The Curse of Immortality

How did I get here? Somewhere in a seemingly infinite dark void of what use to be space. I asked for this; I wanted this. Or at least I thought I did. But just like my first time volunteering for combat, I had no idea what I was in for. I thought about it constantly for the decade the process was underway. I thought I understood the risks, I thought I understood the concept of time. Years of injections to prepare my body for the procedure. All the warnings of different scenarios, like being trapped at the bottom of the ocean for eternity. Well, that is ridiculous because no ocean is eternal. But I should have headed the warning a little more cautiously.

Finally, the experiment. There were four of us. We had to not only have the proper mindset, but a certain genetic makeup as well. Only two of us survived that first day. My body was in so much pain. I remember looking at my arm and being able to see through it. My entire body was seeming to come in and out of existence. After about a week, the remaining two of us started to calm down. The more I concentrated on feeling my body, the less it hurt. Unfortunately, concentrating also made me more aware of the rest my body, which in turn increased the pain. Eventually I started to be able to feel my individual organs, and just feeling them move was excruciating. Even with something as simple as drinking water, I could feel each individual drop as it passed through my body. I can feel some water being absorbed, and other water passing.

I lost track of everything and everyone. My family and friends, as well the other candidate, were gone from my thoughts. I was already alone, consumed with concentration. I was being monitored constantly and would end up going days and then weeks without eating or drinking. Concentrating allowed me to extract the energy I needed directly from the environment around me, regardless of where I was. Over time I gained more control over organs, including my brain, feeling individual synapses firing. The years passed and I began to feel individual cells, their death and mitosis. I noticed every fleck of skin that became dust. After a few decades, one day I just woke up and started acting human again. Those people who were my life now all had different lives or had passed from life. I hadn’t aged a day, and all the normal human problems were not even a thought in my mind. So I decided to put myself to work.

The other candidate had been active that whole time, and not in a good way. I was paid to try and calm them down. After 5 seconds with them I knew they would never get it. They spent their time with parties and overindulging in all thigs imaginable. They were trying to use their results as more of a superpower, without ever taking the time to even try to understand the implications of it all. My talk of concentration was a little too hippie for them, which is slightly ironic as I’ve never cared about love or peace. I tried several more times to make a breakthrough in communication with them, but they were never open to it. So I set my work to the stars.

Before I knew it a century had passed and everyone, I knew in my first life had as well. Yet I had still not aged a day. The other candidate was now the only constant in my life, along with my work. It was always different people asking me to help the other candidate become as productive as I had become. They would have been happy if I could have at least got them to stop causing so much trouble. But that would never happen.

By this time I had already helped with the designing and construction of a permanent base on the moon. Within 200 years there was a complete city on the moon, as well as several balloon cities on Venus, and a permanent base on Mars. All my time and resources went into space colonization. My plan was simple, if I were going to live forever, I would need somewhere to live forever. It’s only 5 billion years until our sun expands into a red giant and then collapses into a white dwarf. That is a drop in the bucket in cosmological terms, so time was of the essence.

Well, almost all my time went into my work. After 500 years, the other candidate started to break down mentally. They were having constant migraines and were having violent outbursts because of these migraines. Murderous outbursts to be more specific. However, there was not much the authorities could due to stop them. Not only were conventional weapons useless, so was containment as the other was able to phase through matter at this point so could literally walk right out of prison while being shot at. The authorities were not even able to physically grab hold of the other candidate to subdue them.

I should admit here quickly that this was last and only time I felt jealousy since after the experiment. Without even trying, the other candidate was able to unlock the phasing ability before myself. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of phasing through solid matter, so this opened up a whole new universe of possibilities for me.

Back to the other candidate, the migraines were causing them to start to slip slowly towards insanity. There was nothing anyone could do. In a desperate effort, they flung themselves into an active volcano. When I received news of the incident, I thought they had been killed in the volcano. I took some time to think about it and think about my own mortal limitations. I entered an 8 month long stretch of meditation. After the first month I began to levitate and eventually phased through the ceiling of the facility. I rose to a spot not too high in the sky and stayed there for the reminder of my mediation. I was unaware of all of this at the time but watching video of it afterwards was fascinating.

After this session I felt a new connection, not just within myself but with the world around me. I didn’t know it then, but I was becoming one with the entire space-time continuum. I saw the cosmos in a new frame of mind and was all of a sudden able to solve many of the problems we were having trying to colonize outside of the solar system. I began to work feverishly. By this time we had not only colonized the Kuiper belt and all the moons of Jupiter, but there was also a permanent space elevator between the tidal locked Pluto and Charon.

A few years later, the other candidate pulled themselves out of the lava. When I heard the news, I dropped everything and went to see them. They were not burnt at all. Turns out they got stuck in a volcanic tube and had to slowly climb out against the flow of the lava. The other candidate was a different being after this exodus from the flame. They had been put into a forced mediation that caused them to start to be able to control their body. They came to me for help, and I gladly accepted them as a student. Unfortunately it was already too late.

There body began to phase out of reality itself, and rather uncontrollably. Their right arm phased out for 3 days. The other candidate was not able to even feel it, much less bring it back into reality. Slowly, more and more body parts would randomly phase in and out of existence. Eventually, their whole body began to disappear for lengths of time. When they came back in, they had no recollection of anything that had happened while they were gone. It was like they were going through brief times of nothingness. This whole thing slowly progressed over several hundred years. But eventually, they faded out and never came back.

There were now only two things in my life, work and meditation. After centuries of meditation, I felt I could control everything about my body, no longer requiring food or even oxygen, impervious to heat, cold, pressure, and even radiation. I had a plan about forever, and it was going to work. And for a while, it did, and it was beautiful. Humanity reached out all across the Milky Way galaxy. Evolution took hold and what were people evolved to numerous different species, as vast as the worlds they took over. Eventually, I was the only human. I tried to start worlds off small. Finding earth like conditions and feeding them single cell life, hoping to come back in a few billion years to find humans like myself. I tried this millions of times and never succeeded. Intelligent life was created more times than I can possibly remember, but never humans. Although I would keep trying over trillions of years.

Although not human, life was highly intelligent and spread out across the local group. Andromeda, Triangulum, the Magellanic Clouds, the Messiers, everywhere. Small mining colonies now existed on intergalactic asteroids. Unfortunately there was a problem. While the Local Group of galaxies continued to come together, everything else became exceedingly far away. Eventually, even our best telescope, the M31 Ultra, which was a giant telescope that was comprised out of over a trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy, could not see any stars outside of the Local Group throughout the rest of the universe.

That was the beginning of my depression. That is when I finally started to fear that I might outlast everything. I came up with a suicide plan. My last resort was the black hole. The idea was that once everything was over, and no more starts were going to form, and if faster than light travel was still not possible, then I would commit suicide by flying into a black hole.

Trillions of years passed. I tried my best to enjoy the time I had. More towards the end I started taking time to enjoy the simple things that did still exist. Plants, flowing water, weird little animals, fun games, good conversation, and I even started eating again.

Eventually new stars stopped forming. So many civilizations rose and fell after that but to me it was all the blink of an eye. As the last of the stars died, we used the Hawking radiation from the evaporating black holes to power our civilizations. Then I realized I would outlive them too. That’s when I became afraid.

Eventually resources diminished to near nothing. Every rock had been mined or eroded out of existence. I remember eons ago back on earth looking at the night sky and thinking there were infinite resources if we could only access them. Well, we did access them, and they did last for trillions of years, but eventually they did run out. And as the resources dwindled, the number of societies did as well. Eventually, after many more millennia passed, there was only one group left. And then, they were gone. I was all that was left. Exotic material, wormholes, ftl travel, it all failed. I could sit and watch a steel beam decay, there is nothing I can make a space station out of that will last longer than I. I sat on my last rock and looked up at an empty sky. The last spaceship only had a short lifespan compared to everything else. I made the decision to attempt to end my life and flew into one of the last remaining black holes.

It turned out to be a really bad idea. I watched as my ship was reduced to a subatomic size and waited for the same to happen to me. Several billion years of this crushing feeling all over my body. Worst headaches ever, levels beyond migraines. It was truly maddening. I tried to concentrate on my insides to allow them to be crushed or phase out of existence as the other candidate had done. It was all to no avail. I was able to finally embrace the pain and eventually the crushing slowed down and the black hole dissipated. This eventually was at least billions of years, as I was now unable to keep track of how much time had passed. As it grew smaller, my size continued to stay constant. When my head broke free was the most relief I have probably ever felt in my entire life. When it was brushing my armpits, it was almost ticklish. Those were actually good years, filled with laughter as it became more of a strong hug. It centered around my center of gravity and then it was in my womb, like the last black hole was my baby. I could feel it inside of me and it was my last companion. I tried desperately to give it my atoms, but my last friend evaporated into seeming nothingness. And now the whole universe was seemingly like this. Just a cold, uniform, near infinite space of evaporated black holes.

It's so dark, I feel not like I’m blind but that I don’t even have eyes. I can’t see my fingers when I brush them over my eyeballs. There is no visible light in the distance in any direction. No stars whatsoever. Honestly, I’m not sure it would be better to see a star now, knowing I have no way of getting there. Of course, I don’t know if I’m moving or not. My frame of reference has been like this for millennia, so I might be stationary, or I might be approaching the speed of light. I really have no idea. I can still hear myself scream, sort of. If I put my fingers against my mouth and in my ear the vibrations transfer enough to be sound. If I just scream out into the void, I don’t hear anything. There is nothing left to happen. Occasionally I sleep, and dream, and that is the only part of my existence that doesn’t completely suck. It’s the only time I see light, inside my mind. But all in all, I am just here in the emptiness of space. Just me and nothing else. I think of people and planets that no longer exist and never will again. I wish I could walk again, even if it was just a small rock floating through the vastness of space. But this will most likely just continue to go on forever. Eventually I will have known this dark nothingness longer than I have ever known anything else. I can only hope that one day entropy comes for me as well.