He began like many before him and many after.

Though he was born before a great many things, such as printed books, Calculus, the fall of Rome, and many others, no one immediately knew he was different.

He had a mother and father and brothers and sisters.

He was born somewhere in France, and worked as a stone mason in a small village that has long since been forgotten.

He grew into manhood and found a wife and had three boys and a little girl.

One of the little boys was prone to wandering. One day he wandered too far and didn’t come home. The man went looking in the forest with some of the other villagers.

They split up, calling out in Occitan to make sure they could find each other. But the man went farther and farther and deeper into the forest in order to find his son, who had since found his way back home.

But the man grew thirsty and stopped at a stream deep in the forest.

It tasted funny but he was thirsty and didn’t think much about it.

The funny tasting stream was the last thing on his mind when he returned home and found his son was safe.

And he got to watch his son and his other children grow and grow. They grew like weeds, as children are prone to do.

It was when his children were getting ready to have their own children that he became aware that something was wrong.

He hadn’t aged in years. His hair was still black, his tanned, but not wrinkled face remained the same as in his youth. His muscles taught, and his back still straight instead of stooping with age like his peers’.

Then he lost his wife, but he still showed no signs of aging. At his wife’s funeral it was a strange sight, with the grieving widower not much older than the deceased’s grandchildren.

And he watched his children grow old. And his grandchildren. He went to his children’s funerals, and his first grandchild’s.

It was too much to bear. The man needed to leave. He couldn’t keep burying his own flesh and blood, and he showed no signs of meeting them in the afterlife.

And, people were starting to ask questions. They wanted to know what magic was keeping him so young. He heard whispers that they were jealous, and that he was going agains the natural order. They thought maybe his body held the secret. Maybe his blood and bones would give them the gift.

So he fled in the night.

He walked, and walked, and walked. He walked for days and weeks. He would stay in one spot for a little while. His life as stone mason allowed him to work wherever he went.

He wandered for decades still looking the same age as before, and now he was careful not to stay in one spot for too long. And he eschewed any relationship so as not to re-live the heart ache of decades past.

Decades passed. Centuries even. The man wandered from place to place. He found himself in many precarious spots. He spent time in England. He fought in the Battle of Hastings.

He ended up in many conflicts. He quickly found out that soldiers could always find work and people didn’t ask too many questions.

He went on crusades. He went to the Holy Land. A few times actually.

He joined a holy order to protect pilgrims. He had long since lost his faith, feeling cursed by some angry god, but there wasn’t much else to do.

He lived through the Plague. Every where he went people dropped like flies, but he never got so much as a cold.

He fought in Agincourt, against his homeland. Though he felt no qualms as anyone he knew there would have died centuries ago.

He stayed in England for a while. He even met Henry VIII once. But, the man that didn’t age eventually grew restless and he heard about the New World, and he joined a group starting over in America.

He liked America. He liked the wilderness, and the untapped beauty, and he found lots to do. He could build and fight. He lived in settlements, and traveled deep into the country and met Native Americans. He traveled up and down the New World. He worked as a fur trapper, and a mercenary, and an interpreter once he learned enough of the new languages.

He fought for the Americans during the revolution. And he moved out west setting up a small cabin. He liked the solitude as there was no one around to figure out his secret. But as with all things, this passed, and no matter where he went eventually people would follow.

And he kept the pattern up. Every few years he would leave and re-invent himself.

Though, one perk of his unnatural long life was that any bank accounts tended to accrue vast amounts of interest. It took some rearranging and some duplicitous financial managers, but finding a corrupt one was never hard to do.

He busied himself over the years, and it was an exciting time to be in America. He saw the industrial revolution, and watched factories shoot up around him. His knowledge of the wilderness and military skill make him fast friends with a certain mustachioed President.

He spent much of his time reading, both books and the Internet and never stopped learning. He had degrees from all sorts of universities and all different field. He’d been a doctor and lawyer, and everything in between.

And there were wars. There were always wars.

He was there in both World Wars, and Vietnam. He fought in Desert Storm, and went to Iraq and Afghanistan. But it was getting harder and harder to remain anonymous and create a new identity every couple years. He bought a yacht and crew posing as the grandson of the man who opened the account. At this point he was a millionaire several times over.

And so he spent time on his boat. He spent decades trying to learn about his condition, and spent thousands on a private lab in order to find out more. But the researchers were always stymied.

And it went on and on, for years and years. In a moment of weakness he took another wife and fathered more sons. And he buried another wife, and he buried more sons.

He isolated himself again. He was but a witness to history, and nothing more. He spent his days watching, and watching.

He saw technology rise and people becoming one with their phones.

He saw the first android.

He saw the human race make it to Mars, and beyond. Deep into his second millenium he watched people move easily among planets, and among the stars.

He witnessed near light speed travel, and worm holes.

He saw Artificial Intelligence that rivaled humans and started building their own systems and extending their reach into the galaxy.

The planet he was born on no longer existed towards the end. It became Terra Prime, the center of the known universe. It was planet wide city, with sky scrapers miles high.

And one day, billions of years from when he drank from the stream, the Sun begin to swell and entered the end of its life cycle.

It turned red and large and engulfed the once humble planet that had once been the cradle of life in the universe.

And the man witnessed it all. He waved good bye to his home world from the evacuation ships.

He moved around the galaxy like he did on Earth. He still had not aged a day.

One day he gave up finally asked an android at a medical center what was wrong with him.

But they had no answers. He was sent to researchers on different planets to no avail. He was a minor celebrity for a while, but it outlived that too.

And he kept on going. He watched civilizations come and go, and giant intergalactic wars.

He saw galaxies come and go.

And finally, billions upon billions upon billions of years after the Big Bang, the universe finally contracted, and for a few moments there was panic as people figured out what was happening.

But the man who lived forever welcomed it. He had been living for long enough.

But, this didn’t stop him either. He watched the universe crunch into a tiny spot, and he floated through an endless white realm beyond space or time.

There was no sound, no sight, just and endless void, and the man who lived forever floated through infinity, wishing for it all to end.