Eternally

Chapter 1- A Not-Very-Brief History

Some people live for 200 years. Lucky ones live 500. There are multiple versions of unlucky people and their unlucky lives.

The first version is a person who, no matter what they do, won't live until 100. In the old world, those people would be considered lucky, the average lifespan in 2010 for a female was about seventy-nine years.

Another version of unlucky, is a child who either dies at birth or only lives a few days.

Due to medical achievements and the unending and occasionally nosy curiosity of the human race, the average life expectancy gradually increased to one hundred years. Then one hundred and fifty. Around the year 2078, a brilliant (though some would argue insane) scientist by the name of Tarkin Brown created a serum. It was an injection that supposedly, he developed to even more increase the life expectancy of humans.

Sometime around the year 2050, a plague had reduced the world's population by half, this plague having been the event that prompted the serum that Brown created. Only ten people died as the serum entered their bloodstream, but about 50 others found that they'd developed deadly diseases from the virus, and had died later. However, in almost 700 people, the serum worked. The first to die of that group was a man by the name of Brenron Harrison. He was one hundred and seventy five years old., and he had been older before being given the serum anyway.

Another side effect, even among those who survived, was that the women found it incredibly difficult to conceive. Out of the seven hundred something volunteers that had survived, three hundred and seventy were women, three hundred and twenty were under thirty five years of age, and less that one hundred of them had a child after surviving the serum.

My mother did.

She was twenty-nine when she was injected with the serum, and was thirty-two when I was born. But as I came into the world, she left. It became apparent to the world that those injected with the serum would indeed survive longer, but there was little chance of surviving childbirth. No one could figure out why the risk was suddenly so much higher. But when I was born, they did not let me live with my father. And they did not let me live with my grandparents.

I was raised by scientists in a lab, for the better part of my childhood. They wanted to know if my mother having the serum in her blood had affected me, or if I was just normal. They soon found out that I was far from normal. I had no superhuman abilities, or any physical dysfunction or malformation. I was just... different. I had always known I was different. It just seemed to me that I felt more, and knew more than anyone my age ever did. I had an eidetic memory and an abnormally high IQ. The scientists that raised me made me exercise vigorously for as long as I could remember. Someone trained me to fight, and to run, to notice everything, and to survive. Little did I know that I'd have to use those skills against them years later.

I turned ten inside that lab. Then fifteen. But when I hit my eighteenth birthday, and they figured there was nothing more they could really do with me, nothing else that they could discover. So they let me go. With no direction, and with no knowledge of the outside world except for what I'd read or seen on television, I left the lab. I first searched for my family, only to find most of them already dead. My father was dead, having fought in the war that had sprung up quickly the year I turned six. His parents had died. My mother's parents had died. I'd almost given up when I found that my mother, before she'd been injected with the serum, had a son.

When I learned I had a brother, I was thrilled, confused, and I had no idea where to find him. After months of searching, I found him in college in the area that used to be New York, he was twenty-five and in grad school. He was so thrilled to have a sister that he let me live with him in his apartment. After a few months, he made the connection that I was the reason his mother had died. I moved out to spare him from the constant reminder. I also left to spare myself from the look he got on his face whenever he realized how much I looked like our mother, whom I'd never known, and he had no pictures of. For years, I kept contact with him, through emails and the occasional phone call, but I never saw him face to face again.

But the idea sprung that, like my brother, I could go to college.

I created a fake transcript based off of the things I'd been forced to learn in the lab, and a college on the opposite coast of the country, in California, offered me admission without having to pay. I was worried, because I'd never been in an actual school setting before, but once I got there, I realized that I was really good at school. I could read people as well as I could read books, so I had no trouble making friends.

But when I got through college, and then grad school, I realized that I hadn't changed physically at all, in all of those years. My body was stuck. I still had my monthly problem, and my hair still grew, but everything else had just... stopped. I didn't gain and lose weight like most people. I could still get tan, but once it faded I didn't get freckles like most people. But I didn't gain or lose muscle, I didn't gain one pimple.

Growing up, all of the normal things had happened, I was rail thin until I left the lab, and then gained enough weight to look more normal. Because of the fact that not one thing had changed in six years, I knew that something besides just my brain was different.

Eventually, I figured out that once I'd hit a certain age, around nineteen, I had stopped aging as a side effect of the serum that was infused in my very genes. And people began to remark on it. People began asking what my 'secret' to looking so young was. They clearly didn't know that I had an actual secret, beyond a face cream or a morning routine. I knew that if I stayed in my college town for much longer, the questions would become less friendly and more accusatory. So I left.

By this time, thankfully, I'd become very independent and able to maneuver in what I still sometimes referred to as 'the outside world.' I sold my apartment in California and moved north to Oregon. It didn't take long to realize that I probably shouldn't stay in any one city for more than six or seven years, or people would suspect.

I had received a degree in Medicine in college and hope I'd find it easy to get jobs wherever I went. After a few years I got my doctorate through another college in Colorado. No matter where I moved, I always managed to find some sort of job.

Fifty years passed of this moving around and finding new jobs. Then one hundred. By my three hundredth birthday, I finally realized that I wasn't just long lived. I, as far as anyone could tell, was immortal. My hair was the same curly red that it had always been, and I was still stuck in a nineteen year old's body. I didn't have the luxury of forgetting anything from the long time I'd been alive, because of the eidetic memory that I used to enjoy. Instead, I just got to hang in this world, watching people die all around me, for too many years to count.

And thus we come upon another form of an unlucky life.

The kind that doesn't end.