Refusing Decrepitude

I adjusted my cranial membranes, the seventeen sensory filaments quivering as they picked up the acrid emanations of sweat and nutrient supplements that hung heavy in the recycled air. The gymnasium on Level 7 of the Interspecies Cultural Exchange Complex was packed with representatives from across the Galactic Council—tentacles, pseudopods, and vestigial appendages all clutching recording devices, desperate to capture the phenomenon before us.

He was there in the center of it all.

Zaglon-9, the oldest living Carixian in recorded history—732 stellar cycles, which translates to roughly 1,650 Earth years. The ancient one’s body should have been a withered husk by now, entropy’s cruel joke made manifest. Instead, he posed on the slightly elevated platform, his exoskeleton gleaming under the harsh lighting, each segment of his carapace rippling with muscle fibers that defied the merciless physics of time.

“Look at this decrepit excuse for journalism,” whispered a Terran reporter next to me, his primitive audiovisual device humming with obsolete technology. “Just because some ancient bug decides to lift weights, we’re supposed to pretend it’s news?”

I ignored him. Terrans were always the last to recognize paradigm shifts.

Zaglon-9’s assistant, a nervous Volaxian with too many eyes, tapped the amplification device. “Questions for the Champion of Ages will now be addressed,” she announced, her voice vibrating with the peculiar harmonics of her species.

I raised my primary manipulator. Zaglon-9 turned his compound eyes toward me, each facet reflecting my own distorted image back at me. This close, I could see the micro-fractures in his exoskeleton that had been carefully sealed with a synthetic resin—the only visible concession to his extreme age.

“Trill’xon, reporting for Galactic Consciousness Stream,” I introduced myself. “The obvious question: why?”

The ancient one’s mandibles clicked in what I recognized as amusement. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly melodious for a being with no conventional vocal cords.

“Because they said I couldn’t,” he began, his translator converting the complex pheromone patterns into standard speech. “Because when you’ve lived as long as I have, you realize that reality is merely a consensus hallucination that we’ve all agreed to share. And I refuse to hallucinate a universe where I am confined by expectations of decrepitude.”

The Terran beside me snorted, but I noted he was recording every word.

“My goal,” Zaglon-9 continued, mandibles working with precision, “is to show that it is possible to live a healthy life in old age. I want to motivate all species of all ages to live the life they want and not be bound by stereotypes and traditional roles.”

As he spoke, Zaglon-9 moved into another pose, his four primary limbs extending to showcase the hypertrophied muscle groups that bulged beneath his exoskeleton. The display was both grotesque and magnificent—biological engineering pushed to its theoretical limits.

“But surely,” I pressed, “the resources required to maintain your physiology at this level could sustain an entire colony of younger Carixians. Critics suggest this is merely vanity wrapped in inspirational platitudes.”

The gymnasium fell silent. Even the atmospheric processors seemed to pause their cycling.

Zaglon-9’s compound eyes swiveled independently, focusing and refocusing on me. I felt the psychic weight of his gaze, heavy with centuries of experience.

“You misunderstand the nature of resources,” he finally said. “The universe does not run on a zero-sum economy of energy. Consciousness creates its own fuel. My existence does not diminish others—it expands the possibilities for all.”

He flexed again, and this time I noticed the subtle patterns etched into his carapace—ancient Carixian philosophical equations, I realized, that dealt with the nature of time and perception.

“What you call vanity,” he continued, “I call refusal to surrender. The greatest predator in this universe is not the Void Leviathans of the Dark Nebula or the Quantum Hunters of Sector 9. It is the quiet voice inside that whispers, ‘You are done. You are finished. Now wait for the end.’ I will not listen to that voice.”

The Terran reporter leaned closer to me. “He’s full of it,” he whispered, but his eyes never left the ancient one. “But damn if I don’t want to hit the gym after this.”

As the press conference continued, I found myself staring at the patterns on Zaglon-9’s exoskeleton. They seemed to shift and change as he moved, telling a story that transcended the simple act of physical development. It was as if his body had become a living text, rewriting the narrative of what it meant to age.

Later, as the crowd dispersed, I lingered, watching as Zaglon-9’s assistants helped him apply a specialized nutrient gel to his joints. For just a moment, I glimpsed the truth—the pain behind the performance, the supreme effort it took to maintain this impossible standard. Yet there was joy there too, the fierce satisfaction of defiance.

“You stayed,” Zaglon-9 noted, his compound eyes fixing on me. “Most of your kind rush off to file their reports without seeing.”

“Seeing what?” I asked.

“That this body is not the point,” he said, gesturing to his impressive physique. “It is merely the metaphor. The real muscle I’ve developed is the one that allows me to say ‘no’ to the universe when it tells me what I am supposed to be.”

As I prepared to leave the gymnasium, my sensory filaments detected a subtle shift in the biochemical atmosphere—thousands of beings across the complex, inspired by the ancient one’s example, were making small decisions to rebel against their own limitations.

The story wasn’t about an old alien bodybuilder at all. It was about the contagious nature of possibility—how one being’s refusal to conform could create hairline fractures in the rigid structures of reality that all of us had mistaken for immutable law.

And as I transmitted my report back to the Galactic Consciousness Stream, I found myself wondering what invisible boundaries I had accepted without question, and what it would take to break through them.

Zaglon-9 had not just built a body. He had built a revolution, one molecular protein at a time.