Letter from a god
A Short Story
Hello,
I’m not really sure what to put in this, but they told me that it is important that I write this letter. They say this is a historic moment, but I’m not really sure either why this is will go down as history. Yes, I have lived for almost a millennia, but for me, death is still a natural part of life.
I was born in 2098, just before the dawn of a new century, and now, today is 2887. I had witnessed the rise and fall of nations. I had traveled the other end of the galaxy and back. I had experienced the wonders of technology. And maybe a little bit too much.
Not long after I reached adulthood, all those centuries ago, the human race experienced a medical revolution. We all cheered. Because we were one step closer to achieve what we had always dreamed; achieving immortality, and become gods ourselves.
Thanks to the new medical wonder, diseases are mostly gone. History. We became stronger, faster, smarter. The average life expectancy rose to 130–150 years. Some even lived past 200. Everybody was happy.
Not long after that, we discovered hyperspace travel, and we begin to discover new galaxies, and colonized other planet. This negates the threat of overpopulated world. Everybody was happy again. Sadly, we never find another intelligent life, in our travels.
Just right after my 100th birthday, just a few years of my retirement, we invented something now I call a hubris. Technology has enabled immortality; humans now can upload their “self” into a form of AI, living in a far durable, replaceable, repairable, android body.
I was one of the wealthiest human at that time, and I joined the program. None of my family and close friends did the same, but they supported me nonetheless. And over the course of a few days, I was able to defy the laws a nature. I am an immortal. I am, a god.
And that was the biggest mistake of my life.
Being one of the few that achieved immortality is not what I thought it would be. I had spent centuries of burying my family and loved ones, and I got sick of it. I got married 3 times, and fell in love more times than that. But I got my heartbroken even more than that. Far too much for a lifetime.
I still have a lot of great grandchildren and maybe some grand children still living by now, but I don’t feel like they’re my family, as we are never close. Maybe I buried too many people I care about, and I had enough. That is why I never try to get close to anyone, ever again.
And what’s worse, I got to experience the fall, of humanity. Funny how the one thing we did to preserve our mortality, is also what killed us. At first, we celebrated at the ability to live longer, but it the end, it just made us stop doing what it was, to be human.
As we live longer, our productive years also got longer. We spend that gift to live longer, only to work longer.
When I was little and from the stories of my grandparents, people do crazy stuff with their lives because they say life is short. But life is no longer short. Everything is structured and well calculated now. They spend their 20s to travel, then their 30s to work their passion, if it is the correct term anymore, and spend the next decades working steady jobs, until they retire just before they turn 100.
Nobody took risks to follow their dreams anymore.
Nobody do crazy changes with their lives anymore.
Nobody did anything with their lives anymore.
People had stopped living.
Ever since we are able to cheat death, we slowly losing our respect, of life.
And this is not the world I wish to live in, any longer. I will soon be deactivating this android body, and my “self” would be deleted. I don’t know what will happen to my soul, or whether I still have one.
I don’t know whether I will experience death, like a normal human would. But then again, I don’t know if I have been alive these last hundreds of years.
I only wish, for you to not repeat the hubris I made.
Yours sincerely,
The first immortal to die.
