Inspired by @ListPrompts. Immortality sucks.
When you say “immortal” do you mean I’m entirely exempt from death?
Or that I no longer age but I’m still subject to disease and injury? Can a bus still run over me and kill me?
And am I otherwise normal?
Or is this immortality in some angelic sense where I occupy a universe apart from the one we know?
I’m going to assume I’m exempt from death but otherwise normal.
In which case this exercise is terrifying.
I’d spend what, relatively speaking, is a very short amount of time living the life I know and love.
A few dozen years with the people I love. I watch them slowly fade away until I am left with only my memories of the people who made my life what it is.
I watch the world I love degrade. Whatever I might hold dear will one day wash away, fade away, burn away…
And I will be left an orphan on an alien world.
And of course some day the earth will cease to be.
What will I be then?
Optimistically I might hope that man has survived and mastered interstellar flight. What a wonder it would be to live through that?!
But it is perhaps more likely he will not.
And I will be a vestigial ape on a barren uninhabitable rock when that ultimate armageddon comes.
And then I will be a man afloat in the agonizing heat of a bloated sun without even a world to rest on.
Quite literally hell for a few hundred million years.
And then the sun fades to a cool dwarf.
And where do I go?
Space is very empty.
And besides, I lack a propulsion system.
And even air to push against.
(Swim swim swim…)
So I orbit the kernel of burned out sun utterly unable to influence my condition.
For a very very long time I orbit.
And in a hundred billion years or so…
When entropy would otherwise claim the universe…
When what the scientist call the Heat Death of the universe would otherwise have finally resolved…
There I will be…
Dissociated from all matter…
And all energy…
And all information…
In absolute darkness and absolute cold…
Single-handedly keeping the entire universe alive…
By my very presence.
There I remain, very lonely, very cold.
And very hungry.
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Forever.