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Biography of an Immortal(continued) He no longer wished to die. Not seriously, like he once had. His only
true wish now was to be able to sleep in peace, undisturbed by the commotion
of the universe, but of course, that was equally impossible. An immortal
didn't need those things everyone else needed to survive. An immortal
does not need food, or air, or water, sleep...love... John stretched his body to its full height, staring down at his toes.
At just shy of two meters, he had been born tall for his time. This
stature later came to be considered average and even short after the
rest of the human race grew taller without him, before poor health and
world-wide hunger shrank the species back down to nearly half John's
present and permanent length. My face. There was one thing John could not see. I want to
see my face. The same face the tiny descendants of John's species
carved into stone, a hundred meters high. The last form of humans that
would ever call Earth home spent years carving this figure of their
god, the giant being that never died, that showed them how to hunt and
harvest in ways that their small brains barely grasped. The small creatures
slowly suffocating on the atmospheric garbage of their ancestors hadn't
been intelligent, but their small frames housed artistic souls easily
surpassing anything John witnessed in his own culture of years gone.
Evolution chose to enhance only one aspect of the human mind, it seemed,
while everything else withered. They replicated the face of the being,
who was trying in vain to save them, in impossibly intricate detail,
worshipping him with every dying fiber in their sick, shrunken bodies. The wind and the rain, worshipping no one, wiped the sculpture from the cliff's face long before John completed his small ship and flung himself at the large red sun on the horizon.
The light was growing unbearably intense, and John's eyes struggled
to adjust, eventually but barely succeeding. Like the simple act of
remembering, adjusting and adapting was another thing that he did impossibly
well. And why not? A being unable to adapt to unforeseen circumstances
has little chance of true immortality. Why not make the divergence from
humanity complete? There had never been a woman in John's life, excluding his mother.
Once he realized that his body was impervious to harm, in his fifteenth
year, he began to steer away from all relationships at a time when it
was traditional for him to begin thinking about marriage. Nearly a decade
before his body stopped changing altogether, John accurately predicted
the pain of watching someone he loved die while he watched helplessly,
wanting but unable to join them. He had been, and still was for the
most part, sure that having to watch his wife die would have pushed
him screaming over the edge on which he so precariously balanced. After leaving Earth, John had wished many times that he had chanced
marriage. If nothing else, he would've had someone to think about fondly,
memories to mull over and smile about. He might not feel so utterly
alone now. The smile on John's face faded again as the surrounding chaos leached
away his excitement. The dying universe was suddenly nothing beyond
a curious set of events. A star that John happened to be looking at began to spread from a bright
dot in the distance to a hazy blot of cotton. It was a sight only an
immortal could have seen: the intense glare that came from everywhere,
piercing everything. He watched other stars spread, like white tears
soaking into a piece of pale tissue paper, joining together into a formless
mass of radiation, atomic nuclei and electrons. And the implosion of the universe was accelerating at an exponential
rate. John soon became trapped in the dense soup that was now the universe.
It seemed to be trying to crush him. He shut his eyes against the burning
light, but it pierced easily through his eyelids and burrowed mercilessly
into his brain. He tried to lift his arms to cover his face, but the
thick matter kept them locked at his side. John struggled to escape from the crushing force, which quickly became
unbearable. For the first time in more than a hundred billion years,
John felt intense physical pain. Impossibly intense. Soon the pain blocked
out all thought but one. I'm going to die! he thought with equal
parts excitement, relief, and fear. I'm dying after all! Every
cell was being crushed, his very atomic nuclei trying to rip apart in
the impossible heat while the universe tried to contract to a pinpoint
with John in the middle. He tried to scream, but there was no air to
fill his lungs. And then it was gone. Everything. Vanished. Time no longer existed,
and yet it seemed to pass. He opened his eyes, and saw nothing. John's
universe had escaped to the unknown, and left him behind. John Pounds
was now a universe unto himself. At another time in his life, he may
have wondered just where all the matter in the universe had gone. This
was not yet one of those times. He waited, for what he couldn't say. Eventually the questions began.
Would there be another Big Bang? Would the universe reappear and explode
again, or was this the true and final end of the universe? Would he
finally be left in peace? There were no answers in the emptiness.
John the immortal wept without sound or tears. He closed his eyes,
turning his focus inward to his own darkness, and drifted into a dreamless
sleep, his arms wrapped around himself to protect against the emptiness. When something bumped into him from behind, it was a struggle to swim
up from the depths of the sweet, calm waters of unconsciousness. The
object grabbed his arm and spun him around, and he reached out slowly
and felt the thing holding his arm. It was a woman. Another human had survived The End. John blinked, but
even his eyes were unable see in the perfect blackness. He reached for
her hands, not knowing what else to do, and found that she was moving
them in a repeating pattern. She paused, and then moved them in another
pattern that John recognized as an early version of Japanese sign language.
She was saying, "What is your name?" "John Pounds," he spelled out in the same language, "from
England." "I am Jingo," she said simply. They were both silent then.
There were a million questions John wanted to ask, but his hands couldn't
seem to remember how to form words. So he reached out for her, touching
her face gently with his fingers and bringing it close to his own, taking
her in his arms. Warmth flowed into the cold tissue of John's lips as
they touched hers. A short time later, a new universe appeared in a bright explosion around
them and silently expanded to fill the void.
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