(In)finitum

(In)finitum

Vaughn Roste

                                      

Immortality is boring.

There, I said it.

It was billed as the end to death. Humanity’s ultimate victory.

I was amongst the first to be Uplifted – escaping our mortal coils and temporal bodies, our consciousnesses were Uplifted to cyberspace. Unlimited longevity. The end of biology. The next great evolution in the history of humanity. The Great Leap Upward.

The digitalization of the soul.

They discovered you really should be at full potential when you do it, lest you be eternally trapped in a less-than-ideal state – so they started doing it on your 85th birthday, by law. Some elected to do it earlier – often they had good reason. Those who skipped it would never make it here.

We were promised a virtual utopia.

To be fair, it was quite fun to begin with.

Dawn

They set up a virtual re-enactment of the entire history of the world, with AI filling in the gaps as necessary—best guess kind of thing. At least you can fast-forward and skip geographies to the good bits. Seriously, there’s hardly any change in the first 100,000 years, just tools and hair. Battles were fought with sticks and stones. Yawn.

It’s like time-travel, but you aren’t “really” there – just watching. We are ghosts.

Just about everyone spends their first million years watching that replay multiple times, at whatever speed you want, hopping between continents, sometimes following families’ genealogies through centuries, most catching the major pivot points. A lot of time is spent watching wars, but Newton and Einstein are popular too. The crucifixion of Christ is perpetually well attended. So are Buddha’s teachings, and Plato’s lectures. Joan of Arc, Moctezuma, Pol Pot, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Nobunaga – all get their own followings. Some creepers prefer Vlad the Impaler, Elizabeth Bathory, Hiroshima, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Gross.

Some follow an art history course, or music history, but frankly, I never found watching Shakespeare scrawl or Chopin compose to be all that thrilling. It’s no more exciting to watch Monet’s paint dry than anyone else’s. The process is, too often, painstaking. Just show me the final product.

Language acquisition still takes time, but time is irrelevant here. After a couple million years, everyone knows everything – all of history, every language, the entire extent of human knowledge about itself. We do have to learn, but luckily, we don’t forget. We access.

They set up another interactive version where you can change whatever you want, and it will play out what that would have been like. Butterfly effect kind of thing. What if Columbus sank on his maiden voyage?

Columbus and Christ, it seems – the two lives with the largest global ramifications.

The burning of the Library at Alexandria comes in a close third. If we hadn’t lost that, we would have landed on the moon in 1612.

But what do you do when you’re done playing with the world? You can talk to whomever you like, or create whatever conversations you want. The debates between Jesus and Ghandi are well-attended. Americans love the Martin Luther King meets Obama room. There’s an entire section devoted to Napoleon battling Genghis Khan in multiple historical eras, even 2070 with mechs.

But after the first ten million years? You’ve done it all. Twice.

You did the things you like most 100 times. You discovered everything you never knew. You relived your own life twenty times and figured out what you should have said when and the ten different people you could have married and how long each of those would have lasted.

You know a lot – like, everything – and, well, then it becomes: now what?

Day

Once you’re done learning, it becomes about self-improvement.

Want to become a concert pianist? You have unlimited time to practice. Take organ lessons from Bach if you want. (Pro tip: be on time. He’s German. For some that means perpetually punctual. For others it means permanently grumpy.)

Little motivation to practice? Who cares?! Practice one minute a day, you’ll still get there. Might take a million years, but you’ll get there invariably. You got time.

Want to play tennis with Serena? Beat Kasparov at chess? Sit on a cloud and play the harp if that’s your vision of heaven. Learn to paint draw run skate swim high jump shot put skydive pole vault knit macrame whatever – have at it. You can’t die. You can’t even get injured.

The adrenaline junkies use this as an excuse to jump out of planes without parachutes – but even that gets old fast.

Everything gets old after the first hundred years of it. And once you’re good at everything – then what?

Dusk

The final stage is about creation. Knowing everything you want to, being good at everything you want to become good at – what’s left? Contribute. Create something.

Some sculpt. Some compose. Some paint. Some write.

Some create digitally, video games or veritable worlds, which opens up entire realms of synecdoche and simulacra.

First we become gods – then we get bored.

Hold off as long as you like – but ultimately, it happens to all of us. It’s inevitable.

Eternity is a very long time.

After a hundred million years – even we don’t want it anymore.

We didn’t conquer death, we just pushed it back significantly.

We learn, improve, and create – then we walk away.

When the time comes, we embrace it.

There are no anguished cries of pain, just silent resignation.

Ultimately, there will be no one left to protest, or miss us.

Self-delete.

Dark

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Canadian by birth, Vaughn Roste currently lives in Chicago. His first book, The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Canadians, was published by Oval Books in England. He is an optioned and produced screenwriter, and a published author of books, plays, poems, peer-reviewed articles, book reviews, program notes for CD liners and Carnegie Hall, and a doctoral dissertation.

(In)finitum first published August 28th, 2026

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