B'Nari medic learns the secret of how some sea creatures eternally renew their genetic telomeres without any harm to themselves. And begin to splice this coding into new bodies which now stop aging after becoming adults because the telomeres never degrade. -- The New Guy
[AN: Pretty sure the B'Nari would be looking into that before they hared off with their gengineering colony]
Immortality can be either a blessing or a curse. It all depends on how the immortal views it. It also depends on how much influence the immortal has, and in which direction. Just as one can change the world with two kind hands... all it takes to ruin one is a singular cruel heart.
B'Nar was founded on the idea of creating the perfect workers for their purpose. Several gengineering corporations went down deep time to operate in competition with each other. The results may be dubious, but the experiment is nominally successful. Some stumbles were made along the way.
Nobody talks about the fifth world, these days, but the records are there for the curious. Pour encourager les autres.
The fifth world became the centre of the Immortal Executive Experiment. Fascinated with a species of jellyfish that was functionally immortal, Lazerus Corp investigated the potential for lengthening a human body's lifespan. Their specific target was the cyclical regrowing of an organism's telomeres. The option to be young and stay young was spectacularly alluring.
It took them half a millennium, but they succeeded. Splicing the genes for telomere regrowth into the human genome. The CEO of Lazerus successfully de-aged to a young adult, maintaining his knowledge and memories throughout.
Young again, he had no reason to step down nor retire. He had no reason to train his progeny to take over. He had no reason to support his progeny, his spouse, or any further family members. He became what B'Nar had been built to prevent: an economic monarch.
A business, and a business man, wants one ideal - to earn all the money all the time. To grow, and therefore profit, forever. To ignore that infinite growth is impossible in a closed system. Even a closed system that's one planetary system. What makes it more impossible is a leader who is increasingly out of touch with technological and social advancements.
It took two hundred years for Lazerus Corp to fall behind the rest of the corporations making up B'Nar. In exclusively marketing the telomere treatments to other CEO's the existing corporations effectively froze in place.
Competition rose up and beat them to better profits. The CEO's of the new bodies maintained the 'outdated' ways of progression. The growths and profits ebbed and flowed, but the immortal CEO's could not compete.
They're still immortal, but they effectively have nothing else.
[Photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash]
If you like my stories, please Check out my blog and Follow me. Or share them with your friends! Or visit my hub site to see what else I'm up to.
Send me a prompt [69 remaining prompts!]
