Note: From an ongoing collection of scifi original shorts. More can be found here.

When word got out that the Patriarch was dead, all of Terra 3 went into mourning. Everyone knew Teve Mall to be a freak of sorts. While the average T3er rarely lived past two hundred, Teve Mall reached that and kept on going. By most accounts, he lived to be 1,143 T3 years.

All of T3 mourned because so many individuals could claim some sort of relation to the patriarch, even if most relations turned out to be somewhat distant. This was one of the effects of living so long a life: You had lots of time to breed, and Teve Mall did exactly that. From the moment his testicles had dropped, he turned to scouring influential families for a wife, and once he had found one wife, he promptly found another. Though he never had more than six wives at a time, there was rarely a time that he had fewer than four. “There’s such a thing,” he was fond of saying, “as too much of a good thing.” It was a saying every publication used in his obituary to describe his long life, although those closest to him knew that he only ever used the saying in relation to women.

But perhaps for Teve Mall, the gathering years had indeed become too much of a good thing, and he decided it was time to die.

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