A murmur of agreement rippled through the room, and Daekwon nodded in support.
‘Yeah, I s-, s-, seen some terrible shit online about farm animals,’ he murmured, shaking his head sadly. ‘I watched Earthlings, an’ uh, Dominion online. And uh, Cowspiracy. It’s … yeah, you right … it’s a c-, c-, crime against humanity, is what it is.’
‘Uh, guys,’ interjected Paola, ‘I was uh, hoping to eat now, and I don’t really wanna think about all that awful stuff while we’re eating. I mean, even though we’re eating vegan, if I think about, like factory farms, battery hens an’ trucks full a’ poor, innocent terrified pigs … I get a little, like PTSD going, you know?’
Chloe nodded, the grim hardness on her face melting away.
‘You’re right, you’re right,’ she said with a resigned sigh. ‘Let’s change the topic before I like, get too worked up.’
Paola handed out plates, burritos and smoothies to everyone, and in satisfied silence they tucked in. After a few moments, though, the usually reticent Jun piped up.
‘We were talking about immortality,’ he ventured cautiously, peering at Daekwon with a probing gaze, almost as if he was testing him. ‘And how it’s impossible for any living thing to achieve. What do you think about this?’
Daekwon considered the question as he chewed on a mouthful of rice and refried beans.
‘You mean l-, l-, livin’ forever?’ he asked after he swallowed his food.
‘Immortality, cheating death on a permanent, infinite basis, yes.’
Daekwon nodded and took another large chunk out of his burrito. He scrunched his large, strong-featured face into an expression of deep concentration as he masticated on both the burrito and the philosophical issue.
“I think,’ he began warily, after swallowing the morsel of food, ‘that it’s, like, impossible. That’s my g-, g-, gut feeling, coz I uh, I guess I don’t know much about b-, biology. But everything living dies, I know that fo’ sure. But I, I h-, have an idea. I think that a person can kinda b-, b-, b-, become immortal. But not in the way you be thinkin’, like.’
‘How so?’ Jun asked, nibbling rodent-like at his food, the expression on his face as serenely neutral as ever.
‘Think of Jesus Christ. S-, S-, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha … J-, Julius Caesar. Cleopatra. W-, W-, William Shakespeare. Them folk died hundreds, or like, th-, thousands of years ago, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘But even though they d-, dead, and they been dead fo’ a long time, we all kn-, kn-, know who they is. Err’body does. A part a’ them … the best part, uh, unless you talkin’ ‘bout s-, s-, someone like Hitler or some a-, a-, asshole like that, is immortal.’
Paola’s face glowed with delight, enjoying her crush’s outside-the-box approach to the issue. Indeed, there was even a faint hint of a smile on Jun’s rigid porcelain countenance.
‘Those people’ Paola said, ‘they … they like, they totally achieved the unachievable. They did become immortal … or as close to immortality as anyone could ever hope to come. Their bodies may have died, but the, uh, like the essence of who they were, the truest part of them, it lived on forever.”
‘Shit,’ Chloe grunted, rolling her eyes and shaking her head, ‘now if only we could convince some of these fuckin’ billionaires who are like, investing their money into getting their heads and brains cryogenically frozen when they die, or like, building skyscrapers to be named for them and stuff, to instead like invest their millions of dollars into this kinda immortality instead. You know much of a difference they could make?! They could buy out cattle ranches in Brazil and give them back to the Amazon rainforest! They could buy palm oil plantations in Borneo and turn them back into native jungle, and prevent the extinction of orang-utans, tigers and Asian rhinos! They could turn the climate crisis around, and literally halt the Sixth Mass Extinction. I mean, like, imagine being that person – the person who in real life is like, the hero of one of those apocalypse kinda movies, who at the last minute saves humanity from like, the giant comet that’s gonna wipe out the earth. They could buy huge sections of the ocean, and like pay the fishing industry more money than they would get from fishing, you know, pay those assholes to leave the sea alone to regenerate and heal. They could become the greatest people in all of history! Bigger than Jesus, bigger than Mohamed or Buddha … because they’d like, literally be saving all life on this planet. Everything!’
‘Man,’ Paola sighed, ‘if only we could convince the damn politicians about this. In like, history class we was learning about how rapidly and drastically they changed up society for wartime production during World War Two. Like, they pretty much forced a massive, unheard of social upheaval to happen in this country … so why can’t they do that shit again to save the planet, to like, fight against the biggest threat life has ever faced?’
‘They’ll only do something like that when it’s about killing each other, and making a profit,’ Jun muttered darkly. ‘When it’s about wiping out whole cities or destroying ecosystems for economic gain … not saving them. When it’s about fighting over who gets the rights to plunder this square of earth or that one, and turn it into a lifeless desert … not who gets the right to save it, and preserve all of the awesomeness of the life on it.’
‘Wh-, wh-, why don’t the government,’ Daekwon asked, diving eagerly into the discussion now, ‘just make people plant t-, trees? Or use p-,
