Greetings, new immortal! My name is Danny, and I'm here to guide you through life as a never-dying official screw-up!
The first thing that happens when you achieve immortality is a lot of glowing. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. I know this from personal experience because I am one of the most wanted immortal beings alive.
***
I screwed my eyes shut tightly, trying to block out the irritating light as it seeped through my eyelids and attempted to blind me. This whole immortality thing is not getting off to a good start, I thought, fumbling around for anything that could serve as a blindfold. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the light shut off. Just like that.
And I was immortal.
For the beginner immortal being like myself, this was the perfect time to sit down and contemplate what the hell just happened. So I did, collapsing heavily on the dirt-packed floor. I didn't feel any different than how I had felt before I'd started glowing like an out-of-control flaming Christmas tree, but I reckoned that only happened when I became full-on godly.
Oh man. I was going to be godly.
I could already hear my mom's voice screaming in my head: "Danny, what exactly do you think you're doing? Being immortal doesn't mean you'll live safely forever, you know. Get back here right now and put that eternal existence to use by milking the cows forever!"
Yeah right, mom. Danny out.
***
I didn't ignore mind-mom's advice completely. I gave myself fifty years to lay low, just hang around. I went skiing in thirteen countries. I broke every single rib, respectively, cracked my skull twice and lost two toes to frostbite. I accidentally crowned myself king of a small island in the Pacific before realizing it was already inhabited by kind locals who taught me how to weave hats out of banana leaves and cook a great root-and-pepper soup. I learned how to speak French, German, Croatian, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic and Urdu. I worked 18-hour shifts in Dunkin' Donuts for seven years straight and earned enough money to send a bunch of my newfound friends around the world. I almost married five different girls and set two others on a blind date (I also attended their wedding two years later). I hadn't checked up on my family once, which was doing wonders for my mental stability. It was amazing.
And then the fifty years were over. But I wanted more. I wasn't sure exactly what I had been planning to do after "lying low", but whatever it was would never be as fun as these past years.
So I took advantage of the fact that I had nobody in charge of me. I took the next century off.
***
This time I was less careful, if you could call the previous years that. I almost split my head completely open while leaping from a desert cliff. I lost an arm and a leg to bloodthirsty sharks off the coast of Hawaii and had them magically grow back overnight. I snuck into nuclear waste disposals and breathed in the radiation as if it were the scent of flowers. The world was getting more brutal, too, so it was easy for my tricks to go unnoticed. With the world on the brink of World War 3, who cared about some reckless young guy who tripped off a cliff in Australia?
But, you know. That would never really be the end.
I needed attention. I wanted to be noticed as an immortal. Officially. I was awfully young- only immortal for 100 years- but I had done more in that century than most immortals had done in a thousand years. I deserved it. I deserved to be hailed as a god.
So yeah, I screwed up. Badly.
I shot the president.
***
I swear to god I didn't mean to kill him. It was the mid-22nd century. The US was a complete hot mess. The president was this ancient, disgustingly racist guy who romanticized the "good old days" of 21st century America as if they had been a golden age. He cared more about robot rights than he did human rights. He was constantly hopped up on about seventeen different illegal drugs, despite the fact that he was almost a hundred years old (I had been living in Mongolia when he was born). Altogether, one of the worst presidents that had ever existed. His name was Steven Derefoe. Everyone hated his guts.
And then it was 2158, and the whole country was going to hell, and there was a riot in front of the Red House (the former president had gotten it repainted after someone had spray-painted the words REVOLUTION across the Northern wall), and somebody's gun ended up in my hand, and I was suddenly being carried above the others, and they were cheering and screaming and tossing me and my world flipped upside down and I yelled and then-
I shot the president. I killed him. By accident. And if that wasn't bad enough, his bodyguards pretty much emptied their guns into my torso and the whole crowd was pretty shocked when I just got up and scampered away like a scared mouse, ten bullets in my chest.
The hunt after "the magical boy" started that very night.
***
Fast forward to twenty-or-so years later. America had officially descended into chaos, the immortal community had been driven into hiding and pretty much hated my guts, and I was seriously regretting everything I had done since the year 2119.
Of course, this isn't the end of the story. By accidentally killing the president, I had left the country leaderless. The vice president was a joke; he'd been quite literally booed out of office three days after the inauguration. The US was pretty much governed by a bunch of crazed, terrified lunatics. Said lunatics were not especially happy to see the first spaceships when they appeared near the moon in the year 2186, and so they did what any crazed, terrified American lunatic would do in that situation: shot the living hell out of them.
Pro tip: do not shoot aliens.
Long story short, the aliens got mad. They invaded. They flattened most of Finland while landing on Earth and then flooded every country bordering the Mediterranean Sea while lowering their weaponry ship. It was not fun, to say the least.
Then the immortals discovered this whole madness was just a real life far-fetched alternate universe I had created by shooting the president that day in 2158, and they decided to punish me for that. I escaped, naturally, smuggling myself off the planet in a cargo ship in early 2240, then stole a small
spacecraft and set out for a new life among the stars.
***
So there I was, an internationally wanted fugitive from immortal law, on the run in the middle of space. And that's what I remained for the next five hundred years or so, never looking back. Forget Earth, I thought. So I tried to.
I did a lot of things. I founded New Japan. I invented the wheely-flicker cake. I became best friends with a space gorilla named 329Bob, a piece of talking metal, a girl named Duct Tape, and a posh yet ruthless former Moon Base government worker (a lovely man called Alecia). I even learned that the immortal pirate Edison McClockface planned to quite literally tear me limb from limb if he ever caught me after I stole his entire supply of bananas!
That's who I am now, as I float in my spacecraft and listen to the sweet sound of rumbling pipes and 329Bob's horrible Venusian rap music. A washed up immortal who went from reckless teen to immortal reckless teen in space.
Have I learned anything in the past centuries since my life changed forever?
Honestly, I have no idea. This is just the immortality section of an illegal Martian underground history schoolbook. I can write whatever I want. I'm being paid.
Signing off for now,
Danny Laughin (renown outlaw)
