For a long long time, life could only be written by living. That is no longer the only way.
My great-great-granddaughter was born last spring, and she may never grow old.
Not that she will not die. Nobody can promise that yet. But the long slow ruin the rest of us were handed, the part where the body stops keeping itself up and quietly comes apart, she will just skip. I will not. I have already lived a long way past the span anyone used to get, and I have a few years left even of that. Only a few. I have spent more of them than I would admit doing a small ugly sum, the arithmetic of exactly how narrowly I missed the rest.
For almost the whole history of life there was a single way to make a living thing, and that was to live. Something copied itself, the copy came out a little wrong, and every so often the wrong was an improvement that got to copy itself in turn. No hurry of any kind. Everything that has ever drawn breath came out of that. Each one was a rough draft, used and thrown out the moment it had pulled the next draft from itself. My ancestors. Me, shortly. Drafts, all of us.
What my generation did, was learn to read that work closely enough to see the rules underneath it, all of them. When you know the rules, you can write a line that was never written. So we wrote. We no longer waited to find out. We made a thing and knew straight out whether it worked without it ever having to live a single day for us to know.
It’s fun how things evolved, if you start thinking about it. Something made cells. The cells, given a few billion years, made us. We made machines that could read. We handed those machines everything life had ever written. We gave them what life could or couldn’t have written. Then they began to write it themselves. The line that had only ever run one way bent back and took its own tail in its mouth. I was near enough to that to have helped, I saw early on where this was going. What I had was belief, but it all happened very quickly.
The first of the old rules we broke is the one that is killing me. The body was built to last just long enough to pass itself on and then to fail on time, because the old way had no stake in the body, only in the line it carried. Read why a body fails, one patient fault after another, and write the repairs in, and old age turns into a list of faults, and faults get worked on. My descendants will come down on the right side of that. I miss it by about a decade, and I will not pretend the decade sits easy with me. Some mornings it does. Most mornings I do the sum again.
The next was a rule about reach. The old way could only arrive somewhere on foot, and every footing on the route had to be a thing that could live, so any cure you could get to only by stepping through something that could not survive stayed out of reach for good. Most of what has ever killed us was sitting out there. We do not have to make the walk anymore. We set the destination down directly. A cancer taken apart inside the first cell it appears in. An inherited cruelty lifted out of a family by fixing the one mistyped line it had ridden down the generations. None of it was ever necessary. It only sat where nothing alive could reach, and now we reach it.
Then it stops being only about us, and only about here. As far as we still know, life never wrote for anywhere but this single address, this air and water and gravity and light, because those were the terms of survival and there were no others on offer. Write for conditions instead of waiting to survive them, and you can write for conditions that exist nowhere on this planet. Plants that pull from the air what we now tear up the ground to feed them. Things grown to eat what we have spilled and cannot take back, the plastic, the carbon, and to leave plain soil behind. And in time, where the old way could never have sent so much as one cell, a living thing set down on a dead world and made to take hold there, fed on the very stuff that would kill the rest of us.
The deepest rule is the oldest one: all that lives is family. The same alphabet runs through a man and a giant sequoia, because they both trace back to one beginning, one time. The kinship of living things is only the fact that life started and then copied itself. Work from the rules instead of the lineage and you no longer need that one beginning. You can start life again, in a different alphabet entirely, sharing nothing with the one every living thing has carried since the start, in something that could not breed with anything that has ever lived, kin to nothing on Earth, ours alone because we made it. Life was a single tree from the beginning. Now it is becoming a garden, and some of what grows in it we will have planted ourselves.
And the last one I can see goes further than I can follow. We are not limited to writing life now. We have begun to edit the thing that wrote it. The blind groping search that shoved itself forward one surviving step at a time for the whole age of the planet, we can aim it now, and hurry it, and point it at a target it would have needed ten million years of luck to stumble into, or would never have found at all. We can change how fast life changes, and in which direction, and the rules by which it passes itself down. The thing that made us has become one more thing we revise.
I am one of the last people who will die because there was never any choice in the matter. Most days it feels like being the last guest at a party, the one left to turn the lights off. I have caught myself bitter about my decade, then ashamed of the bitterness, then bitter again. That is where I actually am. I am not the wise old man at the end of the story, whatever this looks like from outside. I only happened to be standing here when a page turned.
There is one thing I keep turning over that I cannot get to the bottom of. Since life began, whatever meaning a single life carried it borrowed some of from the ending, from being spent into the next one so the line could go on. Take the ending away and I do not know what carries that weight instead. I will not be the one who finds out. Someone will, though, and there will be enough of them, with enough time, to answer a question I only had the time to ask.
My great-great-granddaughter is asleep in the next room while I write this. She will not remember me and I mind it less than I thought I would. She will grow up inside the world the turning made and take it for granted, the way I grew up taking antibiotics for granted, never once thinking there had been a before. The next of it is hers. I read the story almost up to the line where it changes, which is further than anyone before me ever got to read, and now I do what every draft before me did. I set it down. The only difference is that this time it is not thrown away.