The truth was, life didn't go on forever. A thief was following your trail, and one day, sooner or later, he would catch up to you. One day, you would lose it all.

No man alive knew this better than Clarence Corley, for no one had thought as long or as hard about immortality.
Through the panoramic window in his study, he looked at his home. 600 kilometres away, the Earth filled almost half of the sky, and the band of blue stretching from Oahu to Beijing could break your heart with its beauty.
It took about an hour and a half to circle the planet, from dawn to dawn. The light hitting Corley's eyes had been reflected off the snows of the Himalayas just a fraction of a second ago.

In a position such as Corley's, life on Earth could become tiresome as well as dangerous. With new industries and new products constantly developing, he was always on the edge of breaking some law or other, or offending those holding political power. Old laws required a lot of time to catch up to new technology, he had noted. People, in some cases, required even more.
In the long haul, and with the ever-growing number of enemies swearing blood oaths to avenge themselves on him, taking up residence in space had seemed like the sober thing to do.

With Corley's engineering skills, industrial- and cybernetics expertise and massive capital, it had taken him five years.
He called it Ishtar, and it had become his new home. Save for occasional visitors, the usual radio and cable broadcasts and monthly space shuttle supply runs, he was separated from life on Earth. The space station didn't have any extradition treaties. In fact, very few people down there even knew Corley's current whereabouts, and that was the way he wanted it.

Still, he thought as Scandinavia and Western Europe passed before his eyes, Ishtar had not been good enough. Ever since his construction of Jiveshield so many years ago, Corley had spent his life amassing power and contemplating time. The more power you have, he'd found, the more you crave. In the end, power and time were connected, because all men are equal in death.
He had little understanding for people who carelessly threw their lives away in pursuit of money. All the gold and all the gems in the world would last far longer than the flesh of those who desired them. Corley had known then as he knew now, that Death was the greatest thief of all, and would take everything you owned in the end.

Slowly, he had begun to take steps. Corley Cybernetics had diversified into areas less connected with national security, and had spawned a subsidiary, Corley Cryogenics. In this day and age, the afterlife was big business. Several companies had appeared who appealed to the kind of people who, in former times, would have requested their remains be scattered over whichever town, mountain or ocean they held as favourite place in the world.
Now, you could instead arrange for your ashes to circumnavigate the world forever - or as close to forever that mattered to most people. What happened was that upon death and cremation, your ashes would be taken care of and compressed into this miniature version of a bier, onto which was embossed your name and your dates, a short memorial verse, and a religious symbol of your choice. Your Earthly remains, along with hundreds of similar miniature coffins, would then be launched into space and dumped at an intermediate altitude. There, in the Van Allen radiation belt, far from the overcrowded geosynchronous orbit, your ashes would be left to triumphantly circle the planet of your birth for millions of years, regardless of what was happening down there.

It was a decent sales pitch. Since the start, thousands of high-ranking individuals had willed their remains into orbit, creating something of a space-age cemetery up there.
Corley, on his side, had been appalled at how lowly a degree of immortality these deceased worthies had been content to settle for. All that which was you is atomized in cremation, and then for good measure boosted up and left to slowly fry in the proton blizzard of the Van Allen belt.
Out of remains such as these, you would be lucky to have even an extremely advanced civilization being able to reconstruct you - if they ever came close enough to Earth to find you in the first place.
No, he had thought. This was fools being separated from their money. No doubt about that. But this gruesome, space-age afterlife service had given him the idea: this final, great idea.
How much better wouldn't it have been, he thought when he pondered all those ash coffins, if, instead of your ashes, a few of your cells could be preserved in the same way. You wouldn't even have to bother dying first, you could just scrape some tissue off the palm of your hand. With real, living cells up there, high up, beyond the radiation belts, your DNA would be kept intact. That way, alien molecular biologists - or their terrestrial counterparts of the far future - could one day be able to reconstruct you - to clone you, as it were - from scratch. You would rub your eyes, stretch, and wake up in the year ten million.

But there was a risk. The body, and the brain especially, started deteriorating extremely fast once the intake of oxygen and flow of blood had stopped. If he was dead, Corley would be at the mercy of someone else, and would have to count on them to freeze him as quickly as possible. And even if they did, you just never knew what the consequences might be.
As it were, it would make much more sense to freeze the body just before the onset of death, to make absolutely sure no time was wasted. Also, since you had never actually died, this should make eventual resuscitation a lot more likely.

Although - and now the entire idea had played out before him in all its splendor - if willing to go that far, why then only just before death? Suppose you knew you had only a year or two to live. Wouldn't it be better to go frozen immediately, before the body weakened too much? And even then, once you had gotten seriously ill, you would always be at risk. Suppose you woke up after millennia of deep freeze, only to die a year later from a melanoma or some other disease about which the extraterrestrials knew nothing.
No. There could only be one conclusion to this matter. You would have to go while still perfectly healthy, before disease and old age could get you, on a one-way journey to the stars. Far from the solar system, temperatures would fall to a few degrees above absolute zero. There would be no need for external refrigeration - although if something should happen on the way there, it would be wise to bring it along either way - just in case.

Corley remebered how he had halted at this point in his logic, and come to his final realization: Since it would take him a few years to reach the interstellar cold, and since he would bring his own cryogenics system with him to be on the safer side either way, why not then stay awake for the show? Why not stay conscious to experience the ride and see what no man had seen before?
Why not, by God. Through getting quick-frozen only when about to leave the solar system, you would also minimize the time you would have to depend on the cryogenics, in case they didn't work as well as they should.

Yes, Corley mused from his chair aboard Ishtar. Power and time were connected, because all men are equal in death. That single fact is why the kings of the ancient world built monuments to themselves, to stand as a reminder of their presence once they themselves were gone.
But even that could not last forever. The elements would erode the monuments, foreign powers would conquer and obliterate all that the previous kings had accomplished, their very names might well be forgotten in the annals of time. And - most important - no matter how you looked at it, the kings themselves were irrevocably dead as doornails.
No, this was more elegant, more beautiful, more satisfying. Corley had found a way out. He would cheat Death, and evade the greatest thief of all.

At the stroke of midnight, rocket enginges flamed on a sizeable auxiliary craft docked to Ishtar. It rapidly achieved escape velocity, and disappeared out into space. No one on Earth would ever see or hear from Clarence Corley again.

The Methuselah, as he had named it, was not equipped with a radio. He no longer wished to know what happened on Earth. No business reports, no cheering, no disasters, no nothing. Corley was alone with his thoughts, and that was the way he wanted it. In case anything went wrong, the cryogenics would be activated with the flick of a switch. Until then, he had a well-stocked collection of his favourite literature, music and video. He would not be lonely.

In about two years, he would fall into the gravitational well of Jupiter, be slingshot around the great planet, and then flung out into the vast, cold sea of interstellar space. For a day or so, he knew, he would have a view that far surpassed even the one from his study onboard Ishtar. A close-up of the swirling, multicoloured clouds of Jupiter, and perhaps even the famous Great Red Spot.
He had done some thinking about this. If it was only about the view, he would have preferred Saturn and its rings. He would have loved those rings at slingshot speed. But Saturn was at least another two years off, and with its smaller size and lower density, it could not accelerate him up to the same speeds as Jupiter. All things considered, it was an unnecessary risk.
When pursuing immortality, chance was your greatest enemy. There was so much effort to be put in, and on one, single mistake, you could lose it all.

At the velocity the Methuselah would be facing, it would take ten thousand years to reach even the nearest star system. When you're frozen to a few degrees above absolute zero, though, you can afford to be patient. There were so many stars out there, and so little was known about them. It could take him hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years to encounter any kind of intelligence.
But one fine day - he was sure of it - his funeral bark would by chance either enter someone else's solar system, or be intercepted somewhere in the darkness between the stars, and other beings - very advanced, very far-seeing - would take him aboard, and they would know what had to be done.
He was close now. So close to avoiding the great thief and achieving immortality he could almost feel it. No one who ever lived on Earth had come this close before.

And so it was, that Clarence Solomon Corley, 56 years old, with three scars on his body and an IQ of 179, set out on his long journey to the stars, surpassing the Pharaohs, besting Alexander, and outshining the Caesars.
Like the Phoenix, he had contrived his own resurrection. He would live forever.