“Doctor, what’s the bad news?” the patient asked, looking up weakly from the hospital bed.
“You have cancer,” their doctor answered, their voice shaking.
“No!” the patient cried out. It felt like their life was slipping away.
“It’s worse, though,” the doctor made no attempt to comfort their patient, “Our team cannot identify the type of cancer. They claim the DNA is foreign, unlike anything they’ve seen. And it’s spreading rapidly. Even as I removed my tools it was growing, practically instantaneously. It grew over the tip of my scalpel.”
“What does this mean?” the patient murmured, puzzled by what they were hearing from the doctor.
“You appear to be immortal. The cancer is replacing all of the damaged tissue in your body.”
“Like, healing my injuries?” the patient tried to make some sense of what they were hearing.
“Not quite. I urge you to make the most of the time you have left. Every stress you place on your body is being exploited by the cancer. Moving causes micro tears in your muscles, grinding between bones and ligaments, all of it is being replaced. As you age further you will begin to lose mobility, and your neurons will begin to die. They too will be replaced with cheaper copies, your mental capabilities will rot away with your body,” the doctor finished. “My condolences.”
As the doctor began to leave the patient weakly dragged a book from the rolling table next to their bed. It was a historical work, translated from the late 16th century, On the Topic of Everything. They looked up to the doctor and spoke, “Have you read this book?”
The doctor stopped and turned around in the doorway, “No, I haven’t.”
“Neither have I. But I remember it,” the patient’s grasp on the book tightened as their gaze moved back from the doctor to the book’s cover, “It caught my eye in the library. I think—I know, I wrote it.”