Storytime: The Secret to Immortality

Now that I’m an international sensation for being immortal, I already have 4 book deals scheduled, 2 of which are already best-sellers due to pre-orders alone:
How to Become Immortal in Three (Not-So-Easy) Steps
Immortality for Dummies
The Secret of Eternal Youth
Death Can’t Keep Me Down: His First Autobiography
Of course, I’ll go over my methodology here briefly, but for the full story and details, you’ll have to buy the book(s). Here’s how I learned how to be immortal:

Sure, it takes money. Lots of it. But that’s only one of the tools to achieving true immortality; you can’t just buy eternal life in one afternoon. Simply put, you have to work your way up to surviving death. Train yourself in small increments, like immunizing yourself from a disease: inject yourself with smaller, less virulent strains of it. Of course, the “secret” in this case is devising the less virulent strains. Most people think I just survived a car accident, then recovered after a gun shot to the face, and pretty soon I was able to survive any type of physical injury. That’s where they’re wrong.

To be immortal, in the literal sense, not the figurative “my life story will live on after I’ve died” sense, you don’t strengthen your immunity to increasingly deadly accidents. You have to build up your tolerance to death itself. Your death. Starting “small” and fictional: it’s easy enough to self-publish (through a vanity press) a novel in which you are the main character and die at the end of the book. However, that’s just where you start. Gradually building up, you can pull the strings to have your own obituary published in a major metropolitan newspaper. Although I never did it, you could probably name a puppy after yourself, and then kill it. But I didn’t; I took the fast track to surviving death: sponsor a terminally-ill patient. For enough money, a one-month-left-to-live cancer patient with a family too poor to foot the bills will legally change his or her name to match yours. Take your identity. Talk like you talk; wear your clothes. You’d be surprised how much money it took for him to ignore his own family, responding only to people I knew. He knew.

You may or may not remember me in last year’s highest-grossing action movie, where I had a walk-on/cameo role, only to be shot 2 seconds later as one of the numerous characters killed in the film. It took some finagling, but my character was billed “as Himself” in the credits.

Once you’ve built up a tolerance to surviving fictional deaths, faking your death is the logical conclusion. Except that it isn’t a conclusion, merely the next step in a long road. You won’t believe how difficult it is to fake your own death 7 times, and still have everyone at the eulogy bawling their eyes out in honest belief of your demise, none-the-wiser. It makes it a lot easier if you start fresh after each time, moving to a new city, taking up a new job, making new friends.

Before you know it, you’ll be crying with them. You’ll believe you’re dead. And that’s when you can let them in on the secret. It’s tempting to pull a jesus-rising stunt, for the publicity and to recoup your losses. But less than half of those 7 billion people will believe that. If you do it for real, no stigmatic strings attached, you can get them all to believe. Because it’ll be true.

Now I just have to teach them how to use birth-control. With all these people not dying, it’s gonna get crowded pretty fast.