“This issue was taken into consideration before immigration began, which is why migrants were capped at age twenty-five. We’ll do our best to study and to adapt to everything!”

“Study?” The captain shook his head with a smile. “Got a book?” He pointed at the ambassador’s luggage. “Any will do.” Baffled, the ambassador took out a copy of Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov’s Frigate Pallada, which she had gotten halfway through before migration. The captain glanced at the title and said, “Open at random and tell me the page number.” The ambassador complied, and opened to page 239. Without looking, the captain rattled off what the navigator saw in Africa, accurate to the letter.

“Do you see? There’s no need for learning whatsoever. They import knowledge directly into the brain, like how we used to copy data onto hard drives. Human memory has been brought to its apex. And if that’s not enough, take a look at this—” He took an object the size of a hearing aid from behind his ear. “This quantum memory unit can store all of the books in human history—down to every last scrap of notepaper, if you’d like. The brain can retrieve information like a computer, and it’s far faster than the brain’s own memory. Don’t you see? I’m a vessel for all human knowledge. If you so desire, in under an hour you can have it too. To them, learning is a mysterious, incomprehensible ancient ritual.”

“So their children gain all knowledge the moment they’re born?”

“Children?” The captain laughed again. “They don’t have any children.”

“So where are the kids?”

“Did I mention that families vanished long ago?”

“You mean, they’re the last generation?”

“‘Generation’ doesn’t exist as a concept anymore.”

The ambassador’s amazement turned to befuddlement, but she strove to understand. And she did, a little. “You mean they live forever?”

“When a bodily organ fails, it’s replaced with a new one. When the brain fails, its information is copied out and into a transplant. After several centuries of these replacements, memory is all that’s left of an individual. Who’s to say whether they’re young or elderly? Maybe they think of themselves as old, and that’s why they haven’t come to meet us. Of course, they can have children if they desire, by cloning or in the old-fashioned way. But few do. This generation’s survived for more than three hundred years and will continue to do so. Can you imagine how this determines the form of their society? The knowledge, beauty, and longevity we dreamed of is easily attainable in this age.”

“It sounds like the ideal society. What else do they desire but can’t attain?”

“Nothing. But precisely because they have it all they have lost everything. It’s hard for us to understand, but to them it’s a real concern. This is far from an ideal society.”