Immortal

Prologue

I jolted awake to the feel of cold water on my face. I sat upright, coughing violently to expel the amount which had gotten into my windpipe.

There was a burning sensation in my nose as I surveyed my dark surroundings. I was in a small room with no notable light source to be seen.

As my eyes adjusted, I noticed a humanoid figure a few feet in front of me. I jumped back, startled. There was a violent tug on my forearm and I fell sideways onto the floor. I couldn't help but notice that it was clean.

"I'm going to ask you a question." the voice sounded in the darkness. It was deep and flat, without emotion.

I turned my head sideways and studied the being more closely. He was seated on a chair and was leaning forwards, his hands clasped on his thighs.

"...What..." the word didn't make it out of my mouth.

"After you suffer, ask yourself this: if you had a way to stop suffering, would you take it?"

What? Suffering?

The torture was intense. It was unlike anything I had experienced or heard of before. And with everything happening in the darkness, I couldn't even make out the lasting effects on my body, though perhaps that was for the best.

There were physical beatings, tools and simulated torture devices — all used on me for reasons I couldn't comprehend. I tried asking my captor but never got an answer.

It became a convoluted routine, one that I eventually imbibed as natural, however that didn't mean I accepted it or enjoyed it. There was no sense of day or night, just a cycle that constantly repeated: for one part of the cycle I would be tortured and for the rest of the time I would be left alone to ponder upon the question — if I had a way to stop suffering, would I take it?

As the years passed, I began to forget about what my life had been before my captor kidnapped me. I could only vaguely recall where I had been and what I had been doing before the next thing I could remember was the dark room. My family...I had had a family, people who cared about me...there had been other people in the world...

It didn't seem to matter. There was no family here, no people here. Even my captor didn't seem to be human, he was a robot who executed a single program. There was just me.

In this singular room, I was cut off from the world, and yet this ignorance seemed as if it was all that was required, that there was nothing of concern beyond this existence.

"If you had a way to stop suffering, would you take it?"

"Of course I would!" I shouted but the door closed on me.

My captor was never interested in hearing my answer, he always left as soon as he finished asking the question.

My body ached and my bones creaked as I laid back on the floor. It wasn't just due to the beatings, I had gotten old, or so I suspected, there was no way to confirm it. With no indication of the passage of time and with my life being what seemed to be an infinite loop, I couldn't tell whether decades had passed or days. Perhaps my mind was just playing tricks on me.

I want to escape. I thought yet again.

I want the suffering to stop. It was nothing new.

What did I do to deserve this? Asking myself this every day had not given me an answer.

I want my old life back. The problem was I couldn't remember what it had been like. Whatever it had been, I imagined it was something better than this.

Is this my only life? Is there nothing else? This thought was something new, something with a meaning. I couldn't completely understand what it was about this thought, but I knew it wasn't the same as the rest which I would dismiss as pointless. It felt as though I had discovered the beginning of a new path.

The thought came to me naturally. The beginning of an end.