Tzipora, one of the children to stop ageing

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

This is Tzipora. She is eleven years old, scruffy, and a Gregori baby. At the turn of the 21st century, Gregori Hordiyenko, a Ukrainian boy aged nine and a half, stopped aging entirely. By 2063, which is the year Tzipora turned eleven, there are about two hundred Gregori babies in the world, mostly living in secret. Certain religious sects, including Catholics, view Gregori babies as a sign of the Lord’s action and as a movement towards an approaching religious event. Other religious sects see them simply as angels, eternal beings fallen from heaven.

In reality little is known about the phenomenon. Gregori babies stop growing at the point they’d usually reach thelarche. Their cells reproduce perfectly, removing the ageing process entirely and making them theoretically immortal. The oldest Gregori baby is fifty-six and lives in Florida. Gregori himself was run down and killed in an accident in his twenties. Gregori babies have no other defining characteristic; they have been found in the Orient and in Africa and in Europe, they have different levels of wellness and many have entirely unremarkable lives.

Tzipora is Vekllei’s first Gregori baby, although she was abroad when she was diagnosed. She has not reached menarche and does not appear to have even begun thelarche. Other than her agelessness, she is a normal girl with her own anxieties and joys and relationships. As a child, she has not yet quite understood the magnitude of what has been stripped from her: she will never be able to maintain friends as they age without her, she will never grow up or marry, and assuming she naturally survives, she will watch everyone die before her. As a Gregori baby, she can be killed as any other human being can. The one exception to her condition is cancer and tumour-related diseases, of which she will be immune. Her father calls her “angel”, and the pet name took on a new meaning as her condition was realised.

Tzipora is religious and believes in a single God and spirits, but dislikes him and blames him for her own situation, shifting her faith into Vekllei and humanity. Let me know if you have any questions. I love to talk.