They’ve been torching people in the streets since the morning. The borders have been barricaded, and they’re shooting at anyone they see. At first, I thought it had something to do with that weird cult shit that’s been going on in the city since last year, and then someone from the facility leaked this audio file a few hours before shit went down. Spent thirty minutes transcribing it as best as I could from the comfort of my closet.
X is the immortal, I is the guy interviewing him.
Source said that they’ll cover this up, keep news of what’s going on the city from leaking outside for at least a month, lock down the region and blame it on riots. Shouldn’t be very hard, given the population here. So no one will ever know, and no one will ever be able to prove it, which is best given the contents of this transcript.
I’m thirsty and I need to piss, and I would not like to do it here, there’s already a pool of sweat soaking up my pants. Electricity went out five minutes ago, so I can’t even keep this thing charged.
-–
TRANSCRIPT:
I: X, you claim to be an ‘immortal’, correct?
X: Indeed. They didn’t have a name for it back when I was born, because it was simply another mundane characteristic of life.
I: And when exactly were you born?
X: Hard to remember. I’ve experienced much more than my brain could possibly hold, so there are a few gaps here and there. I can tell you with certainty that I lived at least a millennium before the first civilization.
I: Just to narrow it down, what do you consider to be the ‘first civilization’?
[audio cuts out]
I: When you were first brought in, our doctors ran some tests on you, came back to us with the fairly underwhelming assessment that you had the constitution of a healthy thirty year old, and when pressed for proof of any kind that you were the immortal you claimed to be, you struggled to provide any.
X: Having me locked up here for thirty years wasn’t proof enough?
I: We had to. Besides, we know you weren’t lying now. But-
X: Hilarious.
I: But my question is, why were you unable to provide any names, locations, even vague, misremembered life stories? Why?
X: Immortals die too. Corny as it sounds, I have lived a million lives- I lived in the minds of men of which there is not one remaining chemical remainder, identities lost to complete oblivion, lives and egos so vivid that I almost forgot the thousand years I’d lived before that. When I walked into your facility in the Congo, all I could remember was the ten years before and after I’d settled there.
[silence follows, for maybe 4 or 5 seconds, interrupted by the sound of a door opening and something being wheeled in]
I: Tea, coffee, anything?
X: No, thank you.
I: Alright then.
[conversation ceases for another ten seconds, then the sound of a door closing]
I: Can you die, X?
X: Your doctors have already tried several times to kill me, so you should have a more comprehensive answer to that than I myself do.
I: Fair enough. So why exactly did you voluntarily walk into our facility in 1962? You said… you had a warning?
X: A warning. Ah, yes.
[silence follows]
I: Well?
X: Apologies. Your sedatives have done a number on my memory.
In 1962, I walked right into the heart of a nuclear wasteland, just to make myself feel something. I expected to hear my skin sloshing at my boots, to see the glint of my bones, to embrace the deterioration that has eluded me my entire existence. But all I felt was the presence of another being there. The spectres of the food chain, lurking in God’s blind spot, lurking in places that no animal could ever venture into – the darkness of the deepest ocean, scorching deserts, radioactive graveyards like the one I was at.
I: Where exactly was this?
X: Not important. Listen. You see, these spectres were the only ones left unscathed by what happened back then.
I: What do you mean?
X: Back then, there were maybe a hundred of us. The only people in the world. The skies were pitch-black, and we were all immortals. We were sent there to do something. To kill something horrible, something unholy that’d inhabited this world for years.
[six seconds of silence, then X continues]
We searched, and we searched, and we were never able to find it. After a few hundred years, we forgot what we’d even been searching for, and the group had settled down for good. Children, community, recreation, all the luxuries of a people gone soft.
And then they came. Suddenly, the sky was filled with a million glowing pinpricks of light, and out from the forest emerged these creatures, a gross, jigsaw patchwork of animal corpses, coughing pus and blood as they attempted to communicate with us.
At first, all they could manage was random sounds. Horses would chirp like nightingales, dogs would wail like grieving mothers.
They got better with time. They’d manage entire sentences, and when they spoke, it was beautiful.
Slowly, some of us began to wither. Their skin began to split and fall apart, rotting, death finally catching up to them. The creatures dragged their bodies into the forest, and emerged wearing their skin.
[X pauses for several seconds]
I wouldn’t mind that coffee now actually, haha.
[pauses again]
Anyway, the remaining immortals fled. We feared that we’d meet the same fate as them if we lingered there, around those things, for too long. It was like if we listened too closely to what we were saying… death suddenly pounced upon us, and the light in our eyes would go out.
Wherever we went, we heard them. Whispers in the night, murmurs from the stars, faces in the fires. It was like the planet itself was trying to get in our heads. There are predators that hunt animal by animal, grab the prey and all it’s infants in it’s jaws while they slumber, but this thing was beyond that. It was so far up the food chain that it’s appetite, it’s hunting methods, it’s very way of life was simply incomprehensible to us. It devoured entire species. It devoured civilizations, and it was a force of nature, the way the wind is a force of nature, the way the rising tide is a force of nature. It is an inextricable part of the cosmos. It haunts all living things, quashes all sentient life past a certain point of cultural development. We were sent to study it, to end it before we ran headfirst into the great filter.
To us, to devour is to simple erase and consume. To that thing… to devour was to erase and replace.
I was the only one to survive. See the scars here? And here? They’re from cutting out my ears and my eyes. Funny thing was, I still fucking saw them, still heard them. They’d squirmed their way into my fucking brain.
For about five hundred years after that, I saw the ninety-nine live out some strange imitation of our way of life… children… storytelling around the fire… something the thing had cobbled together from centuries of observing us. Putting on a little puppet show for it’s own entertainment. A grotesque mockery of our humanity – a family would be happily sitting by the bonfire, and then the parents would suddenly choke the children to death, toss them into the fire, and go back to talking like nothing had happened. Sudden eruptions of violence. Sometimes, the thing would get curious, get people to start sawing each other in half, pulling their organs out and admiring them.
I said it was a force of nature, but it wasn’t quite so stoic. It had a heart of evil.
It all ended very strangely. One day, what remained of the ninety-nine had an idea.
The thing had put an idea in their head.
Something horrible, utterly abhorrent, but to them, as mundane as breathing the air.
And they acted on it. Before they all died, they built a monument to the thing and perished in it.
[a minute of silence]
I: I’m not sure where to start. ‘Your race’? Are you not human?
X: Only vaguely. By the time your first civilizations rose, any trace of mine had vanished.
I: What are-
X: Listen. You can hardly hope to resist this thing. You’ve wondered all your life why the universe is so silent and dark. It’s because of this thing. This… anti-sentience. Nothing has ever escaped it. In the days after the death of my civilization, I wondered whether it was just part of the natural cycle. An organism is born, and then death catches up with it, and then it dies. Maybe this was simply death acting on a larger scale, quashing sentience, putting it to eternal sleep.
I came to the Congo in 1960. I saw the lights in 1961. I saw the creatures emerge from the forests in 1962. I watched a village dance to the strings of this thing, then it must’ve gotten bored, because the idea occurred to them a bit too quickly, the idea to end all ideas, and they began their work on the monument.
A single man fled the village.
I killed him before he could spread it beyond the village, but it spread anyway. A month later, I heard a man casually act upon the idea in a crowded bar, and most of the people there didn’t bat an eye.
I: What… idea? This… supposed cataclysm… is already happening to us?
X: I tried to warn you. You locked me up and had me sedated for thirty years. You broke my memory.
All of your actions, everything you do, it’s all part of some grand equation. A little effort towards the construction of a monument for this being.
I: How does that work?
X: Ripples. Your civilization is an engine of tiny changes, rippling outwards, coalescing to form one cohesive song, one cohesive action, building this monument, block by block. All these actions operating on a single wicked principle. Something utterly immoral, evil without a question, but reduced to a complete mundanity in your heads.
I can see it, and I can see everytime you act on this idea, but you cannot. Imagine a sociopath, completely isolated from human contact, growing up all his life thinking that choking squirrels to death is a normal thing. A misconception of the highest order. Like thinking that, well, two plus two is indeed five all your life.
I: And what exactly is this idea?
X: Something so fundamentally wrong that to realize it would destroy the backbone on which the thing has built it’s engine. To destroy the backbone of civilization itself. An affront to every ethical code that your race has ever conceived. I could tell you what it is right now. And if you recognize it, recognize that you’ve acted upon it, you are one of them.
[X whispers something for several minutes. The interviewer screams, and the sound of him repeatedly smashing his head into the table is heard, going on for nearly six minutes before coming to an abrupt stop. Halfway through this, X grabs the microphone and begins speaking into it]
X: This entire city must be quarantined. It works slowly with a civilization this big.
[pause]
X: I’ve always wondered why it spared me. Civilization-eater, unable to get to a single man.
And then I observed in the village, the twenty villages that burned that year in the Congo, that there was always a single person. A storyteller. The thing had taken their skin, but they were clueless. From village to village they fled, spreading the grand idea in their cries for help, in their sobbing, in their stories.
I have fled from civilization to civilization, watched them topple like dominoes stretching into the horizon. I am both their death, and their last living reminder. But I can’t remember them all.
[audio cuts out]
-–
I highly doubt I’ll survive this. I keep hearing planes flying overhead. I think they’re going to raze the city to the ground.