This article is not part of Vekllei canon. It may be old, obsolete or just a bit of fun.
They never actually believed that she was any kind of princess. They never even joked about it. The original LIFE magazine article said that she looked as though she were ‘a princess of the Earth’ when interviewer Alfie Ricci met her in the Vekllei highlands, and so she carried that name as a burden for the next few hundred years.
There are many Gregori children alive today, and we have seen the miracle of the first few dozen start to wear off. Gregori Hordiyenko, the little Ukrainian boy whose namesake was adopted by his disease, died age 27 in a car accident. Many others of the “first dozen” committed suicide, were killed by disease, died from complications arising from the genetic function of the syndrome, and a disproportionate number were born into the third world, where they were eliminated by famine, displacement or superstition.
Tzipora Desmoines, Vekllei’s first and only Gregori baby, was born in 2063. By the time of her LIFE interview, she was sixty-two years old. Yet she remains as she was on the eve of her menarche — fourteen, prepubescent, and largely miserable.
When you meet her for the first time, you have no idea how to talk to her. Is she a young teen-ager, or a sixty year old woman? A lot of her patient and soft-spoken quality is misinterpreted as a product of age, but nothing could be further from the truth — which is that Tzipora is largely the same girl as she was in 2077, but the spirit and vigour of her teen-age years and childhood curiosity have been stretched unnaturally over decades, blunting her passion and enthusiasm in all things. To the handful of people left alive that she loves, she can be as childish as ever, but the ghosts that dominate her regrets and favourite memories are starting to overcome her.
She is a rare case, despite thousands of boys and girls now like her across the world. She was born in a brief period where Gregori babies were born fairly healthy and independent, save for their obvious genetic malfunction. Today, among the hundreds that are born each year, nearly all of them suffer from broad anaphylaxis that renders them fragile and useless. In theory, all Gregori children will live forever save a car or the rope doesn’t get them, but as the children born with the syndrome become more and more sick very few that are born today will live beyond a normal human lifespan.
As for Tzipora — in seventy years she will become the oldest human ever, living or dead.