[ WP ] You live on a world full of immortal beings . For the first time in the history of the world 's existence , somebody has died .

Ian despaired. It had all gone so badly. 
 
 Time had crept along, as time does, and in his loneliness, he had made other immortals. He never passed on the secret, but inevitably, someone would chance upon it. It was no surprise he'd almost missed it, his contempt for mankind such that he ignored them as much as he could, sometimes spending whole decades walking across continents. Walk, sleep, eat, walk. Odd jobs here and there to pass the time and assuage the nagging emptiness he'd felt, unable to share his secret. The world was so much smaller now, technology could bounce news and rumour about the planet in milliseconds. Inciting panic and fear within an entire nation was possible with little more than a few key presses on a mobile phone. Revealing that he was immortal would be bad enough, but if word got out that others could be made immortal.. pandemonium. So, he walked, among, but not of mankind. 
 
 From his first days of leaving his home, to his times in the Crusades and the great World Wars, he'd come to learn that people feared, and feared mightily, that which they could n't understand. Not `` did n't,'', mind you, man is after all a learning creature with incredible capacity and appetites for knowledge. But `` could n't'', and that's another matter altogether. A person can fear a spider, but may come to understand it, even learn to co-exist with it, because there's a set of terms that can be easily come to: a detente defined by out of the way cupboards and the heel of a loafer. So long as neither party strays, an uneasy peace can be maintained. Learning that the man across the table from you is in fact three millennia your senior, and will outlive you by an indeterminate amount through not even so much as a fantastic feat of science.. it's enough to start a war. The living ever want to remain living. 
 
 Over the years, Ian had shared his immortality with a handful of others, with disastrous consequences. Madge had indulged her narcissism too far, and descended into serial murder amongst her sycophants. It was a dark moment on Ian's long life, confronting her. She'd pleaded, wheedled, even tried to seduce him. He was implacable. Then came the yelling, the screaming, the knife. Physically, she was no match for him, but even so, neither of them could be killed. She stabbed him in the neck with a knife from the room service cart. He broke her back with a table leg, packed her into her own steamer trunk, and driven off into the night, ending her budding film career in a furor of speculation. 
 
 And so it was that Madge resurfaced, a century after he'd made her immortal, decades after he'd bound her in steel and soaked her in concrete, and dumped her into the deepest part of the Louisiana bayou he could find. The pace of human civilization and rabid energy development had found her cage, a backhoe ringing her proverbial doorbell as it dug a sump for a nuclear reactor, out in the now drained swamps. Thorium was safe, they said, pebble bed reactors not even capable of a meltdown, they said. Build it somewhere else, everyone else said, and so they did. The backhoe had struck the roof of the massive 1943 Dodge truck Ian had driven into the bog, carrying a massive concrete block in the bed. He'd wrapped her steamer in chains, layer after layer, welding them to the bed, and poured concrete over it all. He'd sat staring at it for days, while it cured in the sun, belittling his loneliness and the damage it had caused, cursing his undying being.. lament without end. 
 
 Finding an old truck in the swamp was n't much of a big deal. Finding one so heavily laden as to defy Herculean mechanical efforts to remove it had caused something of a stir. For all the things man is incapable of understanding, some mysteries are simply too good to pass on. It was the find of the century, akin to Al Capone's secret vaults. What's in it? Speculation went wild, the electronic hivemind of the planet buzzing so loud that it managed to find Ian, sitting on a fence post in what was once Moldavia. He'd been there for a few days, hungry but in no danger of starving, just sitting and watching the universe turn, remembering the cities that had come before, the people he'd known. 
 
 A trio of university students on holiday had motored by Ian in a battered Peugot, and thinking he was hitchhiking, offered him a lift. Anika, a pert young blonde from Finland, with the slightest uptilt to her nose, was waving her mobile phone out the window as they drove, fishing for a shred of signal to update her news crawler and media feeds, chattering about the crazy'time capsule' dug up in America. It was n't until Erik, Anika's husky cousin, explained to her and their compatriot, Simo, Louisiana's location in relation to a landmark they already knew, New York, that Ian even realized what they were discussing. His chest constricted as dread gripped him in a vise. 
 
 By the time he got to America, almost two weeks later, the damage was done. Jackhammers had cracked the block, seventy years of damp and rust and mildew spilling her corpse on the ground, a hundred unblinking cameras recording the grisly scene. As sunlight touched her still form, the quiet explosion of her heartbeat changed the world forever. Like so much fictional trope, she stirred. Oxygen and carbon and other elements began to leech into her from her surroundings, her groan shredding the stunned silence as she drew her arms to her, beneath her, and pushed herself upright. A sliver of air snuck into her lungs, reversing their collapse with a sickening wet pop, and Madge drew breath. Ian watched, transfixed, from an airport bar in Madrid as she screamed his name, nothing less than a banshee demanding his soul, the Morrígan of old returned for vengeance. 
 
 Ian despaired at what he'd wrought. Her broken spine healed, ligaments snaked across her waist and hips, and she lurched upright. Gunshots rang out, to no avail. Hysteria set in as the scene devolved into panic and flight. She shook her head as her eyes cleared, new muscle and skin pushing away dead, decayed tissue. She ripped away rotted hair and flesh to have it spring anew, pink and soft. Within minutes, she was whole, as beautiful as the day he'd changed her.. as empty as the day he'd buried her. The perfect capture of digital cameras was undeniable: The burning in her eyes was not love. 
 
 Pandemonium. There is no other word. The entire world had just witnessed the impossible, the implausible, the fiction of legends. In that instant, entire religious orders collapsed. The unanswered question of millennia, had been answered: Is there life after death? Yes, oh yes, and it was not what was expected. 
 
 Madge recognized the scene before her: Cameras, the media paralyzed at her transformation, the few remaining too stupid or stunned to run. Naked, beautiful, and enchanting, she sallied forth with the snake hipped saunter she'd once been known for. Her lilting voice, all velvet and sex, broke the world. 
 
 `` Hello, America. It is so good to be back. You there, be a dear, loan me your coat?'' 
 
 Sixty years later, the riots have long since ended. Society collapsed, a new order manifested. Madge had remembered, and she made others, without the careful concern Ian had attempted. The others made more. They fought. They slaughtered. They ruled. 
 

