On being immortal,
Man, I wish I'd never found that goddamn lamp. Stupid fucking genie. I just had to blurt it out, didn't I? "I wish I were immortal!" Half the time they can't even make you immortal, but Sim Allah Bim of the Seven Winds just snapped his fingers and said "It is done." Damn, was I stoked. I don't even remember what my other two wishes were. Doesn't make a damn bit of difference now.
Oh, it was awesome for a while. I was all jumping off buildings and shit, getting shot and electrocuted, eating glass, the whole extreme sports gambit... I did it all. Nothing could kill me! Then all my friends and family started dying. That really sucked for a while. I made new friends, but they died, too. After six or seven times through with that, I figured friends weren't really worth it. I lived like a fucking hermit. Pfft... how long did that last? Two, three thousand years? Four, tops. Yeah, I started talking to people again. Made new friends. They died, too, but I was over it by then.
Mankind did some really amazing shit over the next couple hundred million years. That was awesome to see too, at first. I went to all sorts of planets, watched them move stars and build dyson spheres, they even cured themselves of all known disease and started living longer. It was soooo nice to have some friends that didn't just die after a hundred years or so.
But then they started evolving. People were turning into pure energy left and right. I couldn't do awesome shit like that, stuck in my immortal body. So I made my way back to Earth to see how they were doing there, but it turned out to be long since abandoned. So I was stranded on this worthless rock I'd seen a million times over with nothing to do. Yeah, the planet had changed quite a bit since I'd last been there, but I still wasn't occupied for more than a million years or so. After that it was boring as hell. I remember once I just sat on the edge of a cliff and waited for whatever continent I was on to drift into another one. Jeez.
But it seemed to keep getting hotter. Now, my immortal ass can stand any temperature you could throw at it, but that doesn't mean I wasn't uncomfortable. Shit, it was hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock. Pretty soon, the oceans were boiling. Now that is a sight to see. I even went swimming in it. Real smart, you fucking genius. I lost track of time, and before I knew it, the oceans were fucking gone and I was sitting at the bottom. Everywhere I went trying to get back up, BAM! continental shelf. Took me a thousand years to find a way back up. The whole thing was desert by that time anyway.
Then there was this galaxy that was fucking huge in the sky. It got so big, it took up the whole damn sky. After a while, you couldn't tell its stars from the normal ones. Then all the stars, new and old, started moving around in all these weird patterns. It was some show, let me tell you. Most interesting thing I'd seen in a while. But just as it was getting good, the goddamn sun exploded.
Now, the sun exploding itself was an even cooler sight than all those extra stars. It got really damn big. Hotter than hell, but worth it. And then BANG! Fucker started exploding. It kept going off for probably a billion years. It was awesome at first, but, shit... give it enough time and anything is boring. By the time it was done it was like night all the time and the sun wasn't all that much brighter than the other stars in the sky. Not to mention that it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey now.
So I waited. And waited. I memorized the stars and came up with names for all of them. And I waited. It was so fucking cold, I didn't move around that much. I couldn't even tell you how long it was, cause it was too damn cold to think. Shit, how I waited.
But then the damnedest thing happened. There was this huge, deafening roar. The sky was on fire. It started getting hot again. The wind got stronger and stronger until I was flying. Then came the loudest fucking sound I've ever heard in my life, and I found myself flying up and away from the Earth itself. When I finally got far enough away, I figured it out. Must have been an asteroid or something. Big fucker, though, there was a sizeable chunk of planet missing; a lot of it was still glowing red hot.
Now let me tell you, I thought it was cold on solid ground with no sun, but that was nothing. Empty space is fucking cold. That and not being able to breath... damn, that was an unpleasant time. I drifted away from what was left of the solar system. After I while I could see the giant cloud of shit left over from when the sun exploded. But then I just kept going. Man, it was a long time. Trillions of years, probably.
I landed on planets or even in stars from time to time. If I was on a planet, I was never there more than a billion years or so before another fucking asteroid came and threw me off of it. When I landed in stars (hotter than fuck), I just had to wait until it exploded and sent me off in some other direction. It really sucked.
But eventually I drifted out of the galaxy altogether. Of course it was nothing like that big pinwheel they told us it was in junior high. Just a big irregular blob. Just drifting and drifting, still couldn't breath. I passed other galaxies. Even from where I was, I could see stars exploding in the close ones. That was cool for a while. But I guess they were all running out of stars or something, the galaxies kept getting dimmer.
About the time the last galaxies were going out, I started to feel like I was going faster. A definite sensation of acceleration. I started spinning around. I don't know around what, but I could tell I was spinning from the few galaxies left out. I started to feel like I was stretching out, too. And then I couldn't see anything at all. Not too long after that I just felt crushed and stopped moving. Just saying that doesn't do it justice. I couldn't even move myself anymore. I felt like someone had crammed me inside a fucking shoebox or something.
This went on for a long fucking time. And I just kept feeling smaller and smaller and smaller. When suddenly I was free. Well, I wasn't being crushed anymore. But I still couldn't move and still felt tiny as fuck. And I still couldn't see anything.
But that's where it ended. Nothing has happened since then. Nothing. And that was a really fucking long time ago. I've already rethought every thought I ever had a googol times. That's not even an exaggeration, I counted. Yeah, I counted to a googol. That's how long I've been out here.
Man, this fucking sucks. Immortality blows.
American defense contractor Lockheed Martin has issued a statement declaring it has made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion. It's hoping to have a prototype ready in five years — and a small, functional unit ready by 2024. source Additionally, the European Commission also recently announced a $1 billion initiative to develop nuclear fusion as an energy source by 2020.