Written in response to the Daily Prompt: No Longer a Mere Mortal
Post Mortality
We didn’t know immortality would one day come in a potion. We suppose we should have anticipated this development, but really, a potion?
Yuck!
We would have preferred a little blue pill. Or better yet, a red one!
We do not think anyone needs an immortality potion, but if an immortality potion helps convince everyone they are really immortals, then perhaps we can say Go for it!
In our past lives immortality was a sort of triumph or personal feat; an achievement of a person’s will, a product of their sheer determination to live at any cost.
Of course, we are no longer living in those past lives, immortal though we were even then; instead, we have left those past lives behind. We have chosen to divide ourselves and to leave those past lives to some of our other selves to continue to live in. We have now moved on to this current incarnation, a new series of lives in which we have already been an immortal for many, many years now, long before this new potion came along.
We have never needed an immortality potion.
Being an immortal does not mean we cannot be killed; this flesh is weak, but it is also very easily replaced. Our immortality is really a guarantee of our immediate resurrection, so long as it is our will to go on, along with a guarantee that one or more of ourselves will always choose to go on with any life we have ever been born into.
We are not sure whether immortality in a potion may really be a good idea, but hey, its done, so how do we live with it?
When we first learned we were immortal we did not want to believe it.
We wanted to die.
Of course, the only way anyone will ever find out if they are really immortal is to die and then return to their life, yes?
We discovered our own immortality long before the immortality potion came along by trying to kill ourselves.
But now, if you hand out all of these immortality potions so that everyone can discover they are immortal for themselves, you are gonna wind up with a lot of people killing themselves just to prove to themselves they really are immortals.
That is actually a dangerous business.
For one thing, our entire civilization may come crashing down as a result of these immortality potions. Why would immortals wish to spend their eternities at their jobs?
For another thing, people will still be dying, however, many of them may try dying more often or may murder one another more frequently.
Sure, no one will really remain dead after they have died, but for people who do not believe these immortality potions really work there is a constant risk of psychoses as their cognitive dissonance between what they choose to continue to believe and what is now the new reality for their entire world collide with each other and vie for dominance.
Yet another danger is that while you will always return to life after you have died, you still experience your death as a physically, psychically, and emotionally traumatic event. If you die often enough you can still develop a pretty serious case of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
We should know, we are still experiencing our death agonies; they continue to reverberate through our overloaded nervous systems.
Fortunately, we are pretty much done with testing our own immortality, we are reasonably well satisfied we will always return to this life each time we die in it.
Our immortality has not changed our morality.
We choose to be a moral person, within our own definitions of morality and within the weaknesses, tolerances, or limits of our disciplines.
That is our choice.
We see no reason to change this choice regardless of whether or not we are immortal.
However, we have known many criminals, some of whom have been self-avowed murderers, who might say the same for themselves; there are many days when we can believe that perhaps they can describe themselves as moral people not only sincerely, but even truthfully.
Morality is an extremely thorny issue.
We do not believe there are any universal codes for morality, we believe morality is a private matter and that morality should always remain a private matter.
We do not believe morality can be successfully legislated, the rate of incarceration per capita in the USA should be proof of this.
Personally, we prefer to choose not to bring harm to any other living being within what we might hope may be a reasonable scope or respectable parameters.
Might we harm one person to prevent harm to another?
Perhaps.
However, for some people, it may become much easier to use deadly force when they know that anyone they kill will always come back.
Eventually, people will learn that their immortality potions have really worked and they really are immortals.
We may only speculate whether morality will improve in this new world full of immortals only.
On that day when all people know they are immortals those people who are still believed to be dead will rise up from their graves and return to their lost lives.
This is because as immortals, the human race will now live long enough to invent time travel and then return to resurrect their dead ancestors.
People who have risen after a long period in their graves will take a long time to get up to speed. They will shamble into their resurrected lives like zombies, slowly healing from ancient traumas that once held them in their graves, and slowly healing from cognitive dissonance between their past lives and this brave new modern eternal world…
We know this because we have already seen it happen. We have already lived forever an infinite number of times.
Enjoy!
Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al…