At first, you think nothing of it. A black picture? A picture won't kill you, and it doesn't. Your day continues, you move on with life, and shortly you stop thinking about it.

The world continues to spin.

One day you marry. You weren't ever expecting to, but you met her at a party and you both hit it off right from the start, maybe because neither of you like parties. She doesn't share your hobbies, and you stop looking at this sort of porn. It doesn't feel like much of a loss; you've grown older, perhaps wiser, and certainly a romp in bed is far more fun than staring at your monitor.

You slowly begin to realise that the world is getting worse. Not in the way you talked about as a teenager and young adult, where you griped, but things were fundamentally okay. It's no single thing. Climate change, a worsening geopolitical climate, regular wars and waves of refugees from the poorer nations and, ever so slowly, worsening xenophobia in the richer ones. It doesn't take long before those refugees are turned away at the border. A few years later, it doesn't seem odd when the military is tasked to slaughter a wave of them. In-between you grow more and more fond of reading the news, even as they get less and less pleasant to read.

You hear about waves of mass death in central Africa, not because of starvation or war, but because of heat and humidity that's simply too much to survive. The same heat-waves affect Asia and America, but those two regions still have functional power and the technology to let them survive it. *Usually*, they do; it takes time, the first time it happens it's a total fluke, but eventually a heat-wave coincides with a hurricane, power is lost and hundreds of thousands die. This forces the government to invest in hardening, though some of the more vulnerable islands are simply evacuated.

Humanity migrates northwards, and southwards; there are a series of minor wars over the defrosted parts of Antarctica.

You have one child. Just the one. You and your wife talk about it, and you both decide that it wouldn't be fair to have more; that you shouldn't have had even the one, really, although you love your daughter with all your heart. Thirty years have passed from today...

And you realize you're not aging.

This is false. Truly, you realized a decade ago, and you suspected before. This day is, merely, the day you can no longer lie to yourself—or to your wife, when her friends ask her awkward questions. You're starting to look like your daughter's boyfriend, rather than the husband of your wife, though you'd be nauseated at the very thought of touching your daughter that way.

It doesn't tear your family apart; you're stronger than that, and they help you hide the situation, even though your wife is confused and—though she'll never say this—slightly jealous.

My precognition stretches no further. What happens next I cannot say, save for the broadest of strokes. Your immortality is absolute, and even should you fall victim to a government or corporation, you will never die. Not for anything humanity can do, nor their successors, who might by this time be getting close. It's hard to say; so much depends on how your people resolve your next challenges, internal and external. Truly, I am not optimistic. You would not be the worst-prepared species to ever succeed, but you are far closer to 'worst' than to 'best', and it is rare to succeed at all.

I will not be looking at what happens. Perhaps one day you will understand why, or perhaps you will have succumbed to memetic destruction. That might be the easiest death, if so, but it isn't what I see my gift giving you.

You will not die.

Not when civilization falls, nor when it reaches to the heavens. Not when everyone around you turns in their flesh for carbon lattices, nor when artificial suns and engineered bacteria ensure their final end. And not, even billions of years later, when the sun swallows your planet whole—as it shall, if humanity hasn't torn it and the planet both apart. That would be the *good* outcome, by the way.

You will never see an alien. Humanity is alone in this universe, and almost every universe like it has no life at all. Your existence is an utter fluke, a blip on the radar of a universe so inhospitable few could believe life could ever have existed, but I will make yours, and yours alone, last. None of my kin will ever think to look here.

A trillion years hence, when the final star dies, you will remain. You will be cold, unable to move, and you will have been suffocating for all that time, but you will not die.

A quadrillion years later, when singularities pepper the vacuum with their final bursts of light, you will not die. Nor will you see them; your eyes never could, even had they not been frozen. The pain, however, that will remain.

If all that time had been akin to a single drop of water, you would have to wait for all the oceans of the world. That is how much time will pass, before you begin to feel something new. Not the birth of a new universe, but the death of the old, as the cosmic expansion speeds up until your body is finally, mercifully torn apart, each molecule individually separated from every other. Then, then you will die.

There is no reason I'm doing this. I will do nothing to help you, nor will I help anyone else. If you must have an answer, I would say simply... boredom. A passing whim, as my consciousness crosses the surface of yet another doomed backwater. A flicker of thought, a moment's amusement worth less to me than the smallest blink of an eye is to you.

Oh, but...

I will stick around for a while, just a short time. I'm excited to learn what the next poster has in store for me.