There are many curious cases of immorality.

Consider cultivators. People who take in the dormant energy within their environment and use it to refine their bodies, until they reach a state where they have perfect control over the processes that constitute their self. Their understanding and influence over the aspects of their body is what allows them to not only survive decay, but thrive, as decay becomes instead a facilitator of individual growth and insight.  A cautionary warning regarding the need for constant change, lest one falls prey to others who grow while they do not.

Another curious case is of course those civilisations who have protected their bodies against the passage of time through the use of cybernetic enhancements. The grinding of gears or the masses of wires seem to almost encourage decay, and it is a sort of false immortality. These individuals cannot survive without maintenance from their network of worlds, even if that maintenance must be done, only once in a thousand years. They rely not on energy in its purest form, but instead resources. Worlds mined and exhausted until they become a hollow shell of their former selves, for the sole purpose of sustaining life.

Seth experienced a different kind of immortality. One that didn’t rely on either of those two methods.

Rather, he simply existed. His consciousness made inherent to the universe, as something that reached beyond the borders of life and death, into instead a conceptual existence.

Was it a good thing?

He didn’t know.

Perhaps other people might’ve dreaded losing their sense of self. He was fine with it though, as long as he maintained some semblance of his memories and consciousness. Enough, so that he could still experience the wonders of the universe.

It was getting rather boring though.

He had manifested within reality as a golden orb. A nigh-omnipotent, wish-granting machine.

Which would likely be enjoyable if people were fighting over him. But less so, because he was floating through space at one kilometre per hour, and it was likely that the universe would die long before he reached any form of civilisation.

Thankfully, this was the exact moment he got struck by a gamma ray burst.

Divine providence? Luck?

He wasn’t going to question it.

The energy transformed into a meaningful amount of acceleration and velocity, and off he went. Likely speeding off towards a planet that had no intelligent life, and where his functionality would be completely meaningless, except perhaps for the one moment in his life where an intergalactic explorer would pick him up and say to his partner, “Look at this. How interesting. I wish I knew what it was.”

He could’ve also said, “I wish for the ultimate heat-death of the universe”, but if that was his first thought after picking up some golden orb in the middle of no-where, then he was either sociopathic, or from a civilisation of highly depressed immortals. It was more likely to be the latter, since joking about death was infinitely funnier when it was an impossibility, and not a desperate cry for help that needed to be acted on.

That is not to say that it couldn’t simply be highly depressed mortals making the wish, but that in most cases, they would instead say, “I wish this could be over”, and whilst they would’ve gotten their wish, one could only speculate what might’ve occurred had one word been replaced with an I.

It was interesting to note, that these were not just curious situations that existed only in his imagination, but sadly memories of his existence.

At least they weren’t like that one wish he granted, where a person, seeing a golden orb on the ground, decided that the only rational course of action was to say, “I wish I could be rich.”

Of course, this was the typical in most civilisations. However in the case of ambiguous syntax, Seth relied on an individual’s imagination to fulfil their wishes.

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That person was instantly pulverised under the weight of ten thousand blocks of gold.

Much better off was the person who simply wanted a name change. Though that was perhaps even more depressing, because with the capacity to use an omnipotent wish-granting device for anything he could think of, he decided to use it for an operation costing one day’s worth of labour.

It is possible to look at these events and wonder whether any good had come out of people using him, and while he would note that name changes were something that granted utility, however marginal, the most correct answer would be no.

It seemed that in the absence of knowledge regarding the nature of the orb as a wish granting device, no-one would go about their daily lives wishing for some positive event to occur, but instead a negative event to befall someone else.

Except for this one girl, innocent and full of starry-eyed wonder and love for the world, who wished everybody to have a good day.

And that day was the happiest day of everybody’s life. The sun was shining, the air was fresh, and the birds were singing. People went out of their way to help other people out. Stressed out people found out that they suddenly regained a love and passion for the job. Depressed people remembered what it was like to have dopamine running through their brains. Even lonely people found warmth and companionship, reunited with childhood friends who were overjoyed to see them again.

It was easy to maintain a sense of contentment with where you were at in life, so long as you didn’t understand what real happiness was like.

And in the fervent pursuit of that happiness over the coming months, society collapsed and a majority of the population died chasing memories of that day.

It wasn’t like there weren’t other positive wishes, but they all usually ended in a similar way, and Seth couldn’t be bothered to store those in his memory.

Rather, without a clear understanding of what they truly wish for, it was better to instead say a small, selfish wish.

But if that meant the person who used the orb to change their name was considered the wisest person to ever exist, then perhaps existence was fundamentally flawed.

The most intelligent wishes came from those cybernetically enhanced immortals. Most likely because in their long years alive, their only remaining source of enjoyment came from randomly picking things up from the ground and whispering their deepest, most meticulously thought out wishes to them.

The problem there wasn’t with the wish however, but rather the fact that Seth needed to understand the wish in order to enact it.

So when they recited a wish spanning ten pages worth of text, including the profound philosophical insights of hundreds of generations of hyper intelligent beings, it’d be a miracle if he could’ve understood it.

Because of this, each wish would fail and they would simply continue on their way, living in blissful ignorance of what could’ve been, if only Seth was a slight bit smarter.

And when cultivating immortals saw this omnipotent, wish granting device, they would simply stay silent. Because in their pursuit of excellence, they recognised that picking up a golden orb off the ground and rattling their wishes off was a completely moronic thing to do, because omnipotent, wish granting devices don’t exist.

Well, it wasn’t like they were wrong. He was technically nigh-omnipotent after all, but he wasn’t sure they’d be comforted by that.

As he continued to reminisce about the myriad of wishes that people had made, the centuries began to pass, until one day, he crash landed on a world.

A rather primitive world, filled with only basic technology and cities, but it didn’t matter. There were intelligent beings here, after all, and that was all that mattered for Seth.

As he waited for people to discover him, he was carried around from place to place by large birds who enjoyed his shiny gleam, but who also realised that he was heavy and thus dropped him off after a few minutes in flight.

Some way or another, this process led him to be dropped into the middle of a busy intersection, where a car running over him caused the car to spin out of control and crash into another car. A man flew out, half dead, somehow managing to clasp onto the golden orb. Upon seeing the fountains of blood and entrails flowing out of him, he started praying to all the gods that existed. “Please, just one wish. I want to survive.”

A miracle. A positive wish that had a positive outcome, even if it was a selfish one.

Though Seth debated whether it could be considered a positive outcome, considering that he was the one that caused the accident in the first place, and the family in the other car were dead, whereas the man in question was now completely restored to his normal state. Which could probably cause problems in the long run.

Still, he considered it a positive outcome, because it meant that the person named Rich was no longer the wisest person to ever live. And that was all Seth wanted in life.

As the police came and took the man in for questioning, Seth faded away, back into the void of space. Ready to go another world.

Or not, as some drone noticed him and collected him out of curiosity, before travelling back to a world owned by a hoarder, where he added a miniscule blip to a mountain of trash.

Here, surrounded by all this, he realised a sad truth. That these pieces of trash had likely provided much more happiness to someone’s life than he ever had. That in his long, immortal life, he had only spread misery and discontent to everyone he met.

Except for the person who changed their name.

Goddammit.