Hi gang, here's my first contribution to hl_chronicles's celebration of Highlander. The prompt was 'Twenty Years: The Immortal Perspective'. PG-13 for mild swearing and a world-weary viewpoint.

From a Distance

Methos sighed and clicked the refuse button on another request to be poked by one of his fellow postgrads that had popped up in the corner of his screen. Keeping ‘off the grid’ was hard, especially in the academic community, but he’d be buggered if he was going to get sucked into any of the inanities of social networking.

Social networking. The phrase was a joke. Millions of people, across the globe all Twittering and poking each other and yet he’d been sat in a room with a group of entirely silent teenagers who, instead of just talking to each other, were all too busy texting and updating their status. If the human race wasn’t careful, they’d all forget how to talk.

The world had become smaller, dangerously so. It was still possible to remain invisible, if one so chose, but the Information Age had crept into every detail of daily life making things very difficult for those who wanted to operate under the radar.

Nobody used cheques in the UK anymore and more and more people used plastic instead of cash; there was already talk of phasing out the smaller denomination coins. Business and personal correspondence was almost entirely electronic. Hell, he’d even completed his final year exams on a computer and most of the ancient texts he’d read were electronic copies. Books were a dying species.

You couldn’t walk down the street without being caught on CCTV, but that was fine as long as he didn’t do anything to catch the attention of the authorities. Far more dangerous were the camera phones and the public’s incessant need to capture everything and post it on YouTube. He’d set up a keyword search to ping any video that featured swords, beheading and lightning that had thankfully so far yielded nothing to be worried about.

Generally he enjoyed these periods; maybe once or twice in a millennium humankind made sudden and great advances in technology. He was currently living through such a golden age of advancement, although you wouldn’t know it for all the complaining people were doing.

It hadn’t been much different in the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution or any of the other periods of so called enlightenment; the poor were poor and downtrodden, the rich got richer and fatter, people got killed by war and disease. Only difference was now anybody with a blog could piss and moan about it for the entire world to see.

Humanity had more freedom that it had ever had. Westerners were free to worship who they wanted, vote for who they wanted, work where they wanted, all with very few restrictions no matter their gender, nationality, sexuality. They were so free that most of them didn’t know what to do with it.

This too would pass, and there would still be Methos.

One day, probably not long from now given the signs he was seeing, this iteration of civilisation would come crashing down around its ears. Nations would fall and new allegiances rise in its place.

Perhaps the people, scared of freedom, would retreat to organised religion and let the strictures of their faith make decisions for them. Perhaps a far right group would become organised enough to make a real political difference and those who were now so free would once more be persecuted.

Whatever happened, he’d kick back with a beer and watch it burn. Then he’d watch as once more they began to pick up the pieces. It was always the same song, only the lyrics changed.

And Methos hates to dance to any drum but his own.