By MN Wiggins
Margo died today. And with her, hope passes, too. Once, the world feared rising carbon dioxide via fossil fuels and deforestation. No one dreamed the last of our species would be wiped out by its absence. Of the few things that remain, only irony is plentiful as I tend to humankind’s last and dying garden. It was vital to survival yesterday, but the garden served no purpose once Margo’s heart gave its last beat. As I record this, time is slipping away—also ironic. I’ve lived for centuries, and time has never been on my side.
I was a strapping young man in the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 763, thirty-some-odd years before a Benedictine monk decided we should call it A.D. I was set on a life of adventure and determined to see the world. My family begged me not to leave our village just east of Beth-Horon, but I was young and stupid. The sea was the life for me, and I whistled as I walked the two days to the coast, not knowing I would never see them again.
Romans had taken scores of seafaring men as rowers, and I quickly found work. Life at sea was arduous, but at my young age, labor felt like play. I visited exotic ports, met people from distant lands, and learned new languages. The life of a sailor was intoxicating, and I had the adventures I’d dreamed of as a child.
Time was a whirlwind. I changed crews as often as it suited me, never owning more than the clothes on my back and the contents of my pockets. I worked hard, played hard, and made friends wherever I went. Then, one day, I realized I’d sailed the Mediterranean twice over and visited every known port. My heart longed for my family, and I joined a crew sailing back to my homeland. When we reached shore, I said farewell to my shipmates and started the two-day walk back to my village.
My footsteps were light. I carried a bag of trinkets from my last port for my brothers, sisters, and cousins. I envisioned their wide eyes around the fire as I enthralled them with wild tales of my adventures. And later that evening, when the elders had retired to bed, I would tell my brothers of the beautiful women at port and how I had become a man many times over. I laughed out loud as I walked. They would gnash at their fists in envy and surely beg to accompany me when I returned to the sea.
But when I reached home, my family had long since died. I met strangers with my family name who took me to their elder, a man of ninety-five years, his eyes white with cataracts. He claimed to be the youngest son of my parents, born after I’d left. None of it made sense. I told him who I was, and the old man felt the smooth skin of my young face. He slapped me, called me a liar, and cast me out of my family home.
I left in bewilderment. Could it be? Had time slipped away, and the sea preserved my youth? My mind raced. As a dedicated sailor, I’d gotten drunk several times in questionable establishments. Had some fair maiden slipped me an elixir for eternal youth? Who knew?
With nowhere else to go, I returned to the sea and lived the life of a fool, jumping from ship to ship and behaving recklessly. After all, I was invulnerable—except that I wasn’t. Thrice, my ship went down with only a handful of survivors, and I took no heed. But the sea was a demanding teacher and not done with her lesson.
We were fishing well off the shores of Sardinia when a storm pushed us farther out to sea. The ship was lost, and I alone survived, clinging to a large wicker basket. The storm passed, and the winds grew still. I floated for days, baking in the sun with no shore in sight. I felt the life leaving my body and knew my end was at hand. There was a comfort in it, knowing I would reunite with my family after a century. But on the seventh day, a vessel found me. The sea had taught me I could die. I simply hadn’t yet.
I left the sea, journeyed inland, and explored the Roman empire for years. I learned the art of persuasion and trade and became a wealthy young merchant and the oldest person on Earth. And in all my time at sea and on land, the wisdom of the ages had taught me a fundamental truth of the universe, a singular, profound guiding mantra that I took to heart: Why work when you can land a sugar momma?
I married rich and traded up as often as future generations traded cars. I drank the finest wines, attended decadent parties, and became a dedicated student of the Kama Sutra—if not its lessons, then at least the positions. It’s important to have goals.
Around 1347, the party ended. Word spread of a great plague over on the Italian peninsula. Watching people suffer and die of disease, or worse, my catching it, wasn’t my bag. I pushed north into harsher climates where I shivered and longed for the lazy days of being fed grapes by future wives. I needed somewhere warmer, somewhere new and disease-free.
A Norse woman told me tales of long-ago voyages to unknown lands across the sea to the west, and I decided to see if they were true. Besides, the plague was headed this way, and her husband would soon return from military training. Leaving on an adventure of exploration just felt right.
With my considerable wealth, I convinced a ship in Bergen to undertake the voyage. Upon reaching the shores of the east coast of the future United States, the salty crew summarily dumped my behind, took all my worldly possessions, and left.
Fortunately, my years on the planet had given me an ear for languages and a delightful personality. I easily made friends with the people I encountered and roamed the American continents from top to bottom and coast to coast—centuries before Lewis and Clark or Forrest Gump. I learned new customs and met the most beautiful women. I fell in love often, married frequently, and moved on before my current wife learned of the next. What can I say? I’m a sucker for weddings.
But while the years had not touched my body, they took their toll on my soul. One day, I sat on a fallen tree trunk and tossed a rock into what would one day be called the Rio Grande. I had no idea how much time had passed in these lands. All I knew was that I was exhausted. I was alone. For all the times I’d married, no one had filled the hole in my heart left from losing my family as a boy. What was the point of it? I would never find true happiness. Other people only suffered a single lifetime. I’d had more than my share, and I was done.
I considered ways of ending my immortal curse, as no one had the decency to end it for me over the centuries. I wasn’t a religious man, which may have been for the best. No respectable religion would’ve claimed me after the life I’d led. But as I gripped my dagger and raised my arms, I stopped. My faith was still there after all those years, buried deep, suppressed by wine, lust, and betrayal. It stayed my hand, and I couldn’t go through with it. Well, shit.
I wandered north and took refuge in a Diné village in the future Southwest of the United States. There, I met Aiyana, a beautiful young woman whose name meant forever flowering, and she had clearly blossomed. I mean that spiritually. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Aiyana was the most intelligent, intuitive, and kindest person I’d ever met. Given my age, that’s saying something. I fell hard, heart and soul. I knew I wanted to spend the rest of her life with her. But the day before we married, I decided to reveal my curse. I had told no one since that day in my village and expected the worst. After centuries of conning women for personal gain, I’d found my soul mate, and here I was, blowing it by telling the stupid truth.
Aiyana took it in with a stone-cold blank expression. I could tell she was debating whether I was an evil spirit who needed killing or a crazed lunatic who needed killing. Either way, I sensed a theme. Or maybe she was pissed I waited until the day before our wedding to fess up. Honestly, hundred years of experience, and I still couldn’t tell what women were thinking when they got mad.
She took my hand without a word and led me to the elders. There was a long silence until I realized I was there to tell them what I’d told Aiyana. I relayed the whole story, minus the part about all the prior women. I wasn’t stupid.
To my amazement, they accepted me for whoever or whatever I was—delusional, immortal, it didn’t matter to them. Over time, they taught me to see my long life as a gift I should use in the service of others and that I was an idiot for squandering it for multiple lifetimes. The Diné didn’t pull punches. I promised to do better, and Aiyana and I shared a lifetime together. Her people became my people.
Those were the happiest 168 years of my life, and in the blink of an eye, I found myself holding my great-granddaughter’s hand as her ninety-six-year-old body took its last breath. She was the last of my line. I had cared for her in her last years as I had cared for her as a child after her parents died of pneumonia. With my family gone, I set out to keep my promise and walked the 2,400 miles to the East Coast. In Boston, I learned the year had become 1720, and I hopped a ship back to Europe with a new purpose.
I enrolled in college in Edinburg in 1721 and studied Physics. When I’d completed my degree, I worked odd jobs until I’d earned enough to enroll in another university in another city. I continued this pattern over the next two hundred years, learning all I could. I studied Chemistry in Amsterdam, Medicine in Paris, Architecture in Madrid, and Psychology in Hamburg. I learned cooking in Reykjavik, music in Sydney, and tap dancing from a bar owner in São Paulo. I used my cumulative knowledge to help those I could but was always forced to move along before anyone noticed my eternal youth.
When Watson and Crick unveiled DNA and gene mapping followed, I resumed my study of genetics that I’d abandoned since my days with Dr. Mendel in Vienna. I was good friends with his daughter. No, not like that. Give me some credit. I had grown emotionally. The whole thing was platonic—mostly.
My research revealed the truth of my identity. I existed and differed from the rest of humanity by chance alone, a rare genetic combination producing incredibly long telomeres and a robust immune system. In lay terms, my engine parts would eventually degrade, but not today, and not for a long time. It explained why I’d never experienced disease. And there were others like me, albeit to a lesser degree. You’ve met them, people in their sixties you’d swear could pass for forty, and those who beat the odds and live beyond the century mark.
But progress is a double-edged sword. The technological age that answered my age-old question also threatened to end it. I’d been careful to fly under the radar for centuries. I’d never allowed my portrait to be sketched or painted. The risk was too great. Being recognized as older than dirt got you either burned at the stake or dissected for science, depending on the century. Then, Eastman ushered in the Age of the Tripod Camera, and the game changed. His three-legged monsters were around every corner, and the demonic infestation only worsened over time. Before you knew it, flashbulbs were popping at weddings, holidays, and the mandatory faculty group photo I always ducked. I did my best to avoid these beasts, but it wasn’t enough.
My number was up when the Age of the Camera Phone arrived. Everyone and their dog were armed with the evil great-grandchild of Eastman’s three-legged beast. Ultimately, it was a group of meddling kids that did me in. They’d started a “Find Your Ancestors” business by adapting a facial recognition program to scour billions of old photographs online for facial characteristics similar to their clients. Then, one night, they put down their energy drinks, popped a few beers, and altered the parameters to search for any recurring face over time, hoping to spot a real Wolverine or Wonder Woman or whatever. And they did.
They caught me standing on a sidewalk in Atlanta just before the crash in 1929 and again in Chicago hailing a cab in 1948. Who knew anyone was taking photos? And then there was New York on March 14, 1972. I’d turned the corner right into a crowd at Loews’s State Theater during the premiere of The Godfather. Camera flashes exploded from all angles, and I took several hits, center mass.
The Pizza Roll Gang had me. Cross-referencing with cellphone photos I hadn’t been able to avoid, they tracked me down. With a few keystrokes, these pimple-faced entrepreneurs announced the world’s first superhero, The Immortal Man. I still hate that name.
Fortunately, most saw it as a hoax, and I was no hero. But it raised enough eyebrows for a pharmaceutical company to take a look in my direction. The more they unearthed, the more I became priority number one. One vial of my blood might unlock new treatments. A bone marrow biopsy might reveal new anti-aging treatments. My genetic material could be the key to billions in revenue. From my research, I knew none of this was true, but I had become the golden goose, and they would never stop coming for me. And I knew what would happen if I were caught.
They almost had me in a diner in Midland, Texas. I was forced to hide in a wall for three days in my hotel in Kuala Lumpur while they searched. Madrid was the final straw. I escaped via forgotten underground tunnels five hundred years older than the touristy ones built in the 1600s. I knew because I’d paid to have them dug back in the day when the King’s daughter and I—story for another day. I made it out of Spain and headed for the one place on Earth where I would never be found.
Back in 1923, I’d learned spelunking from my eight hundred and forty-second wife. Or was she eight hundred and forty-third? In any case, we’d traveled to the planet’s most remote places and discovered the perfect cave. High up a mountainside and deep down a hole obscured by dense foliage was a complex system suitable for only the most experienced cavers. One of the branches led to a steep, seemingly endless drop-off into a dark zone where even algae feared to tread. Making our way to the bottom of this underground canyon, we discovered a blind horizontal shaft ending in a large chamber with an underground freshwater stream. It was magical.
When the cellphone camera apocalypse hit, I dusted off my 1968 degree in Nutrition and proactively stocked my mountain cave getaway with provisions calculated to last a century. I also lowered in an exercise bike and hooked it to a generator. That took a while. In hindsight, I should have disassembled it first. Lastly, I stocked my pimped-out lair with an ample supply of books and, if you must know, toiletries. I’m not a barbarian. Well, at least not anymore.
After Madrid, I descended into my honeycomb hideout and lived the life of a hermit, reading my entire library five times over and watching my overhead LED lights flicker before finally dying. It did not escape me that one degree I didn’t hold was in Electrical Engineering. Dammit.
Engulfed in total darkness, I stretched my provisions as long as possible as I debated a climb back to civilization. Would they still be hunting me after all this time? How much time had passed? Without clues whether it was day or night and no communication with the world above, I had no idea. But as my supplies dwindled, I felt my body wither. My ribs stood out, and I knew I’d missed my window. Even if I’d wanted to return to the world, I’d never make it up the canyon walls. I shivered as death placed a hand on my shoulder as surely as it had centuries earlier when I’d clutched a wicker basket in the Mediterranean. Do you know how much that basket would be worth now if I’d held on to it? Dang it.
I closed my eyes and lay on the cool stone floor for hours, waiting for the inevitable when a trickle of water brushed my face. I licked it and spat out the salty taste of the sea. My mind raced. The mountain was over eighty miles from the ocean—and a mountain. Another trickle wetted my hair. What the hell?
I managed to walk outside the shaft’s entrance at the bottom of the canyon. I peered up into the darkness as a gush of saltwater hit my face and knocked me down. I made it back inside my chamber, but the water level had risen to my ankles. Another gush entered, and I was waist-deep in seawater. Passing away in quiet slumber was one thing, but drowning in the dark was not on my bucket list. I sloshed my way outside the shaft once more as another volley of water completely entombed my home, ruining my copies of Tom Sawyer and Letters of the Arkansas Traveler, one of which is an all-time literary classic—I’ll let you be the judge.
Taking deep breaths, I submerged for protection as successive waves rained down and floated up the canyon as the cave system filled. Once at the top, the water pushed me through smaller tunnels, colliding with incoming waves and tossing me like a rag doll. I held my breath and protected my head until the massive force finally thrust me into the open sky like a giant squid spitting for distance.
I plunged into the sea and surfaced, squinting in sunlight I’d almost forgotten. I managed to reach the mountainside and find protection from the crashing waves. Slowly and painfully, I climbed until I reached a patch of dry soil, where I sat and examined my world as my eyes adjusted to a hazy brown sky. The air carried a putrid smell, and my mountain had been reduced to an island. I saw no other land—or birds. I ran my hand through the soil. There were no insects. I looked at my emaciated body, now vampire alabaster, the latest color at your local paint store. One thing was clear: once I reached civilization, I was getting a refund on that nutrition degree.
After a good rest, I slowly ascended to the mountaintop, a trek made easier as the mountain’s foliage had disappeared. At the top, I found no land mass in any direction. I sat on the rocks of my island prison and laughed. With nothing to eat or drink, at least my sentence would be short.
I laid back and closed my eyes again to ease into the Hereafter. But again, I couldn’t catch a break. A loud rumble in the sky preceded four fires descending on my position. Is this what happens when you die these days? I’d heard of fiery chariots coming for you, but this was a bit much. Maybe they’d upgraded.
A ship landed near my position. People in environmental suits strapped a mask over my face, shot something into my arm, and carried me aboard by stretcher. I awoke feeling as spry as the day I turned six hundred. A scarred man covered in skin tumors sat at my bedside, smiling as much as his face would allow.
“My name is Taz. And you are the mythical Immortal Man, unseen for a century and a half.”
I couldn’t believe it. My provisions had lasted fifty years longer than I’d calculated. There goes my nutrition refund. Shoot.
Taz wore an oxygen mask and removed it only when speaking or moistening his cracked and disfigured lips. He explained that rising ocean levels had been only a portion of the burden the past few generations had inherited. Famine and viral disease had culled most of our species. Fewer people meant that nuclear plants around the world had gone unstaffed and overheated, gifting humanity just what it never wanted—a nuclear winter. Taz marveled at me and gently caressed my unblemished skin that the cave had protected from radiation. Yeah, dude’s touch was creepy as all get out, but he’d saved me. I let him have his moment.
I told Taz my story, minus the bit about wife shopping, sleeping around, and that I’d broken fourteen of the Fifteen Commandments. What? You thought there were only ten? Editors—what can you do? I offered Taz any help my years of knowledge could provide. He took me to a lounge area where people sat and socialized, all with O2 masks and as scarred and disfigured as Taz. But I paid little attention. I was staring out the window at the stars trailing behind us.
Taz explained we were aboard the Hope, and I’d been in a medically induced coma for the last two months as they’d treated my malnutrition. Hope’s mission was to carry the brightest and healthiest of our dying planet out into the stars in a last-ditch effort to discover a habitable world—any decent rock would do. Once found, the crew would set up a colony and send the ship back on autopilot for those left behind. Everyone knew it would take more than one lifetime, and no one would be left on Earth to rescue.
Days before launch, they’d been shocked to detect life signs on an island in the Dead Zone, and Earth’s remaining physicians had debated whether I would survive. Still, as the most untarnished of our species, I was loaded aboard the Hope in the hopes of recovery.
It was presumed we would have enough time en route to solve the reproductive issues plaguing their generation. We did not. We mourned the passing of each crew member in the years that followed until it was down to Margo and me. At 78, she had a stroke that left her brain dead. Like those before her, I hooked her up to life support, not in the hopes of recovery, but out of the need for carbon dioxide. As people died, our decreased numbers failed to generate enough to keep our plants from dying, our only food source. Turning off the CO2 scrubbers wasn’t enough. But even on life support, the crew’s bodies eventually gave out. Margo was the last. It’s been eighty years since I hooked her up—eighty years of solitude, nothing new for me. With her death today, I’ve become the sole source of carbon dioxide, and I am woefully inadequate.
The Hope has found no habitable planets in the 130 years since our launch. But even if it does, what’s the point? Still, I will maintain her systems and keep Hope afloat as long as I can. I’ve quarantined the last plants in an incubator and wear a mask to collect CO2 for my infant garden. I calculate it will grow just enough to keep me alive. Of course, my Horticultural degree is over three hundred years old. So, who knows?
I think of Aiyana and our children the same way I’ve thought of them every day for the last 753 years. No other filled my heart as they did. I carry on knowing that one day, we will all flower together forever. But until then, this is my life. I am the last of our kind. I am not immortal, but I have not died. The same could once be said for everyone. We are all immortal until the day we are cured.
MN Wiggins is an internationally published author, surgeon, voice actor, and humorist from the American South whose short stories have been published in The Horror Zine, Symphonies of Imagination, AcademFic, and more, including stories performed on The No Sleep Podcast, Creepy, Frightening Tales, and Kaidankai. Dr. Wiggins’s complete works may be found at MNWiggins.com.