Boomers WSF2023

Boomers



The day scientists in the Pasteur institute announced they were able to reset a person’s telomeres changed everything. Just this one thing meant no one on earth ever needed to die of anything anymore.

Cancer had been beaten years before, pretty much every known disease or genetic defect could be cured through mrna sequencing drugs...Just Old Father time remained.

The gradual decrepidation of people as the clock ticks, once seemingly as inevitable as the tides, was now beaten.

What’s more, Telomere treatment meant you could live forever in the body of your early twenties.

See Telomere’s are like a built in countdown timer, each time that gene replicates it loses a little bit of the end which is the telomere, this is why you go grey, get less elastic skin, start going to bed at half ten instead of staying up partying until 3 AM.

Telomere treatment simply attaches a little bit of some mRNA to the end, which is sacrificed in preference to the telomere.

It doesn’t last forever, you need a refill every few years, but as long as you get it done, your body goes into overdrive. You can potentially shuffle into the clinic a knackered, saggy 80 year old and the following week, leave under your own power as a vital, 20 something.

Sounds like heaven right? You can live a healthy two or three centuries now with no loss of function. Top athletes can measure their careers in decades. You can see your favourite striker setting the pitch on fire for 30 or 40 years You can go skateboarding with your great great grandad...Laugh at your mates finding great granny smoking hot.

It really did seem that we had broken the back of all humanity’s problems...Trouble is, when the population hits 12 Billion or so, something has to be done else no one is going to be living on Earth before long.

The UN pushed all the big governments into adopting a mandatory sterility ruling. Any person on reaching 12 years old, had to go in and get sterilised so they couldn’t reproduce anymore.

Only the poor though, right? The rich folks like always could pay their way out of being treated like the rest of us and before long, parks echoed to the sounds of young adults messing around, schools closed, Universities closed. There were no more kids to need them. Paediatricians found they were earning less than the guy shovelling popcorn in the cinema because there just wasn’t the demand.

Then some of the more powerful talking heads started demanding that this revolutionary treatment be restricted (To their caste, naturally) so it was no longer available to people unable to pay exorbitant fees for it.

We truly had 2 tier healthcare in the west now, tier 1 for those with the money, meant they would never grow old or suffer, tier 2 the rest, would grow old, would get ill and die.

I remember when I was a kid, way back at school, there was a girl, a Jehova’s witness, she got ill and died because her parents wouldn’t consent to her being cut open and having blood. At the time, we all thought they were crazy, but you look around now, a world without children, with a class of rich, pretty young things lording it over the poor,. The beaten down, the ones who can do nothing against the approach of their own death and I think maybe, we should have all had a bit more sympathy for the Witnesses. We thought we had found heaven but it turned out to be hell.

The End

Nicely done!

Sad... but nice.
Sad and dark... but still a very good story!

Thanks for this SprocketUK! I enjoyed it.

a reply to: Maxmars

Thanks Max, I'll make the next one happy

a reply to: SprocketUK

Very sad, but true.

That is why spirituality is now more important than ever.

It's a very fine line between

Age
Depression
Social conscience
Acceptance
happiness

a reply to: SprocketUK

Great stuff loved it.

Telemores, CRISPR, adrenochrome and young blood treatments, uploading your consciousness and even meds to reverse radiation damage...

There's always gonna be the thems and the usses even if we ever manage to tear down the central banking system.

a reply to: SprocketUK

Enjoyed the read immensely, very “In Time” feel. Good luck

a reply to: chris_stibrany

a reply to: merkins

a reply to: Moon68


Thanks, I think spirituality in opposition to scientific advance does have a more important role than we can perhaps think of.

I think you just gave me some ideas for another one Merkins
In time was definitely in my mind as was season one of altered Carbon