Music for the ArticleWho Wants to Live Forever?
Put your hand down. This is not a vote.
The worst fate possible might well be immortality. Sure, you might like the idea that you get to live forever and see what the world's like hundreds of years from now, but what's eternal life compared to the pain of life in general? From eventual boredom to eternal entrapment and torture to the emotional anguish of seeing your loved ones die, one by one, as you stay fixed in time.
However, they still age normally and suffer greatly from senility, the result of bites by a certain fly. They don't get eternal youth, and are condemned to endless agony. One of the plane's natives, who watches over one immortal in particular, notes that eventually the people bury their immortals, and over centuries their suffering apparently condenses them into a diamond.
They consider the ones who became senile the ones who were better off - at least they forgot their bodies were degrading, and what they had once been. Imagine being trapped in a body too weak to move, remembering how you would play, frolic, run, perhaps being too weak to talk but having all these thoughts in your head... it would be torture.
Sometimes it's because his role as the emergency repair man for the universe means he absolutely cannot die. The universe simply won't allow it. Every time he reboots the universe (it's happened at least five times so far) he's been forced re-live all of human history until the next time he's needed. Oh, and did I mention that rebooting the universe requires him to kill every living creature in creation? He's tried various coping strategies, from blanking his memories to recruiting another to be his immortal companion (they had a falling out after 15,000 years or so) to "accidentally" recreating himself as a woman during the latest reboot, probably in the hope that will make it all different this go-round.
Basically Immortality Stinks
This is the fate of Jack of the Lantern. He was a evil man who tricked the Devil into being trapped in a tree by putting a holy symbol on the trunk whilst the Devil was in the tree. Jack would only allow the Devil down if he promised never to take Jack's soul. The Devil agreed. However, since Jack couldn't enter Heaven (remember, he was evil), he had no where to go after he died. The Devil gave him an ember to light his way, which Jack kept in a hollowed-out turnip. (Since pumpkins were more plentiful and easier to carve, they became the vessel in which the ember was kept.) Jack is now cursed to wander forever, carrying his lantern, a Jack-o-Lantern................................
WAIT!!??? why is your hand still up!? HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT IS HAPPENING AS THIS SIDE EFFECTS!!!
Fri Mar 15, 2013 8:22 pm
