It’s hard, being alive. It shouldn’t be by all rights, after all being alive was as simple as staying alive, and all I needed to do to accomplish that was eat, drink, sleep, and go to the bathroom. Four simple things, made easier by the fact I didn’t have to put in work to get any of them. Not anymore, I hadn’t for a long time. Not that it stopped me from getting up each day, going on a two hour walk that took me about five miles up and down increasingly safe roads and ate breakfast once I got home. Nice and easy. Then I would take a shower, play with myself before or after since I had to change things up every once in a while or let the world become stale and head to work. Walking again most days, hair up and out of the way.

  It would take less then ten minutes to walk to work if I pushed myself, but I was lazy, and would take almost twenty five. Then I would get to work, clock in, spin in a chair and talk to the robots and wait for anyone to show up at a donation center at a time when they could be sleeping in, visiting another planet, or even just playing some full-dive vr game. When no one showed up and talking to automatons that didn’t talk back got too much I would just play with myself there, no one was coming in and honestly I doubted anyone who saw would care. On rare occasion I might turn on an audiobook or try to rewatch one of my ‘Vintage’ cartoons that seemed so recent to me even now and just... suffer until my shift ended. My self-imposed shift at a location manned mainly by machines.

  In theory I was the supervisor for all I did manual labor, my job was to check over what the machines had done and be a human face people could meet and greet with if they came by. I set my own hours, had a decent wage, and got to stay home if I got sick for as long as I needed to. I could even drag some random passerby into the store and let them bend me over and I wouldn’t get fired. I could do all of this because my job didn’t mean anything and only existed to give me something to do and a sense of purpose. It really didn’t feel meaningful-

  I could quit too, if I didn’t like my job. The job I'd been working for the same fifty years. The only issue with that was if I quit the place would be torn down and replaced within the week and the last building still standing from when I was young would be gone. Replaced with the absolute pinnacle of modern technology and whatever ‘job’ I did next, because everyone had to have one might make me do some real work and the only thing worse then wasting away touching myself in an old building no one cared about was doing the same thing in a new modern building with people whose ages I couldn’t tell and who’s lingo I could not follow.

  Because despite being physically in my twenties and mentally about the same, younger my mother might have claimed had she still been alive to tell me. I was almost three hundred years old and very few people still lived from before people died of old age. Two hundred and seventy two and I didn’t look a day over 19, I could even pass for someone younger if I tried. Not that I needed or wanted to anymore, it had been fun for a bit but now all I really wanted was someone my age to talk to or a friend and that wasn’t gonna happen with any of the kids who ran around without a thought in their heads.

  Thankfully I was almost there, that mythical three hundred year mark I had always joked about with my friends and siblings back when I had friends and siblings. They had been smarter then me, and right. Living for a long time was really no fun, neither was being young. I had already visited everything I cared to, had all the sex I wanted too, everything I could do I had done sans have a child and that I couldn’t do. I would have made a terrible parent back then and would definitely make a horrible one by today’s standards. Still, what mattered was that I was almost there, what mattered was that in twenty eight years I could die.

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  I would have to kill myself to do it but that was fine, it turns out when your capable of living for as long as you want to once you’ve lived a natural lifespan your allowed to opt out of being alive. It’s not something I would have ever predicted but then again, I also didn’t predict that earth would be ruled by aliens who dropped what could be considered literal magic on our heads then f’ed off into the void as if telling us they were in charge now was enough to solve all of our problems. It worked tho, as after a not so great time Earth entered it’s best time and things only went up from there. It had been great, grand, exciting, amazing and I had been left behind so quickly I still had a hard time working software children who really were six or seven could with ease despite having been around when it was in alpha.

  It was my fault and life really sucked after my last boyfriend had died in a car accident. I had withdrawn into my apartment and not gone out. Just watching all the movies, and movies I had never had time to watch before and finishing all the games I had never been able to. The games that I could get to run at least, more then a few were lost to time as people became less interested in restoring relics and people who claimed to care like myself couldn’t be bothered to take a few years to learn the skill when I had hundreds. So Anime, Movies, Games, Medication, Food delivery, and maintenance man until he became a woman in the most literal sense and that was that. Good for her but I had wanted a penis not to trib.

  I only left the apartment when I happened to see the donation center where I worked was going to be torn down and wala, suddenly I was employed and back in the system again. I hated being alive and with the only thing keeping me alive being a joke goal set over two centuries ago with people whose faces I wouldn’t know if it weren’ for the miracle of photos the real thing keeping me alive was the desire not to go to hell.

  That was a big factor, and I mean did I really believe in God? Surly not, or else why would I spend my time jilling when I could be chilling with the word. The last Bible my mom had brought me sat in a glass case along with other real physical books, but my tablet had a copy in many languages. Some weren’t even human, not that I knew that anymore then I knew ramen was in the ramen package before I opened it. As the book lay just as unopened in my vast digital library just like my ramen sat unopened as I ate a dinner of a single potato and some sausage I could suck on in my empty dirty apartment.

  I was definitely going to hell, not just for the sex, or the lust, the fact I had killed someone or that I didn’t pay tithes or even attend a church. It was that I was very, very unrepentant and didn’t pray. God could and would forgive a lot, what people preached over the years had changed a lot but what I knew remained the same. I knew God existed, therefore if I did not worship I was going to Hell.

  The same way crazy A.I. cultists had known if they didn’t create their memantic threat death machine, they would suffer for not having created it when someone else did. Just the cultist, I was stuck in a no-win situation because my mother had put me in a position to know God existed. Even if to win all I had to do was be a good girl, change my ways and not kill myself in twenty eight years.

  I needed therapy and human contact, I needed both badly. Not someone I met on a dating app who could use me or just to talk about my sad sad life. I needed a therapist who could convince me to be a real person and not just play the part of one and give myself over to pleasure like the hedonist I knew I was. Thankfully my apartment could do that for me. “Find a human therapist and set an appointment please.”

  “Acknowledged” came the reply in the sweet sweet tones of my early 2000’s space RTS simulator

  “And order more Eternia, I’m running low.”

  “Acknowledged”