I've been King, or Emperor eighteen times. I've been uncountably wealthy for over a thousand years. It's become tedious, the difference between high and low insignificant. King or slave - I've done that, too -, rich or poor, it's all the same deadly dull tedium, now. No challenges, no loves, no hates. Even fear, Humanity's ruling principle, has faded to nothing much.
Immortality has become a curse. God has punished me, and I don't know why.
I wish I could die. Suicide has always failed. I simply wake up, somewhere else. Usually, it's far from where I "killed" myself, far enough that I must learn another language and culture. I've done this numerous times, because the hope for death remains in me.
The change in my situation after a failed suicide attempt is often interesting, for a few years, but I always rediscover that people really are the same everywhere, no matter how they arrange their societies.
I've had almost a hundred wives, with children. I had to abandon them after the children were grown, often with a lynchmob in pursuit, screaming their equivalent of "Burn the witch!", when people began to notice that I don't age. I let them catch me a few times, but it didn't help. I suppose it made them happy, though it didn't do what I wanted. It just hurt a lot.
Boring. Except when they've got a war on. I run toward the sound of guns, hopeful of finding something truly lethal. I missed two opportunities in Japan, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. Being vaporized would, maybe, be enough to end this. Maybe not.
Now, there's a starship in orbit. The people aboard came a couple of hundred lightyears to visit us, to say "Hello, how you doing? You want to trade poems and songs?"
They've explained that our biological differences place an impenetrable barrier between our species, so that there is no possibility of any face-to-face contact. They can't land, or they will die of unknown horrible diseases. That goes both ways - they might accidentally kill everything on Earth, with their microbes.
Hmm... I wonder how I might get onto that starship....
February 2018
YOU ARE READING
Random Movements
Science FictionThere's a lot of space, and time, out there. It's worthy of a long, close look. But a journey should end. It should lead to arrival at a destination. Or, maybe not.
