[ WP ] Death spared your life and made you immortal . Over hundreds of years , you have become friends . He 's been very busy with work and you miss seeing your buddy . You spend centuries attempting to create world peace , stop war and cure diseases so you can spend some quality time with your only friend .

Death spared my life once. It was a long time ago - almost so long that I can no longer remember it. The only thing that I can remember is being sick and willing myself not to die. I had a family that needed my support. I was a doctor myself, lying on the floor of an examination room in my own sick and repeating it in my head. *I wo n't die, I wo n't die, I wo n't die. * 
 
 He appeared and I thought he was a fever dream. With his black cloak and his scythe - just the way that he had always been described. I let out a sob. `` No. No, you ca n't come for me. Not yet. I wo n't let you take me.'' 
 
 Death had no face. `` I'm not here to take you. I'm here because I've never seen someone with this... resilience.'' The fever dream shivered, moving in the light of the doctor's office. `` Are you really alive?'' 
 
 `` Please,'' I begged. `` Spare me.'' 
 
 The fever dream dragged a finger across my cheek - ice against my burning skin that made me convulse and jerk and twitch on the ground. 
 
 Then he was gone. 
 
 I healed from the illness - one of the rare few who did. As I cleaned the sick up from my office I wondered about the hallucination. At the very end of it though I had the opportunity to go back. I went and held my wife and my three children and I went to work and I earned enough money to keep them all happy in those desolate times. The economy came and went - my children grew - and I aged very well. 
 
 In fact, it was n't until I was about sixty that I noticed I had n't aged at all. My wife seemed to notice it first, remarking that my skin still seemed as smooth as it had fifty years ago when we'd met. She remarked that it seemed like I was still a young man. 
 
 She left me soon after - thought I'd been touched by the devil. She took the children with her, and then I was alone. I quit my practice and lived off the streets, wandering at night and looking at all the homeless and the dying that laid out on the curbs. I threw myself into a river but the icy water did little more than make me shiver, climbing out some frozen popsicle of a man. 
 
 The gun left but a mark in my stomach. The rope left but a burn around my neck. 
 
 One day, the fever dream came back. But this time I was sat on a bridge and looking over at the sunset. He came and leaned against the barrier and I looked up at him and said, `` You were never a dream.'' 
 
 `` No. I was never a dream.'' 
 
 `` How long has it been?'' 
 
 `` Seventy years, eighty?'' 
 
 `` But you have n't come back for me?'' 
 
 `` I made my choice with you. You are what you are. You can never go back.'' 
 
 `` Then I'll have to watch the rest of them die.'' 
 
 `` It's the unfortunate consequence. A parent watching their children die. Then their grandchildren. Eventually the grandchildren's grandchildren. You wo n't die. You will never die. Sometimes you'll wish you did - I know that I've been lonely a few times over the years. Maybe that's why I chose you,'' he seemed to be speaking more to himself than to me now. `` Maybe it was just a split second decision. But your determination to live was... *impressive*, at least.'' 
 
 `` And they'll all die.'' 
 
 `` Yes. They will all die.'' 
 
 I stared out at the river, and then turned back to death. But he was gone. 
 
 He came every few months to see me after that. We talked sometimes. I made him tea from my house. I invested and played the new stock market. I went back to being a doctor for a while, and then quit while I waited for everyone who had ever known me to die. Then I went back to being a doctor. The technology changed, but people remained fairly the same. 
 
 Death and I played chess. Death and I read books synchronously and then spoke about them in enthused voices as we threw back shots of vodka. Death and I spoke on the eaves of war and then he would disappear completely for years. I spent the time reading tomes of books and watching the new media as it first came out - first the VHS and then the DVD and then the VR and the IR and the CR. I read the complete *Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire*. I went though all the classics when the books were published. I traveled and let my beard grow as I went from library to library. I touched the oldest of runes. I touched runes before they were runes. 
 
 Death always found me, when he was ready to see me again. We would sit and drink and play chess and talk about everything and nothing. Death would tell me about his job and I would tell him about being a doctor, and he would make a remark or two about how it was funny for friends to be a protector of life and a taker of it. 
 
 He was my friend. 
 
 Three hundred years after he took my ability to die the hundred-year war began. I did n't see death for a century. He came to me one day while I was sitting in former Cambodia - the A.A.C.S flag flying overhead with its eight points and its colorless, drafty tone. 
 
 `` Been a while,'' I said. 
 
 `` Up for a game of chess?'' 
 
 `` Are you going to leave again?'' 
 
 `` Only if there's another war.'' 
 
 There was another war, and then another. The war against the AIs. The war between the A.A.C.S and the N.A.C.U.S that ended in the death of almost two hundred million people. Death was busy, and I was lonely. I went back to sitting on bridges and looking out. I could see the bridges as I could n't have four or five hundred years before - through the teachings of Aristotle and Plato and the wisdom of musicians, actors, and politicians. I could think of a hundred different answers to the meaning of life but I had no one to share them with. 
 
 Death came back one day. `` Chess?'' he dropped into the chair like one of the corpses he collected and I pulled out my chessboard. 
 
 `` I've missed you.'' 
 
 `` Yes. It's lonely to go so long without a friend.'' 
 
 `` I wish you were n't so busy.'' 
 
 `` As long as man exists, there will be someone for me to take. It's the burden that I was given.'' 
 
 `` Given by whom?'' 
 
 `` By whomever is my creator. Yours too, I suppose. *The* creator.'' 
 
 I mull it over in my head as Death takes one of my rooks. After all these centuries there's still nothing that we do but play chess. Game after game after game of chess. 
 
 It dawns on me that if I want to spend more time with Death I need to fix the problem of war. 
 
 Of course, there is the issue of what Death said. As long as there are people, there will be war. 
 
 I have read many books. I have studied many subjects. I have been alone with my thoughts for many years. 
 
 I know the most simple solution to that problem. 
 
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