare proclaim it yourself, lest you become famous and thus… get paid attention. No, you need to find a Willing Mind to drop hints at.. or even tell outright (if you can then disappear to them!). No, I did not influence any of the Great Minds (scientists, inventors) but I have given the issue some thought, you know, just in case an idea strikes me and doesn’t just bounce off.

Other times, you just sigh and wonder how the blazes you missed it. Look, you escape the Labyrinth… you sail the Med for seeming Ages… sometimes rowing, sometimes steering with an oar… and it’s a gol-dang pain in the arm(s). And one day some bright spark comes up with the sternpost, or at least mounted, rudder. Brilliant. And SO. DAMNED. OBVIOUS. in retrospect. I might have been out a few days from the force of that face-hoof.

Oh, and the times you see some “genius” come up with a “brilliant new idea” … that you’ve seen crash and burn a dozen or more times. Except… every great once in a while, technology/science has caught up and NOW it’s workable. It’s all rather confusing, really. Nod, smile, and be ready to bolt to a safe distance – which might be a few borders away.

What can you do? I have no grand answer. Note history as it happens, but be ready to “forget” it (at least in detail) as ‘Current Events’ recedes into being History. Watergate means about as much to many today as does Teapot Dome.

And, well…. The line is MUCH older than the relatively recent tune it’s a title to, but the best I can say is just, “Keep on keeping on.”

Yes, there’s a simple answer to the Longevity Problem, but no, not taking the Canadian Medicine. There’s no future in it.

112 thoughts on “The Longevity Problem by Orvan Ox”

    1. We are now further away from 9/11, then 9/11 is from the Iranian hostage crisis (23.5 years vs. 22 years). We now have an entire generation who can’t remember watching the TV in horror that morning or how weird the country felt after that. Man, that makes me feel old.

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      1. I was recalling the Munich massacre at the ’72 Olympics. Yerrch!

        It’s now been as long since the end of WW 2 as that was from the end of the ACW.

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      2. My wife (5th grade) teaches a segment on 9/11 each September. For us it’s still fresh in our memories. For the kids it’s like learning about WWII. They’re parents were little when it happened.

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      3. Or Challenger. Or Columbia, but the second time it was a little less jarring.

        I felt a bit of that horror last year when I heard, “A bridge in Baltimore collapsed,” found video and realized it was the Key Bridge, which I had crossed many times.

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        1. I remember going to the ’07 NASFiC in St. Louis (strictly speaking, Collinsville, part of the Metro East suburbs) and hearing about the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and realizing it was the bridge we’d gone over when we went to MiniCon in ’98 and CONvergence in ’02.

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        2. I remember my husband waking me up with the Columbia. I was very confused, because the Challenger anniversary was only a day or two off.

          Late January was not a good time for the shuttle program.

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        3. Oh, and there was a crash with fire in a tunnel on I-80 through Green River, Wyoming. I checked—I have time-lapse video of going through that exact tunnel a couple of years back.

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      4. “Millennials are kids!”
        “Millennials were enlisting on 9/12.”

        I’ve been going through the mental shift of being the median age for the country, so my reflexive “oh, this something I learned in high school, so it’s a kids these days” thing is waaay outdated.

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        1. I was 19 and already contracted with LocalU Army-ROTC on a scholarship that made me nondeployable. Is the HS Class of Y2K Gen-Y, or Millennials? Answer: yes. Probably some of each, but I identify more with the older contingent of the two.

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          1. Gen Y is Millennial. Idea was “came of age during the turn of the Millennium.”

            Gen X is the folks who escaped being absorbed into the Eternal Blob of Boomerism.

            …this sticks in my head because my state-wide-award-winning high school had the class of 2000 graduate with “FIRST OF THE MILLENNIUM.”

            >.>

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    2. How many folks know “The Spirit of 76” as anything other than basketball in Philadelphia?

      Although a very small set of folks will remember a very cheezy cartoon called “The Funky Phantom”, about a 1776 “spirit” trapped in an old grandfather clock for 200 years, then set loose by some meddlesome kids. ……. Like much of the 70s, it only made sense there and then. Sort-of.

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      2. I recall an Eddie Cantor movie *Kid Millions* where Eddie claimed to be a ‘spirit’ of an Egyptian ancestor…. “You sound so young, but my $RELATIVE died at age 76.” “I am the Spirit of ’76!”

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  2. Well, I have some good news for Orvan. It seems the Social Security Administration knows millions, I say again, MILLIONS of people over 100 years old! In fact, more than a million of them are over 150 years old. Lifespans have been getting longer remarkably quickly these days.

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    1. While some of those might be fraudulent, many of those are likely ssn numbers remaining active because a younger spouse is still collecting on their earning record.

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      1. Those cases should be pretty easy to see in the data. I imagine the DOGE teams already know quite a bit more about those millions of SSNs and are actively engaged in figuring out who the payments are going to.

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      2. I recall an offspring of a person I knew who was absolutely furious that the person’s death was recorded. Said offspring was getting the SS proceeds* and wanted it to continue in perpetuity. (Speaking of “perp”, I suspect said offspring deserved his very own perp walk…)

        ((*)) Combination elder abuse and said older person had a very generous pension–public servant, my tail.

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      3. The specific issue raised was the “death” field set to “false”. That should be set when paying a surviving spouse. The spouse also would be paying in under their own number, not the decedent’s.

        We will find that some of this is outright fraud. Some is misuse of SSNs by illegal aliens and other ID theft. Some will be clandestine funding of small ops/programs through aggregate fake SSN payments. A small portion will be genuine error.

        Almost all of it, however, is “shenanigans” of one sort or another. The system was designed not to raise flags for misuse. And gee, it got misused.

        It is not “hard to imagine this level of fraud”. It is going to be, “On what planet is this much fraud even possible? Well gosh, right here on Earth in the USA.”

        We haven’t even examined 1% of the overall budget. We may find out that more than half of government spending is outright fraud.

        Or more.

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        1. As I’ve been hammering– the “there’s something fishy here, need to fix that” thing was identified A DECADE AGO.

          I’ve got NPR stories and the audit report over on TwiX.

          Which means that someone had to submit the solutions.

          Which means that specific someones were tasked with fixing it.

          And it is not fixed.

          And all of this is written down.

          :evil smile:

          I like documentation, don’t you?

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        2. I’ve been pointing out to people who keep bleating about how we *need* universal free health care (/spit) that if they really wanted that they’d be cheering the DOGE boys on, because when (I’m going to be optimistic here!) they clear out all the fraud, if we wanted we’d have enough to cover good medical care for every single American citizen many, many times over. Which is more than enough proof that that is NOT what TPTB actually wanted, as if the PPACA wasn’t proof enough.

          I wouldn’t be surprised if the fraud, waste, and abuse combined for the whole of the FED hits well over 75%. The military alone is probably well over 50%. Have you seen the photo of the USS Dewey pulling into Singapore yesterday? Or the Truman post collision? The rust on the sides makes you wonder how either of them is still afloat. I gather we’ve been going for eco-friendly paint. I’m sure it’s a) cheap to make but not to buy and b) many someones’ pocketses are getting lined.

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          1. I’m waiting for the “the debt has been wiped out, because of *fraud elimination, and we are still finding more fraud.” I also expect to discover any and all financial interactions with China are fraud, okay, maybe most.

            (* Fraud – actual fraud, and waste.)

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          2. Apparently, it is “too mean” to put men over the side of a warship on a hoist to chip and paint.

            I was Army. -I- think a rusty ship is obscene.

            I had a piece-of-(HONK!) Jeep, that hardly could be repaired anymore. I still kept it painted and looking functional.

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            1. You have to be in port to hang folks off the side to chip and paint, or at least in an extremely calm area. There were deaths when idiots with shiny pins decided that risk didn’t matter as much as appearances, so now there’s all sorts of rules to try to keep the psychopaths from killing people off.

              Back when I was in Japan, nearly 20 years ago, we were years late for our drydock. That’s where they repair the holes in the bottom of the ship. One of the inspections found one the size of a volkswagon. That’s before we had a door fall off the hangar bay.
              Thanks for the peace dividend, Clinton! And thanks for raising recruiting standards, guys, we’re sooooo much safer now that you can’t get a GED in boot camp.

              Change the paint to one that doesn’t stay on as well, and have duty rotation where you’re not in port often enough that your available manpower can repaint it as frequently as is needed, and you can’t keep it looking nice.

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              1. They dont chip the sides underway? I have several Navy acquantainces who tell vivid stories of doing so underway. One liked that task becasue after volunteering for that a couple times, and doing it well, his LPO basicly left him off all shitty details. (on a destroyer, if recall correctly)

                Can totally see some disaster of “green” paint. NASA switched Shuttle external tank adhesives to some new green-approved stuff. Losing Columbia was the result. Also apparently woodpeckers liked it.

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                1. If I remember your age correctly, they’re probably not too long before the dick-fests that caused the deaths that caused the rules related to it to be changed.

                  Short version, “don’t be an idiot” got ignored.

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              2. My husband was stationed on the Simon Lake when it was in Scotland. A mutual friend who was also there has told a tale of paint chipping detail below the waterline inside the hull which involved getting through many, many layers of paint and going “Hmmm, why is there duct tape here?”, pulling the duct tape off, quickly slapping it back down as she realized it was what was holding the water outside the hull, and quickly calling the appropriate repair guys to do the appropriate long term fix. She said that given the number of layers of paint she had removed before she had found the tape she figured that that bit of EB green and the paint had kept the tender afloat through quite a few Atlantic crossings. You wouldn’t have seen that story with modern paint or duct tape.

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                2. My brother tells a similar story with duct tape on his submarine. The duct tape was depth tested to 200 feet on that particular run. (Just a minor run from their home port, not a deployment.)

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                  1. Army repair stories often revolve around 100MPH tape, 550 cord, and/or a swiss army knife.

                    My swiss knife once got me a big bowl of ice cream from my brigade commander in the middle of the Mojave Desert in July. (grin)

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            2. There is the hull, superstructure, masts, deck, bulkheads, overheads, all have schedules to be met for chipping and painting. The thing you are talking about is a Boatswains chair, that’s what hangs over the side and the Boatswains-Mate sits in it while he is chipping paint or painting, underway not safe. Salt water is also a very mild acid, you put metal, especially metal made out of alloys and you get electrolysis, the metal literally breaks down or melts if you prefer. So ya, it’s a constant chip and paint cycle to fight corrosion, aided by the acid water the ship sales around in. The last time a ship was rust or corrosion free was never.
              “You can make em look pretty, or you can make em work, that’s it” a Deck Chief once told me.

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        2. 2 years NSSF New London/Groton Ct. I have actually done repair work on the Nautilus SSN 571, we used to call it the First and the Worst. One thing notable about the Nautilpig, the butt kits were square.

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    2. Looks like the Howard families got discovered!

      Just because I can remember banging a drum for General Washington, is no reason to fuss over my SSN…..

      (grin)

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    3. My guess would be that many of those are either a) programming issues or b) input errors, and aren’t really that old. Why they’re still on the books is another problem that needs resolution. And then there’s the issue of no SSN, or multiple recipients of the same SSN, which I can’t think of as anything but fraud.The MSM is trying to play it off as only 1% of distributed funds. But nearly $9 billion per year is quite a lot of money that needs to be accounted for. And that’s just the stuff they’ve acknowledged knowing about.

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      1. I found it interesting (in the sense of infuriating) that there seem to be 60 million more social security numbers than the census thinks the population level really is. (And that’s discounting the tendency of certain areas to get extra “people” on the chart.)

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        1. The Census is going to be revealed to be -highly- wrong, which impacts the foundation of Congress.

          We might have to wait for 2030 to fix it under the Constitution. SCOTUS probably wouldn’t go along with “correction” prior to a scheduled census, unless there was bipartisan supermajority agreement, which wont happen. We could see -massive- shifts of representatives shift to other states in 2030. The question isnt “are the numbers bogus” but “Just how massively far off is reality from reported?”

          And those corrections will be away from Donk states. Which is going to annoy some folks mightily.

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              1. When there’s a big financial incentive to lie, and very little if any way to verify, nor consequences, you can be guaranteed that someone, somewhere, is lying to you to get the money.

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              4. Seriously. I’m putting together a concept framework that involves a global shift, and in the process, some people disappear. But I also want it part of the concept that the world census numbers tank when people actually check—and it’s mostly because of fraudulent previous census checks.

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          3. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no rule that says Congress can’t do a new census and reapportionment more often than every ten years. The Constitution just requires that it be done at least every ten years. (They were almost certainly trying to avoid the rotten borough issue that was plaguing England, where MP apportionment hadn’t changed for centuries.)

            All I ask is that if they do reapportion, get rid of the cap of 435 members and go back to the constitutional construction of one member per so many citizens. Not this “every state gets one and then distribute the remaining 385 proportionately.” Multiples of the smallest population state (called the Wyoming Rule) would rather dramatically shift the House with 30 more new red state seats than new blue state seats. (57 new blue and 81 more red).

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            1. I don’t think we want this

              The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;

              Just using 300 million as the notional population, that would give us 10,000 representatives. The horde of Diogenes necessary to find even half that many ‘honest men’ would be quite impressive.

              We might be better off with 1 Representative per county (or equivalent), 3,244, but I bet places like New York City boroughs would complain.

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              1. The Wyoming Rule of one representative per multiple of the smallest state’s population seems like a good way to go back to the spirit of the House and yet keep it a workable size (574 after the 2020 census).

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        2. And some progressives on TwiX are at the, “It’s happening, and it’s a good thing,” stage regarding those SSNs – they’re contending these are ille- ah, undocumented migrants- forced, forced I tell you, to get fake SSNs so they can work. Those unheralded migrants are carrying the system on their backs because they are paying in to it while not receiving benefits. (This pronouncement generally ends with some variant of, ” so there, stupid.”)

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      2. Some may still be legit. In the earlier days of SS, a wallet manufacturer added a facsimile of a social security card to highlight their clear window card holders. A fair number of people started using the SS number on the card as their own.

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        2. I’m aware. And the poor women whose number it was had to get a new one. I thought I read a couple of decades ago that number was flagged as fraudulent and was supposed to be investigated any time it popped up.

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  3. When I saw the title, I thought our guest essayist was going to be speaking about the Social Security rolls. Surprise.

    Elon Musk said that all those people above 150 years old on the rolls should either be dead or very famous. He later appended that Stephenie Meyer might be right about the vampires living among us. Mr. O.O. seems to have found a fourth possibility, and I should have seen it coming. But that’s proving true for a whole lot of stuff these days.

    Republica restituendae.

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    1. “There can be only one!”

      “No. Join the Committee to Prevent the Gathering. We can all stick around.”

      “er…”

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    2. First, Be NOT OBVIOUS. Workaday is “invisibility” and invisibility is your friend. The brilliant inventor or scientist? Almost certainly human. The ‘dull’ clerk that *just happens* to get your order RIGHT despite flubbing things? Well, might be… not exactly normal. But nod, smile, and go on. Even if, ESPECIALLY IF, you really do know.

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      1. The complete Federal Government is a Scandal, that is what they have really been hiding all these years, that is what they have really be doing all these years, not so much promoting communism,they let their nuts do that. No the real crime is stealing from the treasury and lining their own pockets. In truth all they have been doing is embezzling from the American People, you and me and our kids.

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        1. We are going to wind up with about 20% of the actual USA population not on the take, trying to figure out what to do with/to the 80% guilty.

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          1. 20% of the actual USA population not on the take, trying to figure out what to do with/to the 80% guilty.

            Like how, in our warm-body democracy, you keep the 80% from voting out the 20%.

            The Founders didn’t want a warm body democracy for obvious reasons.

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            1. …in our formerly warm-body democracy…

              We don’t even have that any more. Our elections are overturned by the ‘votes’ of dead and fictitious ‘voters’ and nobody ever seems to get to the bottom of it.

              At the rental house I recently sold (to my great relief) the tenants were getting fraud-by-mail ballots for people who moved out years before, and others that had never lived there at all.

              Just had a thought — maybe some of those ‘NGOs’ that have been getting USAID money go through the public records of rental properties and give the addresses to illegal aliens to put on their drivers licenses? Because giving illegal aliens drivers licenses will make them better drivers, don’tcha know. Registering them to vote is just one of those little side effects. ‘If it saves one life!!‘

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              1. “rental house I recently sold (to my great relief)”

                Raises hand. We know that one! I swear rental houses are like boats. Two times owners are happy with them: “When bought.” “When sold.”

                Full disclosure. Our rental was our first home that in mid-’80s was not going to sell. Not when our home was a $68k, ’60s split level (very large lot, so that going for it). Much newer, mid-’70s homes, built down both sides of the canyon were small lot, split level $300k+, homes, selling for $100k. We couldn’t afford to sell for less than what we paid for it. We sold it for what we had into it plus all costs, in ’89. On paper, because renting it, we made money (despite the fight with the IRS on *depreciation schedule, which we “won”, technically).

                (*) Apparently the, our-accountant-could-not-find-the-rule and the IRS-would-not-supply-the-written-rule regulations so accountant could see it, rule is for a home converted to a rental is take the mortgage minus number of years lived in the house, that is the depreciation years basis. So, 30 – 6 (bought in ’80, rental late ’85) = 24 (right?) We were using 22 (yes we pulled it out of the air, for a ’60s built house). Oh, it gets better. If we’d had a 15 year mortgage, 9 years was (apparently) NOT a “reasonable” depreciation basis (go figure). My mathematician husband might have dug in his heals. How we “won”, is we had a final hearing with the IRS replacement agent (thank you Defazio’s office), I walked in with a 4 week old infant, gave her the paperwork stack, and summary. Stated IRS had two choices, 1) We’d agree to refile, without penalty or interest, for the last 4 tax years, or 2) BTW the house sold, we’ll be doing all the recapturing this year anyway, give us the 22 years as reasonable. Walked away from the meeting with the IRS owing us money (hey, if you are getting audited anyway, why not add deductibles you missed but didn’t want to file an amended returns to avoid audit possibility increase?) Also if going into an IRS meeting, take in with you small children or an infant. Agent couldn’t get me out of there fast enough (OTOH YMMV. Could have been both a newborn AND Defazio’s office influence that made the new agent so reasonable.)

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  4. Atomic Robo handled that surprising well. The titular character is a sentient robot made by Nikola Tesla in the 1920’s who is still out and about, running a bit of a research / weird science business in the present day.

    There’s this expectation everyone has with the character that he is a sort of tech bro, and he has a certain amount of that, except past the exterior facing, he’s more like someone’s crazy grandpa. And in the story, all the people he’s known who are gone is starting to weigh heavily on him.

    As he comments, he can do a great Benny Hill impression, and nobody knows what that is anymore.

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    2. Atomic Robo is a fun read. Link for those curious. Similar setup to Hellboy, but with fun pulp sci-fi adventures instead of brooding dark fantasy/horror. And the writer did 8-Bit Theater, back in the day.

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  6. I expect to lose (great) grand parents and older friends. It’s when people my age started dying that it was shocking. The first person from my graduating class (~500) died a month after graduation when he rolled his jeep on the highway while drunk. (Stupidity. Though my aunt and uncle’s school in small town ND had a string of three consecutive years of someone in graduating class getting killed the night before graduation – 2 DUI crashes and an accidental shooting that was alcohol related.) Then we had 3 more (that I know of) die before our 10 year reunion. In all, there have been 7 (that I know of) people diagnosed with Leukemia from our class before turning 50 (at least 2 of them died), which seems kinda high to me. Those are the ones that I am shocked by.

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  7. And there’s the problem of your fellow immortals.

    That annoying SOB is still around after thousands of years and you can’t avoid him for long.

    And yes, he’s as hard to kill as you are.

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      1. “How does one know if he’s truly immortal before the end of time”?

        And there’s the difference between great longevity and “unable to die”.

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  8. As it happens, my NEW BOOK (plug plug plug!!!) deals with exactly this problem, among other things.

    What’s important to an immortal?

    Money? Fame? Power? Possessions? Places? Pride? Her nation? Her gods? Teh Enviiiironment? Delta smelt?

    With ten thousand years of history behind our heroine, what does she care a single damn about?

    The answer may surprise some. >:D

    Said book is Angels Incorporated by Edward Thomas, available at Amazon. If you click through from Sarah’s site I think she gets a commish. If you can’t find it you can go to my blog and click the pictures from there. http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/

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  9. In my line of work there have been many great new ideas and most of them have failed miserably … not really becasue they are bad ideas but becasue the end users won’t accept such a large paridigm shift … what I call “being too far outside the box” …

    first off you have to understand what the current “box” is … the concepts, features, workflows that are currently inside the box …

    then you can start “thinking outside the box” and come up with changes that are not WAY outside the current box …

    those are the ideas that gain traction and eventually change the borders of the box …

    so when you come up with a great idea you have to see how far outside the box it is and judge if its too far …

    in that case you try a figure out the incremental changes starting just outside the box that can lead to the big idea you had …

    I worked on one of the first electronic trading systems … at the time if you wanted to enter a stock trade into an exchange or broker you needed to make a call or at best type you order into their proprietary system … think NYSE or Instinet …

    we wanted to deliver a system that followed the old pattern of entering your bid or offer into our proprietary system (a system users already had on their desk for other reasons) …

    of course in a stock market system until you reach a critical mass of users entering enough bids or offers into the system nobody pays much attention to it …

    I was at a Options trading company trying to sell our system/terminals to them and the head trader took us into his “trading room” … there was 12 computers and 12 Instinet terminals, no people … they had managed to figure out a way to allow their computers to “enter” orders via keystrokes into the Instinet terminals … (they would have hundreds of stocks they needed to enter bids and offers against and adjust those all day long) … Instinet refused to allow they to just send their orders to Instinet via an electronic message and they had actually reduced the number of Instinet terminals they allowed them to use …

    The head trader said if you let me send you orders electronically I’d be happy to lease a few of your terminals …

    Now the idea of electronic orders was not exactly new … people had been able to send order from the buyside to the sellside via a messaging protocal called FIX … but not directly to an execution platform like an exchange or an electronic trading network … (this was in 1996)

    My manager didn’t like the idea … he wanted to lease more terminals and a few at this firm wasn’t a big deal … but once we made it clear to him that the bottleneck we faced selling ANY terminals was the lack of bids and offers on our system he understood that this one firm could bring a ton of bids and offers into our system (the volume on each ticker wasn’t big but it didn’t need to be, they worked hundreds of tickers) and it was those bids and offers which would encourage the OTHER users with our terminals to also enter bids and offers and book trades… (the more players the more chance that actual trades would occur)

    So in 1996 Bloomberg tradebook allowed firms to send us orders electronically and soon it took off … Instinet soon reversed its prior ban and also allowed electronic orders …

    The old idea of picking up a phone and calling your broker to book a stock trade was replaced by entering orders electronically … and this applied to regular folks as well as the institutional clients I worked with … Sellside “brokers” taking phone calls for orders went the way of the buggywhip …

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  11. Here is the problem.

    I have LDS relatives who have painstakingly researched my relatives going back hundreds of years. Everything, or nearly everything.

    But there’s one problem.

    One glitch.

    None of the houses my people lived in before I was born still exist, unless they were living in them after I was born.

    None.

    Sure, there are headstones, birth/death/wedding certificates, census records, enlistment records,and that sort of thing. But literally every house my family lived in before 1958 is gone. No trace. No photos. Not even of the barracks my relatives lived in while serving in the US military.

    This has bothered me a little, like the sound of a mosquito the buzzes past your ear once and is never seen, never bites.

    I’d say I was just another nut; but as I mentioned, LDS researchers are pretty thorough.

    Has someone already written this story in a science fiction novel or anthology?

    Thanks!

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    2. Just checked google maps of places I lived as a child. Someone erased the old house and the adjacent properties. Just grass, and some trees I remember. Like it never was. Creepy.

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    3. The mosquito thing is easy, if the story I was told as a kid while visiting mosquitos-stole-my-hubcaps country in the midwest was true:

      That buzz is the male mosquito trying to pick up girls. The female mosquito wing beat frequency is higher enough adult humans can’t readily hear their buzz.

      And male adult mosquitos don’t bite, while female mosquitos need that blood to make eggs.

      So if you hear a mosquito buzz past your ear, don’t worry.

      But if you don’t hear anything…

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  12. One of the big things about longevity in your characters is why?

    In The Last Solist series, the reason why the Dawn Empire invested so much in biological longevity and the mental modifications to survive centuries of life?

    Fighting spirit.

    The Dawn Empire’s combat mages have one of the most dangerous jobs possible-close quarters combat against monsters and demons and rogue mages and the things that go bump in the night. And no matter how much genetic engineering you engage in, how much training and preparation you perform…you can’t buy fighting spirit. You can’t buy the mental core that gives you the ability to go in and face monsters, to not falter and not hesitate. To only retreat on a tactical or operational level.

    And even with the augmentations, even with their Regalia, even with training, even with the support of Companions that are like blood…it costs. It costs in wounds that must heal, time that will steal away anyone outside of a Dawn Empire mage’s Companions and Servants, wealth and chances and places…

    But that fighting spirit is essential. Not fools or bullies or berserkers. Fighters who can think, can reason, and can fight without hesitation or irrational fear.

    And it is so rare that every piece of it has to be preserved and spent like a miser.

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  13. Pingback: The Longevity Problem | The Elegant Ungulate

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