My name…my real name…is Jesse Ericson.

I remember it mostly because I kept my original drivers license.  It’s yellowed and faded, but I make a copy and laminate it once a year on my birthday (also on the license, another reason I keep it) and alternately leave it in one of three safety deposit boxes under the aliases I can’t forget.

You’d forget stuff like that too, after more than 50 different identities, and 623 years.

Yeah, you read that right.  623 years.  I’m not lying or telling tall tales (a colloquialism that sadly went out of style a few centuries ago).  I’m just saying.

Which I guess brings me to my next point: WHY am I just saying?

It’s a little bit of boredom.  After living that long, I’ve had quite a few hobbies and most of them have stopped being fun.  It’s a little bit because, even though I’m not sure exactly how yet, eventually I will die. I guess.  Mostly, I hope to inspire you.  Maybe both of us.  Because after six centuries, I’m still not totally sure just what I’d like to inspire you to do.

I was born in 1979 (thank you, drivers license) and I suppose my early years were fairly normal.  But then in the early part of the 21st Century, scientists discovered a technique called CRISPR which, unfortunately, did NOT have anything to do with making better fried chicken.  It stood for "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats" and it was the next "Wave of the Future".  I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ll give you a little bit of background.

Scientists figured out that there were these repeating segments of DNA that signaled when a person was exposed to a virus.  Long story short, the DNA remembers and uses this to heal itself when it comes into contact with the next generation of virus or infection.  It was hailed as the cure for all diseases and genetic abnormalities and all this other stuff.  Which it was, actually.  Scientists figured out how to do all kinds of neat and cool things.  But scientists are also fairly public folk.  Governed by rules and regulations and either pushed forward or held back by public opinion.  So there were a lot of ethical concerns and people shouting about playing God, so it only went so far.  Mostly.

At the same time there was a pretty big movement toward Do It Yourself science.  The internet made knowledge easily accessible and pretty much free.  Lab equipment, or schematics for it, became cheap and easy to come by.  Do It Yourself sites sprung up like weeds, and there are geniuses everywhere.  You didn’t need a doctorate to know how to do some of this stuff anymore.  Genetics was demystified.  And I was bored even back then.

So I dabbled.  I built centrifuges.  I made a polymerase chain reaction machine.  I did things the scientists wouldn’t, because I could.  No one was concerned with what some ’backyard biochemistry enthusiast’ could do, as long as I didn’t get my hands on anything that could be made into a biological weapon.  Which I didn’t because killing people wasn’t the goal.  I thought at first that I was doing all this because I needed the one thing you couldn’t buy - Time.  Time to learn the meaning of it all, maybe.  The point to the whole exercise we call Life.  Discover or rediscover some fundamental truth that would transform human consciousness.  I think now, maybe I was just scared.  Death is so…final. 

So anyway, I created a gene by splicing some stuff from different animals and even plants that I discovered had some special properties, and I introduced it into what was called a ’viral vector’.  Basically it’s a virus that has this gene inside of it and when the virus gets in your body and tries to make more of itself by hijacking the DNA of your white blood cells, instead it inserts this gene.  Trouble is, like all good viruses, it mutated a little.  Unforeseen.  Oops.  And now, here I am.

You would not believe how difficult it is to live forever.  Seriously.  Everyone is going to want what you have, and what a mess that would make.  Could you imagine?  Right now we have water and food shortages, ever shrinking natural resources.  What do you think would happen if nobody died?  Or what if some bat-crap crazy dictator got a hold of it?  Or a branch of the military?  Yeah…all these were questions I probably should have asked myself before I did what I did and became Patient Zero.  Zero because about six months after I figured all that out, I burned everything I made and disappeared for a bit.  Well about sixty years, but the term ’a bit’ gets real fluid after half a millennium.

But now I figure it’s time to start telling this story.  Not the technical bits, obviously, because I burned them…and my long term memory was never built to be quite so…well…long term.  But the more important bits.  My life.  My legacy.  And how I’m either going to save the world with this little memoir, or burn it to the ground.  Hopefully, by the end of writing it, I’ll know which one it’ll be…and whether or not I care.