The Thousand Year God

“Happy new year, Alfred.” The incantation should be scrawled darkly across the entrance of the cell, indifferent to the days and nights strobing about it year after year. 50…100…500…800 years now and 800 incantations to abandon all hope—but not for all ye who enter here. Just for Alfred. 

It wasn’t really the New Year, it was simply another year—another year Alfred would be kept alive. Alfred knew that the actual New Year had taken place roughly 4 months prior. He had kept track of the day and date for the first year after being imprisoned, but without anything to write with or on he had accidentally let go of that guideline of time for the briefest moment, only to have it twang away from him into the darkness. By year 30 he was certain he knew what the date and day was to within a range of two weeks or so, but of course he didn’t know which pairing he was passing through, exactly, on any given day.

In year 158, however, the guards had presented him with seven different calendars, each one with a different day of the week for January 1^st.

“Tell us which calendar is correct, and you can keep it.” They had said.

That was one of the things about living so much longer than any other human – a bicentenarian had such a monstrously long time to think about things compared to everyone else. He had been born on June 27^th 2057, a Wednesday, and that would always be his temporal loadstone. 

They were surprised to see him pick the correct calendar after glancing at only 5 of the 7.

So then there he was, guideline back in hand, slowly making his way through the darkness of nearly 6,000 years laid out before him. 6,000 years in exchange for his crimes…

In year 256 it was determined by some board or president or authoritarian regime that he would be allowed to read and write again. A little table was brought into his cell, along with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad, and Converging Brutality: The Latter Half of the 22^nd Century by Zihao Shang. Only books published before his internment were provided to him, the jagged edges of their contemporary forewords sundered close to the books’ spines inside the front covers the only remnants of a world beyond 2127. Although in the case of Converging Brutality, an entire section had been removed in addition to pages here and there.  Presumably these pages had been about him, Alfred, and he was being denied the vanity of reading them. 

And what was the point of all this? To keep his mind wet-preserved in a liquid of the past? To keep the roaring expanse of time that will pass from breaching the seawalls and diluting his past experiences into an impotent wash of a memory? It was a muddled attempt, although he had never felt a deep personal ownership over his actions in life anyway, how could they become more of his own now in this…this afterlife of sorts?

But for now a doctor in a lab coat, white with earnestness, followed closely behind a guard and motioned for Alfred to take a seat in the cell’s only chair. Vermillion vials of blood soon stacked up along the cell’s small writing table like sticks of red sealing wax.

“Slight sting…” The doctor finally pushed several tubes of liquid into Alfred’s veins and a perceptible burning spread through them. Such a quiet consequence for something as irreverent as denying death. 

With that, the doctor collected the medical equipment and followed the guard back out through the cell door. Back to what would be the rest of his day, out there. Back to his children, perhaps, back to the same inane arguments he would have with his wife on Sunday afternoons, back to a small life scratched superficially into the surface of history. 

Not like the bloody trench gouged right through the corpus of humanity that Alfred had plowed.

“See you next year, Alfred.” The steel door clanged to and the sound of bolts sliding into place grated across the concrete walls. 

And then he was alone again. 

In the First Century, as he called it, there had been a great silence—no written words, no outside world, just concrete and the footsteps of guards and an aloneness in his thoughts. 

In the Century of the Sun, the second century of his internment, he had been moved to a cell with a door leading to a small, high-walled courtyard. Birds pecked at the dirt in this space and a few scraps of plants willed themselves into existence there. It had been a peaceful time. 

Then there was the Century of Wailing. A few decades after Alfred was allowed access to man’s written word again, letters began to be shoved through the slot in the cell’s steel door at a measured pace. You murdered my father, my sister, my brother…You will rot in hell when they finally kill you…You’re a monster, a shame on the history of our country…Their words were all the same pitiable complaints to Alfred, and any affect they may have had on him was muted by the fact that these words were all from people long dead. 

“Denying death,” as it was known, had been universally outlawed at the end of the 21^st century—except when administered as punishment to war criminals convicted by The Hague—and Alfred had witnessed nothing suggesting this had ever changed. Guards grew old and retired, as did the doctors that administered the genetic therapy injections keeping him alive. Death is an inseparable part of humanity, but allowing a war criminal to die before the extent of his sentence had been served was an injustice to the victims, it had been decided. 

The letters had all been dated to the decades after his imprisonment, despite only now being provided to him. Hundreds of thousands of letters provided at a steady drip of 7 per day. He would never have had the time to read all of them in a normal lifetime. Alfred wondered if this experiment was meant to stir something akin to remorse inside him, if it was simply an exercise performed in the name of those he had killed. Again, a muddled attempt at…something. Humanity never could decide if imprisonment was meant to punish or rehabilitate in the time leading up to Alfred’s internment, and the continuity of that lack of consensus had echoed with familiarity throughout these 800 years. 

The letters and the wailing had died out early in his 4^th century and Alfred had spent the proceeding 400 years reading any books they’d give him. What else could he do? He could pace his cell, or he could read. The outside world seemed to have grown quiet again, but he little noticed as he read and read. 

He read ancient texts and medieval tomes, he read about the nature of people and of all manner of religions, he read about science and the cosmos, he read philosophy and poetry. His psyche began to spread across each of the pages, losing some part of himself with each word and gaining something else. Alfred—the man—was eroding. The soot of his withered persona was carried away by the wind in the courtyard, up and over the walls to be disposed of, and growing in its place was some other being: one not with the transitory existence of a mortal, but some being with an enduring presence and an omniscience of thousands of years of knowledge. 

Does man not sustain himself on small deaths? Alfred thought. Every guinea fowl, rabbit, carrot, mushroom consumed is a death in the name of sustaining life. A man cannot live without eating death.  How many deaths were at my hand? Slaughtered at my alter, and I have consumed them. I could live 10,000 years. 

In year 838 of his imprisonment, an unexpected letter slid through the narrow opening in the cell’s steel door. 

Alfred, 

I am a researcher working on identifying the locations of all killing fields from the genocides you helped wage before coming to power, specifically those generated during the time between 2077 and 2097. 

Any sites never revealed in the original Clarion Commission trials that took place from 2125 to 2127 would be most helpful. Additionally, learning the fates of the archipelago of so-called Wraith Villages, such as the Village of Encinal, is also important for preservation and documentary purposes. 

Please remember that per Resolution 15 of the World Order Treaty, your sentence cannot be extended nor your punishment made more severe in the case of your cooperation in providing revelatory information in genocides and other war crimes. 

Anna 

Alfred mulled over the letter. It was a little prayer for divine knowledge sent up to the heavens by a mortal struggling against a fleeting quantity of life. He looked out at the courtyard.

Encinal…

An image of twisted oak groves on rolling hills and children running along a gravel path came before him. 

They had taken their time in Encinal. He was seeing it through Alfred’s eyes, someone else’s eyes now. Sweat dripped from Alfred’s nose and brow onto the work in front of him, mixing with all manner of fluids a body can expel. No villager had been spared that day.

Yes, he could tell her what happened at Encinal. He could tell her a great number of secrets he could see through Alfred’s eyes. It would take him 200 years to relay all he knew. She would die before it would all be done, Anna, the poor wretched creature. 

Others would need to pray to him too. 

                    * * *

It only took Alfred 100 years to relay all he knew, but many did pray to him during that time. The government, grappling with a growing reverence for Alfred among an increasingly influential and violent portion of the populace, split on what to do. 

“Killing him would make him a martyr and violate the terms of the Clarion Commission. We cannot risk it.” 

“We won’t be killing him—we would simply be letting him die. And people don’t care about the follow through on some 1000-year-old sentence.”

In the end, it was decided that the death denial injections would be withheld, allowing Alfred to meet a natural death. 

                         * * *

“Alfred, you’re going to meet your maker soon. Long time coming. No more injections.” Alfred stared blankly at the guard, who should have had a doctor close on his heels. The guard turned to exit before stopping in the doorway. “Oh and Alfred, happy new year.”