keyword: ache, title: a footnote on aberrant exo-cultural development in misc. flash fiction

Consider the curious case of a planet called in its various tongues “Zemlja” “Di’qiu” or “Earth” which exo-ethnographers dubbed “Hospice Sol-Three.” It’s not rare to discover a planet whose sentient species hasn’t yet developed a means to end death, ten thousand such worlds are in our records, we ourselves only overcame finality some eight-million cycles ago, of course.

What’s singular about them is the way they largely only treat each other with the dignity and compassion befitting a consciousness doomed to die when they’re very close to an inevitable death. Every other pre-immortality sentience catalogued, by the time technological development is reached, has realized that living is traumatic and fragile, start to finish, that all individuals are responsible to each other to make the short ride hurt less, the only way to soften the miasma of incredulity and fear that’s life is to collectively support each other through it, first to last. The beings of Hospice Sol-Three are the only intelligent creatures we’ve ever found that seem still stuck inside early animalistic hoarding rituals and immediate self-defense.

We call it “Hospice” because that’s one of their cultures’ word for a tradition of compassionate care in the last short period of time before imminent death, in the way that every other planet of mortals we’ve found always treat each other. They do have a gentleness, forgiveness and grace for each other as we do, but only at the very end. It is uniquely strange and, of course, uniquely sad. The known galaxy figured out early that you need always treat each other with dignity in the face of finity yet only share this with each other in the last blink of the fade-out. So, our sarcastic academics dubbed their whole world that, a “Hospice”, even if they don’t realize that’s what it is for all of them, regardless of age or status or health. A great rotating planetary hospice.

There is no definitive cause for their inability to grasp the depths of each other’s confusion and suffering, but most theories revolve in some way around the amazing shortness of their lifespans. They average lives around the length of seventy cycles in the habitable zone of a smaller yellow-class star, one of the shortest lifespans for an intelligent species on record. Maybe their lives are just too short to pass wisdom down generationally, maybe they barely have the time to mate and eat, let alone learn. Maybe they’re just monsters. I hope not but the consideration must be there.

We could, of course, adapt death-elimination technologies for the dominant species of Hospice Sol-Three and distribute it amongst them but it seems best to simply isolate and observe instead. I ache to think what such a short-sighted and selfish species might do with the gift of life eternal. Weaponize it and incinerate half the galaxy. Better to leave them as they are, some occluded race orbiting some obscure star, noteworthy only as negative example of what it is to be briefly alive.