The first thing you notice about splitting is not the pain. There is no pain. The first thing you notice is the silence—the sudden, absolute silence of one voice in your head going quiet, because there are now two voices, and neither of them knows how to share the space.

I am Julian Ashworth. Or I was. In 2045, I was one person. A forty-three-year-old accountant from New York who agreed to be part of the first human trial of the Eternity Extension. The tincture was blue—clear in the vial, but blue in the way that moonlight is blue, or the way a shadow on snow is blue.

Dr. Finch injected it into my bloodstream at 3:17 AM on a January fourth. I felt nothing. I went home. I slept. I woke up and went to work. The only difference was in the contract: my lifespan was now three hundred years instead of eighty.

The first fifty years were fine. I was one person. I was Julian Ashworth, accountant, husband to Margaret (who died in 2093 of natural causes, which was the first thing I ever regretted about the extension—watching someone die when you have three centuries to watch them go), father to two children (who died before me, which was the second regret).

At year fifty, something happened that the doctors hadn't predicted. Or maybe they had predicted it and hadn't told me. I can't be sure, because I am not sure which Julian is telling this story—the original Julian, or the fifth split, or the one after that. The memory is fuzzy at the edges, the way memory gets when you don't know who's holding it.

It started with a dream. I dreamed that I was sitting in a café in Paris. I had never been to Paris. I know this because I've checked my travel records. But in the dream, I was sitting at a table on the Left Bank, drinking espresso, watching people walk by. And I was not Julian Ashworth, accountant from New York. I was someone else. Someone who had grown up in Marseille, who spoke French as a first language, who had fallen in love with a woman named Claire and lost her to a disease that the extension had made obsolete.

I woke up and the dream felt real. More real than the room I was waking up in. More real than the body I was waking up in.

That was Split Number One.

Over the next century, it happened again and again. Every fifty years, a new version of me would emerge—not a clone, not a separate person, but a version of me with a different history, a different set of memories, a different emotional architecture. We shared the same genetic code. We shared the same original memories—the memories up to the point of splitting, at least. After that, we diverged.

By 2145, there were seven of me. Seven Julians, in seven different cities. Julian in New York, who had never left America. Julian in London, who had become a professor of moral philosophy. Julian in Tokyo, who had become a Zen monk. Julian in Buenos Aires, who had become a tango dancer. Julian in Cape Town, who had become a physician. Julian in Mumbai, who had become a poet. Julian in Reykjavik, who had become nothing—a recluse who lived in a cabin on the edge of a glacier and spent his days watching the ice crack and wondering which Julian was watching.

We could feel each other. Not directly—we couldn't communicate in the traditional sense. But we could feel the presence of the others, like a hum in the background of consciousness. When Julian in London was thinking deeply, I could feel the pressure of his thoughts, the way you feel the weight of someone sitting on the bed next to you even if they're not touching you.

By 2245, there were forty-nine of me. By 2345, there were three hundred and forty-three. By 2445, there were two thousand, four hundred and one.

The original Julian—the one who signed the contract in 2045—is gone. Not dead. Gone in the way that a river is gone when it flows into the sea. He is in all of us and none of us. He is the memory of a man who wanted to live longer, and who did not understand that living longer meant becoming many.

I don't know which Julian is writing this. I think I might be the Reykjavik one—the one who watches the ice. Or I might be the Tokyo one—the one who sits in meditation and tries to empty his mind of the voices. Or I might be the Mumbai one—the one who writes poems about a woman named Margaret who existed in only some of our memories and in all of our dreams.

What I know is this: the original Julian Ashworth sat in Dr. Finch's office on January fourth, 2045, and said yes to the blue tincture because he was afraid of dying. He thought he was buying time. He was buying something else entirely. He was buying a multiplication of self until the self was no longer a self at all, but a chorus—a thousand voices singing different songs in different languages in different cities, all singing the same song underneath, the song that the original Julian sang when he was thirty-four and scared and sitting in a doctor's office, wishing—praying—with every fiber of his being that he could just live a little longer.

We live forever now. All of us. Every one of the thousands of Julians, in every city, in every country, on every continent. We live forever.

And every night, in every city, in every cabin and temples and apartments and monasteries, a Julian Ashworth looks at the moon and wonders if the man who started this is looking at it too, from somewhere in the past, from a time when he was still just one person, still just Julian, still just afraid.