So I take this pill, rendering me immortal. For the first...decade or so, everything seems quite normal. Then it gets weird after 2 decades. People go from complimenting my youthful appearance to becoming slightly suspicious, in a way they can't quite quantify.
After 5 decades of non-aging existence, everyone from my generation is at least a septuagenarian, and here I am, still with the face of a 21 year old man. Yet inside, I feel 71. I've already seen the death of a lot of my family, and deep inside I know it's only going to get worse. I have become wealthy from a great many number of interviews and attention from the media as "The Man Who Cannot Age", but it does little to bring me true happiness. I'm already starting to regret taking that blasted pill, and I'm only half a century in.
After 100 years of youth, I have become a reclusive hermit, a survivor of the last great conflict between humans. What little interaction I do have is awkward and shaky - people think I'm mentally ill due to my strange, outdated dialect. Occasionally I'm recognised from my celebrity days, and I have to escape from a town before the government swoops on me to perform experiments on what makes my immortal body tick.
Everyone I've ever loved has been dead for quite some time at this point, with a few ancient, doddery exceptions. Even with the leaps and bounds science has taken in the last few decades, 120 is still considered "Old as balls".
After 500 years, the world is unrecognisable to me from what I remember it being. The human race has become adept at space travel with routine intrasolar flights to and from the various colonies. Yet still I walk the Earth alone, unable to communicate with modern people due to failing to keep up with subtle, gradual changes in language and dialect. The accumulative centuries of life experience - such that it is - means that the decades have started bleeding together and whip by without me really noticing.
Because I no longer interact with humans, I have no reliable way of keeping track of my time on the planet - but I stopped caring about how old I am many lifetimes ago. What does it matter? I am now nothing more than a haunted whisper, with only my own (by now quite fractured and damaged) mind for company.
After 10,000 years, I am very close to absolute breaking point. Centuries come and go in a blur. Decades wink by in an instant. I barely even feel years anymore, as each one makes up 1/10,000th of my entire - massive - lifespan. Ten millennia worth of memory jostle for room inside a crowded human brain that was never meant to exist for this long. The climate has changed, and the planet is heavily into the next Ice Age. I am always cold, always half-mad from my unmatched existential woes...and always, always alone.
A million years have passed...and the torture that is my existence has not ended, and what little lucidity there is left within my mind knows that there are still countless aeons to come. Whatever humans are left are quite different in appearance to the ones I remember, as a million years of evolution has slowly taken its toll on their physiology. Not that it matters, as I only ever see them from afar, having become the best in the entire universe at hiding. I am vaguely aware they have mastered inter-galactic flight, time travel and inter-dimensional travel, yet all of these magnificent achievements are cold to my thoroughly withered and desiccated mind. They are not my own - they are not really even my species' own accomplishments, and so like everything else, it does nothing to move me. At this point, I have long-since failed to realise I am in fact less human than the descendants I share the planet with, having lost any sense of joy - or any emotions at all - hundreds of thousands of years ago. Meanwhile, the millennia scream by me, hardly noticed.
5 billion years pass, and the only thing left that I ever feared has finally come. The sun, once worshipped as a god by cultures across the world...giver of all life on the planet...has finally used up the last of it fuel and begins the rapid and terrifying implosion in on itself. I watch from the charred, baked surface of the long - sterile earth as the gargantuan red sphere in the sky becomes a small, yet utterly ferocious point of light. For the first time in aeons, I feel pain as my rapidly-healing eyes are assaulted by the almost infinite light that pours into them.
In a strange way, I am relieved - or whatever facsimile of relieved my ancient brain is capable of producing - as I know I will now experience eternal peace, if not outright death. I have spent billions of years testing the limits of my immortal state, and I know that the coldness of space will finally...finally...give me the state of unawareness I have been craving for so very long.
What used to be the sun finally explodes in a coruscating nova - small on the scale of stellar events, yet still more massive than any mind is capable of comprehending. The remnants of earth are annihilated in a horrifyingly powerful shockwave, and my tiny frame is catapulted across to the other side of what passes for the solar system. I do not slow down thanks to there being nothing TO slow me down, and the very last thing I ever see, before the vacuum of space finally causes me to eternally freeze and lose consciousness, is the twisted remains of the cradle of human life.
TL;DR - nah, it's not for me thanks.
After 5 decades of non-aging existence, everyone from my generation is at least a septuagenarian, and here I am, still with the face of a 21 year old man. Yet inside, I feel 71. I've already seen the death of a lot of my family, and deep inside I know it's only going to get worse. I have become wealthy from a great many number of interviews and attention from the media as "The Man Who Cannot Age", but it does little to bring me true happiness. I'm already starting to regret taking that blasted pill, and I'm only half a century in.
After 100 years of youth, I have become a reclusive hermit, a survivor of the last great conflict between humans. What little interaction I do have is awkward and shaky - people think I'm mentally ill due to my strange, outdated dialect. Occasionally I'm recognised from my celebrity days, and I have to escape from a town before the government swoops on me to perform experiments on what makes my immortal body tick.
Everyone I've ever loved has been dead for quite some time at this point, with a few ancient, doddery exceptions. Even with the leaps and bounds science has taken in the last few decades, 120 is still considered "Old as balls".
After 500 years, the world is unrecognisable to me from what I remember it being. The human race has become adept at space travel with routine intrasolar flights to and from the various colonies. Yet still I walk the Earth alone, unable to communicate with modern people due to failing to keep up with subtle, gradual changes in language and dialect. The accumulative centuries of life experience - such that it is - means that the decades have started bleeding together and whip by without me really noticing.
Because I no longer interact with humans, I have no reliable way of keeping track of my time on the planet - but I stopped caring about how old I am many lifetimes ago. What does it matter? I am now nothing more than a haunted whisper, with only my own (by now quite fractured and damaged) mind for company.
After 10,000 years, I am very close to absolute breaking point. Centuries come and go in a blur. Decades wink by in an instant. I barely even feel years anymore, as each one makes up 1/10,000th of my entire - massive - lifespan. Ten millennia worth of memory jostle for room inside a crowded human brain that was never meant to exist for this long. The climate has changed, and the planet is heavily into the next Ice Age. I am always cold, always half-mad from my unmatched existential woes...and always, always alone.
A million years have passed...and the torture that is my existence has not ended, and what little lucidity there is left within my mind knows that there are still countless aeons to come. Whatever humans are left are quite different in appearance to the ones I remember, as a million years of evolution has slowly taken its toll on their physiology. Not that it matters, as I only ever see them from afar, having become the best in the entire universe at hiding. I am vaguely aware they have mastered inter-galactic flight, time travel and inter-dimensional travel, yet all of these magnificent achievements are cold to my thoroughly withered and desiccated mind. They are not my own - they are not really even my species' own accomplishments, and so like everything else, it does nothing to move me. At this point, I have long-since failed to realise I am in fact less human than the descendants I share the planet with, having lost any sense of joy - or any emotions at all - hundreds of thousands of years ago. Meanwhile, the millennia scream by me, hardly noticed.
5 billion years pass, and the only thing left that I ever feared has finally come. The sun, once worshipped as a god by cultures across the world...giver of all life on the planet...has finally used up the last of it fuel and begins the rapid and terrifying implosion in on itself. I watch from the charred, baked surface of the long - sterile earth as the gargantuan red sphere in the sky becomes a small, yet utterly ferocious point of light. For the first time in aeons, I feel pain as my rapidly-healing eyes are assaulted by the almost infinite light that pours into them.
In a strange way, I am relieved - or whatever facsimile of relieved my ancient brain is capable of producing - as I know I will now experience eternal peace, if not outright death. I have spent billions of years testing the limits of my immortal state, and I know that the coldness of space will finally...finally...give me the state of unawareness I have been craving for so very long.
What used to be the sun finally explodes in a coruscating nova - small on the scale of stellar events, yet still more massive than any mind is capable of comprehending. The remnants of earth are annihilated in a horrifyingly powerful shockwave, and my tiny frame is catapulted across to the other side of what passes for the solar system. I do not slow down thanks to there being nothing TO slow me down, and the very last thing I ever see, before the vacuum of space finally causes me to eternally freeze and lose consciousness, is the twisted remains of the cradle of human life.
TL;DR - nah, it's not for me thanks.
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