After school, Karyn was in Jon’s room, to discuss plans with the stone.
“Karyn, do you want to live forever?” Jon asked.
“Don’t you dare wish for me to be immortal,” was her answer.
“So that’s a no.”
“Forever is a long time.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“Do you understand, time probably never comes to an end. Not a million years or a billion or even a trillion. In chemistry class a few weeks ago, we figured out there are about 10 to the 50th power atoms in planet Earth. That’s a 1 followed by 50 zeros. Imagine living a year for every atom in planet Earth. That’s still just a 1 followed by 50 zeros. That’s not even a full line’s worth on a sheet of paper. Now imagine a 1 followed by a page of zeros, or a library of zeros, or a zero for every atom in planet Earth.”
“All right, so you figure it would suck eventually, I get it. But, wouldn’t you want to, you know, live as long as you wanted, and you don’t die until you commit suicide, and not get old?”
“Sure, why not.”
“Something could happen to us, either of us, at any time.” Jon said.
“Welcome to life on planet Earth,” Karyn said back.
“Ok, but we can wish for a safety net.”
“It was obviously leading up to that.”
“I just wanted to have your permission,” Jon said.
“Depends on how you word the wish.”
“How would you word it?”
“Well I would rather not have invulnerability powers, so maybe, we respawn, unless we die in a very specific way? So we would have some sort of kryptonite.”
“Oh, but how about we halt our aging process too. And respawn in our current bodies as we are now, otherwise damage might be permanent, like I wouldn’t want to lose an arm, and then still be missing an arm when I come back. And we definitely wouldn’t want to live long lives and grow old and then respawn into an old body and then just die of old age again, over and over again.”
“Ugh, yeah that would be terrible,” Karyn agreed.
“All right, so I’m going to go through with it then, ok?”
“Wait, what’s going to be the kryptonite then?”
“Oh. Uh. How about, falling into the sun?”
“Falling into the sun?! Sure, it shouldn’t be too easy, but it shouldn’t be something totally infeasible either!” Karyn objected.
“Well don’t you think by the time we want to die, humanity will be advanced space travelers?”
“…Possibly. What if civilization crumbles though, we’d be stuck alone on an increasingly inhospitable Earth until the sun comes to US.”
“Fine. Then it should be something hard, but possible to do on planet Earth,” Jon said.
“Killed by rabid beavers,” Karyn suggested.
Jon laughed at that. Then it dawned on him she wasn’t even trying to be funny. Then it dawned on him that it wasn’t even a bad idea. “Rabid beavers it is then,” he said. “I’m really going to do it now then, ok?”
“Yep. I guess, let’s go through with it then,” Karyn said, and then got nervous as Jon got out the stone. “Don’t. Don’t mess it up,” she said.
“All right. Just don’t interrupt me, ok?” He held the stone and said, “I wish, that both Karyn and I would be biologically immortal, that is we won’t grow old, although we won’t be unkillable. I also wish, for whenever either of us dies, by any cause of death other than rabid beavers, as soon as it is safe to do so without immediately getting killed again or severely injured, to be respawned into duplicates of our bodies exactly as they are right now except also with any injuries or scars we have right now healed, and we will suffer no brain damage and have complete memories all the way up to the moment of the death we just recovered from, and the same thing will happen whenever the respawned bodies die too.” Jon then carefully set down the stone and sighed in relief and said “Are you satisfied?”
“Yeah that sounded pretty good,” Karyn admitted.
“Want to test it?” he said in a dark tone of voice.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. What if it goes wrong. I’d rather leave relying on it as a last resort. We already won’t age just from the first part, we don’t need to test the second part, maybe for thousands of years!”
“All right Karyn, suit yourself, but I’m going to throw those dice.” He picked up the stone and said, “I wish, a bottle of. Hey Karyn, how much cyanide does it take to kill a human?”
“Don’t do it.”
“Fine, you’re going to make me look it up on wikipedia huh?”
“5 grams. 5 grams will do it. 1 gram would probably be enough, but if you want to be certain, 5 will do it.”
“I knew I could count on Karyn the grade A AP chemistry student.”
“Also, wish for sodium cyanide, not just cyanide, because hydrogen cyanide is a gas and I don’t want you to take me out with you.”
“Fair enough. I wish for a 5 gram piece of sodium cyanide.”
There it was. Jon picked it up, and popped it in his mouth.
“Shit, this tastes terrible, I thought it was supposed to taste like almonds.”
“Hydrogen cyanide tastes like almonds, sodium cyanide tastes like that mixed with sodium hydroxide which is drano, and you can’t hear me any more can you, shit, you really killed yourself, I sure hope the respawn fucking works. Oh god.”
Karyn was now scared and crying. Jon’s body was convulsing and foaming at the mouth. She felt his chest. His heart was still beating but very fast. And then it stopped. Karyn started wailing. Jon was dead! It was too easy. Too fast.
“Calm down Karyn, I… I…” two voices spoke in unison.
Karyn turned around, away from the body of Jon. And stood before a naked Jon. And a naked Karyn. Both with incredibly long hair, as if they had never had a haircut in their lives, and the new Jon was almost unrecognizable underneath a strange, teenaged boy level of scrawny beard and moustache. They both awkwardly tried to cover themselves up, but strangely enough, the other Karyn put both hands in front of her crotch in the same way the new Jon did, in a seemingly mostly unnecessary way, and apparently with no concern over trying to cover her big breasts. If fact, they seemed to move together in almost every tiny way.
“I think, I messed…” the naked Jon said. “Messed, the wish up, after all,” the other Karyn finished.
“Are you… are they, both?” Karyn stuttered.
“Yeah,” Jon said in their male body. “Both, both of me, is me…” Jon said in their new female body. “And no, we’re not, separate. Separate bodies yes. But I’m in, in both at the same time. One consciousness. But I have 2 brains? Linked telepathically? Is there a range limit? It’s hard, to, use them separately, I want to, move them together.” The thing Jon was most embarrassed by in front of Karyn was actually that their male body was uncircumcised. Jon hadn’t even considered that, as part of having asked for all their current injuries to be corrected when respawned, but it seemed obvious to them now, of course that would have been ‘corrected’ even though he had known his male anatomy to be the other way all his life that he remembered. A similar explanation also obviously underlied their incredibly long hair and untouched body hair, though it was hard to imagine cutting hair being considered as a type of injury.
Karyn picked up the stone and said “I wish the last wish made before asking for the cyanide would be audibly played for us.”
“I also wish,” a reproduction of Jon’s voice played in his room, “for whenever either of us dies, by any cause of death other than rabid beavers, as soon as it is safe to do so without immediately getting killed again or severely injured, to be respawned into duplicates of our bodies exactly as they are right now except also with any injuries or scars we have right now healed, and we will suffer no brain damage and have complete memories all the way up to the moment of the death we just recovered from, and the same thing will happen whenever the respawned bodies die too.”
“You asked for whenever either of us dies, to be respawned into duplicates of ‘our bodies’. In other words both of our bodies Jon,” Karyn said.
“I got that,” Jon said from both voices.
“And I think that also means, if either one of your now two bodies dies, you’ll then have 3. Like the mythical hydra, regrowing two heads whenever it loses one. Every time any of our bodies dies, we’ll go up by one. Unless it’s killed by rabid beavers of course. And I think it might not even apply to me, it may be that if I die, I’ll really be dead, and you’ll simply get two new bodies. Because you wished to be respawned, meaning you’re talking about yourself being respawned but triggered by either of us dying. I didn’t even notice anything wrong with it at the time, but it looks like you really seriously screwed that wish up.”
“Shit,” Jon’s two voices said together.
