Why do the affini have a bureaucracy kink?
You are so much smaller than you know, little one.
Have you ever kept a photograph? It is so much more to you than just an image, isn't it? It is but a single moment in time, captured at the precise position of photons, impossibly brief.
But it carries so much more in its lines and colors, does it not? It is a window into Memory, a peek through Time itself, and carries with it the context in which the memory was made. Friends, pets, places, experiences preserved forever, even though the moment itself was so terribly brief.
The Terran mind was not made to conceive of things at scale, but try for a moment to imagine what immortal means.
How old was the longest-lived Terran you ever knew? Seventy? Eighty? One hundred? A single bloom from a single affini can be more than three of those lives, end to end. I myself am only in my sixth bloom: I have lived for about 1600 of your years.
I am still so terribly, terribly young.
There are affini alive today with bloom counts in the hundreds. Affini who lived to see our species first touch the stars, still so very much alive. Can you imagine what it truly means to live forever? How many friends, pets, places, experiences we've made memories with?
Can you imagine lasting forever, knowing those memories will not?
Knowing all of the emotions, all the love, all the pain of loss, will still remain even when we can't remember why?
Can you imagine how desperately we must cling to those memories, year after year, as time takes its toll on even us? How heavily the centuries weigh on us? Knowing that the things we love so dearly will someday be lost even to our memory?
Knowing we must lose you twice?
But there is a way to preserve those memories. A way to keep those moments, and all the context they carry, protected against the creeping oblivion of time. There is a way to live up to our promise forever, to keep the things we've loved safe, even after they are gone. There is a way to ensure they are never gone.
We keep records.
Extensive, perhaps, from your perspective. But we affini do not operate on the scale of your perspective. We must operate on ours. Every Notice of Intent is a memory of a sophont who caught our eye, of all the potential we saw in them. Every Domestication Contract a memory of who we chose, above all others, to make our own, and why—a memory of the life we planned together. Every floret play form, every vet appointment, every scrap of paper we have ever touched a thousand memories of something we cannot bear to lose, saved for all time in triplicate, pentuplicate, copied and transferred a thousand times across the stars, because we will not allow the universe itself to forget you.
Even if, someday, we cannot remember.
What is the value of memory to an immortal?
More than I can ever say in your language. More than you can ever know.
More than we are willing to lose.
We have not Domesticated entropy just yet. But we can defy it. And we will. We will preserve in paperwork what we cannot preserve in our own bodies: the memories of those who do not live to see forever alongside us.
—Sylvia Wicker, 6th Bloom, she/her Office of Rituals and Records
