Rating: Mature (Adult Themes)
Classification: Short Story
Summary: What would it be like to live forever?
Disclaimer: The characters Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are the property of Chris Carter, FOX and 1013 Productions. No copyright infringement intended. This is for fun, not profit.
Author's Notes: Special thanks to xdksfan.
“I would recognize you in total darkness, were you mute and I deaf. I would recognize you in another lifetime entirely, in different bodies, different times. And I would love you in all of this, until the very last star in the sky burnt out into oblivion.”
-- Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
HEADING: JADES-GS-z14-0
(33.6 BILLION LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH)
The universe is vast, perhaps infinite, and time eternal, as far as anyone knows. Dana Katherine Scully is well on her way to finding out.
Her ship, the Syracusia, lumbers through another unmapped solar system, its engines pulsing, its speed dropping to 60,000 kilometers per hour so that Scully can chart the planets’ idiosyncrasies, look for life forms, add to her extensive knowledge database. If nothing else, the endeavor keeps her from dying of boredom.
“Not that I can die,” she mutters to herself.
It appears the prognosticator, Clyde Bruckman, was right.
LiDAR collects digital elevation data of a nearby celestial body, a Chthonian planet, while sensors record the kaleidoscopic hues of a gaseous cloud in a distant nebula. Holography allows Scully a 3-D perspective of mitosis on the stage of her virtual microscope. Telophase to cytokinesis, one cell splits into two identical halves, a miracle as ancient as the first multi-celled terrestrial organism.
The boon of time doesn’t tempt Scully to slow down. Inertia runs contrary to her nature. Ever the scientist, she conducts experiments, makes observations, writes reports. To learn, to fill time, to stay sane.
Her grip on sanity first began to slip in the middle of the 21st Century, when Mulder grew old and she didn’t. An inevitable panic set in as his hair silvered and sarcopenia took hold.
“What will I do when you’re gone, Fox?” There was no hiding her desperation, not even to spare him. She stroked his lined cheek.
“You’re strong, Scully…the strongest person I know.”
No one is strong enough for this, she thought but didn’t say.
There were several possible explanations for her immortality. Alfred Fellig may have traded his eternal life for her death (though honestly, this seemed the least likely), the chip in her neck, the ship in Africa, the virus and/or the vaccine she’d been exposed to. Or perhaps it was something else altogether, as yet undiscovered. Only one theory could be easily tested: the chip. Ever the scientist, she removed it. What did she have to lose?
Nothing, as it turned out. She didn’t die. Didn’t even get sick.
As Mulder’s time wound down, she asked, “Can soulmates reunite if one of them never dies, is never reborn?”
“Scully, since when do you believe in reincarnation?” He thumbed a tear from her cheek, his fingers arthritic, his skin mottled by time. “You’ve come a long way.”
She shrugged, her need to believe driven by apprehension, not a desire for fact-based truths. “I don’t want to say goodbye. I can’t.”
“You’ll find a way for us to be together again. I know you will. Open yourself to extreme possibilities.” It was an age-old request. “Find a way…for the both of us.”
She threw herself into the task but it wasn’t a mystery so easily solved.
After his death, Mulder loomed across her conscience like elongated shadows at the end of a sun-kissed day. Her life became endless minutes of missing him. Never again would she feel the skate of his fingers across her lower back, the rasp of his late-day whiskers against her cheek, or the warm slide of his breath into her ear when he leaned close to whisper a notion intended only for her. No longer would she smell the brume of his scent when his antiperspirant gave up the ghost at the end of a long case. Or touch the pliant fullness of his lower lip. Or taste the ocean’s brine in the hollow of his suprasternal notch while making love. She pined for his strength and purpose and passion, ached for his insistence on the truth, on trust, on steadfast loyalty. His fidgeting, his calm, his demands, his accord, his refusal to surrender to anything or anyone except to her, only her. She longed for the profound relief of hearing his voice husk late in the night though the earpiece of her phone, Hey, it’s me.
Early in her travels (early being a relative term), but long after Mulder passed away, despondency set in. God’s stubborn silence gave rise to a deep-dyed hopelessness. Neglected by her Maker and with no one to buoy her spirits, she sought relief through suicide. But like Fellig, her attempts failed. Her body healed. External scars faded quickly (razor lines, bullet holes, ligature marks, the tattered membranes in her throat and stomach from caustic cocktails). Would she vaporize if she stepped through the airlock into outer space? Or would her molecules simply reunite, leaving her floating aimlessly in the void, no way to steer a course, nothing to do but watch and wait and think.
Attempting suicide wasn’t the worst thing she’d tried in her effort to assuage her loneliness. The worst? It shames her to admit it, even to herself. But desperation is a selfish beast, more frightening than any of the monsters she and Mulder ever chased.
Here is the terrible truth. Scully attempted IVF to become pregnant. She succeeded. Three times.
No, Scully, don't, she thought she heard Mulder beg each time she experimented with her ova and his salvaged DNA, petri dishes and pipettes and test tubes.
You’re not here! she railed back. I don’t know what else to do!
The children brought her unbridled joy at first. Their small warm bodies, feather-soft hair, milky scent. She saw Mulder in their eyes. Heard him in their laughter. They were bright and curious and spirited. But Scully’s joy soon gave way to grief. She hadn’t truly thought things through. One by one, she watched her lively, beloved children grow old and die, while she lived on and on and on. Happiness turned to regret in one breath, it seemed. All too soon, they were gone. Her two whip-smart daughters, Astraea and Bia, and her sweet boy Eros, last born but first to go. All three have become nothing but memories and interstellar dust. Their atoms free-float through the cosmos.
Rash. Cruel. Selfish, she chastises herself. She should never have burdened them with this life of isolation, born only to ease her own heartache, never able to find their own soulmates, their perfect others. Guilt-ridden, she shut down her experiments and resigned herself to her fate.
How many tears can one woman cry? Scully knows. Rivers. Oceans. More than the number of stars in an infinite sky.
It’s strange how the human heart can break over and over again and yet keep on beating. It’s impossible to harden oneself against it. At least, Scully hasn’t discovered a way.
But with each new millennium, hidden mysteries are revealed. From Scully’s current locus, the heavens sparkle as brightly as Mulder’s eyes whenever unidentified lights danced in the night sky, when theories spilled from his lips like a shower of meteors, when his fingers stuttered over her lunar skin, white-hot, causing a supernova low in her belly.
You know, most people want to live forever, she once told the photographer who chased Death.
Most people are idiots, Fellig had replied.
I think you're wrong, she insisted, bold in her belief. How can you have too much life? There's too much to learn, to experience.
Well. We all know the tragedy of hubris.
An estimated 100 billion galaxies are observable from Earth. Were observable, Scully corrects. The Milky Way is ages behind her now. Earth’s sun burned out millennia ago. In the history of the universe, the life of her home world was but the blink of an eye. And Scully’s life? She tries not to imagine what will happen when all the stars have gone dark and she lives on like the Cimmerians in a tenebrous, perpetual mist. When only she remains, somehow still alive. Alone forever.
“Loneliness is a choice,” she once said, and actually believed it at the time. She no longer recalls the name of the writer who lived next door to Mulder, whose imaginings nearly ripped out her heart. But she remembers her proclamation, spoken bravely, like she didn’t have anything to learn about lost love.
She’d been profoundly naive. A fool.
“Why me?” she begged God, trying to make sense of her situation.
God remained mute on the subject. The idea of an afterlife in Heaven fizzled. Scully would not be reuniting with her long lost family, her children, Mulder. Their souls might live on in starlight, if she were to believe Mulder’s theories about Walk Ins, but she cannot see them there, although she is surrounded by the light of two-hundred million-billion stars and has never stopped searching.
Back when she and Mulder first became FBI partners, the Earth’s Sun burned with the brightness of 3.8X10 to the 27th candles. These days, the number of candles on Scully’s metaphorical birthday cake could probably rival the luminosity of a small star. Her life has been hellishly long with no end in sight. And although today is her birthday, there will be no cake, no candles. She has made a wish, however, and there will be a gift. Thanks in large part to the Cnidaria, a kindly race of sentient beings she encountered while passing through their star system way back when.
According to their long history, the Cnidaria took to space when their planet became uninhabitable. They continued to evolve in weightlessness and, without gravity, they eventually lost their internal skeletons. Use it or lose it, Scully thinks, even as she abhors scientific shorthand. Transfigured over countless generations, the Cnidaria eventually grew pliable and translucent, a bit like tentacled jellyfish. They now ambulate like hot air balloons through the Syracusia, restricted to the antigrav sections of the ship, unable to enter Scully’s personal spaces. She must meet them on their terms as they cannot adapt to hers.
“How much longer?” she asks Cnidaria 46. “Soon?”
C46 bobs its bulbous head in the affirmative. Having no vocal chords, Cnidaria communicate with elegant body movements and use pulses of fluid to create high-pitched beeps and breedles. Scully requires a translator to communicate with them as she can’t replicate their sounds and they can’t imitate hers.
She feels an inexplicable affection for C46. Its innards sparkle like a toy wand she’d owned as a child, amaranthine glitter floating through its oily center with every lift and wave. She has no reason to connect this light show with the creature’s emotional state, and yet she finds it uplifting at a time when she finds almost nothing uplifting.
The Cnidaria are the friendliest alien race she’s met in all of space and she’s met dozens. Hundreds. Mulder would be enthralled by the variety and sheer number. The indulgent Cnidaria treat her like an adored pet, always willing to help her in any way they can. To that end, after much consideration, she engaged them to help her recreate Mulder. Part machine, part human clone, his memories stored digitally eons ago.
“There is one way we won’t have to say goodbye,” he’d said as death tiptoed closer.
“If you’re suggesting you’ll come back as a ghost to haunt me, don’t.”
“I’m thinking something less paranormal and more science-based.”
“I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
Science is her wheelhouse. But choices were limited in the beginning. The best she could do was collect and freeze his DNA and upload his consciousness to an alternate reality, a simulation similar to the one Langly warned them against. It was Mulder’s mind she’d always loved most. If she could save that….
She made arrangements, contacted less than honorable people, negotiated deals. The salient features of his biological brain were collected and preserved, made imperishable in a digital environment, with the hope that one day she could implant his intellect into a body created with as-yet-undiscovered advancements in bioengineering.
For the longest time, he was trapped inside the simulation, alone and unable to reach out and communicate with her. She hated to think of him there, waiting for a release that may never come. She imagined it was similar to being buried alive, something he’d already experienced firsthand. She was desperate to find a way to connect with him. And eventually, she succeeded, via computer. Audio only. It seemed a godsend at first, she’d missed him so much. But it wasn’t long before he pushed for more.
“I want to see you, Scully. Touch you.”
“I want that, too.”
“See what you can do.”
The first facsimiles she managed to create were clumsy and unnatural. His body more machine than human, its components fragile and short-lived.
He didn’t object. Quite the opposite.
“Touch yourself,” he said, his AI voice not quite synched to his facial movements. But it sounded startlingly like him if she closed her eyes.
“Mulder, no.”
“Mulder, yes.” He cleared his throat. An affectation since he possessed no vocal chords. “Do it for me, Scully. It makes me happy to make you happy.”
Happiness was so far in her rearview mirror, she doubted she’d recognize it anymore. But she did as he asked and let his voice lead her to ecstasy.
“Next time you recreate me, Scully, give me fingers that vibrate.” His cheek was chilly and too smooth against her neck, but it plumped when he smiled his robot grin. He had no lungs, so his words didn’t puff warmly against her bare skin.
“Why? You wouldn’t be able to feel it, Mulder.”
“No, but you would.” His eyes shone like glass marbles and his lids clicked when he blinked.
Later on, she admitted to him in a hushed tone, her words steeped in grief, “I’m sorry about the children.” Her throat closed. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart cracked open like a fault line in the Earth’s crust as tectonic plates shifted and strained.
He drew her to him and held her while she wept. “Tell me about them,” he encouraged when her cries dwindled to a few shuddering hiccups.
She did and her heart began to mend.
Later still, he asked, “Where are we headed?”
They stood on the observation deck and peered out at the stars.
“JADES-GS-z14-0.”
“The most distant galaxy visible from Earth.” His arm curved around her shoulders, unnaturally rigid and heavy. “And then?”
“Keep going? Turn around? Stop?”
“Get out of the damn car? Settle down and live something approaching a normal life?” he teased.
She smiled, reminded of their youth. To think, she’d felt dissatisfied in those days, when now she’d give anything to be back there with him, driving highways and back roads for hundreds if not thousands of miles, tucked into a fusty rental while they debated the existence of invisible elephants and mothmen and prehistoric throwbacks like Big Blue.
“This is my normal life now,” she said and leaned into him.
When his manufactured body eventually faltered, which it always did, she schemed to resurrect him anew, making improvements each time.
They said goodbye over and over.
They said hello time and again. They made new memories together.
As luck would have it, the Cnidaria turned out to be skilled bioengineers and with their help, this latest version of Mulder promises to be the best yet. As a race, Cnidaria are asexual, so don’t require the fusion of gametes from two individuals to reproduce. They don’t experience pair bonding. Nor do they produce oxytocin, vasopressin, or dopamine. But they do understand the importance of these things to Scully, so they included them in their design plans.
It’s been a long haul and Scully has wrestled with her conscience often enough. But each iteration of Mulder encouraged her to keep at it. His memories and thoughts are his own, intact from the original, as well as shaped by his extended age and experience, just like any living being’s would be.
The wait is interminable this time and Scully is overeager. She has always worn patience like the boxy, ill-fitted suits of her early years at the Bureau. Throughout her life, she’s yearned to leap ahead: to shoot better than her brothers, to distinguish herself at the FBI, to prove to Mulder that science holds all the answers.
Science does hold the answer this time. He is her proof.
He awakens groggy. Takes in his surroundings. Sits up stiffly on the propagation platform and swings his legs to the floor. Inchmeal, his attention turns to her. His movements are smooth and natural when he stands and reaches out. His arms wrap around her and she luxuriates in his embrace, even as her heart pounds with emotion. His hold on her is both tender and tenacious. The Cnidaria float from the room, sparkling and beeping, leaving them on their own.
“Hey, it’s me,” his voice purls, his chin resting on the crown of her head.
The familiar words bring tears to her eyes.
“Finally,” she sighs.
“Miss me?”
“You have no idea.”
“Oh, I think I do.”
His palms paint her back. His lips tantalize her ear. He draws back but quickly returns.
“Scully, I can feel you!” he exhales, his awe obvious.
“Mm. The Cnidaria placed an extra array of receptors beneath your epidermis, to augment the natural network of nerves in your cloned skin.”
“I can smell you, too.” He leans in and inhales deeply before kissing her full on the lips. She opens her mouth to him and his tongue sweeps in. When he withdraws and exhales, the bloomery of his lungs heats her cheeks. “And I can taste you,” he whispers, delighted. His olive eyes gleam, a reaction to both the light and his elation. These are human eyes, created with his own DNA. He is a mix of machine and the man he once was. “I think I should take my new tongue for a test drive. Here.” He dips his fingers between her legs and prods her there, a gentle stroke that ripens to a searing brand.
They begin like first-time lovers. Tentative and reverential. Wonderstruck. Her heart fills to bursting. Her loneliness dissipates. She has him back and it’s all that matters. It’s all that ever mattered. Their passion builds until they explode like a solar flare and burn as luminous as a gamma-ray burst. They are a tempest. A Heart Nebula.
After they make love, they rest naked on the bed in her quarters. She catches her breath. His sweat glistens.
“Happy birthday, Scully,” he murmurs.
“In a way, it’s your birthday, too, Mulder.”
“Yes. Thank you for my new birthday suit, by the way. Best one I’ve had in a while.” He rubs one hand over his bare chest, ruffling the hair there. He closes and opens his other fist before linking his pinky with hers.
She marvels at the fever in his touch. The whorls of his fingertips tickle her lifeline. His pulse taps a steady rhythm against her palm. His outer body is nearly indistinguishable from the one he inhabited before he began to weaken with age. He’s vibrant again. She feels as excited as the day they first met.
He nudges his nose into her hair. “I knew you’d find a way for us to be together, Scully.” His faith in her was always absolute.
What about love? she recalls asking Fellig all those millennia ago.
Love lasts... 75 years, if you're lucky, he’d said.
Her heart hums. If you’re lucky, she’s learned, love can outlast all time.
THE END
(Posted April 4, 2025)
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