Your comment inspired me to write a short story. It’s the first draft of the first bit of fiction I’ve written in a while so don’t expect too much but I wanted to share:
I should have seen it coming, he thought as he drifted through the emptiness of space.
It wasn’t the first time he had thought that and it wouldn’t be the last but it was exactly what went through his mind at this moment. There wasn’t much to think about but regrets. Not much to do either. Nobody to talk to, not even air in his lungs to scream into the void. Just empty space, fading memories and regrets.
It all had started with an innocent thought, back when he had been a young boy by the name of Marcus. He had watched as his older brother’s favorite dog had been hit by a cart. That had been his first real contact with death and as is normal for any person, he had thought: I don’t want to die. For most people, that thought just leads to a generally cautious lifestyle, maybe a list of things to do, but overall, they don’t spend too much time thinking it. But Marcus had never been like most people. From that day on, that one new thought had consumed his every waking moment and his list of things to do in life had consisted of only one item: become immortal.
So he had spent most of his youth hunting for information about his new obsession, much to his father’s displeasure. He had read stories from Roman and Greek mythology, had found a rare translation of Egyptian lore and had even talked to soldiers returning from the barbarian lands in the north. At one point he had waited outside a doctor’s house for days until two of his brothers had come to drag him back home.
And eventually he had actually found the secret to immortality, long before the medieval alchemists and the 21st century cryopreservation craze. Ironically it had been something so trivial, so mundane that he couldn’t remember what it had been. Then again, after living uncountable lifetimes, there was a lot he couldn’t remember anymore.
What he had found was even what people generally considered the “good” kind of immortal. Not the one where you technically can’t die but still age and become so sick and frail that you can’t do much with your life. He didn’t need to eat, drink, breathe or sleep, couldn’t get sick and couldn’t really be harmed even by extreme forces. With time he even learned to endure things that couldn’t threaten his immortal life but still felt unpleasant, like pain, heat and cold. Even in the endless nothingness of space, he still looked like a healthy middle-aged man with only a couple of scars from before his immortality.
But of course there was a catch. There was always a catch and he should have seen it coming. He had seen so many things coming, just not the important ones.
Outliving his family and friends had been painful but to be expected from the start. Everyone who seriously thinks about immortality comes to terms with that after a while. Even the downfall of his entire culture at the hands of foreign invaders hadn’t really impacted him. By that point he had already been at the other end of the world, studying cultures that nobody from his home had ever heard about.
He had seen empires rise and fall, political systems blossom and revert to absolutist monarchies, religions morph into each other. He had been there for that brief moment in time when humanity had seemingly invented everything at once: contraptions to connect the planet, to explore beyond it and to turn it into a barren rock where no life was possible. Well, no life except his own. He had tried to warn others after the first few rounds of almost-extinction but every time the best he could manage had been a few decades of rebuilding and halfhearted attempts at making sure it couldn’t happen again. And then it had happened again. And again.
Only when he had become the last bit of sentient life for as far as he could reach, he had figured out what the catch was. He was immortal. He couldn’t die by any means, not even by his own hand, and that meant he would be alone forever. It’s not like he had never tried to help others become immortal. He had offered it to his closest friends, to countless lovers that he couldn’t bear to lose and to a few strangers that he had thought to be important for the world’s future. Most of them had laughed at him or politely humored him but never really put any effort into it. A select few had made genuine attempts but none had ever managed to do what he had done. He could only assume they had been lacking that unwavering conviction that had driven him in his youth.
And so he had been alone. For the first few years it hadn’t bothered him too much. After millennia of being around every conceivable kind of person on earth, a bit of peace and quiet had actually been welcome. Eventually, he had spent a few decades, maybe centuries, looking for other survivors but with no success. The only thing he had found was a few remaining sea critters and for a while he had even attempted to breed them into something that would make a good pet.
He had tried to build his own rocket to get off this gods-damned rock and see something new in the universe but it turns out that even with all the knowledge of humankind, more spare time than a human could ever dream about and a whole heap of mangled spare parts that had conveniently been left behind by previous generations, a single human being just can’t do that.
So all he had left to do was sit there for a couple billion years and wait for the sun to burn out and swallow earth.
It had been a spectacle that he wished to be able to share with others. It had been really bright, really hot and a lot slower than he had expected. But most importantly, it had been the last time something interesting had happened to him. After who knows how long, the sun had finally shed it’s outer shell and collapsed into a white dwarf.
The only other thing left was him. No planets, no asteroid belt, nothing particularly interesting to look at. Just empty space, fading memories and regret.
Sorry to disappoint but alligators are not closely related to dinosaurs even though they have existed for a long time. Birds on the other hand are dinosaurs.