Tue 18 Dec 2007
Describe your choice of conditional immortality. The assumption here is that you can be killed, but you’ll live forever if no one manages to pull it off. You can have special powers, but you also have some sort of vulnerability.
Inspired by klangklangston’s MetaTalk comments describing his plan “to be a zombie reanimated by a hive of bees, which I could shoot from my hands” and “keep my body living forever as a hollowed husk of entomological evil.”
Posted by Tehanu20 answers so far!
I’ve always liked the wizened zen monk/wizard aesthetic. Gandalf with no hair, a quiet smile, lightning reflexes, and a sense of subtlety about the whole thing. Just taking what comes along.
I’m going to go with Christ-like resurrected body. Appear and disappear with apparent ease. Enter locked rooms without opening the door. Ability to ascend into heaven at will. Seeming omniprescience and telepathy. No pesky ultimate damnation or unending curse to deal with, as in other alternatives. It’s a win-win, really.
I’d want to be the boogieman. I’d be the creature that people would fear when they caught a glimpse of something in the mirror behind them, and the thing they worried would snatch at their legs from under their bed.
And like the anti-Santa, I would also keep a list of who had been naughty and nice, and I would make sure I spent quality time with those who deserved it.
My magic power would be to come an go at will, and to invoke an unreasonable sense of dread in all those around me.
My weakness would be that one day, people would stop fearing me.
Which, fortunately for me, will never happen.
>>My other power would be that cats would naturally like me. That just seems useful for a boogieman.<<
If possible I’d want to be superman.
If that wouldn’t count then I’d want it to be a pact with God that was some sort of ironic punishment for trying and failing to kill myself a whole bunch of times. My weakness, what would remove my immortality, would be incredible wealth. As soon as I became stinking rich I was just as mortal as the next guy.
I love that dbl’s response is basically “I’d want to be Jesus.”
Well, without the getting-tortured-and-killed bit, presumably.
There’s always the Kurzweilian route: just hang out and wait for the inevitable. Live forever by living for the next few decades. That does take a little sparkle out of it, though: sure, you’re immortal, but so is that asshole down the block.
OMG, I’m all over Dorian Grey on this one. Hideously aging portrait in my attic? No problemo. Though I would actually keep it in a fireproof, maximum security bank vault. And my superpower is that I’m irresistibly witty and charming, plus I have a killer wardrobe.
I actually didn’t have an answer for this when I wrote it other than “Be a vampire! GRRRRR!”
I have a better one now. I think I’d also go the wizard route, omitting the part where I’m a cranky old man for a millennium. Or bald. The catch would be that I’d be immortal until I fulfilled some really important quest or other, and then I’d lost my power and start to age like anyone else (sort of like a mix of Schmendrick and Ged). So it’s a catch-22: use superpowers to save the world, knowing that success means losing them and dying. So it’d be a relief but also a real loss in the end. In the meantime, things like shooting bees out of my hands at my enemies would be no problem.
I’d go with a classic - vampire! Drink blood? No problem, that’s what bad guys and blood banks are for. No sunshine? No problem, I’m a night owl. I definitely need a way to keep myself in a lifestyle to which I’d like to become accustomed, so my super-power would be financial genius.
I had a small attempt at immortality three-hundred and sixty-four days ago, when I had a cardiac arrest at work. Two zaps from an external defibralator brought me back and tomorrow marks my first year post “fall down, go boom.”
Take the internal defibralator that’s inside me now, convert it into a micro atomic force-field generator and I’m set. Y’all can’t touch me, naaa-yaaa yaa yaa-naa.
But I can touch you. Owing to a long-standing grudge held against a former boss and stating that I am a pacifist at heart, I can promise a pie in the face IN PUBLIC for all you who deserve it. Starting with you, “Jack the boss” who treated me so poorly.
I’ll be followed by a smallish servant who’ll provide Tidy-Wipes for the target, for cleaning.
I’d like to be a Goddess with my immortality bestowed upon me by another God or Goddess. Then I could capriciously interfere in other people’s lives, thwarting mean people and helping the innocent.
Then I remembered Baba Yaga. It would be almost way cooler to live in a house that moved around on chicken legs. So maybe if she retired, I could be the fill-in Baba Yaga and hand it off to someone when I became weary of immortality.
Or any combination of the two thereof. It might be fun to have a Venus face and then open my mouth and scare the crap out of people with my iron teeth.
George Clooney and all the powers vested in him.
I’d go the Lazaurus Long method. Not really knowing I’m immortal but having genes (and a bit of luck) to end up that way. All the while travelling the galaxy.
I’d definitely join the Q Continuum, with my ego being my greatest weakness.
I’d be the crazy old cat lady in the decrepit spooky house, with longevity endowed by sheer grumpiness. “Don’t go in her yard, man; she’s a witch who never dies!” I’m about halfway there now.
I’d go with a werewolf type deal. Not turning into a half-man, half-beast…the kind where you go full wolf.
Because frankly I’m tired of humanity after just 30 years. After a couple hundred, I’d definitely need to spend a few decades living in the woods.
Do I have to have a human- or animal-like physical form? I would like to be a fine lavender-scented mist that can travel through the air, riding on the wind but able to settle wherever I like. I would be able (somehow, despite the lack of physical eyes, ears and brain) to see and hear everything in a given area, including people’s thoughts; no walls, force fields or mental resistance could keep me out. My superpower would be the ability to enter people’s minds and deliver an epiphany (one to a customer, please). I could be weakened or dispersed — or, if my antagonist was particularly dogged, completely evaporated (”killed”) — by a mist of sulfuric acid blasted into my cloudlike midst. The ironic beauty of this is that the sulfuric mist would itself then settle all over everything in the area, injuring or disfiguring my antagonists and their surroundings.
I recall a quote I like about this topic:
“Many long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a lazy Sunday afternoon.”
I’d want the want the body of my 25 year old self and the ability to change sex, ’cause I’d get bored.
Immortality is a long, long time.
How about intermittent eternal life? Like, peek in every few years and see what’s happening, go back to sleep for a few millennia if there’s nothing interesting going on.
Kinda like God does now.