Mortimer's Mansion

Prologue

Mortimer's grandfather told him that knowledge comes at a cost. Mortimer had assumed that cost was losing the bliss of ignorance, and he steeled himself for this particular danger with great care. He did not foresee that knowledge would cost him his morality and cost a mansion full of others their mortality. Mortimer's grandfather might have warned Mortimer that he was heading down a dark path, but Mortimer's grandfather passed away.

Fortunately, this was a fate Mortimer learned to prevent for others. He had always been fascinated by the way humans interacted with each other and by the way time functions. In fact, he became so fascinated with both of these topics that he ended up with two PhDs: one in sociology and one in physics. Mortimer then harnessed his extensive education to warp time within the parameters of an enormous mansion. Mortimer created a mansion whose inhabitants never aged. And they never left, thanks to Mortimer's imprisonment with a combination of space-time forcefields and DIY solutions (usually involving more duct tape than he would care to admit). How exactly Mortimer used his science and math to make his prisoners immoral, I never quite understood. I don't care much for physics. Maybe I've been entirely misguided and Mortimer used something closer to magic all this time. Regardless, Mortimer would observe the effects of immortality on his prisoners. He watched how they interacted with each other and with time over the years. This was his project, his passion, his career, his Roman empire, his time, his energy, his pride, his joy, and all of his love.

Mortimer's science experiment sat on the outskirts of the suburbs, nearby but not adjacent to other houses. The mailbox was unique, a wooden, carved, little box with sloths decorating it. The roof was painted a pleasant yet remarkable orange color. And the mansion was always one of those houses that put up every inflatable it could fit in its front yard at Christmas time. But people passing it by hardly paid it a second glance, certainly never suspecting what was going on inside. They only knew what Mortimer let them see.

Mortimer lived in the first few rooms of his mansion upon entry, separated from his prisoners. He carried out his personal life there. He had no family but a few and fleeting friends, none of which knew about Mortimer's project. Mortimer himself remained immortal, mostly due to the fact that he lived in the mansion and occasionally coupled with the use of an age reversing machine (which at its core uses the same science as the immortality house). And so it went on, with Mortimer observing his prisoners, prisoners forming their own lives, and stories emerging from Mortimer's Mansion.