Politics and afterlife. A kind of double post.

So, the news are in. Obama^[1] won.

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“Take away death, what remains?”

Being immortal in the present is quite complicated. The main problem would naturally be the paperwork – pretty much every person is on record somewhere, more and more people have their private information (fingerprints, DNA) stored somewhere. Sure, you could head to somewhere less civilized, but then there’d be little point in being immortal. The perk of being immortal is that you can enjoy life with lessened risk. That means you can enjoy more stuff, you don’t have to worry about dire consequences, unless you really, really manage to mess something up.

Now, one might say that being tracked is not a problem, let someone find out you are immortal, why not? Well, anyone with such an incredible ability would soon find himself in a dark laboratory being tested on. That means poking around in your body, introducing you to new methods of inflicting pain, testing your capabilities of regeneration, etc. That research would go to create more immortals, the first test subjects would probably be supersoldiers, capable of causing mayhem of epic proportions. Something you would generally like to avoid. I, for one, would prefer not to be the cause of some mad-hatter’s world domination, but that might just be me.

Back to the topic at hand, avoiding being noticed and stuck in a box for testing, poking, and probing. There’ll be probing. Obviously that rules out most types criminal activity, that would create a high chance of somebody finding the same fingerprints at a crime scene or on a criminal (you) more than just a couple decades apart, and that would raise a red flag. Residing in the U.S. is also problematic because of their insistence on giving people information about your fingerprints when you try to enter the country. The new ‘bionic’ passports or whatnot complicate things further. In the old days you could simple move around, take up a new identity, none would be the wiser. After a few identities, you could start the loop again, the people who knew you would have died of various causes, including old age, by then. But now… now one could pull a Helen Magnus – stay hidden by either getting rich and building a hideaway underground in the middle of civilization, or simply building a hideaway in the middle of nowhere.

It’s actually quite unpleasant to be immortal. Getting a job is a hassle, voting a complication, buying a flat an inconvenience, having a valid driving licence a nuisance, carrying around valid identification a bloody bother. You have no job history, no (believable) birth date, no (believable) social security code, no (valid) birth certificate… all in all, it would be easier to die. Then again, as this logic (‘if I had died some time ago, I would not have these problems’) applies to everything, and precedent states that death should not be considered a viable way of avoiding problems, one must just accept life on the sidelines, hiding in the shadows, staying behind the curtain, travelling incognito, and remember that everything is transitory, of the moment.