Psychological impact of being immortal

Imagine a meta-human, one engineered to be immortal. A combination of cybernetic enhancements, genetic engineering, and other scientific modifications have made it so this human will not die from aging, and is very hard to kill. They are designed to be a magnificent soldier, and if they start suffering psychological issues, it's intended that their mind can be fiddled with to "fix" them.

Things happen. Rebellion, war, apocalypse, shifting society, new laws - There's so many ways it could happen. End result: This immortal is now free. The cost? There are no others like them.

Further Information:

• Said Immortal views themselves, being immortal, a bit abhorrent to begin with, the results of people playing with things they shouldn't be playing with. They are, however, areligious. Not atheistic, exactly, just not worried about the question of religion at all.
• Given the above, this Immortal would reject anything akin to worship. Not that it would stop some people.
• This Immortal was designed to function in both a communal setting and an individual setting - Being a soldier, they should be able to play well with squadmates, chains of command, and the like, but they also need to be able to function alone for an extended duration. Personality wise, they tend to be more of a loner.
• Similar to this question, HOWEVER, I am not worrying about the outside world, more of how it would affect the Immortal's mind.

Given this setup, what sort of psychological impact would this have, over the span of centuries or millenia, and how would this affect the Immortal's actions/character? I'm looking for <1500 years. Beyond that and society tends to do strange, unpredictable things.

Things I am NOT looking for:

• Biological/genetic/etc implications. I'm not interested in the how - That's the scope for another question, perhaps. I'm also not interested in biological effects, such as being a carrier for diseases, etc. Again, another question.
• Creating more Immortals as the solution. The plot involves said Immortal being strongly against the creation of more immortals. See Further Information above.

posted about 7 years ago

Andon‭

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