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First things first, this probably has blood and/or alcohol on it, because I’m writing this. I’m not sorry, just going to point it out.
When you live immortal for millennia, with time as pliable under your grip as putty, you tend towards certain perspectives on things. For one thing, a bottle of vodka and a gun become your favourite possessions rather quickly. It was, in fact, those two exact things that landed me in the position of Captain First Mate of the starship Aurora.
For the first few thousand years, being immortal is pretty fun. I ran around, gambling, drinking, and indulging myself in whatever fancy happened to possess me at the time. Of course, I did all the usual things first - sight-seeing. All the most beautiful nebulae, the most distant galaxies and stars, collapsing black holes and newborn stars. Eventually you get bored of it; every star starts to look the same after half a dozen or so thousand years. Actually, my favourite place became a bar on the outer rim of a galaxy about a million light-years from here, called something boring and unimportant. It’s where I die, actually, in a bar fight. But not yet.
The other thing about when you can’t die for so long, pretty much every consequence becomes inconsequential. Violence becomes the closest you can get to feeling genuinely excited. Gunfire and explosions start to sound like a sweet melody to ears so old. By the end of it all I had committed pretty much every crime any language in any galaxy had a name for - well, except anything sexual, that shit’s nasty and pretty much the one boundary the doc was firm about.
The only thing other than violence that stays pretty good is telling stories. Collecting accounts from every corner of the universe, being the only one still around to tell them and regaling tales so old that you can make up anything you like to fill in the gaps and no one will question you over it is fun. It’s what I ended up spending a lot of my time doing. Most of my time, actually. Stories about war, and crime, and love, and death. Me and the crew of Aurora, travelling to any old backwater planet, getting drunk enough to kill any other man and performing. Of course, having lived as long as us, we have more stories than we could ever really tell, but some of them are better than others. My favourite to tell was always the story of Rose Red and General White. Met one of them twice, killed hundreds of clones of the other. Got shot by all of them, which to be honest, was probably fair. I’ve been told I’m pretty shoot-able, and I’m inclined to agree.
The only thing I get asked to do other than tell stories, is talk about the meaning of life; I always give exactly the same answer. There isn’t one. Life means fuck all. Everything’s just a messy coincidence of existence, it’s how the universe works. If you want life to mean something, you’ve got to make it do that yourself. If you want the meaning of life to be about finding happiness or some other sentimental bullshit, then you have to just believe it and make it happen. There’s no wrong answer to what the meaning of life is. You are born, you live for a bit, and then you die, and that’s it. Everything, everyone, dies. Even immortal space pirates, eventually.
Like I said, I die in a bar fight on the outer rim of a galaxy far away from here. No one there will really know who I am, or what they’re witnessing. I’ll just be another poor sod who got stabbed. I’m fine with that.
I’m fine with this.
I’m fine with dying here. They’re all looking at me like I’m insane, writing my journal whilst slowly bleeding out with a knife in my chest, drunkenly laughing. I can’t wait! I’m dying! This is just another adventure. Never was much of a poet. So, if you’re reading this, I’m dead, and I think that’s pretty fucking hilarious.