A Letter to the First Immortals

To the Immortals,

If you are reading this, then I am long dead. Whether or not you understand what that means will I guess depend on the circumstances. If you do understand what I mean, then I can only imagine what emotions such a statement might rile up in your hearts. Perhaps you still know a thing about sadness, or perhaps not. Perhaps you feel guilt: the ultimate survivor syndrome. Or perhaps you just feel nostalgia, for a simpler time.

I can only imagine the odd technicalities of the situation you find yourselves in, which to me may seem impossibly confusing, but to you are quite unremarkable, having faded into the background like the sky or the wind. Maybe you’ve all transferred your consciousnesses into digital space, and live forever in a simulated reality. This being the case, I wonder if you’re even aware of your electrical bindings, or if you’ve decided to start afresh, forgetting the world outside in favor of a new beginning, untainted by the earth’s long history. Do you remember the earth, descendants, and the people who lived there? What do they mean to you now?

Perhaps you discovered the cure for aging, and live the life of the biologically immortal. I wonder then, do you fear death now more than ever? Has the replacement of death as an eventuality with death as a consequence for negligent behavior led to the sequestering of the human race indoors, far from anything that could possibly hurt you? Have you done the opposite instead, reinforcing your frail bodies with metal and plasma, so that you might survive the very death of the sun? Are you haunted by the mathematical reality that, as the years of your life grow infinite, so too does the probability of your death? In that case, maybe your world is not so different from mine, plagued with existential fear, and defined by attempts to ignore it. Or, perhaps, being able to live on for millennia has allowed you to make peace with death in a way I never could. I doubt that I did — make peace that is — not really; I don’t think I ever will.

Did you cheat death through the manipulation of time, I wonder. Have you breached the confines of cause and effect entirely in order to live as all-seeing Gods? In that case I must look very silly to you. I write constrained by the belief that you will read this long after I am dead, when instead you are reading it now with me, and perhaps always have read it. If I might ask, is the thought of being constrained by time as inconceivable to you as the thought of being free of it is to me? I presume I will never know.

I imagine that, more likely than not, none of my predictions are correct. Despite the undeniable imaginativeness of the human mind, your existence probably dwells far beyond the realm of even my wildest fantasies. I only have one question, then, which might span every possibility of an immortal future. What happened to me? Forgive me for being so selfish, but I am singular in my perception, and as such am so in my wants and needs. I do not ask out of fear; the dead have little need for fear. I do not mean to know the cause of my death, nor the hour. No, what I ask is what has become of my soul. Where are the memories of me, or the stories told by those down the line? What has become of the changes I caused in my world; have they persisted to your time? Are my children dead, and their children as well? Has my tombstone decayed, year after year, and crumbled into dust?

Do you remember me at all?

Perhaps this is my last ditch effort at immortality. Perhaps I believe that if the immortals read my words, and hear my voice, and remember, that I could truly live forever. Or do I know this to be a fantasy? Are even the immortals doomed to die?

Perhaps.

This is my curse. The curse of perhaps. My pain is knowing of the faint possibility of immortality, through one means or another, whilst also knowing the strongest doubt: that all the evidence I can conjure is against me. Perhaps, just as I am doomed to death, I am doomed to the pain of the uncertainty of its certainty. Perhaps the pain of perhaps is my ultimate burden.

Or, perhaps, it is my joy.