The year is 2230. Thawing of patients frozen before a major breakthrough in freezing technology 2090 is finally possible. Aging reversal has been possible for 100 years. Ruben's body is thawed, and he is given an aging reversal therapy over a couple of months in a hospital. His body is soon as it were in his 20's. His family is also thawed, and they are reunited.
In the first years after his thawing, Ruben feels very out of touch. The world has changed very much. Physically, he is now the same age as his children and his grandchildren. The people who have been thawed generally do not have skills relevant for participating in the economy. The number of jobs that thawed people are specifically suited for, such as recounting an oral history of the past, are much fewer than the number of thawed people. Ruben and his family live on a welfare program while educating themselves about the developments of the past 200 years.
Life in the 2230's is not great for them, but not terrible either. Ruben and his wife are two of the oldest people alive in the world, so they are a bit special. But being a thawed person does not particularly impress most people. They typically socialize with people from their own era.
The community of people who were frozen before 2090 is quite small and closely knit, since they are people who in the first part of their life shared an optimism for the future. Most of them are also open minded to strange sounding ideas.
After updating himself on the technology and society of the future for 10 years, Ruben finds something that he thinks that the society of 2240 lacks. He starts working on supplying this missing service. His first business fails, so he has to fall back on the welfare program. His next venture is more hobbyistic, but it also fails to get traction. Still, he enjoys the work for a couple of years before abandoning the project. After giving up his second business, the decides to try a life of scholarship. His studies are fruitful, and in 2250 he writes a book that becomes quite popular.
In the 2250's, the spends a lot of time with new friends that he met through his research. The years pass quickly, and soon he finds himself a veteran researcher of 20 years. In the 2270's, a new finding revolutionizes his field. The new finding makes new methods necessary, methods that Ruben does not find very interesting to work with. He decides to go into temporary retirement. Ruben and his wife spend a couple of years traveling and in recreation. His intention is to start a new career soon, but he procrastinates and the years pass quickly.
In 2290, Ruben has been retired for almost 20 years. He feels very old and tired of life. However, he is still physically 20 years old and he is not actually aging. He thinks that Nino was in a sense lucky since he never had to make an active decision to die. Of course, he also thinks himself lucky to get a second chance at life.
A chance meeting with a new friend revitalizes his lust for life, and he decides to move to another country. Ruben and his wife have drifted apart, and they decide to separate. Ruben builds a house in a rural area in a country that he never thought he would live in. As he settles in to the new part of the world, he is stricken by emotional realization of what is possible with immortality. No project can take too long. He knew it intellectually before, but it took him 60 years of mortal impatience and boredom to emotionally accept the consequences of his new existence. He starts painstakingly chiseling stones into smooth round shapes. He moves on to rocks, and later boulders. Natural environments are strictly protected in the 2300's, but he has exploitation rights for a layer of 20 meters of bedrock beneath his country house lot.
Ruben starts excavating a large cavern by chisel. He carves countless details and patterns in the stone. Some reliefs take years to chisel. He works in a deep concentration. While chiseling, he meditates on his place in the universe, and on the fate of the world. He finds that after a long while without new impressions, new memories come back to him. He thinks a lot about the metaphoric nature of his enterprise: he is excavating a cave of stone, while at the same time excavating a cave of memories.
Ruben's house lot is 10x10x20 = 2000 meters. Before Ruben feels that he is done with his excavation, he had chiseled away 500 cubic metres of stone. Every day, he removes three cubic decimeters of stone. Therefore, the chiseling takes him 500 years.
The year is 2800. Ruben feels that he has finally achieved the patience necessary to do something well. He takes a break to visit the grave of Nino. Nino feels to him now like a childhood friend who died while they were still very young.
He thinks about what to do next. In the future, it has been proven that there are no fast general solutions to computationally difficult problems (P =/= NP). Therefore, there are still plenty of unsolved puzzles. Ruben chooses a colorful tile problem and attacks it with the patience of immortality. The challenge is to place 256 tiles in a way that obeys certain rules. He moves into a monastery in a remote area. He spends his years on a cool floor, the tiles spreading out about him. He discovers plenty of methods and observations. He does not know whether a computer or another person has already thought of the same things, and it does not concern him. After 1000 years, he has laid 255 tiles in a legitimate pattern. But he cannot place the 256th tile in a way that obeys the rules. He stands up and walks out without finishing. He writes a computer program that uses his methods, that is able to solve the problem in an afternoon.
The year is 3800. Every 10 years or so, Ruben has to get a genetic therapy in order to be physically rejuvenated. It is getting harder and harder to get a genetic therapy that restores the body to that of a human, as they originally evolved. Most rejuvenation therapy includes some update to the body's physiology that makes maintenance cheaper. Most people just get entirely new bodies. The new body also comes with an intelligence upgrade. Ruben has not been in a hurry with this, since he reckons that immortality is a long time. However, after his work with the tiles, Ruben decides to take the next step of his life and get the upgrade. He is one of the last people to do so.
With the intelligence upgrade, Ruben's life changes dramatically. He will later look back on the upgrade as just the beginning.
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