All the Time in the World
A Millennium City Story
By Andy Cayse
He was adrift, like he had been for so very very long now, probably the only thing left moving at all. All around him there was so much…
nothing, a darkness that was both suffocatingly close and infinitely far away, the black perforated only by a dozen or so scattered pinpoints of dim light around and behind him, and by the anomaly ahead that had guided him on this final journey.
He knew he should be cold, but he wasn’t.
He knew he should be suffocating, but he wasn’t.
He knew he should be dead, but he wasn’t.
As a matter of fact, he should have died a lifetime ago. A hundred billion lifetimes ago and more. But he didn’t.
A hundred billion lifetimes ago, he was Mister Infinity, the Immortal Man.
He could still remember how it had happened; it was one of the only things from that life that he still remembered. All that time ago, his name was Wesley Adams, a scientist in some city whose name he could no longer remember on a planet that used to matter to him. There was some kind of freak meteor shower, one that the astronomers had completely failed to spot beforehand, and rained down chunks of strange irradiated rock--or at least, what they thought was rock at the time. Shortly after, stories began to circulate about people coming into contact with the meteor fragments, and suddenly gaining abilities and powers that defied all conventional logic. He was part of a special team of scientists, hired by the government of a nation he barely remembered, tasked to discover exactly what special properties the rocks might have.
It was two-thirty in the afternoon when Wesley donned the protective hazard suit that would keep him safe from any potential meteor radiation. He still had the taste of an egg salad sandwich in his mouth, and his nose itched. His right arm smarted from accidentally banging his funny-bone on the desk a minute before. He kind of had to pee, but knew he could hold it in for just a little bit longer. He fastened the helmet over his head, and when they gave him the all-clear, stepped into the sterile white testing chamber.
His superiors watched intently behind several inches of plexiglass and lead shielding, while a small work-station was raised up through the chamber floor, a thick lead case at the center of it. Wesley prepared the work-station, narrating the procedure into a small recording device for the sake of posterity, then finally opened the case.
Brilliant blue light flooded the chamber, nearly blinding him as he uncovered the meteor fragment. Despite the incredible amounts of energy streaming out of it, easily visible to the naked eye, none of it showed up on his readings. There was no ambient heat being given off, no increase of radioactive waves or particles, no fluctuations in electromagnetic fields. And yet, it still spilled out sparkles of light like a Roman candle.
As his eyes adjusted, Wesley focused and began to inspect the sides of the multi-faceted rock, its crystalline structure far closer resembling a cut gem than any naturally occurring stones he had seen before. The first irregularity he noticed was towards the bottom, where a chunk of it appeared to have been crudely broken off.
The second irregularity he noticed was the small device planted on the inside of the case. It was a rectangular shape, about the size of a cellular phone, with a small blinking light in the upper right-hand corner, and a pair of wires going down its left side.
He still had the taste of an egg salad sandwich in his mouth and his nose itched. His right arm smarted from accidentally banging his funny-bone on the desk three minutes before. He kind of had to pee, but knew he could hold it in for a little bit longer. As Wesley reached towards it, the bomb went off.
All of his senses were assaulted at once. His eyes were blinded by the flash of light. His ears rang from the deafening explosion. His nose and mouth filled with smoke. And every nerve in his body screamed back at his brain, the pain absolutely paralyzing. In that split-second which seemed to go on forever, the sensory shock and utter violence of the explosion failed to drown out the one thought going through Wesley’s mind:
I am going to die.
But he didn’t.
When he came to, he was lying on the floor, the once white sterile chamber now blackened and filled with smoke. Through the haze he saw that the work-station was completely obliterated, debris scattered in all directions. Tiny specks of blue light punctured the smoky veil, little shards of meteor that had dug into the walls and ceiling when the fragment was shattered. He still had the taste of an egg salad sandwich in his mouth and his nose itched. His right arm smarted from banging his funny-bone on the desk five minutes before. He kind of had to pee, but knew he could hold it in for a little bit longer. And though his hazard suit was shredded and burned, Wesley was completely unharmed.
In the following months, two revelations regarding the incident were made public. The first was that the bomb had been planted by a certain Dr. Patrick Bellham, a colleague and rival of Dr. Adams who had been working with them on the project, and began formulating extremely wild theories about the meteors’ origins, and what they would mean for "the future of this world and every world after it," as he put it. His predictions and theories grew increasingly dire, his behavior more unstable and obsessive along with it. Eventually, he was pulled from the project altogether, and was recommended to seek psychiatric aid. The investigation as to how exactly he eluded security and carried out the sabotage would have taken months, only to be rendered irrelevant when Bellham resurfaced as a violent terrorist under the moniker "Dr. Bedlam." Initially interested only in capturing the ‘super-humans’ who had been affected by meteor radiation, the doctor would eventually become the most feared of a very long list of would-be conquerors to wage war on Millennium City.
The second revelation of the incident was exactly what fate befell Dr. Wesley Adams. When the bomb went off, it ripped open his hazard suit, exposing him to the meteor fragment’s radiation. In that moment, before the heat and shock of the explosion would have killed him, he apparently became dislodged from the regular time-space continuum. They theorized that while he could still move freely about in the three dimensions of physical space, he was now ‘locked’ into a fixed point along the fourth dimension of time, preserving his body in the state it was in when he was last unharmed. He would now never age, would never be harmed, would never get sick, would never get hungry…and would never die. Wesley Adams was now the world’s first and only truly immortal man.
Still under the employ of the government, he was joined up with a special task force they had assembled, specializing in disaster prevention at home and protecting national interests abroad. Dubbed "The Meteor Men," they acted openly and with a measured degree of theatricality, serving as a propaganda tool every bit as much as they were a military unit. Aside from their phenomenal powers, they also took on extraordinary identities, complete with flashy costumes and code-names. Given his unique disposition, Dr. Adams was christened "Mister Infinity," and the name would follow him from then on.
When asked how he would be able to effectively keep up with the likes of the super-strong Apollo or the nigh-omnipotent Miss Miracle, he smiled and said that while his teammates were more powerful, he would be able to do more good in the long term. "After all," he said with a grin, "I’m Mister Infinity. I’ve got all the time in the world."
Together, the Meteor Men brought down super-powered menaces, dismantled dictatorships, and stopped catastrophes before they could start. However, their time as a team was short-lived, as were a dozen or so other alliances that Mister Infinity would join in his early days as an indestructible adventurer. The Millennium Guard, The Undefeated, The Champions of Freedom, The Sentinel Squad, The Sons of New Liberty, Uni-Force, The NextGenerates, Justice Beyond, and countless others all welcomed him into their ranks at one point or another. They were all so bold in their beliefs, so passionate in their principles, so grand in their missions, and yet so few of them lasted even a single generation, being torn apart by internal struggles more often than from some outside threat. Mister Infinity found it darkly amusing that, despite their loud promotions of peace, his fellow heroes found themselves fighting each other with an alarming regularity.
As one generation faded into another, he began to notice just how quickly his people aged. His family was all gone before he even realized it. Friends would grow old and die just as he was getting to know them, their children suddenly springing up wearing the faces he used to recognize. His allies could no longer carry on the fight, handing down their roles to protégés or taking their secrets to the grave. He would try to get in touch with someone he remembered from one particularly interesting event or another, only to find their great-grandchildren instead. Slowly but surely, it became too painful to even bother making connections with those he encountered, so he instead put all of his thought and emotion into whatever task the times had thrust upon him.
Three hundred years later, he still had the taste of an egg salad sandwich in his mouth and his nose itched. His right arm smarted from accidentally banging his funny-bone on the desk centuries before. He kind of had to pee, but knew he could hold it in a little longer. Alongside the Sentries of Sol, he fought in the final battle with the Nihilan Swarm, concluding a twenty-year war that saw over two dozen human worlds completely stripped of all life, and two other sentient species made extinct. With humanity’s own extinction at stake yet again, he had agreed to partake on a ‘suicide’ mission into the Swarm’s all-but-impenetrable Prime Hive, in order to deliver the Atom Heart, a bomb that would incinerate the entirety of the monstrous alien horde with the energy an artificial supernova. The other Sentries, alongside the ragged remains of the New Terran Republic fleet, would buy him as much time as possible by engaging the Swarm directly. Unfortunately, due to the unstable energy fields generated by the bomb, remote detonation was impossible, which is why Mister Infinity volunteered to be the one to set it off manually. They lauded him as a hero, sacrificing himself for the good of his world. In reality, he was hoping the Atom Heart would destroy him as well, finally granting him his rest.
Detached as he had become over the centuries, he barely noticed the horrendous destruction the Nihilans wrought on his escorts, the fleet nearly halved within the first minute of the battle. He plowed ahead in his grav-harness, Omnivenger and Captain Quantum cutting a gruesome swath through the Swarm for him, before meeting their own grisly ends barely a third of the way towards the Hive. In his dying moments, however, Quantum released the whole of his energy in a final desperate salvo, cracking open the Hive. Unable to penetrate the rest of the Swarm by himself, Mister Infinity had no choice but to detonate the Atom Heart then and there.
Fierce white light washed out his vision, and he felt himself tumble end-over-end, unable to stop. He lost all sense of direction, all sense of presence…and for a time, the Immortal Man truly did believe himself to be dead.
A few months later, however, the light faded, and stars came back into view. The artificial nova had finally burned itself out, and Mister Infinity had been blown from the area still completely unharmed. However, with his grav-harness destroyed, he had no way to control where he was going, no way to make it back to Earth, to see if his act of catastrophic destruction had even worked.
He was adrift in the void, all alone.
Time began to lose any real meaning to him; after all, nothing in the cosmos seemed to change when seen from a distance. There was nothing to hear, nothing to smell, nothing to taste or feel, and nothing to see but the stars, and they didn’t change. They remained in their places, all so far away that he believed, even as an immortal, he could never reach them.
Gradually, the meanings of words began to escape him. Names and faces eluded him as he tried to recount all of the things he had done. He talked to himself in his head, just so he would not forget how. His imagination would run wild in his sleepless dreams, causing hallucinations that would slowly but surely drive him mad. As a matter of fact, as he drifted, he went mad on several occasions, losing more and more of his memories every time his brain reset itself. And still, he drifted on, unchanging as the stars.
Some time later, something caught his attention, approaching him at a rapid pace. It reminded him of an Earth creature--what was it called? Dragonfly?--covered end to end in ghostly green lights. It grew larger and larger as it approached him, taking up nearly his entire field of vision before it registered to him that it was a ship. A small nodule on its underbelly opened up like a flower, producing a tendril of energy that surrounded him, and pulled him into the vessel’s belly.
He was surprised to discover that his rescuers were in fact human, though they spoke a language that he couldn’t understand (which wasn’t much of a surprise in itself, given how much of his own language he had forgotten). The one among them who could communicate with him--a scholar and expert on dead languages--said that they had been looking for the sole survivor of the Atom Heart Incident for generations now, to learn of what their civilization had been before its fall. The detonation of the nova bomb had succeeded in wiping out the Swarm, but had also crippled humanity’s own fleets, and over time the various human worlds fell into disarray, ushering in a dark age from which his rescuers said they were only now recovering. With so much knowledge lost due to their isolation, his memories would be invaluable.
He didn’t remember much at first, but that was not unexpected for them; after all, by their estimates, he had been lost in deep space for nearly eight thousand years. At the time, such a lapse seemed all but unthinkable to him--it had gone by so quickly. Still, now that he was back among a civilization, he was determined to make the most of it.
Over a short decade, he learned their language and customs, while in turn he did his best to recollect what he could of the centuries he had seen. Pieces came back to him in fits and starts, but it frustrated him to no end that he could never fit them all together in any way that made sense. While the span of his life was infinite, the capacity of his brain was not.
To that end, he commissioned the construction of a super-computer capable of storing tremendous amounts of information, meant to serve as his memory from then on. In its first incarnation, it was a small silver sphere with a single golden light fixture like the pupil of an eye. As a test, it scanned and absorbed every piece of data stored in three whole planets’ libraries, filling its own memory core by 0.0002%. He was pleased with this, and dubbed his new aide LANE (A play on the archaic phrase ‘Memory Lane,’ which at the time he remembered was supposed to strike him as clever)
With LANE completed, Mister Infinity set out to atone for the damage the Atom Heart had done to humanity. Rather than spend the next centuries out adventuring or fighting whatever temporary menace that may arise, he would devote his time to helping the society as a whole by tackling the problems that would take lifetimes to solve.
When asked what he could accomplish where millions of thinkers before him had failed, he simply smiled and said, "I can think about it a lot longer than they could. After all, I’m Mister Infinity--I’ve got all the time in the world."
He isolated himself from the rest of humanity, locked away in a small space station orbiting high above a planet he could now barely recall, where he would conjecture with LANE. They discussed how to overcome mankind’s evolutionary predilection towards conflict, the natural attraction towards kings and demagogues that made true freedom impossible, the discrepancies between what the species was capable of being and what a culture believed it should be. They considered previous solutions and their outcomes, the historical context of each problem and its relevance to the projected curves of technological progress, as well as a million other variables as they slowly but surely perfected their own designs.
The first time he had descended from the station, bringing an ‘ultimate answer’ with him, he was met with the fanfare and adoration that was reserved for the prophets in ancient times. However, each time he would return after having taken years--sometimes decades or even centuries--to solve one of the unsolvable problems of the time, he was met with less and less reverence. More often than not, in fact, the solutions he would bring had already been reached by the people, or the problem was simply no longer a factor of the human condition. He realized that he was quickly becoming obsolete, unable to keep up with the evolution of both the species and the society they created. Over time, they became almost unrecognizable as the world he used to know.
One evening, he had the taste of a egg salad sandwich in his mouth and his nose itched. His right arm smarted from accidentally banging his funny-bone on the desk some ten thousand years ago. He kind of had to pee, but knew he could hold it in for a little bit longer. Seeing how ineffectual he had become, Mister Infinity made the decision to leave humanity behind forever.
