( "Infinity - 008/365" by Long Road Photography (formerly Aff) is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. )
You never, ever, ever, ever die. You live forever. And we really do mean forever. Nations will fall, new ones will rise, and those will fall too. You'll still be alive. Religions will stretch and skew and merge and split and die and revive and die again and revive again. You'll still be alive. The wind will grind the mountains to sand, the surf will consume the shore, and the lakes will dry into deserts. And you'll still be alive. That means you will see all these things and more.
You live long enough to see terrible new weapons produced, and to see them used in terrible new wars. You live long enough to see this used as a reason to produce more terrible weapons still, which are used in more terrible wars still. You live long enough to see this cycle repeat, over and over and over. New wars create new weapons. New weapons create new wars.
Eventually, there's a weapon that's just too terrible, used in a war that's just too terrible. The destruction sweeps across the planet, and most die right away. A few, though, manage to survive. They band together to form new families. The new families band together to form new villages. The new villages band together to form new nations which, after a few thousand years, destroy each again, leaving just a few survivors to eventually rebuild their nations and destroy each other once more.
This continues on about five or six more times (you've kind of lost count) before everyone is well and truly gone, no survivors left to rebuild and repeat the process. You are the last human being on Earth. Because you will live forever.
You live long enough to see nature reclaim all traces that humans were once there, worn down first to ruins then to stone then to dirt. And you live long enough to see squids crawl up onto dry land. You see them get better at staying there. You see their bodies change and adapt. You see them start to make tools. You see them start to tame fire. You see them start making art on cave walls. You see them build villages, then towns, then cities, then kingdoms, then nations. You see their leaders address crowds, waving tentacles and speaking a language that's mostly clicks and hisses. You see them make terrible weapons and fight terrible wars. You see them eventually wipe everything out. You see a few survivors eventually form new nations that eventually make new weapons to use in new wars and eventually wipe everything out again. You see the squids continue this cycle, over and over again, and are impressed when they last longer than the humans did. 10. You remembered to count this time.
( "Nuclear Blast 1945" by thw05 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. )
You live long enough to see new animals evolve and take their place. You witness the rise of: ants, ferns, mold, another kind of mold, a third kind of mold, scallops, oysters, trees, something that looks like a tree but is really an animal, fish, cyborg fish, robot fish, a kind of intelligent shade of blue that eats radiation, stones with fanged mouths that roll to get around, swarms of flying insects that combine their intelligence into a singular ego, something that looks like an animal but is really a tree, hot dogs, living metal, magma people, bacteria, and thick clouds of sulfur that love poetry. And every time is the same. They build villages, then towns, then cities, then kingdoms, then nations. And then they destroy each other. And then they regroup. And then they destroy each other again. You would have sworn the magma people would last the longest, but they only got through three cycles, less than even humans! Turns out, it was the hot dogs that survived longer than anyone else: 29 cycles. You are extremely impressed.
You live long enough for the planet to become cold, barren and lifeless, all these cycles now nothing more than a distant memory. It's a lonely place. There isn't much to do. You spend your time just walking around, seeing the sights. This is pretty entertaining for a few thousand years because you get to see how the landscape changes. But eventually you get bored. You feel like you've seen everything there is to see on this planet. And you're still here. You wait for the sun to blow up. You wait for a long, long, long, long, long, long, loooooooooooong time. But eventually it happens.
You watch the sun get bigger and bigger in the sky until the entire planet is engulfed in its flames. And you're still alive. Inside the sun. It's kind of hot but otherwise you're okay, because you will live forever. You walk around a while and decide this is even more boring than Earth, because at least Earth had some interesting geography, all there is here is fire. Look up? Fire. Look down? Fire. Look left, right, backwards, forwards? More fire. You realize now you have to wait for the flames to die down, which winds up taking a few million years. While you wait, you talk to yourself, to the dying sun, to the memories of all the people, squids and other entities you've encountered on your never-ending journey through life.
Eventually, though, the heat dies down and the sun gets cold. Now there's not even flames to look at. Just great. You wait some more. The cold core of matter that used to be the sun starts to chip away into the cosmic void, little by agonizing little, until it's half the size it used to be, then a third, then a quarter, and eventually you're just standing on something that's about as big as a beach ball. Eventually even that dissolves and you're left just floating through the vast emptiness of space.
( "Tarantula Nebula Hubble combi" by ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, E. Sabbi Acknowledgement: Y.-H. Chu is licensed under CC BY 4.0. )
Sometimes an alien picks you up. Turns out there's a lot of them out there, but space is just so big they're easy to miss. Some of them have nations that span the very stars, vast empires with giant spaceships that patrol the skies of countless planets. Inevitably, they destroy each other too. Sometimes it happens quickly, other times it takes thousands of years, but whenever it does happen, the devastation consumes big chunks of the galaxy, burning millions of planets over millions of light years with terrible energies. And then you're left floating in space once more, until the next set of aliens pick you up, and you see it all happen again.
You don't always wind up with aliens. Sometimes you drift into a star and wait for it to blow up and dissolve. Sometimes you land on an asteroid and ride it through the galaxy. Once you fell into a black hole and it took billions of years for it to evaporate and you to escape.
This all goes on for, oh, as long as the universe does. By the time it's all over, you've seen every star fade out, you've seen every black hole evaporate, you've even seen space turn from black to dark blue. It's been eons since you've seen any matter, let alone life. Your mind has long ago joined the cosmic oneness of the universe, everything you know, everything you are, attuned only to the existence that extends outwards in all directions to the point where it is near impossible to tell where you end and the rest of the universe begins. You are simply, yourself, the universe. It was the only way to deal with the boredom. But you shake yourself out of it once you realize that, yes, it's finally happening. The universe is coming to an end and, perhaps, you with it. You close your eyes as space collapses, waiting for the sweet embrace of nothingness, the last thing in existence to ever die.
You open your eyes. There's nothing. Not even space. Just... Nothingness. It's not hot or cold because temperature is a thing. It's not dark or bright because light is a thing. It's not good or bad because those are things too. You've just never seen so much nothing. You wait. You don't know how long. There's no more time after all, since time is a thing. And so either eventually or suddenly or something in-between, you hear it. A bang. A big bang. The biggest bang, in fact, in all creation. Time comes back into existence around you. Then space comes into existence around you. Then the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the aliens, the nations, the weapons, the wars, the cycles--everything.
You will see it all over again. Because you will live forever.
(CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=599657)
