Remove these ads. Join the Worldbuilders Guild

Immortal Decay

When all you have is time...

Sometimes I wonder if he is telling the truth. Boris opens up so rarely. He looks on in the distance, lost in his thoughts.
"So you had a wife?" I ask.
He chuckles, his arms crossed with the sword across his chest, "I suppose so. I can't remember for sure."
"You suppose? Must not have left much of an impression, then," I say.
"Far from it," he began. "She was divine. She was my life. I only wish I could remember her name, much less her face."
"That must be hard on you," I reply.
"Oh," Boris begins, "tis difficult to be broken by a memory you do not have."
"Then why are you so sad all the time?" I ask.
He stands, sheathes the sword, and stuffs it into the back seat before we enter the car, "I didn't want to forget."
— From The Squire

The human brain is a fantastic innovation of nature. It is capable of gathering, retaining, sorting, and prioritizing massive amounts of information in seconds. It assists us in countless ways, but the brain has limits. It has a finite amount of memory, is easily tricked, and prone to failure and waste without the proper conditioning. This is doubly so for Quasi-immortals, beings who are only near impossible to kill. Immortality has its perks. They can withstand untold amounts of punishment, leave their fear of death at the door, and can give a unique perspective of history. Immortality has its drawbacks, however. Ask any of these pseudo immortals what the worst part of immortality is, and you'd be surprised at their answer. They don't talk about their friends and family moving on without them. They don't speak of the loneliness, either. When The Alexandrian University studied Quasi-immortals, they noticed the same answer across the board: they were remarkably forgetful.

Fun fact: Quasi-immortality

The term quasi-immortal is used to describe any individual who is hard to kill but not impossible to kill. This is often referred to as The Baldur Principal. There are rules that all forms of life must follow, and one such rule is the inevitability of death. The Baldur Principle states you cannot be immune to death. There must be at least one thing that can successfully kill you. Most quasi-immortals find there are many things that can successfully kill them. These things can be broad, like having your head cut off, or anything that can destroy the entire body. They can also be specific, like having your heart pierced with a wooden arrow, but the arrow must be made from a specific species of tree. Most quasi-Immortals have little knowledge of what can kill them. To determine what can kill them without actually dying, they turn to The University. In return for samples and cooperation in various studies, these beings gain insight into their anathema, and spend their lives avoiding it.

Symptoms and Causes

Immortal decay is the name given to a condition all Quasi-immortal beings suffer from at some stage of their life. As the years pass them by, their minds fill with decades to centuries worth of memories the human mind was not designed to retain. This leads to acute memory loss. The memory loss can affect anything the individual has retained. Skills learned and refined a century ago may disappear overnight. Someone may wake up and realize they can't remember what their parents looked like, some forgetting everything about their childhood all together. The worse this state of decay becomes, the more memories one stands to lose. The effects of immortal decay can lead one to too many forms of mental instability. Those who suffer from it are likely to gain manic depressive disorder (bipolar disorder) to some degree or another. Insufficient mental clarity, as well as their reaction to failure, leads to a constant tug-of-war between manic and depressive states in varying degrees of severity.

Treatment and prevention

Each of these individuals must consider the limits of their own body. Humans have not evolved to live for over a hundred fifty years. The truth is, once immortal decay has set in, memories that are lost cannot be regained. This means the effects cannot be reversed. There is no cure, or treatment, to the condition. As such, those who study quasi immortality focus their studies on prevention and mitigation. After many trials and experiments, these researchers developed many therapies designed to mitigate the effects of immortal decay. If the individual practices these therapies consistently and with discipline, some avoid immortal decay from happening in the first place. An example is a form of therapeutic meditation includes going through the mind once every two to three weeks in the first 500 years of life. The cycle of repetition gets shorter every century, though once a day tends to be as short as it needs to be successful. For more information see the sidebar

Memory Preservation: The Method of Loci

A common form of meditation used to preserve and prioritize certain memories over others emerged in the experiments designed to help mitigate immortal decay. This form of meditation involves the individual putting themselves in a comfortable, quiet environment. They then use the method of loci to store memory. They cycle through this storage of memory every time they practice the meditation until habit and repetition seal the memories in their mind. Cycling through these images and pieces of information tells the brain that these things are off limits when the brain needs to forget something to store something new. Those who practice this form of meditation routinely, regardless of their age, almost completely mitigate the effects of immortal decay. Some will still find themselves forgetful but their mind will remain intact, and they will not suffer from the effects of mental instability.

Remove these ads. Join the Worldbuilders Guild

Cover image: by Michael Dziedzic

Metadata

Article template

Condition

World

The Web

Comments

Please Login in order to comment!

Kendallonian

May 23, 2020 08:07

A very logical consequence of long life. I like how you play into the fact that most of our memories are just memories of memories that we've constructed along the way. Good thing an immortal has years to perfect his mind-palace technique! Also, that's probably why there's not a solid knights' templar faction: most knights in this world are probably just crazy immortal folks! Could be fun to try playing one though. So is there any way to gain immortality with a side benefit of expanded brain capacity? Could be nice. I've recently been watching youtube videos and aincent mythology, so I appreciate the bit about contradictory stories making up the mythology we know today.

Dylonishere123

May 23, 2020 18:12 by R. Dylon Elder

Oh absolutely! The brain is so easy to trick when it comes to memory. Yayyyy someone knows what mind palaces are! I love the method of foci and its actually a very useful tool for memory. I wanted to make a brotherhood of knights but didn't want to dip too far into cliche. I'm currently working on it ( the grail knights) and the story that delves into it. As far as whether an immortal can expand it, yes and no. The prestige helps alot. Morrigan, who is no where near old enough to feel immortal decay, uses it to expand memory capacity. The university is working on a memory storage solution involving what's basically a memory hard drive. Young gods ascending to godhood is the only case where becoming immortal adds in extended memory on its own. I'm glad I'm not the only one who watches those on YouTube in free time lol. I saw one on authurian legend and oof. inspired lol

BrokenJac

May 23, 2020 23:12 by Jacob Billings

Hia. As always, your writing is impeccable. I did, however, manage to come up with a few notes.

He chuckles, his arms crossed with the sword across his chest
— Opening Passage

This is somewhat vague. How one holds a sword across his chest is a strange question. I feel like your trying to make it sound like he had crossed his arms as someone who is upset or closed off may. However, you also give the image of someone protecting their possessions. I would specify a bit more with this as otherwise, you might leave a slightly weird image in the reader's head.

"tis difficult to be broken by a memory you do not have."
— Openning Passage

Small note, but I'm fairly certain that you need an apostrophe before tis because it's slang: 'tis difficult... "'tis difficult"

Ask any of these pseudo immortals what the worst part of immortality is, and you'd be surprised at their answer.
— Opening Information

I see why you did it but the use of second person is interesting. It's possible to reword(though optional from a grammatical perspective) as something like: "Many would be surprised by the answer that many of these pseudo immortals offer when asked what the worst part of immortality is."

An example is a form of therapeutic meditation includes going through the mind once every two to three weeks in the first 500 years of life.
— Treatment and Prevention

A slightly grammatical error here. You need some transition from the prepositional phrase to the main clause(between meditation and includes). It's a bit wonky at the moment. Adding a comma and "which" would probably solve the problem.

For more information see the sidebar
— Treatment and Prevention[/quote Two slight problems: 1. you don't have a period and 2. you should probably make this italicized or bold to represent that it's not actually part of the paragraph it's included in. [quote]A common form of meditation used to preserve and prioritize certain memories over others emerged in the experiments designed to help mitigate immortal decay.

There's no subject. Took me a moment to realize what was wrong, but this is the kind of sentence that would only ever be found in a dictionary as, in any other circumstance, you would have to actually state what you're defining: The Method of Loci is...

They then use the method of loci to store memory.
— The Method of Loci

The use of "memory" here seems wrong as it doesn't quite match the rest of the sentence. I would change it to "their memories" or something in that vein to fix the grammar. -- I liked the idea of both having consequences and a solution to the consequences of immortality. The mess-ups of Arthurian Legend was also an amusing extra bit of information.

BrokenJac

May 23, 2020 23:13 by Jacob Billings

(There's a slight typo in there. Hopefully, you can work around it :)

Dylonishere123

May 24, 2020 05:34 by R. Dylon Elder

YES! thank you so much for pointing these out. ill fix them shortly. I do dip into second person quite often in the The Web. i might rework it a bit cause it sounds off here though. thanks again! im glad you enjoyed it all. the arthurian bit is part of my next little project.

BrokenJac

May 24, 2020 05:40 by Jacob Billings

Great. I just wanted to make sure it was all intentional. A really great article. Exciting. I'll look out for it.

Incaseofgrace

May 24, 2020 22:07 by Grace Gittel Lewis

I like it! A cool drawback to extreme longevity, the tie in with history and inaccurate memories is nice, too!

Eternal Sage AmélieIS

May 31, 2021 10:24 by Amélie I. S. Debruyne

Great article! This is a super interesting consequences for immortality, and also something very logical. I also love that you've included the falsely reconstructed memories :D And yes, as someone working in neuroscience, revisiting a memory makes the synaptic connection stronger, while not doing so will weaken them over time until they just disappear, so that's a good way to make sure not to forget. Though that means that memories and brain functions that are used in every day life would not be at risk of randomly disappear. The risk would be more with things people take for granted but that because of that they may not think in great details every day, such as childhood memories (that's what happens for us after all).

To see what I am up to: my World Ember 2025.

Dylonishere123

May 31, 2021 19:33 by R. Dylon Elder

Ooo thank you once again, and some awesomenpraise to boot! I'm glad you enjoyed it.