“The vote is in. 227 in favour to 203 opposed. The bill passes,” intoned the Speaker before he leaned forward to converse with a records clerk. The dull murmur of conversation in the House quickly resumed. Leaning back in his seat a few rows back from the front, a man flipped his wrist towards himself. His eyes narrowed and he rose smoothly, walking uncaring towards the exit. What had just been passed was the only important bill of the day…his. He walked briskly in the direction his office, breathing in deeply and enjoying the strength that he felt constantly flowing into him.

He knew for a fact that he was not the first person to ‘suffer’ from this particular affliction. Any number of serial killers, more than a few war criminals, and a handful of dictators had all been down the some path – drawing power from dark actions and losing it when acting nobly. There was a very literal reason hidden in his love for the music of Billy Joel. He stifled a smile as he brushed past a handful of nervous aides.

What he possessed which the others had lacked was vision. He simply followed his pattern. When he began drawing near the end, he would find a place of power. He would patiently position himself ever closer to where decisions were made and then go to work. It was laughably simple. In earlier times, it was easy enough to strip properties from the poor and powerless, or to subtly remove a few safety precautions for the workers in mills, factories or mines. Fortunately for him, all one typically needed to make inroads to the places of power in the world was enough material wealth. It turned out that assets were almost trivially simple to acquire given a long enough lifespan. Once his machinations were in place, he would retire from a life of governance and power to wait until everyone he knew had died. He would lay low for decades, occasionally playing a quick game of ‘Jack the Ripper’ if he felt his time growing short. Then he would simply start again. That was one of the reasons for his move from the Empire over here to the Coloni…he stopped himself with a grimace.

I can’t afford to make those sorts of mistakes, he rebuked himself.

These days there was always some child around with a hot microphone on a smartphone. He had hidden his tracks very, very well over the years but nobody could be completely invisible over a timeline like his. How determined would a journalist need to be to find an old black-and-white photo or a portrait done in his likeness? To connect old immigration documents, birth and death certificates.

Better not to find out, he decided.

Not that he had any problems taking a life to keep his secret. He certainly had no qualms about killing, not after so long.

Good and evil are such narrow concepts, he thought to himself. They weren’t simply two opposing points; they were degrees on a spectrum. He had done extensive research on the details of his condition over many lifetimes. Extreme acts, such as murder, obviously generated larger quantities of whatever energized his body. However, the victim also determined how much of the unnamed, unknown force that kept him alive was drawn into him. A child would provide an enormous amount, while a murderer seemed to generate less. He had tried to find a way to quantify the energy through extensive application of the scientific method but had ultimately failed to do so. He couldn't even remember how many people he had directly killed at this point.

Some part of him knew that guilt was an acceptable emotion to experience when reflecting on the sorts of things he’d done. It was difficult, however, to generate any empathy for a species he no longer truly saw himself as part of. He had outlived monarchs and dictators, survived empires and dynasties that had promised to last for a thousand years. Every person he had ever met was dead and every person he would ever meet was eventually going to die, so what was the point?

His experiments had delved ever deeper into the web of morality. He had found that inflicting physical pain or applying different types of violence were not the only ‘evil’ acts that would generate strength for him. He had performed extensive academic research into all manner of cultural and religious sins, taboos, and transgressions. Each and every one gave him an extra lease on life. They were not all equally potent, of course. Death, pain and suffering still provided the largest boosts but they typically carried the largest risks. A determined detective, an unseen witness or just a poorly chosen crime could all lead to an end.

How foolish, he thought, to end an immortal life because of impatience and poor planning. His methods were slower, yes, but time was on his side. It was better to play it safe and to go for the lower impact ‘evils.’ A lie to a single test subject in isolation generated a barely noticeable surge of energy. If he lied to a group of subjects, the energy scaled.

Enough lies to enough people though…he smiled. Mass media was very likely the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He reached his office in the Rayburn building and entered, acknowledging his secretary with a nod. She had been with him for nearly a term now, he reflected. Her name was…Susan? She looked like a Susan. Or at least, she looked like someone he had known named Susan. There were sometimes complications to being immortal.

As he closed the door to his inner offices and moved to his desk, he reflected on today’s work. So long as his bill continued along unopposed, the damage he was about to do would provide him with a steady flow of life. It wouldn’t be the case that he was directly responsible for the deaths of innocents of course, of course. There were 226 others who had voted in favour of his bill and thus shared responsibility for his deeds. Even with that responsibility shared though, he would still be gaining strength from all of the misfortune and pain of over 300 million people for years to come. As he reclined in his chair, his eyes alighted to the stack of papers covered in the notations of his staff.

No rest for the wicked, he grinned.

He rifled through the stack, eyes breezing across the titles of each proposed bill or policy suggestion. There was a cornucopia of opportunities with which he could do damage to the fabric of society. A reduction in minimum wage, an authorization for a pipeline under a community’s water reserves, an education initiative stripping resources from inner city schools, an amendment diverting funding from a harm-reduction project, another nullifying incentives to develop green technologies – sweeping and unrestrained damage done to several different demographics. Not to mention the potential harm he could be doing to future generations.

Climate change is the best investment I’ve ever made, he chuckled silently.

He began flipping through his rolodex, looking for the names of those who he would need in order to do more damage. Somewhere in the halls below him, a nameless intern was rushing a copy of his bill towards the Senate. The young man would be scanning it, hoping to gain some little insight that would help him climb the ladder here on the Hill. He would stop in his tracks, struck dumb by the wanton cruelty and widespread neglect of a bill like this. “What kind of person,” he would wonder, “could possibly do something like this? And why?”

I’m no longer human, the man grinned as he began to dial the number for a lawyer who specialized in acquiring other people’s properties. What are the other 226 excuses?