The Last Dream

Henry Harrison was wealthy. All that he could ever want in life, and most things he didn’t particularly want were easily obtained.

No was not a word that held any meaning.

Henry Harrison did have one dream. Immortality. Even before he knew the word he knew that he wished to live forever.

Henry Harrison became a captain of industry. Petroleum. Plastics. Pesticides. Platinum.

Profits and his portfolio were all that matters.

Henry Harrison had his thirty third birthday. He had read once that a man was at his physical peak at the age of 35.

He thought on his dreams of immortality.

He had never made a birthday wish before and he certainly wasn’t about to start. Instead, he drafted a birthday goal. To achieve immortality by his thirty-fifth birthday.

If Henry Harrison was going to live forever, he meant to do it at his peak.

Henry Harrison hired the most brilliant minds the world had to offer.

They worked tirelessly for two years.

Two days before his birthday, they had done it. A simple potion, flavored like pistachio.

Henry Harrison enjoyed pistachios.

Henry Harrison fired the scientists. Destroyed their research and kept the potion for himself.

The evening before his thirty-fifth birthday, Henry Harrison had a dream. A forest. Dark. Trees.

He hated nature. It was not a pleasant dream.

There was a lit sign. Red. He walked up to it.

EXIT

The sign seemed to call to him, but he did not listen.

It was the last dream he ever had.

On the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, alone in his mansion, Henry Harrison drank the potion.

It worked.

He didn’t age a day, an hour, a minute or even a second.

Years went by.

He remained the same, while the world changed and aged around him. His petroleum, plastics, pesticides, and platinum dirtied the earth and the seas and the skies.

Henry Harrison shut himself away in a climate controlled paradise. While the pollution he caused would not kill him, it was painful to breath.

He stayed alone in his manufactured world as the world moved on.

Centuries went by.

Humanity adjusted.

Millenia went by.

Humanity evolved. They thrived in polluted world that Henry Harrison helped to create.

Henry Harrison had become alone. Isolated. He was no longer a leader or a captain of anything. The outside world was poison. He would not die, but the air and water would do his body harm. His peak physical, immortal condition.

Henry Harrison began to hope. He had never done that before.

He hoped the world that he once knew. A world with fresh, clean air and pure, fresh water might return.

It did not.

Eons went by.

Humanity evolved well beyond anything Henry Harrison could ever have imagined. They didn’t even look like people any longer.

He had become a curiosity. A prehistoric remnant of a time when the world was not yet fully formed. A freak of nature.

Henry Harrison had become an attraction. Alone in his bubble.

Henry Harrison had become a prisoner in a cage of his own making.

Henry Harrison never forgot that last dream he had. No matter now many millions of years went by, that red exit sign, written in a long dead language in a forest that could no longer exist never left his mind.

He knew why it was his last dream.

Dreams were tied to mortality. Dreams were a reminder of death.

He wished, more and more as evolution passed him by, that he had taken the exit that was offered.

Death, surely, would have been a better end than no end at all

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