You have worked it out. You must be immortal. That childhood you spent with barely an illness, and if you did succumb to a disease, you felt back to your wonderful self within a day. All through your twenties and thirties those shop assistants kept asking you for ID. Even now as your age is galloping towards fifty you still look twenty something.
You are getting envy from the people you work with. Women want to know your secret, and your friends still laugh at your young looks. But you do not use a particular brand of cream, you live your life with the casualness you always have. You feel a little freaky with that lack of aging.
Imortal – How.
Your immortality has come from a quirk of birth; the DNA mix of your parents has produced a body that heals everything with the speed of the fastest race car. Without the bite of a vampire, or the touch of an alien, a concoction from a mad scientist, you have achieved eternal life.
Never Test.
Do not assess the virility of your immortality. Dear one, it hurts when you cut your flesh, when bones break pain follows. Let the things that should kill you happen naturally. Captain Jack Harkness exploded into pieces of raw flesh and reformed: that must really hurt. As would throwing yourself off a high-rise building. Falling into a coma for the few days it would take your internal organs to reform, and your bones to all fuse together, it still will be pain beyond any rational mind. Attempting suicide may reveal that the deep cut down your arm has healed before you have reached your elbow. Do not try it.
The same goes for conflicts and wars. Protecting your country’s best interests would be a noble act. You can be sure the Generals and the politicians that wanted the war will convince you that national pride is at stake. That your family and community is under a grave threat. But just imagine laying in a field hospital bed with injuries that should have killed you.
Those field commanders will expect you, an immortal, to lead a force into all the neo-suicidal missions. Do you really want the lives of those innocent men on your conscience. Let the guilt stay with the Generals and politicians.
You will have enough guilt as you watch those you love die around you.
The grim reaper will see you, grab his target and run away as fast as his skeletal legs can carry him.
Hiding In Plain Sight
You have lived in your birth town the whole of your life. Why would you want anywhere different? Despite all the fear of immigration in countries today, most people want to stay in their country of birth. And even a majority want to stay in the place they were born. We grow up in a community with a sense of shared culture. That means shared memories.
The person who ‘never grows old’ will become part of those myths. Eventually, that will attract dangerous people. If not those from lofty heights of wealth or power, it could be someone in your neighbourhood. Even if you are benevolent there will be those who find your eternal life an abomination.
You are going to need to hide in plain sight to keep yourself safe from the torment and torture these people could bring.
The same place, the same city is not advised. You could keep yourself safe from detection by a simple move to the next town over. A place that those you grew up around is only an occasional destination. The chance of one of those friends and neighbours spotting you is rare, and they would doubt it is you if they did.
It does not have to be forever. You could return after a couple of decades and pretend to be your own offspring. My advice would be leave and wait for a generation or two to die before you return.
Keep Moving
That same rule goes for anywhere you settle. Your appearance will not change while every decade or two the mortals will look in the mirror and see their age. There is only so far that, ‘I am lucky’ or ‘I have had a good skin routine since my teenage years’ is going to go before the gossip gains traction. Despite what serial killers think, people do notice quiet individuals who keep themselves to themselves.
This does beg one question. Why? Do you really want to stay close to your birthplace? I admire your commitment to community. Will it take a century for you to want to wander? There is a planet to explore, and you have the time to walk every meter.
Data Protection from Governance.
Official records are a minor problem. For all but the last two decades of the last century governance data would not have been a problem. Relying on self-reporting, with certain occupations allowed to hand out certificates, your protection from the Government was straight forward. Bribe an official to produce fake certification. But as that century ended, the digital state was making record keeping more efficient.
Your parents would not have known of your problem, dearest one, so they would have registered your birth. There will be smatterings of your life across official records. The digital age makes these pieces of you turn into a real person.
You will reach state pension age not only with the vigour of a younger person but with the looks too. Accusations of fraud will be hard to defend when the judge sees your youthful looks. Imprisoned is annoyance. Capricious governments may even seize your assets.
It will be better to stay off the records. Look into ways of removing yourself from records. Whether it is a hack to clear the system or a fake death certificate to finish the official record of you. Fake identities, disappearing in confusion of who you are for officialdom is always a great plan.
Work and income.
Which brings us to more practical existence. We all need income in this capitalist system. You will need to work. This is a minor problem that may need a century, or two, to work through.
The nature of humankind is to stay in a place that gives us satisfaction. Careers wise the higher you climb the fewer people you work around the more that distinctive young face will stand out and the higher your profile will become. If you have got a financially rewarding career stay in it but live frugal so you can save the gains. There will become a point where you will need to change positions – with a different company. Honesty about your age will cause consternation with your interview, and deception about your age will mean losing all your experience.
My firm advice is to move downwards not up after decades of a career path. Those at serf level are invisible and not checked very deeply. It is a good hiding place. If HR prompts your manager to raise questions about your past, you can leave. An ex-employee at the bottom rung is not worth pursuing.
After a century, your finances from continuous employment will start looking incredibly positive. You will be debt free, even have created passive income from investments in property and shares. You can rent out the property in the towns you settle when you move on buying another place. Shares from long term thinking. You may need a couple of companies to avoid certain financial questions. But the pro-capitalist governments around the world often have lax investigation of companies.
With the freedom from financial hardship, you could start thinking about other things.
The things that make being an Immortal fun.
Fame And The Immortal
What – you are thinking – you just wrote a section on hiding. Fame is the opposite. But fame for the immortal is very possible if you take the right precautions.
The creative arts are certainly open to you, beloved immortal. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, dear, practice. Ten thousand hours of practice can give you mastery of any skill. A mere seven to eight years dedication just two to four hours a day.
The preparation for fame is the secret. Most people hope for it, but you can master fame. You can become famous in anything. All you need is to establish your image before the fame. Change your hair colour, age up your face, wear precocious glasses anything that cements what you look like with the populace.
There is a limit on fame. Rarely does it cross a generation with the same ferocity. Earn your money, bask in the fame. Be that somebody for a generation. They will love you, worship you and then fade away. You have a choice when to stop.
A word of warning: Do not fake your death. Look what happened to Elvis. You do not want the paparazzi taking your photo and proclaiming you live.
Quit while you are a super star. Announce your retirement with a grand gesture, a final tour, a last piece of art, a last movie or stage show. After which you can just fade away.
After The Fame
Find a lovely small town to live in. Not too small that everyone knows everyone else but not so large that your fans will number in their thousands. Buy a little place, comfortable but not ostentatious. In fact, be rid of all the attributes of fame, the houses, the cars, all the noticeable things. Throw your image of fame into the rubbish and you return to being you.
Wherever you choose to live, if your fame was worldwide, you may encounter your fans. Obviously, you could live as a recluse for decades, a path others have already trod, but you have a life to enjoy. In exchange for secrecy, you can allow the odd fan unbridled access – close friendship. What fan would not love that?
The longest fame should be that of a writer. A quiet lot, usually working alone, and invisible but for a name on a book and a small profile picture. With an ease of name changing, you can make that career last well into centuries.
Love and the Immortal
You may have eternal life, my gorgeous immortal, but you are still humankind. We need companionship, we experience love – no matter how hard our heart becomes. How long since you discovered that the grim reaper fears you, can you remember the life before? Do you remember your first love? All those you love, their mortal coil will unwind. The tether to the end, which left you unbound, is still holding tight to them.
Bluntly, everyone you love is going to get old, they are going to die.
In your grief, your heart will harden. You will swear away from love, from companions, because the pain is too much to bear. Trust me that pain defuses.
Your existence requires a different mindset to mere mortals.
You can love for an entire life, it just their life not yours.
The intrinsic problem is their bodies will get older. Now you could set limits on how long you can stay with one partner. Two, three years will be great but a mere blink of an eye for you. Any longer though and they are dedicating their life to you and when you leave, can you contemplate they will be alone for the rest of their life.
The Confession
When do you tell the potential partner of your ability to defy death?
My advice is early on, when you know you want to share the rest of their life.
You confess, “By the way my loved one, I am immortal. I cannot die.”
Their response will fall into two categories: either ‘so am I?” or “are you insane.” Especially if you do not want to go through the torture of losing a child, and refusing to have anymore, you may get, “is that really your best excuse for not wanting kids.”
The point is you have owned up early. The incredulity or the disbelief will wane. Stay calm, do not seek to prove anything. For a decade, two, they will forget about it. By the end of the third they will see the aging in the mirror and an understanding will have labour pains. “I told you I could not die,” when they question your youthful looks.
There is no reason for you not to have children other than you will outlive them. But there is the chance that the mutation in your DNA could pass to the next generation. You could have an immortal family. If you can avoid procreation until you understand your own immortality, time is your friend, and years are but seconds in your life. You may find that you would not wish your gift on anybody. There will be centuries where this immortality is nothing but a curse. That emotional pain is your only close companion.
Love Is.
Love is a strong bond. Going longer than lust, deeper than sex and purer than the companionship. It should last a lifetime. Only that, loved immortal, means you will be the one mistaken first for the child and then the grand child of your lover. And it will still be you sat by their side, holding the hand, and stroking their face as they take the last breath.
The Immortal and Aging.
It is difficult to understand the aging process, young eternal. If I could, I would, believe me. For obvious reasons before your body reached maturity it aged like every other child of humankind. It would be highly suspicious and excessively dangerous for a child to age at the same rate as a mature body. You cannot be a toddler for a hundred plus years.
The rush of hormones at maturity changed your aging process. But you are still aging. Every century you age a tiny bit more. If you aged like a mortal, look at a picture of a century old human and imagine what you would look like after two centuries or more.
I suggest you look after your body. Treat it with kindness. Yes, you could overeat, drink copious amounts of ale and gain hundreds of pounds, before taking the years to lose that excess weight. Your life is yours to live how you choose. You have the time to understand every existence a human can enjoy.
You Have Time
There is enough time and pain to come for, what for others would be, self-destructive behaviour.
We still do not know if destructive behaviour adds to your version of aging. I am sure you do not want to look twenty for the rest of your life. For one, that is not what happens. As a rough estimate aging is four (perhaps 5) years per century. Once you hit your first millennium you are going to look mature. That will stop for the next millennium. If you are about to hit your second millennia and still look thirty or forty, contact me.
Now is a suitable time to start investing in anti-aging techniques.
Cloning, for example, could be a fantastic way of giving you a new body for when the age really begins to creep into the everyday. Science has managed to clone, but it has yet to advance the technology where, you my precious one, can use it effectively. Cloning your own body and allowing it sentience would be morally and legally dubious. A growth tank without any brain input must be virtuous in comparison.
By the time science has invented a way to grow the clone – and you have checked that your benefits are also in the clone – medical science should have developed far enough that a talent surgeon can place your brain in a new body.
The Future
Look forward to the future.
The future is yours.
The human civilisation may be on the brink of collapse, but when has it not been.
There are always doom-laden people shouting from the roof tops. And there will always be deniers of obvious truth. Most people will always ignore both and continue living every day. It may not be the life of the living, just an existence. But for you, my dear immortal, you will gain the experience of knowledge.
You can and will forget the details, even most people you meet and share memorable times will drift like the bottle on the ocean from your memory. It is the nature of longevity. But those big events you will see how they pan out. You will experience them all.
History is Disaster
Look through the history of the planet. Pandemics, Wars, genocide, nation enslaving nation have all come and gone. And even now eighty years since the first atomic bomb exploded, yet that threat still hangs over us.
You will witness the worst and the best of humankind. For those with short lifetimes they will be mesmerised with fear or delight by the events. You, however, will know it is just a blip in the time continuum. A mere blink of your eyes.
Dictators do not live for long. Elected politicians stay in power for little more than a decade. Political systems may survive for century after century, but they change and adapt or end up eating their own existence. Those invested in the system are either replaced, rejuvenated by the next generation until the system eventually evolves into something new. Evolution is always slow, but you will be a witness to how it was and how it became new. You will not be able to speak of what you had seen, but your intellect of the past may serve you in good stead. Just remember to speak as a historian not an eyewitness.
Humankind is greedy. We will consume all the knowledge that we can from the trivial to the vital. You are still humankind. You will always need knowledge. Track the scientific break throughs, understand all the advances and how they could benefit you and humankind in the future.
An Immortal Future
One day you could be walking the continents looking for other humans, the same as you, or just the survivors. It could be an insane, small, politician pressed the war button or an ignored global disaster, no matter how forewarned the world was. Nuclear destruction or global disaster (like warming) could result in the deaths of billions. But never one hundred percent. There should always be survivors. On islands or even the major continents. It will mean searching for that perfect place. One that could sustain the population you find.
It could be up to you, beloved immortal, to guide that population to be the best of humankind.
The new genesis. The new society built better than the one before. One that remembers not just the failures of before but the wonders too. A planet still aware of the whole despite the destruction. A planet still connected for the betterment of all.
Why, my wonderous immortal, was your creation made possible. You will need to put aside your own self and start thinking of all of humankind. You, and any others like you, will need to guide the post disaster generations to achieve the greatness that humankind is certainly capable.
Medular Sinclair, Social Media
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