Inner Spaces (Sci-Fi Fantasy)

72 brilliant scientists decide to leave their overcrowded planet to a distant planet where they could pursue their research without interference. Through genetic re-engineering, they had reprogrammed themselves to become asexual and thus lost the ability to reproduce sexually.

Another advantage to becoming asexual was they increased their lifespan to 1000 years each, enabling them to live long enough to achieve vast feats of engineering and pursue their research to extreme heights.

Before leaving their home planet they were able to secure embryos with which they could continue propagating life on their planet but they also engineered these embryos to become asexual as they themselves.

Their goal was that eventually, they will be able to find the genetic sequences that bestow immortality and thus there would be no need for any kind of reproduction because the generation that achieves this immortality would then be the last generation. 

They calculated the time it would take them to achieve this feat to be in about 100,000 years so they took just enough embryos that would sustain their civilization to this prime point when there will be no need to reproduce forever. 

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Things did not turn out the way they expected, after striving for many years they still could not figure out the secret to immortality and they soon were running out of time and embryos as many generations of this new race had passed on. 

Despite achieve enormous feats of science and engineering, they could not get at their most elusive goal of immortality, these brought severe discontent and malaise amongst this race of super engineers.

So they decided to try one more idea before their time is up. They would build a machine that would search for any race of beings in any corner of the multiverse, within their own universe, other universes or any other of the infinite timelines and parallel universes.

After completing the design of the machine they realized that the size of it would be a hundred times larger than their home planet and would consume the energy equivalent of ten of their suns. So they decided to look for a grade of matter without resistance. A grade of matter that once charged would maintain its charge for eternity.

This search led them to the discovery of an inner space within their own space which contained matter of a grade that would enable them to build their machine. The size of the machine would still be the way it is according to the design but the energy requirements would be drastically reduced.

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The machine was built and set to action, searching and seeking but it could not find any race that had achieved true immortality. There were races that could live a billion years more than what they could achieve which would seem like immortality but eventually they had to die. But death in these advanced races was optional and out of choice. But no matter how long these races lived, eventually they got bored and had to exit life.

This was such a mystifying discovery and the least of what they expected their machine would help them discover. What they realized is that in order to be truly immortal there must be a constant desire to uncover novelty. Now they stirred their machine towards the discovery of any race that has cracked the code of how to exist continually in a state of perpetual excitement from the uncovering of novelty.

But time was running out for their race as eventually, they were down to a single embryo. So they decided to build an interface to their machine as a small device which they encased in a piece of worthless metal to create a medallion. 

They would attach the energy structure of the medallion to the genetics of the child to be born with the last embryo, after which they would transport that child to a primitive planet so that one day a race would discover the secret to the medallion and continue their search for the secret behind infinite novelty.