Baccano:Volume5 ~Immortal - reports on Nile (Excerpts)~
「Immortal: Reports on Nile (Excerpts)」
Author: Victor Talbot (Immortal, of the FBI)
(omitted)
I will refrain from writing my personal thoughts regarding the subject, one "Nile." This is due to the fact that, upon examining the statements he has given, one can easily determine the nuances of his personality.
Statement 1
"I am a king. I was taken in solely for that purpose, and named after the river that was my mother. The archeologist who took me in never gave me a surname, and so I never called him Father."
Statement 2
"Upon gaining eternal life, I found myself gripped by an increasingly powerful fear. A fear that one day, having become a being which knew nothing of death, I would come to forget the concept of other peoples' passing, as well. And so I strode forth onto the battlefield. I journeyed everywhere there was war, resolving to hold death ever close to my side. Even should that death never take me."
Statement 3
"And as the years passed, before my eyes... I beheld a great mountain of corpses. I say this: it was a sight which I had seen so often it was now tiresome.
"But... upon losing those who I had called comrades on the battlefield to death, unable to protect them, I realized a truth. That immortality itself no longer pained me. What would truly send me to my knees would be the time to come when everyone but myself would some day succumb to death and I would be swallowed in complete darkness.
"It was no different. Not one bit. Though I thought that losing those dear to me one by one would be the tragedy of immortality, I learned that that thought was little more than folly. Immortal or mortal, there was no difference whatsoever. The number of losses meant nothing. It was always the same.
"Yet... there was one thing that had changed. My face. I cried out at my own helplessness. I thought that my mind would explode from rage, or be crushed by sadness. But the face that stared back at me from the lake's mirrored surface was... nearly expressionless, with only a hint of sourness about it.
"I was terrified. To think that throwing myself into war in order to remember death, to continue to exist as a human... would instead result in becoming inured to death itself. And that is why I am afraid. Afraid to look upon my own face with my own eyes."
The subject, who came to me during the Cold War, gave his account in an exhausted voice and vanished. Instead of arresting him, I laughed calmly and sent him on his way.
...In the end, submitting this report would end up jeopardizing my position, so as of this moment I will make this report my secret diary. I'm just not cut out for this stuff. Shit, shit, shit. Those god damn... (what follows is endless griping about FBI executives)
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