PUTZHO: Evolution doesn't stop with immortality.
Let's say you tell me a story.
I like it, but maybe I think the narrative structure is too choppy.
ULAQUE: Like an episodic melodrama, or a long-form comic strip?
PUTZHO: Or maybe I find it too self-referential.
ULAQUE: Too didactic, with characters telling each other things that they already know?
PUTZHO: Let me finish.
Since I'm not happy with your story as-is, I add some bridging material.
PUTZHO: Then I tell my version to a dozen other people.
Some of them never re-tell it.
Others make their own changes before passing it along.
After a thousand iterations, there are a billion different versions of your story.
ULAQUE: That's quite a culling, since the number of possible versions would be in the neighborhood of twelve to the power of 1000.
PUTZHO: Culling!
EXACTLY.
These tellings of your story are subject to the selection pressures of fitness, reproduction, and elimination.
Maybe there's no sex or death in the All-Star, but something in here has to keep evolving.
ULAQUE: Many somethings, Putzho, and they have been evolving for longer than your planet has had life on it.
PUTZHO: There might be more reasons why I don't like the story you tell me.