[ WP ] You 're an immortal human who has been jumping from galaxy to galaxy looking for a way to die , but for the first time in 1.985 quadrillion years , you encounter something that makes you want to live .

The woman wandered through the ruins of a dead city. She had a number of names, words from languages so dead even their derivatives were dead, words in more contemporary tongues—or whistles, or *snects* depending on the physiology of the speaker—and words that may well have just been made up specifically to describe her. 
 
 The children of humanity, the ones with civilizations that went far back enough to remember Earth, the *first* Earth, sometimes called her *Grandmother* or *Ancestress* or *Honored Progenitor* in varying translations. She had made no contact with them for some time, and as she picked up occasional relics of the dead civilization, then discarded them, she debated finding them again. She was sure she had never borne life from her body, but had long since given up disputing the matter. It would be good to see what they had made from themselves. Maybe they had found an answer to her question. 
 
 Here, the people called her *Sapien* with no understanding of the word ’ s origins, simply because she asked. She was the last of her species, and after her first few regenerations, she no longer remembered a proper name. It was the best she had. 
 
 Of the major powers in her current galaxy, none looked like her anymore. These people, these primitives, had bred themselves to resemble her, to look almost like ancient humans, and she felt their loss more keenly than any she could still remember. 
 
 After ancient humankind seeded the galaxy with colonies, they became less and less what Sapien considered “ human. ” Still people, but alien. They spread further, to other galaxies, other dimensions. Sapien had long since lost track. They adapted their new worlds to suit them. More often, they adapted themselves to suit their new worlds. 
 
 Some changed through evolution, like the furred folk of a cold, mountainous planet. Some were self-modified, bearing virtually no similarity to the mankind of old. Earth itself was long gone, and so was New Earth, Terra Grande, and New New Earth. She couldn ’ t keep track of it anymore. One of her first deaths was when she tried to die with Terra Grande. It was Earth all over again, with the sun-blasted remains of a scorched little rock gradually being absorbed into the corona. She remembered the pain of that death, her body immolated, the denial of oblivion, the unwelcome awakening. Dying by fire was the worst, an agony that persisted. 
 
 Still, doing it that way lost her a hundred thousand years to the regeneration process, and then the agent of immortality woke her in the Ship, in some new place. It was time that passed quickly, rather than dragged slowly. Sapien thought her immortality as another person, as the *only* other person who could stay with her. Some imperceptible being who had been there all this time, who kept her from dying, who preserved her as a relic of the species that founded countless planets, that, so far, was the origin of at least half the life she found in the varying galaxies. 
 
 It was long past time that she destroy this body and regenerate a new one, and yet she put it off. Age was not the issue, it was memory. These ruins, they carried so much of her hope with them, and had failed. The people she had raised here from primitives, through the fumbling first steps of civilization, to the cusp of the space age, only to fail and fall upon one another. It had been the work of ages, a hundred thousand years, a drop in her time bucket but still more intense than the previous million, more involved, more real to her than any of her pre-regeneration memories. 
 
 She could obliterate herself for a time, and wake somewhere far away, and this emotional pain would be dulled by imperfect connections, by the inevitable forgetting, by time ’ s erosion. But she remained, ignoring any of a number of opportunities. Her children, or as close as she could get to having children, had killed one another, and it seemed disrespectful to leave them without some sort of tribute, without understanding their fall. 
 
 There had been some sort of closeness there. She wasn ’ t their god, she wasn ’ t their mother, she was their guide through the growing pains of civilization, and something had gone wrong. A generation or longer of wandering this planet, and she could find nothing to salvage, no one to save. Just the lesser life, the plants and animals that seemed familiar, but distinctly *off* in some indescribable way, just like the people here looked human, but for their slit nostrils, their jewel-bright hair colors, the pale spots that marked their spines and sides from armpit to hip. 
 
 They were differences, but not imperfections. Quirks she valued, that helped her keep an emotional distance from them as individuals. She could still love, like she had loved these people. It was the cruelest pain she had ever known, even worse than dying by fire. 
 
 After more years of wandering, Sapien found herself at the remains of the home she ’ d built for herself. Even here, she had managed to save no one, nothing except the ship, which really had probably saved itself. It stood on crumbling stone, too heavy for pavement, too massive for just one person, her silent partner in this endless life. 
 
 It was time to move on. She had no answers. There were none to find. Like many times before, she would pilot the ship into a star or galaxy ’ s core and end her suffering with unending pain, until her body regenerated. 
 
 The Ship ’ s systems gradually activated as she approached, the ramp lowering to greet her, lights glowing, as new as the day of her first trip, the one that had trapped her like this forever, the one that she still saw in nightmares every generation or so. That perpetually burnt-out light remained dark as she passed, it could be replaced but would *never* come on. The empty cargo bay, which was meant to carry supplies and usually carried nothing. The rows of empty stasis tubes that were supposed to be filled by others, in time, but had stood empty for the test flight, and so would always stand empty. 
 
 Except, as she traced her hands along the familiar surfaces, some tubes were occupied. Six of them, three opposite her own pod, three beside it. Sleeping faces, slit nostrils, topped with vibrant hair. 
 
 She looked back through the main pod hold, no others were occupied. That old curiosity stirred, wondering what had caused her to be trapped in this cycle of unending life, and now, what had caused these five to be trapped with her? She hated them instantly, raw envy clenching her fists. They wouldn ’ t be alone when they woke, they would have one another through the endless ages. 
 
 She loved them, just as quickly, because she wouldn ’ t be alone when they woke. 
 
 Their regeneration was incomplete; they must have died the first time at the end of their world. It would be decades before they woke. 
 
 Decades were nothing. 
 
 She could wait. 

