Seconds and Centuries
I think it was during 1944… yes, that was the time. Before I start telling my story, I… no, this is right. As I write this down, I can feel it approaching, so I’m sorry if this seems disheveled. It was 1944 when this all began, and for me, it all stopped.
I was working on the Manhattan Project, testing nuclear rods and the like. It doesn’t even matter anymore I suppose. If my memory serves me right, and it rarely does anymore, I was in the test chamber and it locked on me, sealing me in. The rods became powered and the room flooded with the energy of the atom.
I should have died, and I almost wish I had. It took a few years, but I noticed something; even if all the others didn’t. They grew old and weary with time. My body never changed. Time had stopped for me.
It was 2005 when someone noticed me. A rich woman came to me one day, asking for me. Well, not me. It was the person I had been. I faked my death in the 1980’s to avoid suspicion. I had had a new identity which I thought would keep me safe.
How wrong I had been. She kept asking for my secrets, she said she had been watching me. My answer was that I knew nothing and she should leave. Thankfully she did. It wasn’t the last time I saw her.
It must have been sometime between 2050 and 2080 when she kidnapped me. She took blood and skin from me, doing everything to understand. The pain was incredible, and somehow, still feels fresh in my mind. She must have held me for years, but now I think of it as mere seconds passing by.
I’ve lived a good life, which I know. It’s been a long time too. Maybe 15 billion years now… I’ve lost count. After my last friends died, I stopped caring. No one came after them.
I suppose I should write what happened from the very beginning, then again, maybe from when humanity faded. That would be better. In this, a letter to whomever may come after me.
Very quickly, however, I wish state that this will be written quickly. This is because the man who had all the time in the universe is running out of time.
Back to the timeline. After humanity came a lot of nothing. The Earth healed from that brutal war. Forests overtook the planet and I found enough food to live comfortably. About a million years later came a less than likeable species.
They looked like spiders mixed with primates. I was not a fan of them and they didn’t like me either. They were fiercely xenophobic. Luckily they lasted only about a thousand years.
The wait for the next race didn’t feel quite as long. Only one thing still holds in my memory of it. A terrible earthquake happened. It rent the world apart. Earth didn’t look quite like Earth after that. I think this actually wiped out the spider-apes. Good riddance.
Next important thing came from space instead. I won’t say, or can’t, say much about what happened next. They stayed for what seemed like less than a second before flying back away.
I suppose that’s the problem with living forever. My head, it just became full after a while. Everything just began to squish and mold together. I can barely pick out what happened anymore. Civilizations rise and fall in the blink of my eye. Thankfully it’s over soon enough.
I don’t know what the creatures from the sky did, but the Earth was changed even more after that. Stranger creatures began to form, and I’m surprised I can tell what they seemed to be to me. ‘Ancient’ mythic creatures. I don’t even know what year it was then. It was at least 40 million years after the rest of humanity fell.
The strangest creatures came next, but still more favorable then the spiders. Ponies, I suppose. I was in my cavern when they started to settle in the lands surrounding me. I waited for them to pass as the rest of the species had, but they stayed. One day I walked among them.
Mortal creatures like that always have the same responses, fear and perhaps even hate, yet one of them came to me. Her name escapes me for now, but she helped me in a way.
I told her of my plight, my pains, and my dreams. She told me there was nothing she could do. I felt nothing at that. I knew nothing ever really changed anymore. However, she did offer me something. She offered me memory, if just for a few millennia. Excited to remember, I leapt at the offer. She too, shared my plight of being ageless. I asked her how old she was. Her answer paled in comparison to mine.
I remember her asking what I did for all these years. ‘Nothing,’ is what I told her. We both agreed that it was a boring life.
Very long story short, we made close friends. Sadly, it turned out that she was not as immortal as she thought. Her fix for my memory made time pass normally, as it had back all that time ago. I felt the pain as she slipped into weaker and weaker states. Her fix faded as her power did. I watched her fade to dust in front of me, in my hands.
After that I just lost all hope. Luckily, it’s all over soon. I can feel it draw closer every… second? Year? Century?
It’s hard to tell what it is, but it’s darkness, a darkness I’ve not had to worry about for a long time. Anticipation grows within me for it. If I look outside of my cave I see the Earth, rotating at speeds that seem faster than light. The forest falls and returns in an instant. Time has no meaning for me anymore, but it soon will.
Yes… something has changed… finally. The light’s brighter now. The sun is bigger and redder. This is what I’ve been waiting for all these years now. Finally, a supernova… even though what must contain my death approaches at speeds unknown, it all seems to slow down for me?
I await it anxiously. I wish to join everyone else wherever they have gone to. Especially to my old friend… what was her name? Ah, yes, Celestia.