A historical cyberpunk – The evening city bent prismatic lights across the open floors of an ultramodern penthouse. They cast broken shadows over the figure of a man, standing bare chested with hemp-linen joggers at his floor-to-ceiling windows. Tidy smart-suite and spartan sleek walls behind him, consoles once subtly integrated into his decor, were now hitting their tipping point of cascading failures. Requested update alerts and blinking warning screens blended with luminous skyline adverts, obscuring his view of the vast rivets of skyscrapers and black canyon streets far below. All reminding him that the walls were closing in.
Ten thousand years he could remember, living on this earth. One hundred turns of a century and countless seasons of change. With each turn, he had been able to adapt, to turn the page, to reinvent himself. Whether by way of luck, his own cleverness, or his compounding dynastic wealth – he always found a way forward.
The earth was turning again, but this time there was no straight path. The past could no longer predict the future. Humanity was at a frontier where he could no longer feel safe. The lines of knowledge were blurring between the real and the computed. And the age of integrated intelligence was demanding more than he could give.
Every individual choice, every organizational decision, assisted. Every persona, integrated across online and offline lifestyles. Every human experience, flattened to one acceptably accessible, universal norm. Secrets and privacy, the currency that had helped him stay hidden for so long, helped him thrive through every empire’s rise and fall, were going extinct.
The silhouetted man stood palm planted on his high towering window, recounting how it had come to this. Whether it was inevitable. Whether to count his blessings humanity hadn’t destroyed itself long before now. God only knows how he would’ve dealt with a nuclear holocaust, or any other mass extinction event. Ten thousand years, maybe longer, he had walked the earth as an early man, passing as a modern one. Able to survive, able to turn with each revolution. He didn’t even know if he could die. But there was surviving, and there was living.
***
Forehead pressed along the glass, he scanned the adjacent avenues to a panoramic Coca-Cola advert. The model’s hologram, two stories high, crisp resolution skin so real, and blood red lips wet enough to kiss. Her smile glistened with the reminder of a safer time. A simple nostalgia from one hundred years ago. Trading futures at a Wall Street corner office, draped in pinstripes and wool blends. Tossing Boxster keys to valets, striding straight past club bouncers and velvet ropes. Cherry ice-cream smiles like these were flashed at him by the dozen.
Even now, two oceans away from Manhattan, his billion dollar media acquisitions weren’t as thrilling anymore. And neither compared to that century of conquests, from Spanish bays to the South Atlantic. A pirate commander with as much wind in his prosperous sails as his long black locks. A fat loyal crew, who followed him to the edge of the earth, tracing the coastlines of Chile and Peru, plundering villages and installing gold mines. A wealth overreached, a town’s inevitable revolt and the Spanish army’s intervention. Disavowed by his king and sold into slavery for eighty years. Blessed with long life but not wisdom, he should’ve known better. It seemed he still possessed the greed-demons of man.
Spending time in chains was good parole, time to think upon his misdeeds. Time to rebuild and repent. He had gone into hiding for long stretches before, like a cicada for the ages. Burying treasures and forged documents across the continents, biding his time for memories to fade and empires to fall. As he had done leaving Morocco, a titled noble, six hundred years earlier.
Those were warring times, chaotic times. Good for opportunists with a lot of patience. As Islam flooded the Draa valley in North Africa, uniting the desert tribes, he built his wealth from humble emissary to naval commander. A new trade he had learned from those burly southfaring vikings, whom he still missed outdrinking over trading post campfires.
Before that, along the Pilgrim’s Road by caravan and then Egypt alone for two hundred years, he learned the value of laying low as a nomadic trader. Buying up shares in land and olive presses, as he wound the south basin of the Mediterranean. Securing his options and betting futures, while growing a safe distance from the sacked mosque cities to the east. A fugitive in hiding, waiting for the tides to shift again.
In the ninth century, he had been a woman, a great princess of Baghdad, wanting for nothing, and moving the economics of the world and the men upon it like a chessboard. She was at the center of the Caliphate, ignored by historical record, face veiled and feet hennaed, worshiped for her tempestuous beauty. Just as a wise man named Pericles had claimed one thousand years earlier in a different land for a different time, all were certain they were at mankind’s pinnacle golden age in this jeweled city of spires. So certain that future ages would marvel in gratitude at the path set for wealth and enlightenment. So certain all would endure forever.
It was the safest she had ever felt. Unlike five thousand years before, when she – and he – had served as chief advisor to a Sumerian king. Cleverly hiding in plain sight, whispering his spells of magic and prophecy, through the shifting dynasties of Mesopotamia. Outwitting and embarrassing the court’s alchemists and clerics, all charlatans compared to his thousands of years of knowledge. Knowledge of the stars, the trends of man, the turning of nature. And all the time in the spinning world to contemplate their meaning.
His experience in weather prediction had served him well. Moving from farm town to boom town, carving out a franchise of fortunes. Delivering rich forecasts and richer harvests for those fertile river-cradled lands. Deftly avoiding suspicion of his uncuttable skin and unwavering health. Untouched by plague and disease, ever wary of growing dissent from lynch mobs and witch burners. Never too proud to pack up and start anew, seeding his fortunes ahead of his path.
A wandering necromancer, they would whisper, who had high dealings with the devil, vanishing when exposed. Banished over the public’s stirring interests of his treasured secret. But he was no mystic. He had met no devil, nor any angel along his four corner wanderings of the Earth. He feared judgment in this life more than in heaven. A worry of loss that came long before he fully knew what he was. So many faces in his tribe growing older before him. So many of his own glimpsed unwrinkled reflections across still waters. So many attempts at stoning him, worshiping him, exiling him to frozen glacial wastelands.
He scantly recalled stroking his first lover’s hair in a warm cave, belly full of child and fire roasted mammoth. It was then he first saw their old shaman draw his face on the stone wall. That first shouldered look of suspicion. And the man’s first warning, his secret could not be hidden for long.
***
Off shore banking and tax havens were gone. No more shell corporations and money laundering. No more forged birth certificates and reinvented identities. This man of millennia, could no longer simply disappear for a few decades and wait. Going off-grid and reemerging as someone else, a wealthy forgotten heir to a fortune. Off-grid no longer existed. Every facet of living, from geolocations to online transactions, authenticated and policed, permanently tied to your unique genetic ID. With social credit scores and career behavior reports, from cradle to grave, a person’s public record was unshakeable.
This early man stood over the city streets shrinking below. Every wall console still flashing threatening script errors. Panels at his desk asking for authentication. Cameras asking to be unobstructed. Household OS updates making final warnings to be downloaded. Old accounts asking for new digital passport verification. His violations were ticking upwards to an infraction point. Surely the authorities had been alerted, his fugitive status upgraded.
He considered burning it all to the ground before they arrived. Making them work for their investigation. An ashy puzzled mess to sift through, including his charred and impossibly breathing body in the rubble to haul to the… morgue? A hospital? Some military bunker? The end he had dodged his entire everlasting life. Men in suits prodding over this ancient genetic anomaly, a black swan they would never understand.
Expecting the door to be kicked down at any moment, resigned to a life as government property, something occurred to him. He would endure – as he always had. More than that, he would adapt. He had not avoided capture for so many century’s revolutions merely on the merits of his health and resilience. He survived because something inside him, coded deep within, knew how to grow stronger in adversity. He didn’t simply heal through trauma, he evolved ahead of it. Spontaneously changing height, changing race, even genders. He didn’t will it consciously. It was emergent. A change that manifested because the climate demanded it. And this was no different.
His pliably limitless brain was continuously absorbing new trends and cultures on reflex without bias. Some intuitive alarm system that changed course without knowing why. Something that knew before he did. Maybe even something that had already foreseen this turn of ages. Something that wanted this cornered retreat, the opportunity for the only true path forward.
Without thought or reasoning, the man suddenly hurled a heavy steel chair at his towering corner windows, splintering them like the fragments of his transparent lies. Building alarms immediately bathed the room in throbbing crimson light. Buzzing surveillance drones rose from street level to meet his eyeline. Infrared cameras grabbed every detail of this social infraction, live-streaming to the masses.
This man, this hidden man, stood naked to the world, arms wide in the gusting winds of the open air. He smiled for the cameras, allowing them to swallow up the defiant act to follow. Then he jumped. Into the night’s skyrise void, trusting preternaturally what would come next. A jump to put a sedated video streaming population on their feet. Falling to terminal velocity, wind whipping through his hair like off the bow of his old forgotten ship, or on horseback through desert valley, or from the frozen craggy peak of a hunter’s perch.
There would be no toiling away, sequestered in some government laboratory, not while the whole world was watching. Until now, all of humanity and this immortal had one thing in common. With time on their side, they had accumulated knowledge. Now, they had their best chance in all of history to discover truth, in themselves and together. His body would hit concrete and show the world how to survive and how to live. It was time the public eye met his true self.
Paul Carreo 