[ WP ] In the distant future , the unbearable burden of immortality is reserved only as a means of capital punishment for the worst offenders . Only those who give back to society are afforded the privilege to die .

I have appointed myself to die today; a bewildering amount of people are expected to watch. I pray that they are entertained. I'll stick around to observe their reactions. 
 
 Do I fear death? 
 
 Of course not. 
 
 I'll elucidate. 
 
 Most humans die nowadays. It's a spectacle, usually. Planned and pandered. Of course, by this time death has been bested. Did you think that humankind would let Death continue his funny little game? 
 
 Of course not. 
 
 So we play our games now. We live on the edge of forever, indulging in whatever strikes our fancy every odd century or so. Eventually, though, ennui sets in and we simply set ourselves free. It is n't with fear or regret or fight; we just grow bored. We see it all and once there's only one thing left to try we step through that door and do n't look back. Very few people can conceive of living until the stars die. 
 
 There would be no fun in that. 
 
 My fun for the past millenia and a half has been jettisoning our undesirables into the void. It's seen as a public service; I'm quite the popular fellow for it. Such a fate is allotted only to those who deserve it, so fear not. Unless you've murdered, raped, disrupted a planetary ecosystem, or anything else on that scale, you have nothing to fear. I've clenched quite the monopoly on the business and, due to my services to humankind, I am being given an honorary death, visible to all. 
 
 The thing is, I wo n't be setting forth into that unknown just yet; I've got one more thing to do. 
 
 See, I've recently grown dissatisfied with what I've done. No human deserves to somersault through nothingness for hundreds of millions of years. I've done it myself - for 300,000 years I floated through Andromeda and it was terribly boring the last hundred years or so. The occasional comet would sail past, keeping me entertained. A few chance visits to solar systems were interesting. I even once saw a single, living fish swimming in a sea of interstellar space. Racing alongside him was quite strange. I grew fond of him before we floated apart. 
 
 I digress. The moral of this story is that immortality spent doing nothing is a fate worse than death. Even the worst of us do not deserve such torture. So I will stage my death. I will venture into the cosmos following the launch paths that I sent my poor criminals on, and I will find them all and allow their lives to finally end. 
 
 And then I, too, will rest.
