Forever Thirty
· #micro
Aurora adjusted her e-lenses, the protest below snapping into sharp relief. From the hundred-and-twentieth floor, the chanting was a low thrum, the signs held aloft like desperate pleas to indifferent gods. LONG LIFE FOR ALL. STOP THE MONOPOLY. The same demands, echoing daily against the mirrored facades of the Big Four, a quartet of megacorporations whose tendrils wrapped around every facet of civilization. Helion, the largest, loomed dominant, its name a byword for both innovation and ruthless control – particularly when it came to GeneLife’s anti-aging therapy.
A sigh escaped her lips, misting briefly in the recycled air of her private balcony. Inside Helion’s walls, time was a commodity, carefully rationed. Employees received their annual rejuvenation cycle, a precise cocktail of gene therapies that arrested aging, granting them extra decades, even centuries. Veterans, some well over two hundred, moved with the practiced efficiency of seasoned professionals in their prime. Decades, even centuries, spent within Helion had forged an unrivaled depth of institutional memory, a fortress of knowledge. No upstart competitor – constantly losing talent both to the constraints of a natural lifespan and to the irresistible draw of the Big Four’s life extension – could hope to overcome such accumulated expertise. Smaller companies withered, their brightest minds inevitably drawn to the gilded cage of extended life, leaving behind skeletal remains of forgotten industries. Venture capital dried up for any enterprise not blessed by a Big Four partnership – who would invest in a future measured in mere decades when centuries were on offer?
Ten years ago, a ripple of hope had spread among the masses barred from the therapy, those condemned to the brevity of a normal lifespan. A group of independent scientists, fueled by ethical outrage, had dared to pursue their own research. Helion’s legal eagles descended like harpies, the ensuing lawsuits protracted and brutal. The scientists, denied the very therapy they sought to democratize, now lived their dwindling, accelerated lifespans in frustrated obscurity, a stark warning to any would-be challengers. Whispers of alternative research now vanished like smoke in the wind, snuffed out by the sheer economic gravity of the Big Four.
Aurora retreated inside, the balcony doors hissing shut, muffling the distant cries. She filed her daily reports – the same incremental progress, the same layers of bureaucratic approval. A quiet rebellion flickered within her: the yearning to build, to create something beyond Helion’s meticulously controlled ecosystem. But the thought felt as flimsy as the protesters’ cardboard signs against the monolithic power she served. Who would trade a guaranteed 200-year lifespan for the uncertain trajectory of a dream?
She caught her reflection in the polished chrome of a passing service bot. The same smooth skin, the same untroubled eyes she’d had since her thirtieth birthday, four decades ago. “Forever Thirty,” she murmured, the old joke tasting like ash in her mouth. It was a promise, a perk, a prison. The chants outside seemed to grow louder in the sterile silence of the corridor, each syllable a tiny hammer blow against the walls of her carefully constructed reality. As she walked towards her next meeting, the pervasive hum of Helion a constant companion, the unspoken truth settled heavy in her chest: “forever” wasn’t a gift; it was a leash, and the protesters, for all their perceived naiveté, might be the only ones seeing the cage for what it truly was.