The Agency of Aging

The Agency of Aging is failing, or being attacked, and everyone in possession of the anti-aging microchip is quickly dying with no hope for survival.

I saw on the news that morning, breakouts of widespread, rapid aging. People, young people, were growing old and elderly in front of their very eyes before they dropped dead in mere minutes. It has happened before, in small, isolated attacks when the microchip regulator that they put in the brain malfunctions and fails before the technicians can fix them, but it’s never happened on this large of a scale. It was terrifying.

They were saying on the news that everyone with a chip was at risk. Of course it was said in that newscaster way of trying not to induce a panic by bellowing panic-worthy news and then telling everyone to stay calm and orderly. Everyone had a chip nowadays. I had a chip. Everyone had cause to be alarmed.

Usually I would be in at work by eight but I was glued to the television, listening to the same feed, watching real people age and die on camera with the “BREAKING NEWS” marquee flashing red, as if it were a film. Instead I finally picked up my bag and ran out of the door, heading for the AOA. Which was probably not the smartest place to go, seeing as that was the place that regulated aging and everyone would be going there. And they did.

Traffic was more hectic than usual, which I expected with logic but loathed and was frustrated with the restlessness that comes with being rushed and scared and helpless. Ambulances screamed past my foreign made tin can, EMTs rushed out of the van with metal stretchers and defibrillators, trying to force life back into the wrinkled, broken bodies that lay on the street side. People had simply collapsed with age when only minutes before they had been perfect and healthy and young. That had been the selling point of AOA, the Agency of Aging, to “begin and end with youth,” as they said.

After the science came out and the doctors said they’d found the cure to aging, there had been no reason not to take it gladly. No one wanted to grow old and sick when they had the option to stay young forever. The scientists responsible became overnight celebrities, sent on talk shows, news rooms, the Oval Office…They had reportedly discovered the part of the brain that controls aging, the part that allows your body to gradually fail, deplete, and eventually die, and after extensive research and testing, learned to regulate the progression of age via a wireless microchip. Of course there was a limit, and the body was only able to physically take about two hundred years of operation before the battery juice, essentially, ran out.

The president loved the idea immediately and was elected for a second term based solely on the fact that he created a brand new division of government to control and regulate this new technology, the AOA, giving it to the public as a government service. His approval ratings jumped even higher when he initiated federal subsidies and tax cuts to encourage those who could not afford to have the procedure. “It is one hundred percent a service to the public,” he said at the press conference with a politician’s grin. What he didn’t tell the press at the time was that during every procedure, the AOA programmed a GPS within the microchip, and that the oh-so charitable government was monitoring everyone’s moves, not to mention the information and brain scans available through the AOA main computer database. But even when this information was leaked the people were still too enamored with being young and beautiful to care much about personal privacy and Big Brother watching their every move.

Now it’s practically mandatory. Insurance companies started to raise rates on people who didn’t have the chip while lowering rates on those that did, businesses began discriminating against “agers” even though it was made illegal that same year…Of course the fashion keeps getting younger, as it always has, only recently it has become “in” to claim your chip in your teens, though why anyone would want to be sixteen forever I haven’t the faintest idea. I got my chip when I was 25 which is a little later than most people who get them as soon as they come of age at 21, like a ritual of adulthood. Anyone younger has to have parental permission and there have been scientific studies to suggest that if the procedure is done before the brain stops growing, there is potential for serious mental damage.

I looked over out of my safely tinted window to see a girl reach out in front of her face as if she were blind, her skin sagging and her back stooping more and more just as I watch her fall to the concrete. There isn’t anything I could do to help her so I sit in my car and cry.

Finally traffic starts moving again, the roadblock is lifted to let some of the pressure out, and I drive as fast as I can in the same direction as everyone else. You can see the AOA from practically any point in town. It’s a massive modern structure of concrete and glass sitting atop the tallest hill ominously overlooking everyone. I can’t get very close for the amount of cars piling into the parking lot and along the drive up the hill, so I park behind the car in front of me and start climbing, huffing with dozens of other frightened people up the steep climb.

By the time I reach the top I see bodies scattered along the pavement and walk through crowds of people quickly becoming like them. There were at least a couple hundred people crowding the lot in front of the building, I couldn’t even see the glass doors for the bodies. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly, I only knew that I had to do something and the only people who could possibly help were the people barring their doors. It was clear that they weren’t going to do anything and just let us all die, we were all deluding ourselves, but we stayed. There was nowhere else to go, nowhere to hide, no one to help. We couldn’t even help ourselves.

The chip is regulated, controlled, and monitored all day, every day by the people of the AOA, and the data is stored in the most extensive connected satellite mainframe the country had ever seen. If the chip were to malfunction without proper surveillance, and if it weren’t caught in time, the chip would cease to operate and go offline, no longer staying the natural aging process. It would be like a levy breaking, if a chip would go offline for more than a few seconds; all of the natural aging the person would have experienced comes rushing back to them in a tidal wave. The effects aren’t so horrendous if someone has only been implanted for, say, ten years but many of these people, myself included, have had a chip for decades, some of the ancient ones have been young for nearly a hundred years. And they were the first to go.

As I stood on the side lines, my heart pounding frighteningly fast through the adrenaline fueled panic rush, I had my thoughts that this was some kind of attack, a political or social statement made by the resisting agers. They hadn’t really been in the news for the past few years and everyone just assumed most of them had aged out and died, the new era of youth taking over the next generation absolutely. But I had my doubts that this was an accident; something this widespread and devastating was almost too much to be a fluke. And if this was really an attack, whoever was responsible was devious to the extreme and coldblooded. This wasn’t like a regular terrorist attack where a single location was bombed and a random amount of people were caught in the crossfires, this affected everybody and there was no way of telling who would be taken unless you were in tune with the main computer. Which is the reason people were clogging the building’s arteries, trying to break into the facility and find their names on the list of the dead.

Suddenly a wave of aging swept over those pounding their fists against the glass and they fell against each other, gasping for the breath that swam out of their shriveling lungs, buckling on newly arthritic legs. I looked around at the devastation, at the newly made sea of bodies lying on the asphalt lot, and then down at my own body, lifting my shaking hands to see whether or not I was yet marked. There were some still standing, shocked and scared, crying and pleading to whoever remained inside the AOA and refused to help us, but we were the last. We all moved closer to the glass, putting ourselves in the same position that did no good for the ones who had met the Reaper only moments ago. As I got closer I saw the shadow of someone inside, sitting in a desk chair behind the long, curving concrete counter in the reception area. He sat with an ankle across the opposite knee, leaning back as if relaxed. I didn’t care about any terrorist attack, I didn’t care if this was some disastrous mistake, all I wanted was for the man inside to find the humanity within himself and to open the doors. I screamed so hard that I found that I was wheezing, my voice hoarse and broken. And then he moved.

I think every one of my unfortunate companions, myself included, held our knocking and held out breaths for the space of a second while the man stood. He walked in the shadows but I could tell that he was carrying a tablet, one of the ones the AOA technicians used to communicate their work to the massive mainframe; ones that had the power to sustain life, or induce rapid aging. He stopped in front of the doors, close enough so that we could see it was Ladon, the head security guard. We all knew him as he was a constant figure at the center. He was a good looking man, who seemed to be middle-aged, if there was such a thing anymore, but it was such a face that made a person stop and wonder just how old he was, it could change so quickly. His was a timeless face.  

We all stared at him, a few pleaded with him through the glass, but then he lifted the tablet and pressed the screen. The change was almost immediate. I could feel my insides falling, shriveling, just…dying. The feeling of helplessness that had plagued me all day long pulled me to the ground, and even in my sick stupor, I tried to avoid hitting any bodies that had already claimed space on the ground. Fluid magically filled my burning lungs as my heart began to beat irregularly, my chest constricting with every missed rhythm. I had no time to notice my skin become as thin and wrinkled as tissue paper though I am sure it must have. My thoughts would have naturally turned to memories of friends and family had I recalled any at the time; my brain, too, was failing. I could think of nothing but the swelling in my chest and the aching pain in my limbs. There was such weight in the world, as if gravity had suddenly chosen to unleash extra pressure. I felt so heavy, so tired.

In the end, I was the last to let go and as I opened my cataract filled eyes for the final time I saw Ladon, unharmed and un-aged, in the middle of the destruction, staring around him at the decrepit bodies turning to dust with a small smile of satisfaction on his lips. And then, heavy with the weight of fatigue, I closed my eyes, realizing with distant apathy that Ladon was an ager.

 

 

Author's Note

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