BY WILL SWARDSTROM
There exists for everyone a moment.
It’s so small, you can almost miss it, but it’s important. Vitally important. In that moment, all can be lost, or all can be saved. It is that moment that stands between victory and anarchy.
In music, you hear it when the song swells, building bit by bit until eventually the music reaches a cliff. All the instruments drop out. The vocalist may act as a bridge of sorts across the chasm of silence, but the moment is solely dependent on the other musicians. The impetus is on the piano, percussion, and the collection of other instruments to count, to keep a steady but silent beat internally, only to resume playing at precisely the right time.
Should the band hit the mark, the song sends shivers up your spine. It brings the crowd to their feet, and gives the piece an air of authority it didn’t have before.
If the musicians miss the landing, there may be no salvation. Their chance is gone, now just part of a disjointed past. Whatever the song sounded like before that infinitesimal break, it now has the sound of ruin. For the audience, the failure of a solitary moment within the song only accelerates their desire for the end. It cannot come soon enough.
But in that moment, neither has happened. The musicians have not yet succeeded or failed. Both options await them, depending on their internal clocks. The overwhelming joy of everyone rejoining at the perfect moment is balanced with the abject fear of failure.
It was there, in that moment, where I lived. Always waiting. Always letting my fate be determined by others. Always hovering between a rousing triumph and a crushing catastrophe. I was that moment. But my moment was never under my control. I was always under his control. Throughout the moments of my life, though, I became the man I am, and I am not ashamed of it.
Those were the moments I truly remembered. Over time I learned that names and dates are utterly forgettable. I can’t tell you the name of the man who decided whether or not I deserved to board one of the few lifeboats on the night of April 14, 1912. I don’t remember what day of the week it was when I was chosen to be one of the first to experience the guillotine during the peak of the French Revolution. I have no idea what clothes I was wearing when I was part of the crowd that decided the fate of Jesus of Nazareth.
What I can tell you is how I felt. For a brief moment, I thought I was the master of life and death. I was not. As was so often the case over the past few millennia, the result turned out to be death, but over and over I was brought back due to a gift. A curse. An experiment.
Whatever you want to call it, immortality has followed me.
My name is Bek. I have been alive for nearly five thousand years.
I live for those moments, but I have come to realize that the truly special moments happen too infrequently. My sense of mortality has grown too thin and I have found I don’t have the same thrill about my life anymore.
My only wish is to finally die. To experience an end. When I was younger—in my first life—I would have craved a life like this. A life apart from all the rest, where death held no reign over me, and I could live like there was no tomorrow.
Instead, I simply move from one experience to another. I cannot die as everyone else does.
My master will not permit it. Instead, I am forced to live. Again and again, my life is forfeit to satisfy his curiosity. For a long time, I thought the irregularity of my existence was a blessing. Instead, I have come to understand that it is a curse. Over and over I have tried to end my life, only to be brought back again and again. Different place, different body, but it’s still me.
Human technology has not done this. It was a gift of the gods. At least that’s what the pharaoh told me at the time. He offered any of his servants to the gods to appease them, and I was selected.
Gods.
Just another name for aliens.
Of course, I didn’t understand this for a very long time. In fact, I was thousands of years old by the time I recognized my “creator” for what he was.
He said his name was Osiris. Is that his real name? Five thousand years ago I would have sworn to you it was. Just like dates, the name really doesn’t matter. He was a god, and then he wasn’t. All I know is that to him, I’m just part of a grand experiment.
It was a warm day (but weren’t they all in ancient Egypt?) when I was called into the pharaoh’s palace to meet with the vizier.
“Bek!” called a palace guard.
I walked over to him quickly. That was when I used to care about what happened to me.
“Yes? What can I do to please the king today?”
“You can start by wiping that grin off your face. You are requested at the palace. The vizier needs you.”
I quickly found myself at the palace with about twenty other men, all about my size, waiting to be seen. I knew better than to talk to any of them. I had been called to see the vizier, not them. When we were all finally called before the vizier, we were instructed to line up. The vizier inspected each of us, dismissing a handful as he went. In the back of the room, I glimpsed a cloaked figure, but again, I knew to not say anything.
Eventually there were about ten men left in the room.
The cloaked figure stepped forward to address us.
“I have selected each of you from afar. I have chosen each of you to show the power of the gods.” He paused. “You may wonder who I am.”
Slowly and purposefully, he slid back his hood, revealing a glowing presence. It shone so brightly, each of us had to look away. But before I did, I caught a brief glimpse of dark green skin on the most glorious face I’d ever witnessed in my short life. I knew who he was before he even had a chance to tell us.
“Osiris,” I gasped under my breath.
Apparently it wasn’t quiet enough, because the god approached me. Suddenly I was afraid. Osiris was known for much, including his role in the afterlife.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I am Osiris. Who are you that you are so wise?”
“I…I am Bek.”
“Bek.”
“Yes,” I said as boldly as I dared. I was speaking to a god, but I wanted him to grant me his favor. My answer was short, but it offered him what he wanted.
Osiris laughed. It was loud, filling the entire chamber with echoes upon echoes of deep roars and howls that somehow came from the being in front of me. The men on either side of me shook with fear. For whatever reason, I was unafraid. The laughter somehow reached inside of me and touched something. I felt…peace. While the other men were a hair away from cowering, I stood tall, proud that Osiris had chosen to address me. I had pleased him, somehow, and who was I to question a god?
Suddenly, I was alone in the room with Osiris. Gone were the vizier and the other men I had shared the chamber with. In fact, the room was different somehow. Like it was the same room, just in a different location. It took me centuries, but I eventually learned it was Osiris’ ship, occupying space above the earth and designed to look just like a royal chamber room in ancient Egypt. That day, however, I was awestruck by everything surrounding me.
“Bek, I have chosen you to be favored among all men. As the god of resurrection, I wish for all men to witness my miraculous rebirth in the body of a man,” Osiris said. He put his hood back over his head, so the light receded, but kept his face visible. He locked eyes with me and at that moment, I felt greater than any man who had ever lived. “Your life will be a beacon throughout the ages, endless and steady. You are blessed among men, for you are no longer a mortal man, but are immortal, a step closer to the gods themselves.”
I don’t remember weeping, but I wouldn’t have been surprised had I spontaneously burst into tears. A favor from the gods was truly magnificent. That I would be chosen was the pinnacle of my life.
Little did I know that my life up until that point was miniscule compared to what was to come.
What happened next was so minor, I didn’t give it much thought for years, but I came to understand that what Osiris did to me was what gave me eternal life. As I stood there, looking into his eyes, I felt a sharp but brief pain in my neck. I don’t even remember his hand moving there, but Osiris had a gauntlet of sorts, made of gold and shining jewels. Knowing what I know now, I came to understand that it concealed some sort of handheld syringe.
He left his hand there for a moment, then pulled it away and took a step back, as if he was admiring his creation.
“Bek, you are now perfect. Man will no longer have dominion over you. I will guide you through the ages of earth still to come. You will be my constant as the tides of humanity rise and fall. I will see you again soon.”
Before I could even open my mouth, the world disappeared around me, and I found myself standing in my home. The bed was next to me, and I lay down, desperate to sleep. And sleep I did. It was the first time I’d slept as an immortal man.
• • •
In my life, I’ve experienced many things. The birth of my first son. The birth of my one hundredth son. The rise of Rome. The fall of Rome. The creation of sliced bread and the advent of television. I’ve been privileged enough to shake hands with Charlemagne, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Winston Churchill. I fought at the Battle of Hastings, the Battle of the Alamo, and the Battle of the Bulge. I have lived more than any man before and surely more than any man after me.
As I said, I have died many times, but each time I reawaken in another body. Every time, a perfect body given to me by Osiris.
That first body, though…that one was mine. Given to me by parents whose names I have long since forgotten. The only memory I have of when I was a small boy is of playing along the Nile River. Every year the river would flood, bringing life to the once dormant riverbed. One day I was playing among the reeds along the riverbank with a few of my friends when my mother called to me.
“Bek, make sure when the sun is just over the big pyramid that you head home for dinner. Do you understand?”
I nodded, desperate to resume my playtime with my friends.
“Are you sure you understand?”
“Yes, Mother. I understand,” I said, my eyes on a ball that my friends had brought with them to the river that day. “Can I go play now?”
She smiled, the love from mother to son clear in that one small gesture. “Yes, my son. Go play. Enjoy the day, but come when I asked, all right?”
“Okay!” I shouted back, barely registering the words she’d spoken. Years later I would regret not heeding those words the first time. Instead, I went to play, not ever looking back at the pyramids off in the distance. The sun began to set over the Great Pyramid and I kept running and kicking the ball with my friends. Before I knew it, my mother was out calling to me again.
“Bek, it’s time to come to dinner.”
“Coming, Mother!” I shouted back, but I continued to play among the papyrus. I ran and laughed, my friends and me enjoying the last rays of sun on a bright spring day in Egypt. At the time I thought it was a precious thing, the sun on my back and the wind in my face. Before I realized it, much time had passed and when I turned to run towards my friends, I found my mother standing before me.
“Bek.”
I hung my head. I knew I had disappointed her.
She walked towards me and took my head in her hands. I heard my friends scatter and for a few moments, only my mother and I were alive. The world could have faded away; I wouldn’t have noticed. She was my entire world and I had let her down. She crouched down to look me in the eye. I couldn’t avoid the tears welling up as she spoke to me. Never will I forget her words.
“Bek, my dear son. Life is a wonderful thing. I love to see you enjoying the time you have and friends that you can play with each day,” she said, capturing my attention with her soft eyes. I can still remember that look to this day, along with the slight brush of her hand across my cheek as she wiped my tears. “If you ever remember anything, please remember this: your word is your bond. It makes you who you are. When you grow up to be a man, a promise kept or unkept shows everyone the type of person you really are. For good or bad, for better or for worse, if you promise something to someone, you must follow through on that promise. The words you say will not matter, unless you back them up with your actions.”
As a small boy, I didn’t comprehend what she had said to me that day as twilight came to the Nile River. The words went into my mind and stayed there, but I didn’t think about them until much later. It was one of the few things I could remember about my mother. Her words that day formed the basis for the man I would be…again…and again…and again…and again.
• • •
I awoke with a start, my head pounding like a fist hammering on the door.
Except it was literally a fist hammering on my door.
“Bek! You get your sorry behind out of bed and to the work site! The foreman says all hands are needed today, and that means you,” growled the voice on the other side. It was a friend at the time, another whose name has escaped the confines of my mental storage over the years.
I dragged myself off the stiff bed and prepared for the day. A few times, my head felt like it was about to explode, but that was no excuse. The foreman would have me whipped if I didn’t show. Better to suffer a headache than deal with pain on my backside as well.
Within the hour I was hauling bricks for the new monument—me, and hundreds of my closest friends. We’d all heard stories about how the Great Pyramid had been constructed, and the pharaoh wanted this one to be as close to that one in quality as he could get. A few hours in and I had already soaked through the few articles of clothing I had worn to the work site.
As I was getting another stone ready to transport, I caught a shape out of the corner of my eye. My breath caught for an instant when I saw Osiris talking to the foreman. Perhaps he was here to take me with him. Perhaps he would stop the work for the day. Perhaps…
The foreman stepped up and called out to all the men working that day. “Okay, you grunts. Orders from the top—everyone must double their block totals until further notice.”
This was one of those moments. I didn’t realize it, but I was about to be tested with forces beyond my control.
Osiris wasn’t there to save me. He was there to kill me. Well…my body.
We doubled production. Food, water, and breaks were not doubled. I am proud to admit I lasted longer than many on my work gang, but within a week, most of us had collapsed along the route to the new monument. The heat, combined with lack of vital resources such as water, doomed us from the start. Egypt wasn’t the most forgiving of places.
It was about midday of the sixth day after the production order. I thought I could make it. I thought my body was stronger. I thought it was just a test.
It was, but I was wrong about my body. I collapsed from severe dehydration and malnutrition. I wasn’t dead when I fell, but an hour in the sun, unattended to by a doctor, ensured a painful end.
Except…it wasn’t.
The moment…that one brief instant between this life, and the next…happened on Osiris’ ship. I stopped breathing on Earth, under the naked sun, before the Old Kingdom of Egypt even came to be. But I didn’t die. Not really.
My body stopped working, but my consciousness was immediately transferred to another one. It was a strange feeling, but not unpleasant. In fact, there was a bit of euphoria as I moved from one body to another.
How did I know I had gained a new body? I didn’t at first, but when I opened my eyes I found myself lying on the floor of Osiris’ chamber. I looked down and found myself naked. I reached down and touched my arms and my legs. My skin and muscles bounced back with the elasticity that hydration and health provided. My body was different, but my mind was the same. It was clouded, though. It cleared instantly when a voice rang out in the room.
“Welcome back, my son!”
I looked up, momentarily concerned about my lack of dress, but then realized I was in front of a god, and if he wasn’t concerned, I should not be, either. I was too stunned to speak, though.
Osiris gestured to my right and I saw a small pile of neatly folded clothes. I understood he wanted me to put them on, and he addressed me as I did so.
“How was it? The process of dying, and being resurrected—how was it?” Osiris asked.
So that was what had happened. It made sense. Osiris was the god of resurrection, but I hadn’t put it all together quite yet.
I finished dressing while I gathered my thoughts. I spoke my mind, unaware at the time that I didn’t have to be honest with Osiris.
“It was glorious, my lord. In one moment, I found my body too weak to continue. The effects of the sun had been wearing on me and the overseers were not providing us enough water. Thankfully, you have chosen to resurrect my spirit into a new body, much like your wife resurrected you,” I said. “I do regret I failed you in your appointed task for the pharaoh. But I am grateful you chose to give me another chance.”
Osiris smiled, his white teeth a stark contrast to his greenish skin. He was happy, and that made me happy.
“No, my son. You have not failed me. No matter what you do, you will never fail me,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Bek. I had the foremen push you and your friends to test the limits of what you were capable of. I knew that no matter what happened, you and I would meet again here, safe from the ravages of death. That is the gift I gave you. You possess a life eternal, now,” Osiris said.
“Eternal life, my lord?”
“Yes,” Osiris said, and waved a hand. To his left, a dais rose out of the ground. On it was a bronze medallion. It had a very Egyptian look to it, but was mysterious in other ways. It was attached to a flexible leather lanyard. “Take this. I will always be able to find you, but this will give you added protection. As long as you wear it, I will be there. You will surely live again, as long as you carry this with you.”
I reached for it, making sure not to actually touch Osiris. It was one thing to accept a gift; it was another altogether to dare to make physical contact with a god.
“Thank you. This gift…it is more than I could ask for,” I said.
Osiris held up his hand. “Do not thank me, Bek. Your death and resurrection today were easy. Painless. Maybe even pleasurable. I think you will have to die again and again, and I cannot say each death will be as seamless as the one you just experienced. Are you prepared for that? Will you live an eternal life for me? Are you willing to accept the consequences of that choice?”
Who would turn down everlasting life? I didn’t that day. I wouldn’t for a long time, but he was right. Death stopped being easy. Thousands of years later, I wish with everything I am that I had refused his offer.
“I will serve you in whatever way I can,” I said.
Osiris touched a bracelet on his wrist, and he vanished. My eyes saw a smiling god in one moment, and a rocky terrain the next. I swiveled around, trying to find the familiar sights of the monuments to the pharaohs in the distance. No monuments. Just mountains. A cool breeze blew through my clothes. I shivered, and saw for the first time something I could never have imagined, something I did not know the name of until later.
Snow.
• • •
I barely lasted five days. I didn’t know it then, but Osiris had dropped my newly regenerated body right in the middle of the modern-day Canadian territory of Nunavut. Even now, several thousand years later, only a handful of people live there. The Inuit, though, never found me during that short stretch. I managed to find a cave, but the clothes Osiris had given me were the same small loincloth and tunic I had worn in Egypt—not quite the proper attire for the near-Arctic.
That was probably exactly what Osiris had in mind.
“Back so soon?” Osiris asked after I had died and returned to his care.
Nowadays, I might have had a few choice words for the guy. Back then, he was still very much a god in my eyes. I was silent, praying he would look favorably upon me in my next life.
Osiris offered a wry smile as he advanced towards me in his vast chamber. Once again, I was lying in the middle of the large room, naked as the day I was brought into the world. I sat up and immediately found the pile of clothes nearby. I dressed and secretly wished for more. Even with a new body, I still felt a chill from the past few days.
“It might surprise you to know that less than a half-day’s journey to the north of your cave, there was a dead carnivore. Alive, it would have been five times your mass. Had you found it, skinned it, and appropriated the meat and bone from the creature, you would have had an outer covering, a source of food, and tools. You could’ve lived in that environment for decades.”
I was astonished. “How was I to know that?”
“There was no way for you to have known, Bek. But I didn’t put you down there to sit in a cave and hope for salvation.”
I considered that for a moment. “I am guaranteed to live again, correct?” Osiris nodded. “So, I am tasked with living as much as I can. Sitting and waiting for the end is not in your master plan.”
“That is correct, Bek,” Osiris answered. He opened his hand. In his palm was the bronze medallion he’d given me before. “I saved this for you. It will be in your clothing for you to put on again each time in the future, but I knew you would want to talk to me after your experience.”
“Yes, Osiris, I do. Why was I sent there? I had never before seen…”
“Snow,” he completed for me. The way Osiris said it gave it an air of magnitude. I had heard the word before – Egyptians did have a name for it, we just rarely used it. With Osiris, however, it seemed like a divine word that I would be grateful to even utter again.
“Snow,” I repeated, letting the word linger on my tongue for just a moment. “If you would consider letting me, a mere mortal know, why was I sent there?”
Osiris laughed. “I will tell you, because now you are not a mere mortal any longer. You have eternal life! That life will take you many places in your world, not just Egypt. I wanted you to get a taste of the extreme climate conditions of the planet immediately. If I had just told you of the place you visited, would you have chosen to go? Would you have believed me?”
I was honest. “I would have gone. For you, I would go anywhere, my god Osiris. But, no, I would not have believed you. Never in my wildest imaginations would I have dreamed such a place existed.”
“Good. Thank you, Bek, for your honesty. I dare say, you may not always trust me so readily, but I am glad for your loyalty at the present. As for why you are to go there and many other places in this world—I am a god, yes, but I am a curious god,” Osiris said. “I must confess that you play a critical role in my curiosity. I long to test humankind and you will be at the center of those tests.”
“I will do what you ask of me, Osiris,” I said, parroting what I’d said earlier.
“Will you? Let’s see what you think after a few more trips back to your world. Are you ready?”
I nodded, and Osiris touched his bracelet. He shimmered out of view, and I found myself in a vast desert.
I sighed in relief. I was back in Egypt. The dry heat of the cracked earth radiated up towards my face and I closed my eyes, welcoming my return to the desert I had grown up in. A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead and I smiled.
A noise startled me. I opened my eyes and slowly turned in a circle. A creature stood about ten paces away. I wondered briefly if it was a meat eater, but it didn’t look fierce or even hungry. It was about my height, narrow at the top, and larger at the bottom, with large, padded feet and a long tail. Before I could say anything, the creature turned and hopped away, bounding towards the sun one leap at a time.
This was not Egypt.
• • •
In spite of its many challenges, I lasted a couple of years in Australia. I was alone for a long time, but I knew how to survive in the desert. True, I was very dependent on the steady Nile River, but that just meant I knew how important a fresh water source was. It took me two days, but I knew that finding vegetation would take me closer to water. I had to trust that Osiris had put me within walking distance of what would keep me alive, just like he’d done in Nunavut without my knowledge.
Life was tough, but I learned a lot. Eventually I explored further, and that’s where death found me. The original inhabitants of Australia—the aborigines—were surprised to see me. I’m guessing they figured I was inherently evil since I didn’t get a chance to explain myself before a spear pierced my heart.
I died. I moved to another body and was placed back on Earth without seeing my god this time. I lived again, this time in a rainforest. The mosquitos were as large as my hands and the animals loved to pelt me with their excrement. I learned to live and then died in the tropics.
The next time, death came to visit in the form of disease. My decline was long and drawn out, and I was thankful when death finally came. Again, I had no downtime in Osiris’ chamber. I was placed inside a village at the foot of a mountain. I looked up and saw that the mountain’s peak was smoking. The ground shook beneath my feet and the mountain began to make noise.
I noticed the village was vacant. Osiris had known the mountain was unstable. He’d known the village was already abandoned, and he had chosen to put me in harm’s way anyway. I convinced myself this was a test. He knew what he was doing. He was a god, after all.
I quickly scouted the village, hoping there was something I could use. Something I could do. Osiris had provided for my survival the other two times. This time, though, I found myself choking on the hot ash raining down from above. It seared my face and burned my throat. I could not escape. I was not going to survive.
I didn’t want to disappoint Osiris. I remembered when I had just holed up in the cave during my Arctic life. Osiris hadn’t been content with that, so I determinedly tried to live. I could barely breathe, but I crawled as far as I could to leave the town. It was no use. Just past the village limits, I was struck by a chunk of volcanic rock, instantly breaking my femur. The pain was intense, but I knew I would be resurrected again. Living with a broken leg in a volcanic wasteland was no life when I knew the next would surely be better. I folded myself up and grasped my necklace, praying to Osiris for the end to come as soon as possible.
The end did come, but it was not quick.
When I finally did succumb to the effects of the volcano, the moment from death to life was not as pleasant as I remembered it being. The sounds of the volcano exploding above me were gone, replaced by the emptiness of Osiris’ chamber. Unlike the first few times, though, the moment was jarring. I found myself questioning whether I was really going to be resurrected this time, but after a few moments, I felt the cold stone against my naked back. I was back in my body again.
I kept my eyes closed as I completed the process back. Footsteps approached and I knew he was there. Waiting.
“Welcome back, Bek.”
I cautiously opened my eyes and found him standing in front of me. He was still garbed as he had been the first day I saw him. His skin was still green. It was as if he had not aged, but I felt like it had been centuries since I had seen him last. My body, though, was still as young and as taut as the day I had stood in the pharaoh’s chamber. Identical, in fact, in every way.
“Greetings, Osiris.” I stood and gathered the clothes from the ground. I carefully and slowly put them on, wary of what was next for me.
“How has your life been?”
“You mean lives, my lord.”
He seemed to be staring at something over my shoulder, and hesitated. “Oh, yes, lives. How have they been?”
I recounted the time I had spent in the land of the jumping mammals, then the weeks in the rain forest, and finally the hours in the shadow of a volcano. Three lives. Three moments.
Osiris listened and then questioned my actions in the final life. “Did you think you would be able to evade the effects of the volcano?”
“I knew you were a kind god and would do whatever you could to offer a way to safety. Just as you said, in the snow there was a carcass I could have harvested, and when I arrived in the desert, I found a river for fresh water. I knew you would have left me a gift to survive. I am sorry I was unable to locate it before I perished.”
Osiris laughed. “But there was no escape. In this case, there was no way out. I placed you there as a lesson: sometimes there is nothing that can be done. But I saw your valiant attempts to stave off your fate, and for that you are commended.”
I was confused. Did he want me to fight for every last breath, or did he want me to accept my fate?
He saw the confusion on my face. “My dear Bek, what is it?”
“Osiris. I’m sorry, my lord, but what is my purpose? What is it I am supposed to achieve? Why have I been gifted eternal life if I am supposed to strive for every breath in one life and accept defeat in another?” I asked.
“Oh, Bek. I thought you would have figured it out. I am conducting experiments. I cannot control everything, but I can control you. Your body, your blood, your physical fitness. In all experiments, there are multiple variables, but the one performing the experiment needs one thing. A constant. They need a control.”
I don’t know what I would have said, but I wasn’t given the chance. With a swift action, Osiris pushed a button on his bracelet, sending me to a new land, one lush with green grasses and tall trees. A few birds chirped in the distance and the sun was warm, but not overly so.
I didn’t care, though. I was numb.
My life meant nothing to Osiris. I was just a body. He could use me over and over through whatever means he chose. I was nothing special to him.
Instead of living my life as he wanted me to, I made a decision that day. I would live like I wanted. Maybe there wasn’t much of a difference in what I would have done, but it was different in my mind. It was different in my motivation. I stopped living for Osiris and started living for myself.
It was probably a few centuries before I saw him again. I lived more than a half-dozen lives in that span, but he kept resurrecting me and depositing me in a new place without a rest stop in his chamber. Each time, I was dressed like an ancient Egyptian and I had the bronze medallion. The places I went were different in climate, culture, and people, but one thing was always the same. Me.
I encountered Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu (who wasn’t as hairy as the stories say). I met Hannibal. I saw Athens before Sparta overthrew it in the Great Peloponnesian War. The terra cotta warriors were new the first time I saw them.
Decades sped by as my lives continued to come and go.
When I saw Osiris again, I knew the Egyptian gods of old to be unreal. I had seen the “power” of a vast number of other gods, and had decided for myself that my master was a false one. He held dominion over my life, but he was no god.
“Your name is not really Osiris, is it?” I asked on a rare trip back to his chamber.
“I was wondering when you would ask me that,” he replied. In that moment, the garments he had worn in my presence for years vanished, replaced by a utilitarian article of clothing. “I can be rid of those now.”
“What should I call you?” I asked.
“The only name I’ve had on your world has been Osiris, so that is as good a name as any. It would make me happy to hear you continue to use it.”
And so, like any adolescent, I stopped doing what he liked. I found ways to make him unhappy. I ran towards death like a moth towards flame. I went through body after body until I finally realized I was probably living my lives just as he wanted me to. He was testing my body’s capabilities and I was simply providing him with more and more opportunities to test me.
For centuries, I managed to live full lives. I even settled down and met a few women.
But it wasn’t enough. There was one thing I lacked.
I wanted to die.
• • •
It wasn’t that my life wasn’t fulfilling. I certainly found various ways to entertain myself throughout the years, but after a certain point, it was all the same. One man’s dictator is another man’s king is another man’s president. They’re all the same. And that’s what my life was like as well.
Dying from smallpox wasn’t too different from wasting away due to scurvy, or kicking the bucket after meningitis, or even a good bout of pneumonia. When you’ve had them all, the ending is unchanged. One death was the same as the next.
And Osiris’ words came back to me again and again. The first time I had died, he had said, “I cannot say each death will be as seamless as the one you just experienced.” He was right. Each time I passed away, it was as if someone had jabbed another dagger into my ribs and sucked my organs out through a straw. My brain was jelly for longer and longer each time as I recuperated. I finally decided that the more years that passed between one death and the next meant a little bit more suffering for Bek.
By the time I reached the Middle Ages, the pain was almost unbearable. So I began to think about how I could actually die.
I was obsessed. I spent at least one of my lives simply contemplating death at a Buddhist temple until old age snuck up and took me in my sleep. That was a good life. I wish I could do that one again.
I came to one conclusion: Osiris had to die. For me to die, he had to die.
How do you kill a god? First, you acknowledge that he isn’t a god.
In one of my few trips back in the Middle Ages, I confronted him. “You are not a god.”
He regarded me with thin eyes. “No.”
I knew I couldn’t fulfill my next statement yet, but I made it anyway. “One day I will kill you. For all the times you have killed me, you will pay.”
He laughed and turned a dial on a dais. “Good luck with that. Have a nice death, Bek.”
He’d sent me to the summit of a mountain. I suspect it was Mt. Everest or K2. Either way, I lasted a few hours.
While he held the power of my resurrection, he also seemed unaware of how many lives I was living. He wasn’t attuned to each of my lives, and he’d even mentioned “my world,” leading me to believe he was some sort of alien who had come to our planet to conduct his own particular brand of experiments—with me at the fore.
So, he wasn’t a god. I was still stuck with the problem of killing him. I had a lot of time to think about it, and I finally came to the conclusion that I was a clone. Each body after my first, born thousands of years ago in Egypt, was simply a clone. It explained the identical form and age as that first body. It allowed Osiris to prepare many duplicate sets of clothes as well. I didn’t know if he had hundreds of clones sitting in storage, or if he simply printed up a new one each time I died, but either way, I was a clone.
That eliminated several different methods of taking Osiris out. After all, I was given a new body and new clothes each time. I was a constant. His control. That meant each body would be the same each time. No variations.
But just as I was Osiris’ control, he had inadvertently given me one as well. Sometime in the 1400s, I had scratched the necklace with a 17-carat diamond I’d found in a South African mine. I had never tried to do anything to it before and was scared that perhaps Osiris would be angry.
That was during my rebellious stage, though, and I didn’t care. After death came a few weeks later when a shaft of that diamond mine collapsed on me, I reappeared in Renaissance Italy. I looked at the necklace and saw that the medallion was unchanged. There was a long scratch on the back, almost scoring the bronze piece from top to bottom. I smiled. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had found my control. Just as I stayed the same in each life and location for Osiris, the medal Osiris had sent with me was the same each time as well.
For hundreds of years I didn’t dare act on my knowledge of the necklace. I learned metallurgy and other crafts. I created my own works with many types of metal, and curated collections based on the design of Osiris’ medallion. When the technology finally advanced, I ran the medallion through an X-ray and tested it. I found the homing device Osiris had planted in it. His technology was far beyond my own, so duplication was probably out of the question for a while, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Eventually, I settled on adding to the medallion, and making the extra mass not just bronze. Something a bit more…explosive.
Even then, I needed a way to control it. I needed to be awake and conscious during the moment of transfer. I had to get Osiris to talk to me. He hadn’t given me an audience since the waning days of the Roman Empire, so I wasn’t hopeful, but I knew I needed the medallion to be ready whenever the moment struck.
I had spent the past few decades killing myself over and over. Any way you can imagine to kill yourself was probably on my radar at some point during those years. Every time, I’d just reappear on Earth, ready to live and die again.
Each time I got ready to die, I gripped the medallion, hoping that the next time I did so, Osiris would be standing near me in his chamber. Each time, though, I simply opened my eyes on Earth; no supposed Egyptian gods were staring me in the face.
Nothing changed until I went back. It was fitting, I thought… I went back to Egypt. I found the Nile River and marveled at how civilization had grown up and encompassed all the land surrounding the river. I didn’t know if my plan would work, but I submerged myself in a bend in the river, upstream from Cairo. There was no one else around. Just me. And the medallion. I put it in my mouth and forced myself to swallow river water at the same time.
I felt the water burning my lungs—this wasn’t the first time I’d drowned—and knew the end would be near. I clamped my teeth down on Osiris’ medallion and sank to the bottom of the river. The end would be welcome. I hoped I wouldn’t be back. This was my end—at the place where it all began. My eyes shut for what I hoped was the final time and I let the water take me.
Each time before, the moment from one life to the next was seamless. The soundtrack of life kept playing for me, but I hoped to stop the conductor once and for all.
• • •
The rushing water of the Nile was gone. I was dry and naked on the floor of Osiris’ chamber. I felt disappointment ripple through me. I had failed.
I kept my eyes closed, waiting for Osiris to appear. The silence was interminable. I’d lived thousands of years, though, so what was a few more minutes? Any minute, the being I’d once met in the pharaoh’s palace would stroll in and doom me to another cursed life on Earth. Any moment…
But he never came. Minutes had ticked by in my head before I dared open my eyes to find the chamber empty. No clothes lay next to me. There was just me and the chamber. For the first time in hundreds of years, I was completely surprised.
In the moments between lives, I had never left this room. There were doors, but I had never before had the opportunity to discover what lay beyond them.
Now was the time. Now was my moment. Would it end in disaster or victory?
Slowly, purposefully, I sat up and inspected my surroundings, a place I’d been to dozens of times, but only now had free rein to explore. While there were doors, most were false. Placed there to resemble the pharaoh’s palace in Egypt, a place now in ruins on Earth.
But one door did open. One door did lead beyond the confines of the chamber.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought I’d seen everything, but the room I entered was vast. The far wall was barely visible and each empty spot was filled with…me. Hundreds of some sort of cryogenic tubes were lined up end to end, and from inside all of them, the same face stared back. Me.
But the endless amount of Bek clones wasn’t what grabbed my attention. In the middle of the room was a workstation with a table in the middle. A body lay on the table, a bloated, sopping wet version of myself. I recognized the clothing. It was me. The last body I’d had, which I’d drowned in the Nile.
But my head was gone, destroyed in a small explosion.
It had worked after all.
Osiris lay next to the table, his own torso a mangled mess. What I assumed was blood covered the area, but it was a dark green, similar to his skin color. In one hand was the medallion, a little worse for wear after the explosion.
I’d done it. I’d killed him. The tiny explosives I’d implanted into my teeth and jaw had worked.
I was finally free to die.
But…
With hundreds of copies of myself to spare and no master ruling my life…did I even want to die anymore?
Life is composed of pivotal moments. I’d experienced many of them over the centuries—but none of them had been as significant as this one. With Osiris gone, the success or failure of this moment was up to me. I could fail. I could have monumental success. Either way, it was all up to me.
Entirely up to me.