the children's immortality project
While the majority of the content on this site is rated PG-13 and is SFW, this article itself is uniquely rated R. It contains references to fears about p//rn, cults, the exploitation of children, gore, and r//pe. None of that actually shows up, but we worried about it at the time. It’s a long story, and it involves 4chan. Proceed with that in mind…
Humans have inherited a huge challenge....we have inherited a life and some unexplored ability to keep it.
We as a group are perpetuating, through beliefs of limitation, our responsibility to ourselves and all others..... to deal with our collective inherited mortality resolution possibility.
Further, children have inherited the tendency to become like those who are here now. Within that their life potential is being widely subverted. Education and art can do much to change this tragedy into a miracle of unknown size.
When humans propagate they create both life and death for another innocent being who will come into physical existence to learn about manifestation from those around them.
In the era before Mandatory Immortality this is a death sentence called life.
Humanity wrote a law about pre-meditated murder and this definitely fits that description.
With everyone hypnotized to act as if this intention is sufficient, the children have no protection from this era of rationalized deathwish imposition.....UNTIL NOW!!!(clarification link)
Introductory text for Physical-Immortality.com, a website (amongst many) created by Robert Ray Hedges of the Children’s Immortality Project.
If everyone born is destined to die, is bringing life into this world premeditated murder? I really don't believe so, but Robert Ray Hedges did. And so, the question takes us to 4chan, circa February 2010...
Perhaps you read 4chan and shudder reflexively, and that’s quite understandable. These sites often garnered controversy for their association with right wing politics, pointless online cruelty, and poorly-planned, cliché jokes. A lot of people have valid reasons for disliking 4chan, and I won’t pretend otherwise. At the same time, this image fails to encompass what 4chan actually is (or, rather was, in the late 2000s).
4chan’s big, and has a lot of different areas, focusing on many different topics. Subject matter ranges from papercraft (the /po/ board) to ghosts ( the /x/ board - more about that soon). A lot of these boards have nothing to do with politics or the kind of awfulness usually associated with the site. In the late 2000s, when I visited 4chan frequently, I hung out on /x/.
/x/ focused on the “paranormal” allegedly. You probably know it (if at all) as the birthplace of creepypasta. Threads about that (and about general paranormal phenomena, paganism, and the occult) drew me to the board over and over. Nowadays, a cursory glance tells me the place has changed a bit, but back then, you could find a lot of strange, interesting stuff there.
Creepypasta was always on the menu on /x/, and sometimes unfiction or alternate reality games, such as the ones promoting The Dark Knight in 2008. Sometimes, us /x/philes (as we called ourselves at the time) would come across (what seemed to be, at least) a real-life mystery, though. One such mysterious subject was the Children’s Immortality Project, which us /x/philes investigated on and off, but never really came to any clear understanding of.
Here’s a link to the site. Well, one site, that is. There were many.
To say that the Children’s Immortality Project was a series of websites would be a massive understatement. It was practically a filing cabinet full of pages, all packed with similar text, and all posted online. Robert Ray Hedges, the man behind these sites, referred to this as a project to “take over the internet” in the name of immortalizing children. Ambitious, even in 2009. The text on the sites made little sense, but, of course, referenced the desire to create a project to make children immortal.
They all focused on the remarkably simple thesis. This man believed that it was cruel and wrong to bring children to life only to die. In other words, if one is born to die, why live at all?
Antinatalism? Not quite. He also seemed to believe that, were children raised unaware of death itself, they might, in fact, become immortal. Robert was keen on using his websites to “take over the internet” and somehow solve the problem of death entirely, either by stopping children from learning about it, through technology, or some other means.
Mandatory Physical Immortality gives all Children their Right to Life; Their Eternal Physical Life!
Be The Truth, with Love and Evolving Clarity intentionearing Sedona Psychic Readings
In the near future, when it's no longer considered acceptable behavior
to create all children just to kill them....LIKE WE ALL DO NOW!!
Humanity owes it's newest members a different attitude about death and taxes.
The Children’s Immortality Project clarifies their goals a bit on another page, amidst many links.
Our Limitation Conditioning places them in our Attitude Karmic Prison
The sites explored varied paths towards life extension, mostly mystical or on the pseudoscientific fringe. There was talk of vitamin supplements, cars that run on water vapor, and using plant extracts to extend your lifespan. More significantly, these pages always, always pushed the notion that giving life was wrong as long as death existed. At one point, Hedges even said that sexual reproduction counted as murder because the child created from such a union would eventually die!
Despite this, he also posted a bit about seeking a romantic partner of his own. He called her “Shesus A. Christ,” for reasons I couldn’t work out. Hedges referred to himself as “auditioning” women for the role, though it’s unlikely any applied. He shared some NSFW images to his pages about this, and spoke as if such a union would help his quest. Other religious topics included God’s gender, and - at one point, God’s skin color? I have no commentary here because I’m not sure what to say…
The sporadic NSFW images, while featuring adults, were worrying to many of us, because some of the other content seemed targeted at children. Hedges didn’t mention anything particularly NSFW in those contexts, but still, it was gross to see such images on a site with the word “Children’s” in the title. This fellow probably just didn’t grasp that, because for all his claims of “taking over the internet,” he didn’t seem to understand the place very well, at all.
I recall one of his many pages, referencing Harry Potter and the Indigo Children mythos, calling Harry “the King of Indigo Children” and extolling youngsters to follow him or something, while seeking immortality. Other pages insisted that children could only trust each other and Hedges, since everyone else wanted them to die (ie, to not be immortal).
I doubt any children found this, though, and that’s quite a good thing! While Hedges may not have succeeded, the site’s message clearly tried to target kids. Many also featured images of sad or pathetic-looking children (or children in peril) with captions about how they were “created to die” and thus being murdered by having been born. One (still extant) seems to focus entirely on Dakota Fanning (a child star at the time) with captions about how she was an “indigo child” cruelly created to die. Either way, it’s not a good scene!
4chan’s threads on the topic matched the ominous vibe of the sites, taking them quite seriously indeed, and much more seriously than I would’ve thought. While the 4channers continued to babble about how this might be a “secret society” or “underground pornography ring,” I certainly didn’t believe that. A “secret” society trying to get to the top of Google constantly isn’t really doing things right, and ditto for any “underground” groups doing nefarious things.
Furthermore, all of the pages resembled each other and showed the exact same level of technical skill. It was clear (to me, at least) that Hedges was working alone, not with help or a group. He actually describes himself as homeless and solitary, making a small stipend from his endeavors (via advertising) and working to “stop death” all on his own. On a (main-ish, now archived) site, he wrote:
My Google Adsense office is an internet cafe in a small California town in the foothills. I pay for my office space by buying food and beverages there, which I would be buying anyway. Google is my employer and they have Adsense and an Adwords program for making money using the internet.
I am my own boss. As long as I follow a few simple Google Guidelines for clean and relevant content and use error free code, then I have complete freedom with my business strategy. There's an immense amount of help on the internet to set up your own internet business model and evolve it in real time. Now I'm investigating Googles electronic payments method so I can get my Google check deposited in my local bank account. Note *That worked out Fine! by the way
Robert Ray Hedges, via the Children’s Immortality Project, via Physical-Immortality.com
I saw no reason to believe he had involved any other person in this project beyond the random folks who visited the sites. If the Children’s Immortality Project had been a cult, surely someone else besides Hedges would’ve shown themselves eventually, but they didn’t. It was all him, very transparently so, and I never saw evidence of any actual children involved, either. If Hedges was a cult leader, perhaps he was just very unsuccessful at being one, or had different aspirations entirely?
Some people claimed, very insistently, that browsing any of the Children’s Immortality Project websites whilst logged into Gmail would result in receiving strange websites and spam messages, some of which involved animals harmed, gore, or worse.
Here’s a weird thing, though. I had a Facebook account back then, a very old burner one that I’ve since deactivated and abandoned. I used it to add Robert Ray Hedges as a friend. He added me back. Did I receive creepy messages, images, etc, like people claimed they were? No, not exactly, but…
Hedges did indeed contact me, sending a Facebook message saying something like “Would you help with my Children’s Immortality Project? Please share my pages EVERYWHERE and have ALL YOUR FRIENDS do the SAME.” It was written in the same weird verbiage as the sites, but not (more) alarming than that. That was it. No creepy porn, no gore. I let it drop and never contacted him back, removed him, and lost interest in investigating further…
I bet the people who did receive communication from Hedges contacted him first, and got messages similar to my own, not shocking spam. Some might’ve been more effusive. This is, of course, just suspicions, and I could be quite wrong.I’m extremely skeptical that anything more than that happened. It’s likely that folks embellished what communications they did receive from Hedges when posting about it on 4chan, too, hence the claims of disturbing emails. In some threads, 4channers even claimed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation had contacted them with questions about Robert Ray Hedges or to warn them away from the sites. Others trotted out the claim that it was, in fact, a secret society - and that they’d been asked to “join” the project:
Okay. To TRY to sum it up the best way I can.
There were these links ALL over /x/ to the "CHILDRENS IMMORTALITY PROJECT"Like DumbFucks, we clicked them. Followed them, etc, etc.
Apparently it was some sort of Child Molestation/Rape/Kidnap/Satanic Gothic shit Cult code name. And we were all browsing "Their" websites like Idiots.The Websites themselves contained pure nonsensical shit with weird ass Space Age/Techno 80's Music. Massive fucking Bibles of Text that would atleast have you scrolling for like 10 minutes.
Apparently there were keywords and links you were supposed to pick up on if you planned on Being a Member. And if you were on the sites for more than like 2 minutes tops, you email would be tracked and you'd get these weird ass Email's in your Gmail Account (Because everyone uses Google. Fucka Bing) And or WHATEVER Host you used to make a Gmail Account. Such as AOL, Hotmail, etc.
An anonymous poster on 4chan in February of 2010, surely being honest and not just bullshitting, right?
4channers (back then, at least) sure did make up wild stories for clout and attention in their threads. 4chan’s anonymity didn’t quite excise that temptation for some folks, usually younger ones.
People saying they’d gotten unsolicited spam from the Children’s Immortality Project without even entering their email addresses on the sites definitely lied. That’s not a capability of the web itself - unless youtype your email address or log in on a website, it’s not going to mystically “harvest” your address from the air. I remember trying to explain this to people (who were making the claims) in threads at the time, only to be told that it was “a secret society or cult” and thus they had “higher technology;” 4channers wouldn’t let anything, including the truth, get in the way of a good yarn.
That said, it didn’t change the fact that the Children’s Immortality Project, with it’s myriad labyrinthine poorly-designed websites, existed, and so did Robert Ray Hedges, its creator. It probably wasn’t a “secret society or cult with higher technology” harvesting email addresses of 4channers to invite them to join after sending them gross pictures. The websites themselves were real, though, and Hedges himself had put a lot of time into them. Despite their messy nature, they were elaborate and extremely numerous.
Hedges seemed to sincerely hold these beliefs, about birth being evil without immortality, etc. I suppose you could consider him a “cult of one,” since he seemingly had no followers, just (us, 4chan) gawkers.
My theory? The obsession with making children in particular immortal makes me think that Hedges himself may have lost a child somehow, and that this may have been the impetus for his “project.” Maybe he developed the elaborate mythos about the evils of birth (which leads, inevitably, to death) as a decidedly unhealthy way of coping? There’s no way to know for sure…
This same theory has been floated before in many different places where the Children’s Immortality Project gets mentioned. I’m not the only one to suggest it, and I’m mostly just agreeing with other people. It’s probably second only to the (extremely-4chan, sadly) suggestion that Hedges had created the sites to somehow lure children (specifically) into a cult for nefarious purposes.
That particular idea probably got a lot of mention on 4chan because (most unfortunately) the chans always look for that kind of horribleness and will fabricate it where they don’t find it (again, anons seek attention in the most shocking ways). I just didn’t (and still don’t) see evidence of it. The sites are disturbing, but more in the “this man needs psychiatric help” sort of way than the “this is a ring of p//d//s” kind of way.
Though some of the profiles believed to belong to Robert were (apparently) active as late as 2017, his Children’s Immortality Project seems to be no more. The sites have largely vanished, relegated to the Wayback Machine’s haphazard archives. According to someone who (claims that he) knew Robert Ray Hedges offline, the man has passed away, accounting for his current absence and the end of his “project.”
The Children’s Immortality Project is really only one of many discrete yet enduring mysteries /x/ investigated over the years, and is one of the more unsettling ones, if you think about it. I say this, oddly, because of 4chan’s obsession with it. I suspect we’ll never know any more details than we already do, and perhaps it’s not our business anyways?
4chan’s /x/ saw this as a fun and spooky mystery. At the time (fifteen years ago) it was fascinating, but now? It all seems rather tasteless, even a bit cruel, to have treated the Children’s Immortality Project like game. It clearly wasn’t, after all! Everything then (and now) points to Robert Ray Hedges having been a real person, likely mentally unwell, and definitely not a suitable source for your spooky online entertainment fix.
Imagine how it would feel to have your (probable) psychoses approached as a “spooky game” by weird internet people. He may have sought that out, but should 4chan have delivered? Nah, and if you can’t empathize directly (because they’re too crazy, or whatever excuse), imagine what it would feel like to know a friend or relative struggling with mental illness had fallen into such a strange relationship with the internet. Would you be okay with that? Probably not. I wouldn’t.
That said, I still found myself scrolling through old accounts by 4chan users who visited the sites (full, mostly, of creative fiction, naturally). I still, obviously, wrote this article and people (you) are still reading it, about Hedges, the Children’s Immortality Project, and all the manifestations of his mental state, whatever it might’ve been in actuality. What do we make of that? I’m not sure. I do, admittedly, allow myself more freedom when writing about those who have passed. I wrote this hoping to highlight the incident as it played out on 4chan, not exactly the Robert or the Children’s Immortality Project itself.
The latter is an unbelievable source of fascination, don’t mistake me. No average person would or even could create such a vast maze of pages, images, and links seemingly leading in circles. It would be ridiculous of me to expect people not to find it fascinating in much the same way one would find Aristasia fascinating, I guess. But the Children’s Immortality Project, as noted, has vanished now, and Robert Ray Hedges is, in all likelihood, dead.
Looking back at it, I see (mostly) one man who (probably) didn’t get the help he needed, instead spending his time investigating search engine optimization and obsessively dreaming of a deathless future. I also see a loud gallery of channish gawkers who desperately wanted his scribblings to be something more than what it clearly was, and were willing to embellish (more than) a little bit to keep things fresh.
Neither’s a good thing, but they work particularly poorly together, like toothpaste and orange juice.