☄️

Such kind words to hear. Rather, they used to be.

So sweet, spoken from the mouths of mortals to each other. To show care and love throughout their fleeting lives.

"There is a future with you in it." They said. That means "Live until tomorrow and spend tomorrow with me."

But one day, when those words were spoken, they were lies.

"There is a future with you in it." My lover said to me at my lowest.

"There is a future with you in it." My doctor said to me as I battled the pain of my lover's dying breath.

"There is a future with you in it!" The scientists said excitedly as they noticed, my cells and body aged, yes, but deteriorated, no. My cells were immortal, it seemed.

"There will always be a future, where generations of mortal humans can look up to you." The world promised me.

And so, finally, I accepted it.

The future will always have me in it. That's fine. I can shape the future, I can help, I can nurture.

But I can't stop disaster.

One night, someone looked to their lover just as mine had looked to me and said "there is a future with you in it."

And at that moment, the planet went still. Fire erupted from the ground it seemed as the force of an incredible shock wave ripped the planet apart. Every mortal life blinked and lived only long enough to wonder what was happening.

Heat unlike any fathomable to the mind of humanity blasted the planet, incinerating it and all its lovely life.

Except for me.

For many years, though years have become immeasurable now, I did not know what had become of me.

My body was nowhere. I could not see, I could not feel. I could only think and I could only know.

When my cells tried to rebuild, they rebuilt in the only way they knew how. They were built for Earth, so they died in the great vacuum.

I stewed in my knowledge like a strange tasting dream. My memories bright and clear, but now so we're concepts. Equations. Knowledge that didnt necessarily for as a "memory" but was remembered. They took a form to me, something I could not describe because I could not see, feel, smell, taste, nor hear these forms. I simply... understood them. That was all that was left for me to do.

At one time I found myself noticing things. Sensations at first and then distant stars in my vision.

As I realized eventually I could see once more I looked unto the flesh which had formed a cocoon around my thoughts.

My eyes fell upon a sight so ghastly and twisted the thought of a body such as this may frighten a mortal to death. This new body, this amalgamation of mutation, if what would have become of humanity should they have lived out here in the vacuum of space.

The light was dim, from distant stars, and very little to reflect on. My body glistened like ice as I unconsciously swam beyond distant twinkling giants.

My bones creaked; I could hear it within myself. Not carried through the oxygen in my blood, but echoing through the very tissues that make up my form. What I was was no longer human by any sense of the word, and becauss I was no longer human the revelation did not alarm me.

Of course my body has warped and become alien to even myself. Evolution will find a way, as long as it has the will to. Of course my mind no longer works in the same way. It has too much knowledge to hold. Of course it must think differently to optimize use.

I told myself these things to pass time, but eventually time stopped passing. I let go of the final shred of mortality keeping me tethered to my past, that which measures time.