Chapter 10

Today is my 550th birthday. I am immortal but not a vampire. I could still die if I am killed somehow. But I won't die of a natural death.

The magic of human immortality came about with the discovery of the immortal jellyfish. Cell regeneration through transdifferentiation finally did it.

The concept of human immortality was explored in many cultural productions including the movie "Jupiter Ascending". It's a movie I have watched countless times.

Human immortality rendered childbirth meaningless. Those few who still stick to the sentimental value of having a bloodline legacy migrate to Mars which has also been terraformed. But only relatively few people migrate to the Red Planet, our Earth's habitable neighbor, as also reflected by my own reservations.

Why I chose to live on the Moon is because I need to easily visit my family and my boyfriend who chose to stay on Earth. And to be brutally honest, it didn't appeal to me to settle on Mars due to the 9-month journey that takes to travel to Mars which is 225 million kilometers away from Earth. In fact, the distance can be greater or less than that depending on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits around our star, the Sun. And while a one-way trip to Mars would take about nine months, if I wanted to make it a round-trip, all in all, it would take about 21 months as I will need to wait about three months on Mars to make sure Earth and Mars are in a suitable location to make the trip back to Earth. So Mars is the choice for only those who want to permanently migrate and settle on the Red Planet and never return to Earth taking all these troubles into consideration.

Some of my friends say that I live in the past. That's true. I live in the past, in my youth, if it could be called that due to my immortality. I still fondly cherish all the memorable moments of my younger days. This may explain why I still perceive that Coldplay's "X&Y" is the greatest album ever made. And this may also explain why I am so out of touch with the linguistics of Gen Z and Gen Alpha - the generations that were born after me. Maybe I will undertake an online course to study Gen Z speak and Gen Alpha speak. Otherwise I may have to live the rest of my days as a dinosaur which has completely lost touch with my contemporary times.

Strangely enough, even the late blooms of the 21st century have not completely transformed in at least the cultural aspect of semiotics. Proof: as society progressed into the 21st century, attention shifted from Gen Z—individuals born roughly between 1997 and 2012—to Gen Alpha, the group starting from 2010 onward. These generations are distinct, each shaped by the technological, societal, and global contexts of their upbringing. In that sense, I can still afford to be a dinosaur that can adapt to the society of the year 2500 AD.