So he told me all about it, the Horsemen, the murder and pillage and rape, the being gods among men and immortals alike, destroying gods visiting destruction on village after village, wiping out tribes of people. And he told me of how it never got old, killing--the thrill of deciding who lives, and who dies. I didn't understand, or think it important. I don't have four thousand years of immortality behind me, and I wasn't there. Perhaps the world was different then--or perhaps it was exactly the same. Drive-bys, gangs, mass suicide of cults, mass genocide of peoples, the world may have always been this way, twenty centuries B.C. or twenty centuries A.D. Short and nasty and brutal for mortals, long and nasty and brutal for immortals, and that only if we played it right.
I mulled it over, from what he saw as the "glory days," to Methos' betrayal, and the eventual demise of the Horsemen. I began to understand, almost against my will. Something bigger than oneself. A sense of purpose, even if evil. But all the same, my heart was breaking within me--here was a desire for power and control so extreme--but wouldn't that be the way? Extremely old--extreme passions.
No way to relate it to myself. That disk I had in the safe deposit box began as a plan, however misguided, to "fix" mankind. It seemed so simple, after all. A simple cold virus. A few separated strands of RNA, my immortal RNA. A strand of information designed to mutate the human genome. I hoped to make immortality contagious. Transferrable.
Instead, I created a Type-4 virus that could wipe out millions. The virus replicated itself at a disturbing rate, mocking the immune system, eventually driving it to consume its host. I closed my eyes, picturing the poor creatures who first got a taste of my so-called "gift." My best intentions. A potential Armageddon. I could not do more harm even if I desired to. What difference if I followed him into this folly? It was not as if he had a plan.
And then he said something that made me take full notice, to re-evaluate him, to bring him back into my full esteem--
"It doesn't even have to be used, the threat of it is enough."
"What do you mean? For threatening Mankind?"
That astonishing look again, the wheels that turned so deliberately. He possessed something subtle in that dark soul of his after all.
"For testing Methos."
Ah, so it did keep getting back to the old one, after all.
Posted on Apr 22, 1999, 10:31 PM from IP address 207.103.36.70