The Immortal man and The God Particle:

You would think that after trillions of years of living that I would forget my original life, that my mind would delete things from my memory to make more room but… when you’ve lived as long as I have… the rules surrounding what counts as normal stops applying to you. Though it does help that my so-called origin story is actually one I quite like and it all surrounds something called ‘The God Particle’.

Now the God Particle isn’t its’ official name, it hadn’t existed long enough to get one before everything went pear shaped. Before its discovery the God Particle was theorized to be an endless particle, both matter and antimatter. Able to change its mass and construction at any time, an eternal material that in theory could be programmed by scientists to make any material they wanted. The discovery of this miracle material obviously had the world in uproar, everyone was excited as this could mean the end of every shortage there ever was or will be. Countries that were previously at war with each other were settling their differences in order to all get a piece of the God particle. The greatest minds of the world were gathering to try and speed up the process of creating the god particle, and it is The god particle as there could only be one. All subsequent attempts to create it would simply move that one particle back there. Scientists suppose that it’s because of the endless nature of the God Particle that there cannot be more than one of it as infinity and infinity is still just one infinity.

The reason I know all of this, the reason I know so much in depth details about such an important and powerful experiment isn’t because I worked on it… no, my brother did. He was one of the leading heads on the experiment and one of the four to originally theorize about the existence of the God Particle. I’m just his dorky brother who became a fiction author instead of going into sciences like my brother, the dreamer of the family. Though I don’t consider myself a dreamer, more… self aware.

I come from a family of STEM graduates, people who dedicate their whole careers to science and the pursuit of knowledge. On paper that sounds nice and all until you learn about them personally, borderline mad scientists all of them. I’m not excluding myself from that classification either, I just put that creativity somewhere much more constructive and less likely to let loose a poisonous gas in a populated area. True story, that was the last day we saw grandad. My family may not personally like the path my life had taken but society itself on the other hand was relieved. I was suddenly known as the only normal and safe person in my family. Not really the face of the family but more like the main speaker. Whenever someone in my family did something outrageous or dangerous the press would always look for me to speak to because I was less likely to use them in an experiment or have them be caught in an explosion.

Moving on, my brother was one of the lead scientists on the experiment. The key word here is ‘was’ as he had some pretty out there ideas when it came to the god particle. These ideas were welcome at first as each crazy idea got all of us closer and closer to the creation of the god particle, but once the complete method of creating it was discovered his idea became more and more terrifying in the eyes of the scientific community. One of the very few things the god particle couldn’t make was life and that was the line my brother was pushing to cross. To truly create the ‘God’ particle, he wanted to make the penultimate discovery, the experiment to end all experiments. Honestly… I think he just wanted to make himself immortal both in history and physically. As you can probably guess by now… he wasn’t the one who became immortal.

My brother’s descent into madness began the day he was taken off the experiment, officially it was said he was temporarily demoted while he was on vacation. We all knew what that really meant… he had been fired. His ideas and private experimentation had finally gone too far and for the safety of everyone involved and the continuation of the god particle creation he had been barred from the experiment. He obviously didn’t take it that well, he didn’t have a full breakdown but he did isolate himself from the rest of the family for a while. It wasn’t like he was going to miss the creation of the god particle as he was the main developmental force behind it. Without him the project slowed to a crawl, going from a week until completion to a month.

Surprisingly it was my brother that reached out first, since I was the only one in our family that was socially aware I was asked to help my brother get back on the project. Keep in mind that while people would listen to me, I still wasn’t a scientist. Almost everything would fly over my head, I wouldn’t be able to help in any way shape or form… so of course the only compromise for my brother being let back on the project is that if I, the voice of reason, stay by his side for the duration of the project. I was confused obviously by the choice but my brother latched onto his chance. He dragged me all over the world as he worked harder than ever making up for lost time. For three weeks I stayed by my manic brother’s side and tried to curb his more erratic ideas. Tried to keep him from going off the deep end… I obviously didn’t do that good of a job. It was at the end of the second week that I started to notice something was different, I had been around the project long enough and had multiple aspects of it explained to me enough times that I had a basic idea of what was going on.

Various technicians and scientists were almost happy to take a break and try to explain what they were doing and how it would lead to the creation of the god particle. Some people were priming power sources or refining and warping materials to the point pure energy. Working their way up to creating the catalyst of the god particle. It was like creating a sun in your backyard, a lot of cosmic materials had to be recreated and stabilized before they could be used in conjunction with each other. The more I learned the more and more I realized that something wasn’t right with what my brother was doing. While everyone else was working with hard metals and chemicals… My brother was working with plants, blood, and biological matter. Things that had nothing to do with the god particle.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt at first, I confronted him in private. I didn’t question him directly about it, just dropped a few questions about what he was doing and how it fit into everything. I framed the question like I was just curious about his work, nothing harmful. I guess that was my first mistake, my brother has never willingly shared anything about his work with me and I have never asked to know more about his. He clammed up after that and whenever he wasn’t required to be around me he would send me away or find some kind of excuse to get away. The air between us became strained and tense, it became more and more apparent that my brother was doing something he was supposed to. Day after day I tried to get my brother to open up to me and again and again he hid what he was doing. I was torn, my choices were either to continue trying to get my brother to tell me what he was doing or… turn him in.

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I procrastinated my choice for so long that it ended up being made for me, two days before the final creation and unveiling of the god particle. The two of us were currently staying at a hotel in New York, it was late at night and I was walking back to the room with a whole pizza for the both of us. I wanted to celebrate all of my brother’s hard work and… to be honest I wanted to do something nice to maybe alleviate the heaviness in the air between us. The feeling of absolute dread that filled me when I found a completely empty room. I knew where he was going, the lab was only a few blocks away and I had the keys. I didn’t beat him to the lab but I did beat the police who were responding to the silent alarm from the window he broke to get in. I could hear them getting closer as I followed my brother deeper into the lab towards the Accelerator, The accelerator is a multi leveled interesting particle accelerator that would take each of the prepared materials and energies and smash them together at speeds that might not even be quantifiable. I found my brother at the intersection point, the point where every level of the accelerator intersected, where the god particle would be created.

The intersection point was housed in a large pressure chamber that made it safe for someone to be near the particle. My brother was standing at the control panel beside the chamber, the accelerator was activated and primed. He was going to create the god particle, I'm going to be honest… This is the part I wish I would forget. I tried to stop him, tried to calm him down and step away from the control panel. He yelled, screamed, and raged at me. He ranted about the world, about the unfairness of it all, about how he should have been the head of this project, he was throwing a tantrum… there was no other way to say it. I didn’t know how to help, so I asked, I asked him how I could help him. I asked him how I could have this all better, then he started to scream about me. How he hated how nice I am, how he hated that I wasn’t as smart as him and how somehow that made me better than him. With ever spit word he shoved at me hard and harder, He threw me into the chamber with him and shut the door behind him. I was confused for a moment until I saw that the police were here and were trying to pull the chamber open.

I was so focused on the police trying to bust down the door that I didn’t even notice the gun until it was too late. Bang! Piercing pain in my side, I staggered back against the wall. Bang! My breath shuttered as the bullet crashed through my lungs. Even with half a lung working I still tried to convince him that this was a horrible idea, he just yelled louder at me, he kicked at my arms as I tried to defend myself. The police were battering down the sealed door but I was a bit more focused on my brother as he reached past me and rested a hand on the protective glass I was leaning on. It was happening, the god particle was coming into being as I bled out. Actually… I won’t live long enough to see it as I watched my distracted brother level his gun at my head. I heard only the beginning of the bang that came from the gun before everything went black.

It was when I woke up after that I was more concerned. I was laying in a pile of broken glass and sparking wires. People were yelling somewhere around me and sirens were everywhere. I had later found out that the final butter my brother had shot had gone through my head and through the protective glass screen that separated me and the god particle. The look on that poor policeman’s face when the dead body covered in bullet holes got up perfectly fine with only blood stained clothes. My brother had been arrested for murder and grand larceny, the whole time screaming about being a god and how everyone would regret locking him up. I cut my hand on some glass getting out of there and watched in real time as it sealed itself up like it was never there. I had become the god particle, infinite, endless, immortal.

The following days were a whirling of events, first the press release talking about what happened, then the public outcry about how I should be tried for theft. In the end it was ruled that I had the god particle forced upon me and couldn’t be held culpable. My brother got life in prison and almost lost his mind all over again when he saw that I was alive, that I was the god particle now. Scientists tried to extract the particle from me but everything failed. The particle wasn’t just inside me, I was the god particle in every way and it couldn’t be undone. The world was at each other's throats arguing over what to do with me that at some point I decided to just… leave. I left, I went to some desolate part of the world and ignored the world. It wasn’t like they could stop me, cells couldn’t hold me for long. They couldn’t kill me, threaten me with anything, bribe me with anything. I disappeared off the face of the earth and did what I wanted, I wrote as many stories as I wanted, learned how to play almost any instrument, finally got caught up on every show I missed, got back into shape and then proceeded to lose all of it because I would forest to get for a few months. It wasn’t until a random para-military troop finally found out where I was. I found out that the world had gone to war and now it was over… everyone lost. I was apparently gone for so long that war had broken out and been going for so long that the largest governments had broken down and was being run by a bunch of extremists.

The para-military group that had found me called themselves the loyalists, loyal to who you ask? Loyal to me… or at least loyal to what I represented. I had been turned into a folk hero that proclaimed freedom and tolerance of others and that's what all these people wanted to do until the end. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. The world was going to end soon, the extremists that were running the world powers now was trying to go out in a blaze of glory and were working up to a full on nuclear apocalypse.

That was the first apocalypse I went through, I let that group of people stay with me and let them build their bunker under my cabin. I let them read my books and tried to keep their minds off of the end… their end. It was really hitting me now that I am immortal. The bunker never got finished, not that anyone really tried. It was like a comfort party, everyone making sure they were happy and comfortable for the end. I almost regret becoming friends with them, I can’t even remember their names, but I can still remember their smiles… and the fear in their eyes.

The end was sudden and painful, a sudden explosion in the middle of the night on the horizon that quickly grew closer. Nothing was left standing… except for me. I was left completely alone on a scorched planet, my body had grown back almost immediately and it was so sudden that I didn't even feel any pain. I spent a long time after living a simple cycle. Sleep, wander, sleep, wander, sleep, sleep, sleep. Time meant nothing in the face of an immortal, I went crazy, I went sane. My mind played tricks on me, painful cruel tricks, I would hallucinate people or animals just over the next hill only for them to disappear the moment I got close. Eventually I completely zoned out and let time pass around me.

Soon because of the constantly changing weather I was encased in stone, the only reason I was released was because the earth exploded…. You, you heard me. Our sun had finally grown too large and enveloped our planet before exploding. I survived that too, and floated around space uncontrollable for countless millennia just dreaming of the past, the future, everything. The next time I woke up, it was in a red hot crater on a lush green new earth. Life always finds a way and now I had a front row seat to it.