prompt: story, title: the daily grind in idea barrages

You may be wondering why someone who has been alive for over seven-hundred years would be working in a cellphone customer service center, employ only slightly worse than mucking out the port-a-potties after an outdoor three-days jam-band festival, and only slightly better than sticking your arm into an active woodchipper for YouTube views. “What’s his story?” That’s to say if you knew my story. If anyone would ever read this and believe it. I think I might try and publish it as fiction just for fun but, come on. I’m sure you’ve seen the diminishing-returns of the Highlander film series, any near-immortal worth their salt eventually figures out how one leverages lifespan into perpetual wealth. Secreted knowledge, old investment, art treasures and so on and so forth. I certainly don’t need to do the most mentally soul-crushing work on Earth for the minimum wage.

But I do need to do it. Mostly because I’m a coward.

After about eighty years of looking like I was stuck in my early thirties (or, back then, my early twenties, when the peak of medical sciences was leeches and garlic necklaces, people tended to age a bit harder) I was stuck having to figure out why it was happening. You can get away with “my family ages well” for a decade or two, but eventually folks start asking questions and back then those questions tend to be followed with accusations of warlock-craft and throwing around words like “stake” and “drowning”. One tends to skip town and change your name around then.

Eventually, I managed to wander into a mystical grove where a wise woman submitted me to the battery of magical texts to figure this sort of thing out, and she came upon an epiphany: my long life is fueled by absorbing human misery. The more people suffering around me, the quicker my immortality would recharge. Which is, you know, a bummer, of course. While my not aging had gotten to be very sad, at times, having to see everyone I loved grow old and die around me, I am not certain there’s an afterlife, less certain I’d go to a nice one if they exist. In my cowardice, I’d have to keep soaking in the suffering of others to delay my finding out.

But after centuries of having to live in war-zones or work in dire asylums, I’ve come to this less onerous compromise, microdosing the misery of hundreds around me, instead of the more acute pain of a handful of comrades or patients. Just a little taste from every poor soul shackled in the farms of cubicles around me in this brutalist mess of a building. Working three six-hour shifts a week of this putrid drudgery is more than enough to keep the gray hairs and my eventual eternal damnation at bay. By the time they could notice I never age, I will be onto the next similar wage slavery, everyone none-the-wiser. Under this awful economic model, I’m certain I’ll live forever.