Faxterilios is old enough to remember the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and might outlast Saturn’s rings. He lives under their light but blind to it and to everything else. There are no eyes in Enceladus’ sea nor other life than him and the simpler organisms he seeds from his own body to patiently gather energy and nutrients he will later consume.
There’s nothing simple in his biology. Just enough of his brain was left human to keep his identity in some senses continuous all the way back to his birth. The rest of his body he engineered to wait out eternity ageless and indestructible – a white giant of the most advanced biotechnology three hundred years of genius and ambition had been able to acquire.
On this he succeeded.
Faxterilios is the oldest and last remotely human being in the universe. Human enough to after just a few millennia have gone completely mad. But madness isn’t death. He’s still himself. He still remembers. He could with the right knowledge and means be made whole again.
We have a law against it. No matter the temptation of the historical knowledge that could be unlocked from his mind we have forbidden ourselves to approach him or even enter his sea. We scan from above and wait. Not for him to die or alter, for he won’t, but for us to change. We cannot bring him back until our respect for our para-ancestors lets us do it and our desire for well-deserved revenge quietens enough for us to trust ourselves to treat him well. That we feel and can feel both things at the same time is the last human trait left to us.
So we wait. Younger than him but just as impervious to death, forgetfulness, perhaps forgiveness as well. With the patience to do nothing and see if we might be wrong about that while he methodically circles the ocean in the darkness under the ice.
Wow. Europa?