Methuselah's Curse
I was born in a time without dates. When I was born, it was summer, or so the elders told me from my earliest memories. Back then, we counted time by the seasons. I remember one hot fall when they said winter had come and gone already, only to come back again in less than one moon cycle. Some of the elders counted that as a whole season, adding it to their age. When they spoke, they would proclaim how many seasons they were old, proudly stating, “I am 30 winters old, so respect me.”
With that being the established system of the time, I can’t give you a birth date or even a birth year. My memory is excellent in some regards though, I can remember the face of everyone I have ever met and put a name to it. I can remember events clearly from just about every year of my life. As such, I can make some approximations. I figure I was born in the year you might call 7650 BC, give or take a few winters. Years later, once more established calendars took place, I gave myself the birth date of June 21st or the equivalent summer solstice of whatever calendar in use at the time. It has been one of my better decisions throughout the years, easy to remember and easy to pinpoint no matter who is deciding the dating method of the day.
Now as any scholar will tell you, civilization was just starting back then in the forms of cities and such, but most people were still like me, on the verges and not actually involved in this great event. I wouldn’t see my first city until I was already over 3000 years old. And let me tell you, when I did I was positive that man was on the pinnacle of all he could ever learn. I have thought this many times in my life only to be amazed a few centuries later.
But before I get on too far with my story, let me tell you about the first two millennia of my life to give you a starting point for just who I am. I think it important for you to realize just how far it is that mankind has come with each successive generation.
In that time, one lived in his village and that was about it. You would occasionally venture to another nearby village, but overall, traveling of a distance of more than a few week’s walk wasn’t done in one’s lifetime. The area we lived in lent itself well to staying in one area though, that area being what is now southern France. It was rich in game, fruits to be foraged, offered plenty of supplies for simple dwellings and plenty of caves to weather the occasional storms and wintery weather. I believe from my studies that some of the other early cultures were nomadic, but not my people. We stayed put.
We called ourselves the U’tars. That name didn’t have any special meaning, it was just who we were. Other villages were the U’laks. All of them were U’laks. We might say we were going to trade with U’Laks by the far river and such. With no rules of grammar to go by at the time, I speculate that U’laks was the equivalent to the word ‘them’. At least, that is how we used the word.
There was little fighting in those days. We did squabble and did go to war occasionally though war meant usually a single battle or a small series of battles with a band of U’laks from far off who had usually fallen on hard times. We would join with other villages nearby and usually drive them off. In my first 100 years, I only remember three times going to battle against neighboring villages. The battles were quick, usually not fatal unless from a festering wound caused during the fight and within a few seasons it was all forgotten.
There were reasons for not being very warlike. We lived hard lives. A storm which we casually ignore today could kill. A bad winter could kill. Some would die of disease every cold season. We were more afraid of being killed on a hunt by an angry boar or bitten by the hidden snake than we were of being killed by some opponent. Survival itself was the enemy, and when a competition for resources didn’t exist, there was little need for fighting. There was space, food, and water enough for all.
Most of our time was spent with the men hunting for food and the women foraging. Outside of that, the battle of the sexes was almost non-existence. Women did take care of the primary duties of child-rearing, but beyond that, all tasks were shared. I remember several women over the years who also became great hunters, and later on, as the village grew, great fishers of the river we lived near. However, as a man could never bear a child, it was women’s duties men never took on. At that time, it was men who were excluded, women could do all tasks.
Now during this time, generations passed quickly. It wasn’t like now. Woman were usually having their first kids by the time they were in their early teens, by this I mean just after puberty. By the time they were twenty, it wasn’t all that uncommon for these women to already have two or three kids. And for every pregnancy they had, probably only about half made it all the way to birth, and of those several wouldn’t last the first few days. Death was very common and accepted. A child wasn’t considered alive, that is the holy man wouldn’t bless the child with a name, until his first full moon. I guess there was one division of the sexes back then, the men were the holy men who blessed marriage and birth, while it was the holy women who blessed the dead.
I took my first wife at eighteen. I think she was about thirteen. Men always married later in our society. You had to earn the right to marry. Usually, a man hadn’t earned the elder women’s permission to marry until around twenty. Tests and rites had to be performed to prove one was man enough to take a mate to provide. It was my nature, more about that later, that allowed me to succeed at such an early age. Anyway, she died in childbirth of our first child, so I married a girl from a neighboring village about six months later. She died also.
This didn’t bode well. Up until then, I was considered blessed by the spirits. That is who we served, the spirit of everything. We referred to this spirit as a he and a she, it was everything. The word used, Ua, meant both man and woman. The best way to think of it was that everything had a spirit, all the same yet all different. We were living spirits ourselves, but all trees, buildings, even drops of water were part of this spirit. Sometimes this spirit was individualized by the item, sometimes not depending on how we were trying to appease or honor it. The spirits were everything. We didn’t believe in a god or goddess, didn’t believe in an earth mother or father. We only believed in the spirits. When we died, it wasn’t the will of God, it was simply our spirit getting bored with its current manifestation of life and wanting to move on to experience something else. It made sense at the time and I was a very devout believer.
However, spirits could bless you or be angry with you. If things went well, you were blessed by the rest of the spirits. And up until the time my first two wives died, things had gone great. On my first time out hunting a young deer, I had wandered near a nest of wasps. Bloated and sure to die, I survived. I was eight winters old at the time. A few years later, I was gored by a boar and survived. I was bitten by two of the hidden snakes and survived. I was considered blessed. But now with two wives dead, the elders assumed I had either angered the spirits or that they were angry that I hadn’t died when I was suppose to. But getting a mate was only the decision of the elders so far as they gave permission. In my village, the girls chose the man first, then the man either agreed or disagreed. No girl wanted to risk dying by offending the spirits. If there was a crime, it was taking a girl as a mate against her will.
We didn’t really have a judicial system, and nothing resembling a system of punitive measures. I was shunned for a few seasons and the young girls quickly forgot about it. I married a few years later, and this wife bore me four daughters and five sons before dying around the old age of 32.
Now I should add something else, we didn’t live long lives as you do now. Elders were those close to thirty. Many died before thirty. A few might live to sixty, but that was extremely rare. So not only was being born and surviving itself a struggle, life was so hard that reaching 30 was a task.
During this time, I didn’t age. I reached my prime and never got any older. No one really noticed for a long time. I became an elder, but with no written records, it just became accepted I would always be there. And I did this for several hundred years. With such a small community and such a small knowledge base, I was just accepted as the blessed holy man. I soon became the holiest of holy men for several villages around. I had several wives and many many children. Eventually, it seemed the entire village was made up of my descendants.
It was a forest fire which finally destroyed my village. It forced us to flee and separate one dark night. With my then wife and two daughters, we left our lands and decided to trek down to the nearby ocean, and from there we would travel the coast to the new lands.
I was over 500 at the time. And in that 500 years, I had learned a lot about the various plants around me. I knew which ones were safe to eat, and more importantly, I knew which ones gave me the visions. But in my case, I could eat the leaves and berries of plants like the nightshade and instead of dying, I would gain potent insight. It had become my belief through these visions that the spirits of the dead had left us and traveled to a distant place up the coast to a land free of all strife. Before that, we believed the spirits just carried on in a form of reincarnation. And endless cycle. When a bird looked at us funny, it was nothing more than an ancestor remembering some small tidbit from a former life. I was so convinced in my beliefs that I had convinced my family of their truth also.
When the fire hit and killed most of my village, leaving many more in anguish from disease which struck a few days later, I decided it was time to leave and travel to this village of the spirits. I was off to visit the dead.
And remember, I said earlier my memory was excellent. Today you would call it a photographic or eidetic memory. I believe this is partially due to my nature of immortality, my mind is just as eternal as my body. When I went to visit the dead, I was off to see 500 years of friends, loved ones, wives, children, grandchildren, their children, and so on who had died before me, each of whom I could see in my mind’s eye just as easily as I see you now. It was the first time I myself had conjured up anything like the concept similar to what heaven is thought of today. I was going home.
And I was driven on this mission. We traveled to what is now Italy. Unfortunately, by the time we go there, my wife was sick. We stopped at a village which took us in only after much effort to communicate with them. That was the first time I became aware of the concept of differing beliefs and customs. These people were of a darker hair and taller stature than I was used to. They also spoke a language almost totally foreign to me. However, take us in they did. I stayed there five years, saw both my daughters married into their culture. My wife died eventually and the next night I snuck off to seek her out in the village of the dead.
For the next sixty years, I traveled the coastline. I would go so far, meet up with a village and learn their ways for a few years before traveling on. I spread my beliefs of the village of the dead, hoping to find someone who had heard rumors of such a place. And it was in this time that I developed a strong knack for acquiring languages. Ever since I went public about my immortality years ago, that has been one of the prime sources of my income, teaching scholars about the hundreds of dead languages I have learned in my lifetime, for like most my memory, my knowledge of those languages is almost perfect.
But suffice it to say, speeding this story up, I eventually made it to the outskirts of what you now know to be the beginnings of the Egyptian civilization around 4000 BC. And this was when I was seeing my first large gatherings of people in what might be termed as a city. I saw for the first time men whose sole job it was to protect or fight. For the first time, I saw people whose sole job it was to govern. And I was already three and a half millennia old. So believe me when I say I was very set and in my ways, I was convinced that these people were full of folly, that the spirits surely must be angry with them.
And at that time, I thought I knew about everything. I knew more about medicine than any of these people, I knew more about the making of tools, more about herbalism, more about just almost anything, or so my arrogance led me to believe. I secretly scoffed at their primitive ideas of gods in the sky, thinking them foolish for harboring such beliefs about the spirit world. But being the traveler I was, I had become well practiced in hiding my opinions.
In turn, they astonished me so completely that I eventually gave up my primitive notions about most everything. They taught me to write, the simple pictographs they used that would eventually turn into hieroglyphics. I became a priest of theirs and for the next two thousand years stayed in one place, helping teach others while learning in their various scribe schools and various institutions of learning. And I would like to add, they were quite advanced when it came to academic studies. The Greeks and Romans would later have similar levels of openness in their studies, but then I wouldn’t see that kind of open thought again until almost the 1400s. I can’t begin to describe the limitations imposed by Christianity on the pursuits of research during the dark ages. When ideas like the earth is round, the moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun will get you killed as a heretic, only the most devout of scholars rock the boat.
Now I am sure you will ask, were you there when the Pyramids were being built? Yes, I was. But I had little to do with them. I did visit them as they were being built, I understand many of the technologies at the time used to construct them, however, your historians have more or less pieced it all together correctly. But I was never directly involved. I was still just the common man, rarely involved in the great events of the day. I heard the stories, but it was always someone else doing the deeds. Compare it to what if someone asked you a thousand years from now if you were involved in building our skyscrapers of today. Likely you would say no, though you have visited them plenty of times, possibly even live in one.
I could spend hours telling you about all that I did during the first several millennia of my life. How I influenced this or that, how I actually came up with this or that innovation, but truth was, I was little more than a witness. By this time, I learned that allowing people to have knowledge of who and what I was led to strife. People were now suspicions of someone who was immortal, ascribing it all sorts of evil or magical meanings. People would start either worshiping, or more often than not, they would start trying to tear me down. It was like a curse, someone would be told I had been around a particular school for the last several decades without aging and they would make it their goal to prove I was either a fake or somehow cursed. And that was usually preferable to being made some type of holy man.
After a few times of this, I began hiding who I was. I became a master at forging documents and would start traveling from school to school every few years, stay at one for about ten years and then move on.
I also took up stints in the military, and though I never became a high ranking officer, I did lead men. Once even over 2000 men in the service of Pharaoh Ramesses the II. But even then, I stayed in the background. I never actually met the man, though I did see him upon occasion in parades.
But by about 1500 BC I was getting bored with this existence. Trade routes were continually opening up, word of distant lands opening up. Having lived this long, I was really starting to take on a rather hedonistic view of life. And I wanted to see more of the world. My particular cravings, some I won’t even go into for fear you will judge me harshly, were beginning to make life living among the orderly Egyptians difficult. I left and began to travel.
For the next several centuries, I traveled, mostly on the sea and saw several of the port cities of the Mediterranean. It was amazing that I didn’t die during this time. I had a few close calls, even had to make a few long swims to shore when my boat capsized, but I was lucky I guess. With all ships that never made it back to port, I still find it amazing that I was so foolish. But luck was with me.
I then spent a few hundred years living in Greece, during part of its Golden Age. And this was where I started getting a knack of meeting up with the great people of the day. I once even debated Socrates in open forum. As I said, I was of a definite hedonistic thought during this time in my life. I found Athens to be quite liberal and this suited me rather well, but my nihilistic approach toward viewing the duty of man to man was where I came at odds with the great Philosopher. Obviously, I didn’t win anything, I have never seen any evidence that my arguments changed any minds, maybe only refined the arguments of the day’s philosophy.
Rome was on the rise, and as I said earlier, I had mastered the techniques of forgery. As Rome rose, so did I in where I could go. I became a Roman citizen and no one could prove otherwise once I got all my documents in place. I moved on to Rome itself in an attempt to avoid most the wars of the day, but by around 100 BC, I was quite bored again. Believing at the time that anywhere but Rome was an uncivilized wasteland devoid of any form of reason, I left out again once again for the rumored lands to the east.
Stories were abundant of great civilizations far to the east, how wise and advanced they were, but as with most things of that nature, in Rome we considered them to just be mere fables. But in that direction I went.
But I really don’t want to bore you with a long story that just keeps going. I was over 7000 years old, so you can imagine I have already left a lot out. But to gloss over the next several hundred years I did go east, I made my way all the way to what is now Japan. What I learned on my travels was again immense. I learned a lot of new languages, customs, and ideals. My respect for life returned somewhere along the way, as did my devotion to ancestors also returned. I believed I had come to the place I was meant to be several times while in the east. But unfortunately, I was plagued by being an outsider. My skin was different and eventually I was forced to move on once the novelty of my presence wore off. I was always seen as somewhat inferior and that eventually that would hinder my ability to move around freely in their societies.
My skills as a warrior were fortunately unmatched, having had so many years training with about every known weapon of the time, so I was relatively safe during these travels. I survived most wounds, many of which would have been fatal to normal people and this did afford me some level of protection. I only add this to say that in my early travels I really faced little risk.
But by the time I returned to the west around 300 AD, I had learned that it is best to hide among my own people, by this I mean those who look like me. The world was not yet the multiracial conglomerate it now is, back then skin color mattered more than ever. That was the last time I would venture east before the twentieth century. I look back today and see historians pondering over the occasional evidence of Caucasian influence in the peoples of the east and sometimes wonder if those aren’t indeed some of my descendants they are finding in Mongolia, Japan, and China with the occasional blonde hair.
I digress again.
It took some doing, but I did integrate myself back into Roman culture. My only real regret of my absence from this area was that I missed the birth of Christianity. Like many historians, I am really curious as to how early Christianity really was. I am not sure if I would have been lucky enough to actually encounter any of the original founders, namely Jesus and his Apostles, but it would have been nice. By this time in my life, I was still making the attempt to meet the more famous people of the day where ever I was at, but I still chose to stay in the shadows as much as possible, never seeking the limelight for myself.
But even then, with all of my knowledge, I occasionally found it hard not to seek out some young inventor or artisan and plant seeds of something great or new. I tried my best to advance the society I lived in without becoming one of the great innovators of the time. I had already learned that innovators often met with terrible fates and I didn’t wish to share that fate when new powers took over or when the religious men of the day got involved. Already Christianity was earning its dark name which endured throughout the middle ages of being a suppressor of free thought. I don’t know what I would have done had I known where it would all end up a few centuries later with the inquisitions. Probably would have fled back to the east as fast as possible. What they did was rather similar to what the Nazi’s did to the Jews. The only difference was the level of technology made things more of a one on one process back then, so an element of how many people one man could torture and kill became a factor.
But at the time, I did rejoin Roman culture and made my way up to Britain where I stayed for the next five centuries. As Roman rule faded, so did I from society. For about two centuries I became more or less a hermit, living out in the distant woods, only occasionally making my way into a town here or there for supplies or news. All I can really say is once you slip into this lifestyle of being a hermit, the monotony takes over and it is really easy to live an entire life that way, letting the years slip by. If there is any part of my life which is kind of a blank, it is those two hundred years, all merging together as a monotonous blur of repetitive behavior. I like to humor myself at night wondering if I spawned any legends of being Merlin during my hermit years. I certainly did nothing Merlin like, except being the strange stranger out in the moors who has been there for generations.
It was a woman that brought me out of this life. I saw her one day during one of my treks into town. I hadn’t been with a woman in over 50 years, and I saw this young girl who was more beautiful than any I had ever seen. Not to bore you with the story, for I did win the girl and was bored of her within two years, but I had cleaned myself up and within a span of six months I had reintegrated myself into the society of the day. It was not Rome or Greece or even Egypt. The technologies were far more advanced in some ways, especially iron working, but everything else was so backward I could scarcely believe it. In my first seven millennia, I had never seen such a backtracking on technology. I so wanted to just strike out and bring back many of the old ways, but by now I had seen enough of what the Church did to those who brought about change of any kind to the status quo that I was fearful to even seriously contemplate such an action.
I made my way back over to France, explored the lands of my birth. This quest took me several years, but I think I finally found some of the caves I remember from my youth. From there, I made my way back across Europe. I didn’t want to go back East, but I did want to explore. I had actually seen quite a lot of northern Africa already, but I had never seen the middle east. I headed down to the area of Jerusalem. I was curious still about the origins of the Church. In seven hundred years, it had changed so much it was almost scary.
I arrived about 60 years before the first crusade and found myself a new home. The culture of the time was drastically different than what we now know. They were still a repressive society in a lot of ways, especially toward women, but they were much more open to new thought than the Christians of the time. I more or less embraced early Islam. The coverings they wore allowed me to hide quite effectively in their society. Then the Crusades arrived and I fled the whole region. I was done with war and all it brought. I often wonder, what kind of people would they had become if their religion and grown in peace and not with the brutality offered by constant war with Europe. Not saying they were at all innocent, they had long ago invaded southern France and Spain, but still, I wonder.
But I fled again after the first crusades started, this time back for a quick trek through Southern Africa. And a brief trek it was, by my thinking. I spent less than 50 years there before hurrying back up to Europe. Most of the people I met were quite friendly, but those who weren’t were scary. Some tried to kill me almost on sight, thinking my white skin marked me as some form of demon. I made it a little past what we now call the Congo before I turned back after a nasty encounter with a rather cannibalistic bunch. That is where I lost my hand. You can’t tell it now of course, but those bastards cut off my hand.
I made it back up to Venice in the year 1254 and stayed put for the next four centuries. In the course of about 20 years, I had accumulated a small amount of wealth. I befriended a youth who you would know as Marco Polo. If I have any real contribution to history, that is it. I told him of my travels to the far east, and though he didn’t quite believe me, or at least I don’t think he did, he eventually sat out in that direction.
Well, deciding to try and stay here, I started a routine. I expanded my wealth, occasionally reviving some long-dead secret to help make more money. To hide my agelessness, I became quite gifted at cosmetics and the art of making myself appear to age. Then I would go into partial exile for a year or so, locking myself up or taking a small trip, then coming back as a relative who inherits everything. This strategy worked so well it got me by easily into the 1600s. I left after the great decadence started sweeping through the nobility of Venice. I enjoyed it for a few years, but certain traits of how I was in my hedonistic years still bothered me, for by now, you see, I was a rather devout Catholic.
I survived everything that came Venice’s way and enjoyed life. Few realize these days that Venice herself was largely a national power in and of itself for almost a 1000 years. I can respect such fortitude.
I made my way to the Americas once travel became halfway reliable, curious to see more of the world. Traveled south around Mexico City during the 1700s, curious as to the empire of the Aztecs, which led me in turn to investigate the Inca’s. But by early 1800's I was back up in the United States, relishing in the amazingly quick advancement of ideas and technology.
Now let me stop here, because this is kind of where my story takes off, all before now just being background, but also this starts in on the reason for this story. It is at this point in my life where things start changing. I am having the time of life. With my memory, as I have already said is quite astute, I already have a great understanding of most of the sciences. I had traded a few letters with the greats of the Renaissance periods like Newton and Galileo so I was as up on various topics as any scholar. I had even met with Da Vinci countless times, I would almost say we were friends.
But with the world getting so big, I was for the first time seeing a change in how things worked. Two thousand years ago, one man in his lifetime could accumulate most of the working knowledge of the world, how to farm, and to hunt, how to smelt tin and copper to get bronze. All that stuff. But now, one needed to start specializing. It was in the schools of those days that I found that only because of my considerable wealth of knowledge could I compete on every subject. But I was quickly getting left behind on areas I didn’t stay abreast of.
I tried like everything to stay current on mathematics. I thought I understood Calculus but learned that I didn’t know half of what I thought I knew. Concepts started coming about that I couldn’t grasp without much thought. Ideas were also starting evolving faster than I could assimilate them. I quickly started focusing on various fields, seeking to master what I could, then switching over to a new field as I felt more or less caught up. In the 1840s, I gave up. I headed west and got caught up in the whole gold rush. I stayed there, avoiding the Civil War, until about 1930, when I headed back east. Dates are coming to me easier now because so much happens in a year each and every year is important, not just a century.
By now, two things were becoming apparent to me. And this is where my tail of sorrow starts. First off, do you notice my stature? In my youth, I was a big man, even in Roman times my 5'7 frame was considered large. Now I am a short man. Physically I was still on par with the average man, but in a lot of ways I found myself deficient. Not having grown up playing sports, I never developed the knack for a lot of the newer games they played in the early 1900s. But it was mentally where I found myself lacking the most.
Computers came along, and adapt to the life I did, but not without a struggle. I adapt like the elderly do, I am used to the old ways. The youth have the advantage of growing up with the new technologies and learning them as they come out, I had to pick them up after the fact. Though I look to be late 20's, most people find me somewhat backward because I am always a little behind the times. My near perfect memory does help, but now all my wealth of knowledge hinders as much as it helps. I find it hard to accept the full advantages of something new, a lot of times it is easier for me to just do things the way I have known for centuries and not learn the new methods.
After the great war of the 21st century when an engineered plague wiped out a third of mankind, I was in financial ruin. Centuries ago, I would just go out and start anew, I could hunt the land. But now all of that is impossible, making one’s fortune is not like it used to be. I can’t just go out and waylay somebody and steal their goods like I might have centuries ago. (Yes, I have done just about everything.) But I also began finding it impossible to hide who I was, forging documents was becoming impossible for me, I no longer had the skills to forge convincing papers, nor the money to pay for forgeries. So I made the decision you know about in 2185, I went public. For the last two hundred years that decision has kept me quite comfortable, allowed me to travel the world openly. I went from being a nobody to a world celebrity every few decades as my name is shuffled around again.
As technologies improved to improve oneself, I improved. I got the implants that allowed for better vision and hearing. Allowed for long distance communication via thoughts, I got the implants which allowed me to surf the world computer network in my mind. I even got other implants which allowed me to do calculations blindingly fast in my head.
And through all this time, they experimented on me, poked, and prodded in every which way. Because of this, they now know what makes me so special. Already several people have been made in my base image, using only the good attributes of my cellular structure.
So now I am an oddity. My wealth is old wealth, from investments and the such. But I can no longer compete against the humans of the day. Oh, I got all the implants, but I am slowly being left behind year by year. To give an example, there are food types out there I can’t gain sustenance from because my stomach is not gengineered to do so. The newer implants are no longer viable with my older biology, for you see, humans have now changed themselves so much I am a relic, a dinosaur if you will.
I first saw this coming the day I saw a green-skinned baby. Some scientist and his wife had produced their kid so that it would have enhanced chlorophyll in his skin so that he could better survive in a world where food is sometimes scarce. The same enhanced chlorophyll found in engineered plants of the day which allow them to make 20 times more fuel than their natural ancestors. Their thought was to introduce the genes to make and utilize chlorophyll into the populations of the world faced by continual famine. Babies are now engineered so their minds develop with tighter neural clusters, allowing for much great thought. Nearly everyone has perfect memory now, not by an implant, but by birth. Many are now immortal like I am, though it comes with the government mandate that if you are immortal you must be infertile, but that will eventually change, things always change.
And as the culture changes, so do other aspects. I am ugly these days when in my earlier centuries I could woo about any woman I wanted. I am weaker than average, far weaker. Though I no longer have any facial hair, I had to have surgery to make myself appear like others, new generations are born hairless. Each generation of babies looks more and more perfect to the ideal standard of the day. My endurance is also far less, I am now a slow thinker compared to the children of today. I can’t conceptualize PI to the first 50 digits without my implants like almost any 4 year old can now do without their implants, their brains having been so improved. I can play musical instruments, but now every six year old has already mastered most instruments. Even my eyes are now backward. I could scarcely believe it when I was told years ago that all engineered babies were now getting the new eyes, eyes modeled after the hawk and the squid, engineered correctly instead of the backward eyes nature originally gave us. Not only do these eyes see with a clarity I can only guess at, these new eyes see naturally in a much greater spectrum range, including way down into the ultra-violet range. And not because I can’t be given an implant, it has to do with how my visual cortex is wired. What would make one an social phenom in centuries past, your Beetovans, your Newtons, is so replicated in the basic makeup of the each baby that it is commonplace and without the emotional side effects savant genius often carried in centuries past.
As I said I am but a sorry oddity, one who has outlived my time. I keep up only by virtue of implants, but even they don’t help much anymore in this losing race. See, I even have a fully intact hand grown out of my own flesh to replace the one I lost in Africa. But it is my mind which can no longer keep up with humans today. That is my sorrow and misery. Here I am, almost 10,000 years old. Fully fit, fully healthy. For all but the last 500 years, I have been the model of human achievement, I was the smartest and one of the most skilled at whatever I did. Now I am almost obsolete, and except for my repository of knowledge which is now readily available and downloadable in a two-minute data stream from any public library, I have little value.
I might find solace if I could look out and say humans have changed into something far different these last few centuries. True, not all look exactly human anymore, but you haven’t lost anything. You all still love, hate, experience life, whatever just as great as any human ever did. All you have done is changed yourselves to keep up with the times, changed yourselves so you can more readily adapt to a quicker paced world.
Do you know what I find frightening now, look at our pets and how we have changed them in the last 100 years of genetic engineering? We now have pets which are so intelligent, dogs and cats able to grasp the rudiments of language. Another two hundred years and the pets may surpass me. What then? Will I be no more than a pet, or possibly less than a pet. If one’s dog is smarter than I, will that dog have a pet? Could I end up as a pet’s pet? What about a thousand years from now, how far will man have changed himself then, yet will I still be what I am? Technology is not growing at a linear rate, even today when they say we will hit walls of what we can know and do soon, technology grows at an exponential rate. Technology advances so fast now that over half of it seems to be devoted to improving humans so the next generation can keep up. Will I someday be a trophy for somebody, like a work of art, to be kept on display? How will I survive? As a zoo exhibit of what early man was like?
I can’t stress this enough, I have lived long enough to see stars go nova in the sky. I can look up and say with certainty that the constellations have changed some in the last 10,000 years. They say the sun is so dense that it takes a particle of light after it is created roughly 5000 years to work its way from the center of the sun to the surface before it begins its eight-minute journey from there to here. I know how long that is. The light we see today was originally made back when the Pyramids were being built. To me, years go by quickly, add up quickly. Yet in the last several centuries I feel more and more like I am being left behind. What started out slowly and with a sense of awe had turned to definite dread.
But I say all this with a warning. Hundreds of people have been born in the last few years with the same make-up generated in their chromosomes by science which allows me to be immortal. You will share my fate if you're still with me in several centuries, I will not be alone. My specialness will only be I was first, and nothing else. We will proceed down through the ages, immortal, but seeing the race of man forever moving out of our comprehension. And what happens when we’re little more than the bug in the road compared to what they have become? Will we really want to be immortal then?
With that being the established system of the time, I can’t give you a birth date or even a birth year. My memory is excellent in some regards though, I can remember the face of everyone I have ever met and put a name to it. I can remember events clearly from just about every year of my life. As such, I can make some approximations. I figure I was born in the year you might call 7650 BC, give or take a few winters. Years later, once more established calendars took place, I gave myself the birth date of June 21st or the equivalent summer solstice of whatever calendar in use at the time. It has been one of my better decisions throughout the years, easy to remember and easy to pinpoint no matter who is deciding the dating method of the day.
Now as any scholar will tell you, civilization was just starting back then in the forms of cities and such, but most people were still like me, on the verges and not actually involved in this great event. I wouldn’t see my first city until I was already over 3000 years old. And let me tell you, when I did I was positive that man was on the pinnacle of all he could ever learn. I have thought this many times in my life only to be amazed a few centuries later.
But before I get on too far with my story, let me tell you about the first two millennia of my life to give you a starting point for just who I am. I think it important for you to realize just how far it is that mankind has come with each successive generation.
In that time, one lived in his village and that was about it. You would occasionally venture to another nearby village, but overall, traveling of a distance of more than a few week’s walk wasn’t done in one’s lifetime. The area we lived in lent itself well to staying in one area though, that area being what is now southern France. It was rich in game, fruits to be foraged, offered plenty of supplies for simple dwellings and plenty of caves to weather the occasional storms and wintery weather. I believe from my studies that some of the other early cultures were nomadic, but not my people. We stayed put.
We called ourselves the U’tars. That name didn’t have any special meaning, it was just who we were. Other villages were the U’laks. All of them were U’laks. We might say we were going to trade with U’Laks by the far river and such. With no rules of grammar to go by at the time, I speculate that U’laks was the equivalent to the word ‘them’. At least, that is how we used the word.
There was little fighting in those days. We did squabble and did go to war occasionally though war meant usually a single battle or a small series of battles with a band of U’laks from far off who had usually fallen on hard times. We would join with other villages nearby and usually drive them off. In my first 100 years, I only remember three times going to battle against neighboring villages. The battles were quick, usually not fatal unless from a festering wound caused during the fight and within a few seasons it was all forgotten.
There were reasons for not being very warlike. We lived hard lives. A storm which we casually ignore today could kill. A bad winter could kill. Some would die of disease every cold season. We were more afraid of being killed on a hunt by an angry boar or bitten by the hidden snake than we were of being killed by some opponent. Survival itself was the enemy, and when a competition for resources didn’t exist, there was little need for fighting. There was space, food, and water enough for all.
Most of our time was spent with the men hunting for food and the women foraging. Outside of that, the battle of the sexes was almost non-existence. Women did take care of the primary duties of child-rearing, but beyond that, all tasks were shared. I remember several women over the years who also became great hunters, and later on, as the village grew, great fishers of the river we lived near. However, as a man could never bear a child, it was women’s duties men never took on. At that time, it was men who were excluded, women could do all tasks.
Now during this time, generations passed quickly. It wasn’t like now. Woman were usually having their first kids by the time they were in their early teens, by this I mean just after puberty. By the time they were twenty, it wasn’t all that uncommon for these women to already have two or three kids. And for every pregnancy they had, probably only about half made it all the way to birth, and of those several wouldn’t last the first few days. Death was very common and accepted. A child wasn’t considered alive, that is the holy man wouldn’t bless the child with a name, until his first full moon. I guess there was one division of the sexes back then, the men were the holy men who blessed marriage and birth, while it was the holy women who blessed the dead.
I took my first wife at eighteen. I think she was about thirteen. Men always married later in our society. You had to earn the right to marry. Usually, a man hadn’t earned the elder women’s permission to marry until around twenty. Tests and rites had to be performed to prove one was man enough to take a mate to provide. It was my nature, more about that later, that allowed me to succeed at such an early age. Anyway, she died in childbirth of our first child, so I married a girl from a neighboring village about six months later. She died also.
This didn’t bode well. Up until then, I was considered blessed by the spirits. That is who we served, the spirit of everything. We referred to this spirit as a he and a she, it was everything. The word used, Ua, meant both man and woman. The best way to think of it was that everything had a spirit, all the same yet all different. We were living spirits ourselves, but all trees, buildings, even drops of water were part of this spirit. Sometimes this spirit was individualized by the item, sometimes not depending on how we were trying to appease or honor it. The spirits were everything. We didn’t believe in a god or goddess, didn’t believe in an earth mother or father. We only believed in the spirits. When we died, it wasn’t the will of God, it was simply our spirit getting bored with its current manifestation of life and wanting to move on to experience something else. It made sense at the time and I was a very devout believer.
However, spirits could bless you or be angry with you. If things went well, you were blessed by the rest of the spirits. And up until the time my first two wives died, things had gone great. On my first time out hunting a young deer, I had wandered near a nest of wasps. Bloated and sure to die, I survived. I was eight winters old at the time. A few years later, I was gored by a boar and survived. I was bitten by two of the hidden snakes and survived. I was considered blessed. But now with two wives dead, the elders assumed I had either angered the spirits or that they were angry that I hadn’t died when I was suppose to. But getting a mate was only the decision of the elders so far as they gave permission. In my village, the girls chose the man first, then the man either agreed or disagreed. No girl wanted to risk dying by offending the spirits. If there was a crime, it was taking a girl as a mate against her will.
We didn’t really have a judicial system, and nothing resembling a system of punitive measures. I was shunned for a few seasons and the young girls quickly forgot about it. I married a few years later, and this wife bore me four daughters and five sons before dying around the old age of 32.
Now I should add something else, we didn’t live long lives as you do now. Elders were those close to thirty. Many died before thirty. A few might live to sixty, but that was extremely rare. So not only was being born and surviving itself a struggle, life was so hard that reaching 30 was a task.
During this time, I didn’t age. I reached my prime and never got any older. No one really noticed for a long time. I became an elder, but with no written records, it just became accepted I would always be there. And I did this for several hundred years. With such a small community and such a small knowledge base, I was just accepted as the blessed holy man. I soon became the holiest of holy men for several villages around. I had several wives and many many children. Eventually, it seemed the entire village was made up of my descendants.
It was a forest fire which finally destroyed my village. It forced us to flee and separate one dark night. With my then wife and two daughters, we left our lands and decided to trek down to the nearby ocean, and from there we would travel the coast to the new lands.
I was over 500 at the time. And in that 500 years, I had learned a lot about the various plants around me. I knew which ones were safe to eat, and more importantly, I knew which ones gave me the visions. But in my case, I could eat the leaves and berries of plants like the nightshade and instead of dying, I would gain potent insight. It had become my belief through these visions that the spirits of the dead had left us and traveled to a distant place up the coast to a land free of all strife. Before that, we believed the spirits just carried on in a form of reincarnation. And endless cycle. When a bird looked at us funny, it was nothing more than an ancestor remembering some small tidbit from a former life. I was so convinced in my beliefs that I had convinced my family of their truth also.
When the fire hit and killed most of my village, leaving many more in anguish from disease which struck a few days later, I decided it was time to leave and travel to this village of the spirits. I was off to visit the dead.
And remember, I said earlier my memory was excellent. Today you would call it a photographic or eidetic memory. I believe this is partially due to my nature of immortality, my mind is just as eternal as my body. When I went to visit the dead, I was off to see 500 years of friends, loved ones, wives, children, grandchildren, their children, and so on who had died before me, each of whom I could see in my mind’s eye just as easily as I see you now. It was the first time I myself had conjured up anything like the concept similar to what heaven is thought of today. I was going home.
And I was driven on this mission. We traveled to what is now Italy. Unfortunately, by the time we go there, my wife was sick. We stopped at a village which took us in only after much effort to communicate with them. That was the first time I became aware of the concept of differing beliefs and customs. These people were of a darker hair and taller stature than I was used to. They also spoke a language almost totally foreign to me. However, take us in they did. I stayed there five years, saw both my daughters married into their culture. My wife died eventually and the next night I snuck off to seek her out in the village of the dead.
For the next sixty years, I traveled the coastline. I would go so far, meet up with a village and learn their ways for a few years before traveling on. I spread my beliefs of the village of the dead, hoping to find someone who had heard rumors of such a place. And it was in this time that I developed a strong knack for acquiring languages. Ever since I went public about my immortality years ago, that has been one of the prime sources of my income, teaching scholars about the hundreds of dead languages I have learned in my lifetime, for like most my memory, my knowledge of those languages is almost perfect.
But suffice it to say, speeding this story up, I eventually made it to the outskirts of what you now know to be the beginnings of the Egyptian civilization around 4000 BC. And this was when I was seeing my first large gatherings of people in what might be termed as a city. I saw for the first time men whose sole job it was to protect or fight. For the first time, I saw people whose sole job it was to govern. And I was already three and a half millennia old. So believe me when I say I was very set and in my ways, I was convinced that these people were full of folly, that the spirits surely must be angry with them.
And at that time, I thought I knew about everything. I knew more about medicine than any of these people, I knew more about the making of tools, more about herbalism, more about just almost anything, or so my arrogance led me to believe. I secretly scoffed at their primitive ideas of gods in the sky, thinking them foolish for harboring such beliefs about the spirit world. But being the traveler I was, I had become well practiced in hiding my opinions.
In turn, they astonished me so completely that I eventually gave up my primitive notions about most everything. They taught me to write, the simple pictographs they used that would eventually turn into hieroglyphics. I became a priest of theirs and for the next two thousand years stayed in one place, helping teach others while learning in their various scribe schools and various institutions of learning. And I would like to add, they were quite advanced when it came to academic studies. The Greeks and Romans would later have similar levels of openness in their studies, but then I wouldn’t see that kind of open thought again until almost the 1400s. I can’t begin to describe the limitations imposed by Christianity on the pursuits of research during the dark ages. When ideas like the earth is round, the moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun will get you killed as a heretic, only the most devout of scholars rock the boat.
Now I am sure you will ask, were you there when the Pyramids were being built? Yes, I was. But I had little to do with them. I did visit them as they were being built, I understand many of the technologies at the time used to construct them, however, your historians have more or less pieced it all together correctly. But I was never directly involved. I was still just the common man, rarely involved in the great events of the day. I heard the stories, but it was always someone else doing the deeds. Compare it to what if someone asked you a thousand years from now if you were involved in building our skyscrapers of today. Likely you would say no, though you have visited them plenty of times, possibly even live in one.
I could spend hours telling you about all that I did during the first several millennia of my life. How I influenced this or that, how I actually came up with this or that innovation, but truth was, I was little more than a witness. By this time, I learned that allowing people to have knowledge of who and what I was led to strife. People were now suspicions of someone who was immortal, ascribing it all sorts of evil or magical meanings. People would start either worshiping, or more often than not, they would start trying to tear me down. It was like a curse, someone would be told I had been around a particular school for the last several decades without aging and they would make it their goal to prove I was either a fake or somehow cursed. And that was usually preferable to being made some type of holy man.
After a few times of this, I began hiding who I was. I became a master at forging documents and would start traveling from school to school every few years, stay at one for about ten years and then move on.
I also took up stints in the military, and though I never became a high ranking officer, I did lead men. Once even over 2000 men in the service of Pharaoh Ramesses the II. But even then, I stayed in the background. I never actually met the man, though I did see him upon occasion in parades.
But by about 1500 BC I was getting bored with this existence. Trade routes were continually opening up, word of distant lands opening up. Having lived this long, I was really starting to take on a rather hedonistic view of life. And I wanted to see more of the world. My particular cravings, some I won’t even go into for fear you will judge me harshly, were beginning to make life living among the orderly Egyptians difficult. I left and began to travel.
For the next several centuries, I traveled, mostly on the sea and saw several of the port cities of the Mediterranean. It was amazing that I didn’t die during this time. I had a few close calls, even had to make a few long swims to shore when my boat capsized, but I was lucky I guess. With all ships that never made it back to port, I still find it amazing that I was so foolish. But luck was with me.
I then spent a few hundred years living in Greece, during part of its Golden Age. And this was where I started getting a knack of meeting up with the great people of the day. I once even debated Socrates in open forum. As I said, I was of a definite hedonistic thought during this time in my life. I found Athens to be quite liberal and this suited me rather well, but my nihilistic approach toward viewing the duty of man to man was where I came at odds with the great Philosopher. Obviously, I didn’t win anything, I have never seen any evidence that my arguments changed any minds, maybe only refined the arguments of the day’s philosophy.
Rome was on the rise, and as I said earlier, I had mastered the techniques of forgery. As Rome rose, so did I in where I could go. I became a Roman citizen and no one could prove otherwise once I got all my documents in place. I moved on to Rome itself in an attempt to avoid most the wars of the day, but by around 100 BC, I was quite bored again. Believing at the time that anywhere but Rome was an uncivilized wasteland devoid of any form of reason, I left out again once again for the rumored lands to the east.
Stories were abundant of great civilizations far to the east, how wise and advanced they were, but as with most things of that nature, in Rome we considered them to just be mere fables. But in that direction I went.
But I really don’t want to bore you with a long story that just keeps going. I was over 7000 years old, so you can imagine I have already left a lot out. But to gloss over the next several hundred years I did go east, I made my way all the way to what is now Japan. What I learned on my travels was again immense. I learned a lot of new languages, customs, and ideals. My respect for life returned somewhere along the way, as did my devotion to ancestors also returned. I believed I had come to the place I was meant to be several times while in the east. But unfortunately, I was plagued by being an outsider. My skin was different and eventually I was forced to move on once the novelty of my presence wore off. I was always seen as somewhat inferior and that eventually that would hinder my ability to move around freely in their societies.
My skills as a warrior were fortunately unmatched, having had so many years training with about every known weapon of the time, so I was relatively safe during these travels. I survived most wounds, many of which would have been fatal to normal people and this did afford me some level of protection. I only add this to say that in my early travels I really faced little risk.
But by the time I returned to the west around 300 AD, I had learned that it is best to hide among my own people, by this I mean those who look like me. The world was not yet the multiracial conglomerate it now is, back then skin color mattered more than ever. That was the last time I would venture east before the twentieth century. I look back today and see historians pondering over the occasional evidence of Caucasian influence in the peoples of the east and sometimes wonder if those aren’t indeed some of my descendants they are finding in Mongolia, Japan, and China with the occasional blonde hair.
I digress again.
It took some doing, but I did integrate myself back into Roman culture. My only real regret of my absence from this area was that I missed the birth of Christianity. Like many historians, I am really curious as to how early Christianity really was. I am not sure if I would have been lucky enough to actually encounter any of the original founders, namely Jesus and his Apostles, but it would have been nice. By this time in my life, I was still making the attempt to meet the more famous people of the day where ever I was at, but I still chose to stay in the shadows as much as possible, never seeking the limelight for myself.
But even then, with all of my knowledge, I occasionally found it hard not to seek out some young inventor or artisan and plant seeds of something great or new. I tried my best to advance the society I lived in without becoming one of the great innovators of the time. I had already learned that innovators often met with terrible fates and I didn’t wish to share that fate when new powers took over or when the religious men of the day got involved. Already Christianity was earning its dark name which endured throughout the middle ages of being a suppressor of free thought. I don’t know what I would have done had I known where it would all end up a few centuries later with the inquisitions. Probably would have fled back to the east as fast as possible. What they did was rather similar to what the Nazi’s did to the Jews. The only difference was the level of technology made things more of a one on one process back then, so an element of how many people one man could torture and kill became a factor.
But at the time, I did rejoin Roman culture and made my way up to Britain where I stayed for the next five centuries. As Roman rule faded, so did I from society. For about two centuries I became more or less a hermit, living out in the distant woods, only occasionally making my way into a town here or there for supplies or news. All I can really say is once you slip into this lifestyle of being a hermit, the monotony takes over and it is really easy to live an entire life that way, letting the years slip by. If there is any part of my life which is kind of a blank, it is those two hundred years, all merging together as a monotonous blur of repetitive behavior. I like to humor myself at night wondering if I spawned any legends of being Merlin during my hermit years. I certainly did nothing Merlin like, except being the strange stranger out in the moors who has been there for generations.
It was a woman that brought me out of this life. I saw her one day during one of my treks into town. I hadn’t been with a woman in over 50 years, and I saw this young girl who was more beautiful than any I had ever seen. Not to bore you with the story, for I did win the girl and was bored of her within two years, but I had cleaned myself up and within a span of six months I had reintegrated myself into the society of the day. It was not Rome or Greece or even Egypt. The technologies were far more advanced in some ways, especially iron working, but everything else was so backward I could scarcely believe it. In my first seven millennia, I had never seen such a backtracking on technology. I so wanted to just strike out and bring back many of the old ways, but by now I had seen enough of what the Church did to those who brought about change of any kind to the status quo that I was fearful to even seriously contemplate such an action.
I made my way back over to France, explored the lands of my birth. This quest took me several years, but I think I finally found some of the caves I remember from my youth. From there, I made my way back across Europe. I didn’t want to go back East, but I did want to explore. I had actually seen quite a lot of northern Africa already, but I had never seen the middle east. I headed down to the area of Jerusalem. I was curious still about the origins of the Church. In seven hundred years, it had changed so much it was almost scary.
I arrived about 60 years before the first crusade and found myself a new home. The culture of the time was drastically different than what we now know. They were still a repressive society in a lot of ways, especially toward women, but they were much more open to new thought than the Christians of the time. I more or less embraced early Islam. The coverings they wore allowed me to hide quite effectively in their society. Then the Crusades arrived and I fled the whole region. I was done with war and all it brought. I often wonder, what kind of people would they had become if their religion and grown in peace and not with the brutality offered by constant war with Europe. Not saying they were at all innocent, they had long ago invaded southern France and Spain, but still, I wonder.
But I fled again after the first crusades started, this time back for a quick trek through Southern Africa. And a brief trek it was, by my thinking. I spent less than 50 years there before hurrying back up to Europe. Most of the people I met were quite friendly, but those who weren’t were scary. Some tried to kill me almost on sight, thinking my white skin marked me as some form of demon. I made it a little past what we now call the Congo before I turned back after a nasty encounter with a rather cannibalistic bunch. That is where I lost my hand. You can’t tell it now of course, but those bastards cut off my hand.
I made it back up to Venice in the year 1254 and stayed put for the next four centuries. In the course of about 20 years, I had accumulated a small amount of wealth. I befriended a youth who you would know as Marco Polo. If I have any real contribution to history, that is it. I told him of my travels to the far east, and though he didn’t quite believe me, or at least I don’t think he did, he eventually sat out in that direction.
Well, deciding to try and stay here, I started a routine. I expanded my wealth, occasionally reviving some long-dead secret to help make more money. To hide my agelessness, I became quite gifted at cosmetics and the art of making myself appear to age. Then I would go into partial exile for a year or so, locking myself up or taking a small trip, then coming back as a relative who inherits everything. This strategy worked so well it got me by easily into the 1600s. I left after the great decadence started sweeping through the nobility of Venice. I enjoyed it for a few years, but certain traits of how I was in my hedonistic years still bothered me, for by now, you see, I was a rather devout Catholic.
I survived everything that came Venice’s way and enjoyed life. Few realize these days that Venice herself was largely a national power in and of itself for almost a 1000 years. I can respect such fortitude.
I made my way to the Americas once travel became halfway reliable, curious to see more of the world. Traveled south around Mexico City during the 1700s, curious as to the empire of the Aztecs, which led me in turn to investigate the Inca’s. But by early 1800's I was back up in the United States, relishing in the amazingly quick advancement of ideas and technology.
Now let me stop here, because this is kind of where my story takes off, all before now just being background, but also this starts in on the reason for this story. It is at this point in my life where things start changing. I am having the time of life. With my memory, as I have already said is quite astute, I already have a great understanding of most of the sciences. I had traded a few letters with the greats of the Renaissance periods like Newton and Galileo so I was as up on various topics as any scholar. I had even met with Da Vinci countless times, I would almost say we were friends.
But with the world getting so big, I was for the first time seeing a change in how things worked. Two thousand years ago, one man in his lifetime could accumulate most of the working knowledge of the world, how to farm, and to hunt, how to smelt tin and copper to get bronze. All that stuff. But now, one needed to start specializing. It was in the schools of those days that I found that only because of my considerable wealth of knowledge could I compete on every subject. But I was quickly getting left behind on areas I didn’t stay abreast of.
I tried like everything to stay current on mathematics. I thought I understood Calculus but learned that I didn’t know half of what I thought I knew. Concepts started coming about that I couldn’t grasp without much thought. Ideas were also starting evolving faster than I could assimilate them. I quickly started focusing on various fields, seeking to master what I could, then switching over to a new field as I felt more or less caught up. In the 1840s, I gave up. I headed west and got caught up in the whole gold rush. I stayed there, avoiding the Civil War, until about 1930, when I headed back east. Dates are coming to me easier now because so much happens in a year each and every year is important, not just a century.
By now, two things were becoming apparent to me. And this is where my tail of sorrow starts. First off, do you notice my stature? In my youth, I was a big man, even in Roman times my 5'7 frame was considered large. Now I am a short man. Physically I was still on par with the average man, but in a lot of ways I found myself deficient. Not having grown up playing sports, I never developed the knack for a lot of the newer games they played in the early 1900s. But it was mentally where I found myself lacking the most.
Computers came along, and adapt to the life I did, but not without a struggle. I adapt like the elderly do, I am used to the old ways. The youth have the advantage of growing up with the new technologies and learning them as they come out, I had to pick them up after the fact. Though I look to be late 20's, most people find me somewhat backward because I am always a little behind the times. My near perfect memory does help, but now all my wealth of knowledge hinders as much as it helps. I find it hard to accept the full advantages of something new, a lot of times it is easier for me to just do things the way I have known for centuries and not learn the new methods.
After the great war of the 21st century when an engineered plague wiped out a third of mankind, I was in financial ruin. Centuries ago, I would just go out and start anew, I could hunt the land. But now all of that is impossible, making one’s fortune is not like it used to be. I can’t just go out and waylay somebody and steal their goods like I might have centuries ago. (Yes, I have done just about everything.) But I also began finding it impossible to hide who I was, forging documents was becoming impossible for me, I no longer had the skills to forge convincing papers, nor the money to pay for forgeries. So I made the decision you know about in 2185, I went public. For the last two hundred years that decision has kept me quite comfortable, allowed me to travel the world openly. I went from being a nobody to a world celebrity every few decades as my name is shuffled around again.
As technologies improved to improve oneself, I improved. I got the implants that allowed for better vision and hearing. Allowed for long distance communication via thoughts, I got the implants which allowed me to surf the world computer network in my mind. I even got other implants which allowed me to do calculations blindingly fast in my head.
And through all this time, they experimented on me, poked, and prodded in every which way. Because of this, they now know what makes me so special. Already several people have been made in my base image, using only the good attributes of my cellular structure.
So now I am an oddity. My wealth is old wealth, from investments and the such. But I can no longer compete against the humans of the day. Oh, I got all the implants, but I am slowly being left behind year by year. To give an example, there are food types out there I can’t gain sustenance from because my stomach is not gengineered to do so. The newer implants are no longer viable with my older biology, for you see, humans have now changed themselves so much I am a relic, a dinosaur if you will.
I first saw this coming the day I saw a green-skinned baby. Some scientist and his wife had produced their kid so that it would have enhanced chlorophyll in his skin so that he could better survive in a world where food is sometimes scarce. The same enhanced chlorophyll found in engineered plants of the day which allow them to make 20 times more fuel than their natural ancestors. Their thought was to introduce the genes to make and utilize chlorophyll into the populations of the world faced by continual famine. Babies are now engineered so their minds develop with tighter neural clusters, allowing for much great thought. Nearly everyone has perfect memory now, not by an implant, but by birth. Many are now immortal like I am, though it comes with the government mandate that if you are immortal you must be infertile, but that will eventually change, things always change.
And as the culture changes, so do other aspects. I am ugly these days when in my earlier centuries I could woo about any woman I wanted. I am weaker than average, far weaker. Though I no longer have any facial hair, I had to have surgery to make myself appear like others, new generations are born hairless. Each generation of babies looks more and more perfect to the ideal standard of the day. My endurance is also far less, I am now a slow thinker compared to the children of today. I can’t conceptualize PI to the first 50 digits without my implants like almost any 4 year old can now do without their implants, their brains having been so improved. I can play musical instruments, but now every six year old has already mastered most instruments. Even my eyes are now backward. I could scarcely believe it when I was told years ago that all engineered babies were now getting the new eyes, eyes modeled after the hawk and the squid, engineered correctly instead of the backward eyes nature originally gave us. Not only do these eyes see with a clarity I can only guess at, these new eyes see naturally in a much greater spectrum range, including way down into the ultra-violet range. And not because I can’t be given an implant, it has to do with how my visual cortex is wired. What would make one an social phenom in centuries past, your Beetovans, your Newtons, is so replicated in the basic makeup of the each baby that it is commonplace and without the emotional side effects savant genius often carried in centuries past.
As I said I am but a sorry oddity, one who has outlived my time. I keep up only by virtue of implants, but even they don’t help much anymore in this losing race. See, I even have a fully intact hand grown out of my own flesh to replace the one I lost in Africa. But it is my mind which can no longer keep up with humans today. That is my sorrow and misery. Here I am, almost 10,000 years old. Fully fit, fully healthy. For all but the last 500 years, I have been the model of human achievement, I was the smartest and one of the most skilled at whatever I did. Now I am almost obsolete, and except for my repository of knowledge which is now readily available and downloadable in a two-minute data stream from any public library, I have little value.
I might find solace if I could look out and say humans have changed into something far different these last few centuries. True, not all look exactly human anymore, but you haven’t lost anything. You all still love, hate, experience life, whatever just as great as any human ever did. All you have done is changed yourselves to keep up with the times, changed yourselves so you can more readily adapt to a quicker paced world.
Do you know what I find frightening now, look at our pets and how we have changed them in the last 100 years of genetic engineering? We now have pets which are so intelligent, dogs and cats able to grasp the rudiments of language. Another two hundred years and the pets may surpass me. What then? Will I be no more than a pet, or possibly less than a pet. If one’s dog is smarter than I, will that dog have a pet? Could I end up as a pet’s pet? What about a thousand years from now, how far will man have changed himself then, yet will I still be what I am? Technology is not growing at a linear rate, even today when they say we will hit walls of what we can know and do soon, technology grows at an exponential rate. Technology advances so fast now that over half of it seems to be devoted to improving humans so the next generation can keep up. Will I someday be a trophy for somebody, like a work of art, to be kept on display? How will I survive? As a zoo exhibit of what early man was like?
I can’t stress this enough, I have lived long enough to see stars go nova in the sky. I can look up and say with certainty that the constellations have changed some in the last 10,000 years. They say the sun is so dense that it takes a particle of light after it is created roughly 5000 years to work its way from the center of the sun to the surface before it begins its eight-minute journey from there to here. I know how long that is. The light we see today was originally made back when the Pyramids were being built. To me, years go by quickly, add up quickly. Yet in the last several centuries I feel more and more like I am being left behind. What started out slowly and with a sense of awe had turned to definite dread.
But I say all this with a warning. Hundreds of people have been born in the last few years with the same make-up generated in their chromosomes by science which allows me to be immortal. You will share my fate if you're still with me in several centuries, I will not be alone. My specialness will only be I was first, and nothing else. We will proceed down through the ages, immortal, but seeing the race of man forever moving out of our comprehension. And what happens when we’re little more than the bug in the road compared to what they have become? Will we really want to be immortal then?
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