text: I was a part of a group of southern Mesopotamian people whose name I’ve long forgotten. My earliest memory was gazing at the August sun as my father unloaded luggage from the cart. We were settling into a mudbrick house on the Euphrates river. It was near a quaint port-side village. It was nameless now, but later it would be named Babylon. Life was normal for the first 11 years of my life. We hunted, farmed, drank, did everything as we were supposed to, I never got sick, never injured myself, nor tried to. I had never seen my own blood. I never will. The year was 1502 BC, I was 11 years old. It was a period of instability as Hittites-- a vulgar people from the south, marched on my town. I joined with my fellow children, we had shields made of wood and no sword, and we marched into battle with our fathers and grandfathers. Little did I know, a shield was the last thing I needed. Everyone but myself were slain, and my city was sacked. I was unscathed. The Hittitian scimitars hacked into my shoulder, but would not cut, their swords stabbed at my belly but would not go through. I slinked away in the fog of war, terrified of the fragility of my company, and my own inability to die. The wheel of history turns, 400 years pass. In the Kassite Dynasty, my Babylon was renamed Kardunias by Gandash of Mari, then taken by Shutruk-Nakhunte of Elam, and then again by Nebuchadnezzar. I had slowly aged to about twenty-five years old, and I realized that I will stay like this for a very long time. Since the Hittitian scimitars of 1502, I had lived alone. I participated in no wars, fighting only to defend the small parcel of land I have drawn for myself, and only when I know I can slay the invader. I wanted no word of my immortality to spread. During these years I tried to injure myself, escalating my efforts until they were all exhausted. I had starved myself of food and water for six months, tied stones to my feet and descended to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, I had bathed in the lava of an erupted volcano, I had flung myself from the highest cliffs into the jagged rocks below. And through all of it I incurred not a single scratch. My health was constant, an apparent real rule in a world where all rules were made up. It was 567 BC, when the name of the ruler was still Nebuchadnezzer, though a different man entirely, built the Hanging Gardens. It was... a beautiful place. In the majestic flat shores of the Euphrates rose this mountain of rich flowers and exotic walnut and juniper trees, pristine water fall from the sky, birds and fowl lived in harmony with one hundred thousand terraced white bricks. It was always my wish to go inside, to climb the wide stone steps between the embossed columns, and be within the Garden. I had accumulated some wealth, and sentries to the garden were easy to talk to. But my age had tricked me into immense patience, and it was another mere 600 years before I travelled back to Babylon, and my heart was broken to see the garden in rubble and ruins, my people raped and slaughtered. That was when I finally left Mesopotamia. My journey took me to China, Japan, North America, South America, and back to the Cradle of civilization in Africa. Twice the ship I sailed on sank in a storm, and twice I walked the rest of the way along the ocean floor. Very few things of note happened in the next two thousand years. It was 1969 AD before my wanderlust was once more awakened. It was unbelievable, but that bright diadem on the brow of the sky, man named Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin had set foot upon it. How I envied them! I was still fancying the thought of imprinting my boot print upon every square inch of the Earth, yet this man, whose life will expire like a whisper in the wind, had placed his own upon the stars. With my heart fluttering, I applied for a job at NASA. I was not a particularly curious man, and I had taken no interest in the sciences, for they seem to evolve and spread faster than I can walk, rendering any studious efforts wasted. But I had been to many places, and spoken many languages, and I knew the perfect combination of words and tone to say over the telephone as the interviewer named Gus Redman asked me “You have no education at all? What can you do?”. I said those words in that tone, and I got the job. It was merely ten years later that they sent out the first space craft into the voids of the sky. I had risen in rank and education, and thus participated in every decision in its design. I was not aboard it, but I watched with such love as a father would to his son as Voyager I was sent off into the world. It was 16 days later, on the Voyager II that I rode. As the countdown ended, I felt the most unnatural force push against my back. I accelerated to a speed I never thought possible, through the atmosphere, past the blue skies, and into the vast black expanse. Not once did I look down. Even before leaving the stratosphere my mind was already on other worlds, where the landscape was free from the germs of empires. They had asked me to wait seventy-five years, after the plutonium batteries have exhausted themselves before I could pilot. The Voyager II’s mission and responsibility to Earth would be exhausted, all instruments would shut off, and the spacecraft would only then be mine. I sat immobile for two hundred years, perhaps I hoped this washed my own body of all Earth’s responsibilities. Amongst the gifts of my colleagues was a telescope and a hand pump. The idea is I would collect space dust and pump into a container to pressurize and expel it in the direction opposite I wish to go. This would be my only way to control or accelerate the spacecraft to avoid orbital capture. They feared that I would be pulled by the gravity of a star and crash into it, however unlikely. To them, to be stranded amidst fusion explosions of 27 million degrees for eternity was a terrifying fate. Though to me, I only need to wait for the death of the star and climb onto the ejected material of the expanding upper core. Though these trinkets wouldn’t last even five hundred years, they were the well-wishes of a dead civilization. I gazed behind me, the sun of that August Mesopotamian day was now just one of a billion other stars, 50 billion miles away. The last shred of solar wind caressed my ship over 160 years ago, marking the final exit from the influence bubble of the Sun. I felt an unusual sense of longing, not for that now invisible pale blue dot, but for the other Voyager. It was to be my only companion in the eternity of time, my son, and we were headed towards the opposite ends of the universe. I turned my gaze forward, and relaxed. In about a hundred years I will be entering the Oort cloud, and it will take another 60,000 years to pass it. Then if I wasn’t picked up by extraterrestrials already, it would be another 240,000 year wait until I swing by Sirius, the brightest star visible from Earth’s sky, followed by Pav and GJ 754, 100,000 years later. In about 100 million years I would have completed one half orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy, and then it would be time for me to leave it, perhaps to Andromeda. I fancied that if I wanted to be even more patient, Andromeda will be crashing into the Milky Way in about four billion years anyways. After that will be when the real sights begin, I plotted my path towards the crab nebula, some 4.6 light years away. For an immortal, looking forward to something was a dangerous practice. Time moved fast enough when I was looking back. But I couldn’t help it. I want to see galaxies collide, I want to see stars born, I want to peek inside black holes, bathe in cosmic dust, have planetesimals formed upon me, I want to strike a pose in front of super novae. For the first time in my life, anticipation welled inside my chest. I had two hundred years of space dust collected now and pumped it behind me to accelerate forwards with half the force of a silent fart. No wars. No tyranny. No anger. No games of status that my fellows cling to day and night in the entire whisper that was their existence. I gave myself as a gift, for the grand thespians of the cosmos deserved an appreciative observer. Upon this ephemeral craft I journey, into the unknowable infinity. With constant velocity, and an eternity to savour it. What a show it will be. Though I am already prepared for it, I wish the universe never ends.