They’re not sedentary.
They’re just bored.
GIGER: Very well, young man. Let me ask you both a simple question. Do you want to die?
NOG: No.
JAKE: Not really.
GIGER: Of course you don’t, so why should you? Why should any of us end up as putrefying corpses in wooden boxes stuck in the ground, or vaporised into subatomic particles and vented into the cosmos like a bad case of gas? No reason that I can think of. I have devoted my life to the study of death, and do you know what I found? Death is nothing more than the result of cellular boredom.
JAKE: Boredom?
GIGER: Think about it. The cells in your body have been doing the same job, the same dull monotonous routine, every day since you were conceived. Metabolise, divide, metabolise, divide. Wouldn’t you get bored? Of course you would. So at some point, the cells just say, ‘that’s it’, and you, the unwary victim of cellular ennui, are quite literally bored to death.
NOG: I never thought about it that way.
GIGER: Doctor Bathkin of Andros Three was the first to come up with the answer to solving the puzzle of death. Keep the cells energised. Keep them in the game by teaching them new mitochondrial tricks. Unfortunately, before he could finish his work, Doctor Bathkin died in a shuttle accident. Or so they say. And while the soulless minions of orthodoxy refuse to follow up on his important research, I could hear the clarion call of destiny ringing in my ears. And now, after fifteen years of tireless effort, after being laughed at and hounded out of the halls of the scientific establishment, after begging and scrounging for materials across half the galaxy, I have nearly completed work on this. The Cellular Regeneration and Entertainment Chamber.
JAKE: What does it do?
GIGER: I’m glad you asked. It is specially designed to transmit biogenic energy on a chromoelectric wavelength and send uplifting and entertaining messages to the nuclei of every cell in your body. Spend eight hours a day in this machine and your cells will never get bored. You will never grow old, and most important, you will never die. That is the goal of my work, nothing less than immortality itself.
