Well, if you’re immortal and can regenerate yourself, every 30-40 years or so fake your death with lots of blood and gore. Use makeup, age yourself, and change your appearance slightly and wait a couple years after your death to reemerge as the distant cousin.
Darling, if you are as old as I am you realize moving around too much can catch notice. You have to start over numerous times over the centuries, making new ‘friends’ etc.
Besides don’t you think we already have a network in place to help us deal with this? There are enough of us out there that we can do this. Just a few government officials in our pockets, a few hackers etc (though we did not have to deal with this years ago. It was so much easier in the dark ages, which weren’t all that dark.)
[sub]Hehehe this could be a Vampire: the Masquerade thing too.[/sub]
Actually, XPav, in Kage’s Baker’s The Company series, one of the characters does just that for over 400 years. Read Mendoza in Hollywood* to learn more about it.
Moving around a lot is good, especially if you move between countries.
Of course, in re: Sandman, a couple of approaches sugges themselves.
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Mad Hettie - in other words, just be crazy and homeless, and tell anyone who you want to, since they will (correctly) regard you as a homeless crazy person. This is not optimal.
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become an attorney. Make a pretense of representing a “client” who is, in fact, yourself. This is much more likely to succeed than the old conceit of leaving property to a random “nephew”, since it is much less likely to raise suspicions, and also because many nations recognize an atorney-client privelege that would interfere with casual investigation by the authorities. (semi-implied to be what Bernie Carpax did before the wall got him).
There is a SciFi book which talks about this:
“Way Station” Clifford Simak
As I recall, a human is operating a way station for aliens to use as they travel around. He does not age if he stays within the boundries of the property.
A scientific magazine discovers he has been a subscriber for some unusual number of years and they contact the guy to try to find out whether he has renewed a parent’s subscription or what.
slight hijack, but in The Picture of Dorien Grey I don’t think it was completely clear that he was actually not ageing, possibly just a mental thing. Carry on
Speaking of Dorian Grey, as I’ve stated elsewhere in these forums, as time goes on I am more and more open to the possibility that Stephen Fry is Oscar Wilde, and there’s a real horrorshow portrait of him mildewing in an attic somewhere.
So why dontcha ask him? He makes it look easy, the cheeky bugger.
Go to Time’s Square on New Year’s Eve and appear on national TV counting backwards as the ball drops. At least, that’s how Dick Clark does it.
There is an excellent book by Poul Anderson called “The Boat of a Million Years” about this very thing. Basically if I recall correctly the immortals in that book just kept moving around, staged the occasional ‘death’… returning years later as the adult ‘child’ or ‘grandchild’ of the deceased when memories were dimmer. They’d salt money around everywhere in case they had to make a quick exit. It’s a great book, I highly recommend it.
And always remember how Duncan MacLeod made his money in the original Highlander movie: antiques. Easy enough for a patient immortal-buy a bunch of stuff in the present, keep it in a warehouse in good condition for a few decades, then sell it as a collectible.
And there’s always the method that an immortal (Well, more like…obviously undead. REALLY obviously.) character of mine used to manage his paperwork: he just used his real birth date and personal information, but only renewed his driver’s licence, etc. in a highly liberal part of California, where everyone was too polite/politically correct to make an issue of it. This was in a very silly story of mine, needless to say.
No, I read this recently. The entire point is that he sells his soul to remain eternally youthful. He never ages a day from that point on, and soon, people begin to notice. The picture of him, however begins to age in his stead, and as he sins, it gets uglier and nastier to reflect the state of his soul.
Of course, when he destorys the picture, it all catches up with him.
This presumes you’re a man, but you could do the following:
Find women of the night to impregnate every two decades or so. Once the woman has given birth, have your manservant do away with her. Make a big deal of having your new son at the castle. Make certain that the villagers know through gossip. Sell the child into slavery in a faraway land, and then, when the child would have been 25 years old, introduce yourself to society as the child.
Tell the others in the village that your father has passed, and you are free at last to leave the castle as you choose. You now have a good ten years on the outside before you go back into hiding in order to “raise” a new “heir”.
As for the manservant, he will come from a family that has served you for hundred’s of years.
And you’ll need to falsify death records for the supposedly deceased antecedents. I recommend homeless people from a large city as stand-ins. The proper payoffs will get the proper notarization on the death certificates.
Yes, I understand it’s a bloodthirsty business, but I suppose one’s perspective changes when one never ages.
Another thing you could do is dye your hair once in awhile and maybe wear glasses sometimes.
You get to ignore the problems of identification up until a hundred years ago. My father’s actual birth certificate was written on a prescription blank. “Infant son, born to . . . . . on sep 17, 1913.” And an illegible scrawl. It was enough to get him a top secret military job.
So, seeing it coming, after a thousand years or so, you begin with a family having some hard times, early in the depression. You set em up with their mortgage, and a regular stipend. Then you get a really bad doctor, and you have him give you birth certificates and death certificates, for the family, of extra children. Then, you give the kids money to “Run off” in the traditional American way, and set themselves up around several countries. By the time new technology gets all these records collated, you have half a dozen fictitious families, and can farm them for new identities as needed, and get your old ones retired to the family farm when necessary. After a while, Doc Useless signs the death certificate, and you dig a grave in the family plot.
Every time you hear of a country having a revolution, you send agents to set up a new set of families. The records are lost in the revolution, you see. But the family keeps their own bible, and there you are, born just thirty years ago. The DNA thing gets sticky, so you stay out of really high tech societies for as long as you can.
Tris
“Beware the fury of a patient man.” ~ John Dryden ~
Work in the goverment’s record division. Set it up so that you still have access after you have left and it would be easy. As long as you don’t leave anything behind that could be tied to you there would be nothing to arouse suspicion.
Or just claim that you are a clone of (insert your name here) who just died. Pretty soon that could actually be accepted.
That’s easy. Just create a trust fund to hold these properties.
Antiques are good but stocks are better for this day and age. First of all, you need to hold the antiques for at least a hundred years if not more. Then you need to be a bit lucky with your purchases - paintings, stamps, china, etc. Stocks are better because they appreciate in value faster. Just make sure your trust fund holds them.
Oh, create the trust fund in some country such as the Bahamas or British Virgin Islands so nobody can see your records.
Heh - I have to wonder how aggressive an immortal would be in his portfolio. I mean, how many huge upheavals has he seen in the last 2000 years, and thus how confident would he be in the latest investment scheme? Likely he’d still be stinging from the Tulip bust of the 1600’s.
He’d invest in real-estate. Definitely. Problem is, that’s the most tracable as well. But keep it diversified, and sell it to your “son” every 40 years and you’re set.
If the Immortal is a vampire, how would they travel around so much with limited hours due to sunshine?
Air travel would be problematic for long haul flights ( departing at night, but arriving in the morning and traveling by coffin in luggage does not contain any appeal for me.)
I’d like to think that an Immortal could be a doctor who floats around from Hospital to hospital over the years offering excellent care and bed side service, kinda like Jarod from The Pretender.
Or working as a Norm Abrams type, a know it all , fix it all carpenter, jack of all trades…hey…notice how Norm doesn’t really age…?
Nobody asked you to keep your stocks for centuries 
Oops sorry about leaking your secret there.
- get good at computers, hack new identities.
- buy a house in a stable location.
- set up a trust for the house.
- establish a “family” cross country. (my estranged brother in calif.)
- become a bit of a recluse.
- join the sdmb for social ties.
- every now and then stage a death.
- have “cousin” opal from cross county inherit the house.
- rinse, lather, repeat.