This month’s theme:
Mortal Immortals

We often seek to avoid death. But what would immortality be like?

“Afraid to Die”
Sword & sorcery
By David M. Fitzpatrick

Death pursues me. I continue to flee.

I’ve worked in this stone castle for three hundred years. I’m another century older than that. I work with spells and chemicals—the perfect union of magic and science—to develop the potions that have kept me alive. It used to be easy: whip up an elixir, drink it, and watch in the mirror as the wrinkles on my face smooth out, as the gray in my hair darkens, as age retreats from youth’s advance. I’d feel my body rejuvenate, my organs regenerating into more robust machines.

I remember my wife’s heart giving out. I wasn’t there when it happened. I was in my workshop, frantically learning my enchantments. I found her dead in the yard, her face a mask of agonized dying.

Each time the potion takes longer to enchant; it must be more potent every time to do its work. With each imbibing, the wrinkles smooth a bit less, more gray remains in my hair, and the man who peers back at me from the mirror nonetheless looks old.

I’ve lost three centuries working my magic. I’ve always told myself that I just wanted to live for as long as I could so that I might enjoy a wondrous, fulfilled life. Instead, I’m a slave to this circular process: I work to live, but all I do is live to work.

My eldest son died in my arms. The knife from the highwayman had pierced his gut, and before I could look up the right incantation, he’d died. His brother and three sisters followed, all for various reasons. I was never there for them, or could never save them. I was too busy learning to save myself for the ages. The lost years, lost days, lost memories… a life I could have had. Shorter, perhaps, but better.

Death has frightened me since I was a boy, when my mother died giving birth to my sister, when my father died in some forgotten king’s war, when the plague raged up the northeast coast of the continent and killed there-quarters of the populace, including every person who still meant anything to my teenaged self. I was determined to escape death forever, at the exclusion of all else—to be forever young.

Young! Four hundred years old isn’t young, no matter that I look no older than sixty.

Yesterday, a young man invaded my castle. I’d built it a thousand miles from civilization, in a mountain-ringed forest valley, so that none would bother me, but they regularly found me. This armored man on horseback had heard the rumors and tracked me down. My magic alerted me when he entered the valley, but I let him get to my wizard’s workshop in the central tower. I turned as he burst in, rushing toward me with sword extended.

“I have you, wizard!” he cried. They always think they’re so courageous and clever. “You’ll show me the ways of your magic now—especially how to live forever!”

“You don’t really want that,” I said. “You’d need to spend a lifetime learning my ways, only to spend seven more lifetimes of daily work just to keep yourself alive. And you’d have to do some terrible things.”

He wavered, his blade wobbling, and confusion crossed his face. “What sort of things?” he said, his voice less courageous now.

“Things like draining the life from young men foolish enough to challenge a powerful wizard.”

His eyes widened, but I pulled the wand from my robe and called out my command word. Blue magic, like liquid electricity, blasted forth and hit him. He yelped for a moment, but dropped his sword as he levitated, frozen and helpless, two feet off the floor. I grabbed his torso with both hands, muttering my spell.

I saw the fear in his eyes as his very life force flowed into me. His youth fueled me like a tankard of hot cider, and I continued casting as his eyes sunk into his head, his face wrinkling as it desiccated before me. I kept incanting, kept draining, until I finally released the dried husk that had been his young body. It crashed to the floor and exploded into dust.

It wasn’t like my potions, but it did give me new energy. I sighed and returned to my work.

I wasn’t always like this. I was a beloved son and brother once, and later a caring husband and a father to five children. Perhaps I was more selfish than caring. I could have spent more time with those I loved, but instead most of them were dead and gone before I knew it.

That’s the self-inflicted hell that I deserve. I’ve forsaken those I’ve loved and those who loved me, ignored the beauty of the world around me and the fragile, brief gift of life that I had been given—surrendered my own freedom to become a selfish, heartless monster.

I could have teleported that young man away with the casting of a simple spell. But instead I killed him. For what? A few more years?

No. To avoid death. To run from it. To live for as long as I can, no matter the cost.

I am terrified of dying. I can only imagine what I’ll be like in another four hundred years. Will I reach a point where I’m more afraid of continuing as the creature that I’ve become—where I’ll be more afraid of living?

Or will I need to resort to genocide to stay young, and worse yet bask gleefully in the youth that a thousand dead young men at a time will give me?

I dearly hope that I become more afraid of living first.

“Waiting to Die”
Vampire
By David M. Fitzpatrick

The master who turned me was born in Akkad during Sargon’s reign. He’d been a soldier for the king, slaughtering Sumerians as he sang as victory song of Akkad, and was struck down on the battlefield. For reasons he never knew, Dakor didn’t die, but he awoke with a pile of Sumerian and Akkadian bodies atop him. Their blood had washed over his face and into his mouth, and in his delirium he drank it thirstily, and it was good. When he was sane and healthy again, he crawled out from under the dead, and he was at first appalled at what he’d done.

But he found that he needed it. He tried to find a cure, but he only found new layers to his curse. He burned in sunlight, for instance. So he kept to the shadows of night and enjoyed the better side of the curse: immortality.

Dakor embraced it. He also found that sharing his blood with others made them like him. That’s how I came to be—among so many others over his lifetime. When he found me, I was a slave on a Mississippi cotton plantation the year before the Civil War began. It had been such a hot and humid night that I’d chosen to sleep outside, under the stars, rather than in the slaves’ bunkhouse, and I woke to find myself powerfully restrained as his teeth sunk into my carotid artery. He meant to kill me, but something about how I struggled so valiantly impressed him, so instead he turned me.

We were the greatest of friends, inseparable for decades. I can recall all the times he sang his Akkadian victory song. It wasn’t a bloodthirsty song; it was actually a nice ballad about the beauty and glory of Akkad. I learned it, and we sang it together through two World Wars, the dawn of the Space and Computer Ages, and more.

But by the 1980s, Dakor had grown uncommonly weary. One morning, while we hid in an abandoned warehouse as the sun rose outside, he turned to me and said, “It has been a privilege knowing you these past one hundred twenty-five years, Alistair. But it’s time for me to go.”

“Go where?” I said, not understanding.

“Out there.”

“But you’ll burn!”

Dakor sighed and clasped a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve lived forty-five hundred years, my friend. I’ve just had enough. It’s time to die.”

Realization hit me hard. “Just like that, you’d give up immortality? End the greatest gift ever?”

He laughed. “You’re so young. Perhaps in a few millennia, you won’t feel so energetic.”

He grabbed me and pulled me close, and we embraced for a long while. When he stepped away, he smiled and said, “I hope there’s an ‘other side,’ Alistair, and that we meet again.”

And, just as casually as he could be, he strolled to the warehouse door, opened, it, and stepped out into the brilliant morning sun.

I’ve seen our kind die in the sun over the years—caught in a sunrise, forced from a burning building, staked out by vampire hunters. It’s never pretty. It begins with sizzling and smoke; the skin reddens quickly into a terrible sunburn, and then it blisters as if the victim is being boiled alive. They always scream in agony as the skin bubbles and the skin turns to ash, until their exposed muscles begin to burn. Their screams finally end, but they keep burning until they’re nothing but bones.

Not Dakor.

I ran to the door, careful to avoid the sun, and I watched him tear off his shirt and throw his arms into the air, even as the burning began. He was red as a cooked lobster immediately, and he spun about, smiling and laughing, as he began to bubble and blister. He danced in the sunlight as his skin burned away and his muscles went up in flame, and I could hear him singing his ballad of the beauty and glory of the ancient kingdom of Akkad as he finally collapsed to his knees. There was still a smile on his skeletal face as he died.

I was stunned and mortified, and I knew I’d never understand it.

*   *   *

Fast forward four thousand years.

I’ve sung Dakor’s song through all that time. It’s the only thing I have left of him, and singing it connects me to him still. Humanity long ago left Earth to explore the stars. I went with them. It’s amazing that vampires do just fine on other worlds—ones without a star and atmosphere similar to Earth. I lived a normal life, more or less. I could go out in the daytime. As long as I had blood, I lived—and it was easy to synthesize blood, so there was no need to kill.

But the utter boredom, and the never-ending loneliness, were unbearable. Sure, there had been friends and wives and people I knew; that never stopped. But they just died and died. I never did. And as far as I could tell, I was the last of my kind. I never met another vampire after the middle of the twenty-first century. There were not even other immortals to share my life with.

I’d never wanted to return to Earth since I’d left, but I found myself craving it. When I saw from orbit that blue marble with the yellow sun illuminating it, I wept. It was so beautiful—the planet of my birth, the world of my death.

I took a shuttle down to a mountaintop at the edge of the night side and sat, cross-legged and shirtless, on the rock as day began to break. It was time to die. I waited for it, waited to smile and laugh, to sing Dakor’s song, and to dance in the sun as my body burns to ash and bone.

When the sun exploded over the horizon, it bathed me in its beautiful rays, and I felt the burning begin—

—and terror overcame me. It hurt, and it was nothing to smile about, and I leaped to my feet and ran for the shuttle. By the time I got inside, I had second-degree burns across every bit of exposed skin, and blisters had already begun to bubble up across my body. I stumbled inside and closed the door, and hollered to the computer to black out the windows.

*   *   *

That was five hundred years ago.

The number of times that I have sat outside a shuttle or on a roof or outside a cave, waiting for the sun, only to have my survival instinct take over at the last moment… it’s a bit embarrassing, in some ways—especially when I think of how valiantly Dakor met his fate, with complete conviction and total happiness.

Each time the sun burns me, I last a little longer—smile a little longer, sing a little longer—before the pain tells my brain to get me moving. One day I’ll stay just long enough. I think that day is coming.

Humans try to live as long as they can because they don’t know what living for a long time is like. Dakor knew. I know.

I think the sun is going to burst over the horizon any moment.

“Desperate to Die”
Zombie
By David M. Fitzpatrick

I’m still in here. But it’s like my body is under someone else’s power—like a remote control has taken over everything. But I’m here. I’m still Cheryl. The proprietor of a shop once. Reds and whites, Swiss and cheddar…

Where are the guns?

I survived after the apocalypse for seven years before one of them got me. I escaped, but the bite did its work. And now I’m trapped, watching helplessly every day as my body lurches this way and that, under control of my dissociated primitive brain, and I scream in my mind to let me die before I experience it again. I can’t handle it. I can’t.

But I always say that. I just want a goblet of wine, a few bites of cheese…

Where are the guns?!

I’m most worried that I’ll never really die. The scientists learned so much about the undead before the world fell. They aren’t really undead; just a new kind of life, and one that regenerates—forever, perhaps. What they didn’t know was that the person who once was—the consciousness, the sentience, the personality—remains, trapped and helpless. Or maybe I’m unique; maybe everyone else dies, and I’m the only one suffering like this. For the sake of every human who has been turned, I hope that’s true. I’ve been like this for a year and I can’t imagine living like this forever.

Up ahead, I see a human stagger out from between two houses and into the street. It’s just a kid—he can’t be more than thirteen. He’s limping, dragging a foot—injured. I can hear him crying. He should have gone into a house. Why would he come out here, disabled like that?

I can hear myself snarling. I hope he hears me in time.

FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST, WHERE ARE THE GODDAMNED GUNS?!

He looks back as I stagger down the street, around the wrecked cars and garbage, growling and gnashing my teeth uncontrollably. He screams like a terrified toddler and tries to run, but his foot is really bad—maybe broken—and he stumbles and falls, face first, into the asphalt. He’s stunned long enough for me to overtake him, and I see my hands reach into my field of vision. I collapse atop him and feel him struggling beneath me, but I bite quickly into his throat and tear.

I can taste his blood and feel his flesh in my mouth, and he thrashes wildly. His blood is no wine, his flesh no cheese, and although I’m repulsed I feel horrible glee at the tastes of him. My strong hands grab his head and I bite again. Blood explodes into my mouth and he lets out a gurgling scream as I eat him alive. Crimson spray is everywhere, but he doesn’t fight much longer. Soon, he’s struggling only weakly beneath me, and I keep eating.

Guns… doesn’t someone have a gun?

The boy’s screaming has brought other zombies lurching into the street, and soon I’ll have to share him. I hope they outnumber me and I’m pushed aside like the runt of the litter—for I can’t bear to be part of this horrific thing. Mentally, I’m retching and vomiting; physically, I’m tearing fat and muscle from his bone, drinking his blood and ending his life.

The horde of zombies descends on me. As I’d hoped, I’m shoved aside like the runt. My body still claws and tries to feed, but there are too many of them. By the time they’re done, there won’t be anything left.

I used to run a wine and cheese shop. I had a life. Now I’m just a cannibalistic bystander in my own mind.

Where are the survivors with the guns? One day I’ll be lucky enough to be there when one of them comes out shooting, and a bullet tears through my brain and ends this. Until then…

The monster in control of my body sees one of the boy’s hands tumble out from the throng of zombies, having been chewed off his arm. I head toward it and collapse on the prize. I feel my teeth sink into the warm flesh, feel the blood squirt into my mouth…

Please, for the love of God, where are the guns?

“Living to Die”
Sci-fi
By David M. Fitzpatrick

Who created me?

I don’t know.

I’m a traveler. I came into being fully conscious—so many eons ago. I’m composed of tachyons, so with but a thought I can go anywhere in the universe that I choose in but an instant. I needed to merely wish it. But it was only me—only ever me. I searched the cosmos for billions of years, but I never found another like me.

I learned to shape my energy in myriad ways—to take any form that I chose. I’ve watched the rise and fall of millions of civilizations. I’ve known so many sentients across time and space. I’ve lived and loved, but they always died. Some intelligent life forms lived for decades; some for centuries; some for millennia. A few lived even longer. But without exception, they always died.

Ganorr was my greatest friend. He was a being of energy, the last of his kind; his species had died out a million years before, and he’d thought he’d never find a kindred spirit. He couldn’t travel the universe on his own, but I, the traveler, took him with me. He’d lived for a hundred million years before we met and for a billion more after. We were the best of friends.

But one day he began behaving strangely, and I could sense that something was happening to him at a quantum level. His energy form began to break down. It took a thousand years, but every day I could see less of him surviving. His memories began to vanish, and near the end he was only ever lucid about one thing: me, his constant companion for a thousand million years.

I remember his final moments. He’d had periods of lucidity in the days leading up to this, and he’d made his wishes clear. We floated just outside the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, where matter and light swirled madly around in a death spiral. I could withstand its gravity, and I held Ganorr’s energy in place.

“Are you sure?” I asked him. “There’s no turning back.”

“I need to go while I still have my mind intact,” he said. “Living for so long wouldn’t have been bearable without you, old friend.”

I touched his energy with mine, and it was beautiful.

“The black hole will tear me apart, but it won’t hurt,” he said. “I’ll become one with so much energy. Perhaps I’ll find the last vestiges of my people. Perhaps consciousness will continue. Perhaps.”

A great sorrow washed over me, shaking every tachyon of my being. His forever was ending. Mine would go on a lot longer. I’d experienced the loss of so many life forms, but I couldn’t even fathom the concept of death.

“Good-bye, my friend,” he said. “I’ll love you always.”

I knew he wouldn’t—knew that all that was him was about to end. But I let him go, and I watched his energy get sucked into the black hole in the wink of an eye.

I had to move on. The traveler travels, after all…

*   *   *

That was just two billion years into the universe’s existence. And for countless billions more, I never found another friend like Ganorr—not just his friendship, but his long life as well. I wondered whether I would one day suffer the same fate.

I spent eternity as the traveler, roaming the universe, making friends and watching them die; posing as life forms to befriend some and romance others; moving on when they were taken from me.

I knew for a long time that the universe was ending. The stars were going out, black holes forming at the centers of galaxies, until the skies became sparser no matter where I went. The intelligent species in the universe thinned as well, from countless billions to countable millions. Eventually, they dwindled to thousands and then hundreds, and one day there were no more sentient minds left in the universe but mine. I hoped otherwise, and I spent a solid million years scouring the universe in desperate hope of finding someone—anyone—out there. There was no one left.

All the while, the stars kept winking out. The galaxies kept collapsing in on themselves, and the black holes that gobbled them up merged with other black holes, and those with still others. All the while, they emitted radiation, but I knew the truth. Subatomic particles were decaying, and the quantum foam that was the foundation of all of spacetime began to break down.

*   *   *

The last protons decayed long ago. There’s nowhere left to go—an unfortunate situation for a traveler.

My tachyons are composed of different things than protons. The scaffolding of spacetime around my being is different than the rest of the cosmos—sort of a pocket universe of my own. But I could look into myself and see that my tachyons were dying. I was losing them by the thousands every day.

I drifted in the black void, one that had once held a trillion trillion worlds, but now held nothing. I thought of my life, when I’d had places to go. There were no such places left.

And I thought of Ganorr, the best friend that I’d had. He’d been gone for a trillion years now, but every day he was as sharp and crisp to me as he had been when he was alive. I remembered meeting him…

Him…

What was his name?

I had so many memories of him, but suddenly I could not remember his name. If I could forget him, what else have I forgotten? I was coming apart, and with no black hole to give myself to. I could only wait, lost in the void.

It has been so long. I don’t even know how long, even compared to how long I’ve lived…

How long have I lived?

Can’t remember.

I live only to die. It’s a slow death, but one day I will decay and will be gone forever—the last bit of a dead universe, still holding on desperately, but one day… gone.

I live only to die. It’s a slow death, but…

But…

Black void…

It’s so dark and cold.

Why can’t I just die?

*   *   *

Where am I?

Is someone there?

Who created me?

I don’t know.

“Impossible to Die”
Fantasy
By David M. Fitzpatrick

The wizard. The vampire. The zombie. The traveler.

I’ve reached into their minds and heard their stories. From outside the multiverse, I have so much more to see and experience than they ever will. I can go anywhere in time and space, and in any of the limitless universes that exist, at will. I can enter the minds of any of them at any points in their existences, should I choose.

The wizard has to fight every day to extend his life. I don’t.

The vampire has to fight every day to end his life. I cannot do that.

The zombie wishes every moment to end her life. I wonder what oblivion would be like.

The traveler is losing his memory, losing his self, as the very building blocks of his energy decay and end. That will never happen to me.

I’m a different kind of life form. I have always been, and always will be. I’m the sort of being that mortals imagine—that perhaps they call a god. If only. A god could do anything, and there are many things that I cannot do.

I can always occupy my time by entering the minds of infinite personalities that have existed through all the multiverse. I can manifest as any of their kind. I have lived a googol of lives as them, and can live a googolplex more if I choose. How could I ever be as desperate as the wizard, the vampire, the zombie, the traveler?

Maybe I will one day. Maybe even all this limitless opportunity will one day bore me. One day, I might be striving to find death. Yet I know it’s impossible—unless there could be an end to the multiverse, perhaps.

Now, I doubt.

I wonder if a being greater than me—one who sees a multiverse of multiverses, of which mine is but one—is in my mind, hearing my thoughts. Would such a being doubt? Would such a creature ever wish for death?

For the first time in my endless existence, oblivion is beckoning. I’ve never heard that call before. Hearing it now terrifies me, just a little, in the furthest reaches of my consciousness.

But maybe I welcome that bit of terror.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.