Chapter One: The Diagnosis:

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Dr. Ethan Carter sat in his dimly lit office, staring at his  MRI  Scan, glowing like a grotesque nightlight  on the monitor directly in front of him. His hands, once steady as steel, trembled slightly as he traced the jagged shadow on the image—a cluster of cells that did not belong. The cruel irony was not lost on him. A man who had spent his life researching longevity, studying those who defied the natural limits of aging, now faced the undeniable reality of his own mortality. The second hand of the clock on the wall continued to mark time.

Gliobastoma Multiforme Grade 4. Unmistakeable. Growing silently in his head. The diagnosis pulsed in sync with his headache, clinical and cruel. The tumor’s measurement seemed to be mocking him, 1.3 cm. The size of a walnut, now the size of his future, questionable.

 

“If I saw this on one of my patients I would be afraid to tell them the news,” thought Ethan. Great the doctor cries while telling the patient. Prognosis as if recited out of a standard text book, not good, not operable.  Three months at the most. Maybe last till spring.

The office door creaked open, and Dr. Morse, the hospitals head oncologist, entered, his face etched with concern. "Ethan, I didn’t expect you to be here so late."

​

Ethan forced a smile, gesturing to the scatter of research on his desk. "Just tying up some loose ends, like what’s left of my life.”

Dr. Morse approached, lowering his voice. "Have you thought about what you’ll do? About telling Anna?"

Her name was a blade to his heart. They hadn't spoken in months, not since the tragedy that tore them apart. "I don’t know," Ethan admitted. "Part of me thinks she should be the first to know. The other part... wonders if it’s kinder to keep it to myself."

Dr. Morse clasped his shoulder. "She deserves to know, Ethan. Whatever’s happened between you two, she cares. And she's not just anyone; she was part of this—part of your work."

​

Ethan nodded slowly, the weight of decision pressing down on him. "Maybe you’re right. I’ll try to call her."  “I’m so sorry Ethan”, Morse’s voice cracking like thin ice underfoot.

“Three Months at the most”,Ethan mused,  A quarter of a year, 90 days.

​

“Maybe you  could try chemo and radiation?”, Morse suggested knowing what Ethan’s answer would be. “Hell no, Ethan spat out, ”what little time I have left, it’s not going to be in some chemo infusion lab or being blasted by high intensity Electron fire.”

Ethan  was tempted to tell him the joke he  learned in med school  about telling patients their prognosis’s.

It goes a little like this . The doctor tells the patient he has 6 months to live. After thinking for a second the patient says, “but doctor I don’t think I can payoff my bill in only 6 months”. The doctor replies, “Ok, I’ll give you another 6 months”.  Cruel humor. Another 6 months would be precious.

"Ironic, isn’t it?" Ethan muttered to himself, turning away from the window. "All these years chasing immortality, and I might not see the spring."

​

Morse exited leaving Ethan alone with his spinning thoughts.

The irony was a live wire in Ethan’s throat. The past 20 years spent studying the behavior of the ends of chromosomes called telomeres and the associated enzyme telormerase. The secret to slowing down or maybe even stopping aging. On the brink  of  a breakthru. Human trials next. Now this. 

​

The research was based on the premise that if the telomeres could be preserved or even lengthened than the key to longetivity and even the reversal of aging could be possible. The enzyme telormerase was what he was painstainkenly working on. This is the enzyme that preserves the ends of the telomeres and with Anna’s help he had developed a form of the enzyme that he had named TS-25 that would do just that. 

 

The problem that most Cell Biologist had been wrestling with for the past 10 years is, if you increase the levels of telomerase you also increase the risk for potential cancer cells to replicate. Feeding a monster while trying to preserve the organism. Not a good trade off. What Ethan had discovered was a derivative from the Chinese herb Astragalus that helped preserve the telomeres without allowing the cancer cells in the body to access it.  It had worked in mice and the 2nd phase which is the human trials was about to start and now this.

​

After Morse left Ethan logged onto the lab server and started downloading all his lab research to a small thumb drive. Mail it to Anna. She’ll know what to do with it. He changed the password on the server and put the thumb drive in his pocket, also grabbing a vial of the most recent synthetic distillation. Ethan wrote down a note to his practice manager. “Need to go away for awhile, have my backup Dr.Fish take over with my patients and have Dr.Morse take over running the lab” “Will be in touch”

“Maybe a long while”, he mused to himself. The Pharma giant Telergene was funding this project and with what he had heard recently about the fudging of data on their Alzheimer study he’d rather not see them get ahold of his recent data. 

He exhaled, the weight of 46  years pressing against his chest.

​

Ethan looked like a man built by long days and longer thoughts.  With a lean, wiry frame, he moved like someone used to both laboratories and the wilderness. His hair, once neat, had given up the fight — a tousled mess of dark brown shot through with early streaks of silver. His eyes were a sharp gray, restless and searching, as if always chasing an answer just beyond reach. A few days’ stubble clung to his jaw, and his clothes — simple jeans, a weathered leather jacket, and scuffed boots — spoke more of pragmatism than vanity. 

​

The once-pristine space around him now felt suffocating—lined with bookshelves filled with research journals, case studies, and medical books all staring at him as if to say, “some good all this knowledge is to me now.” 

A sound escaped him-not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. “Well played, universe,” he muttered to the empty office His gaze drifted to the framed photo on his bookshelf: Dr.Ethan on stage at the world Gerontology Conference circa 2020, pointing to a graph of telomere attrition rates in Okinowans.

​

No one understood back then what he was aiming for . Dinosaurs, everyone  of them.

Anna was with him then, always supporting, always encouraging. Now he felt she was in the next universe. “God I wish she were beside me now”, thinking to himself.

​

Not too long ago the concept of real longevity was just a theory, a puzzle he had tried to solve, but one that stubbornly refused to reveal its final piece. And now standing on the edge of a breakthru this.

His Phd thesis at MIT on Telomeres attrition  was based on   how they shorten with aging and eventually cause the genetic material called DNA to mutate with cell replication thus causing cell aging and eventually death.

As we age the ends of the chromosomes tend to shorten as the cells replicate leading to geriatric cells. This is nicely called senescence but with Ethan it brought on images of cells moving around with walkers and canes. Rest homes for aging cells that did not know enough to die.

​

If this riddle of preserving the ends of the genes could be solved, aging as we know it would be slowed down significantly or maybe even stopped . And now he was close, really close.  

For years, he had studied the myths, the stories, the so-called miracles he encountered in his travels.  The villagers who claimed to live beyond a century, the monks who seemed untouched by time. He always attributed it to, diet, or some obscure environmental factor. But now, facing his own impermanence, something inside him had shifted.

A whisper in his mind. A pull in his gut. Premonitions. Flashes of Light. 

Weird dreams the past few weeks. This weird pressure in his head.Part of the reason he allowed for the Brain scan. He  did not like doctors. Ironic since he was one. 

​

“Am I ready to die?. Or maybe right now?”

“If I’m gonna go I don’t want those bastards getting ahold of my life’s work. All they care about is the gold at the end of the rainbow.”  . This  drug that would make them billions. Daily phone calls, threats about pulling funding if he didn’t come up with something soon. Something about them having recent trouble with the FDA. Well we’ll  see.

In his small Gerontology practice he was observing his patients getting older, looking to him for answers. Now it all seemed like a cruel joke. 

He pushed back his chair and stood, ignoring the difficulty with balance, the pain  in his head. Moving to the window, he gazed at the city skyline of Cambridge, the neon glow reflecting against the glass. Rain outside blurred the skyline beyond his office turning the TelerGene tower into a smeared watercolor of neon. They were funding all this research hoping to get a good return on their investment. 

​

A memory surfaced- 

3Am in the Harvard lab, Anna asleep at her desk, her hair pooling over a stack of DNA methylation reports. Back then he remembered her saying,”We’re going to rewrite the rules of aging, Ethan” She believed in him, and more.

Now the lab only smelled mostly of antiseptic and stale ambition. His fingers brushed the Nobel nomination letter(never won) in his desk drawer next to the tin he had stashed the ampules in.

A mixture he had prescribed for himself. The unthinkable  ran thru his mind. End it now, less pain, less suffering, less waiting. Not much family, parents gone, single child. There is only Anna and we haven’t spoken in 4 months. It all went really bad after she lost the baby. “I mean we lost the baby.” “I’m such a fool.”

​

“ Let me see if I can remember the stages of terminal illness.” Hmm, is it Shock, Denial,Anger, acceptance,bargaining ?  Who cares! Maybe I’m experiencing it out of order. First anger, then pissed off, then really pissed off. But who am I going to be pissed off at ? 

A gust of wind rattled the glass, and for a fleeting moment, he swore he heard something. A voice? A call? There’s there’s  that damn feeling again. 

​

For weeks now he had been having  these strange dreams, or possibly  visions. Dismissing them as part of the brain stuff, they were getting stranger each time. Moving thru space, flashes of light, being caught between two black walls while moving along at impossible speeds. Hard to describe but strangely real. And then at the end of the movement a man with intense eyes. Maybe the Wizard of OZ without the flying monkeys.

The name Sebastian stands out or maybe Stan or something like that.  It reminds me just a little of the time back in college with the LSD I was experimenting with except without the brain tumor. 

He shook his head, laughing bitterly at himself. “Delusions, Carter. That’s what happens when you spend too much time in your own head.” Yea I had done a lot of that. I’ve always been a bit of a nerd, too much time in school. One of those people that made school into a profession maybe because I was too afraid to talk to girls or have any friends. So first my bachelors of science with a specialty in genetics, then onto Harvard medical school, then a Phd in molecular biology, and then without any social skills whatso ever out into the world. 

And yet…

“Here I am on the verge of a breakthru that will revolutionize aging and I may not live to see it!”

[Flashback:Harvard Medical School-1998]

 

The cadavers skin felt like cold chicken under Ethans scapel. Across the dissection table Anna Armitage whistled “Don’t fear the Reaper” as she buzzed sawed around a  cranium to reveal the brain tissue after removing the top of the head.  “Is that Blue Oyster Cult that your singing over this dead body?” Ethan muttered. “Better than crying over my Organic Chem Grade like you last week.” Her grin was a slash of levity in the formaldehyde gloom of the Lab. It was then that he started loving her though it took years for him to even slightly express a romantic interest. 

Much  later after medical school they worked together in the Harvard lab both working on gene research. A fellowship with Ethan who had along with his MD had gotten his  Phd in Molecular Biology at MIT,smart boy. Very smart boy. But not smart enough to hold onto her.

Now—a quiet, persistent urge to leave. At first, he blamed it on his diagnosis. The mind playing tricks, conjuring fantasies of adventure before the inevitable decline and end. But this was different. Adventure, Death. “Let me see, what a choice”

It felt strange, strong , internal, maybe a longing, weirder dreams. “Am I going crazy?”

As if something—or someone—was calling him.

He turned back to his desk, flipping through a stack of patient files, reports, and letters. Buried beneath them was an old manila folder. His most recent research. Cases of extreme longevity. People who lived not just beyond a hundred, but impossibly long.

And then there was the name that kept appearing—a footnote in various accounts, dismissed by colleagues as folklore.

Sebastián.

​

A man reportedly over 300 years old, last seen in Indonesia. The name had come up in interviews, old medical texts, and whispered stories told by villagers who swore he existed. And now the name was showing up in dreams, random thoughts, even as flashes of light, like a lightning bolt that comes and goes quickly.

Ethan hadn’t believed it. Not then. But now, standing on the precipice of his own mortality, what did he have to lose?

He pulled out a map, tracing his fingers over the places he had been—Okinawa, Sardinia, Tibet,  . Each one had led him closer to an answer, but not the answer.

​

And the strange map that had shown up in a dream he had that he had feverishly sketched one morning after waking from another strange journey . An island shaped like a heart.

Maybe Sebastián was a myth.

Or maybe he was the missing piece.

Ethan felt something for a split second other than resignation. A pull?

His computer screensaver flickered to life-A photo from his fortieth birthday . Hanna had baked a cake shaped like a DNA helix. He’s been too busy to blow out the candles, already late for  a grant review call.Now he’d give anything to taste that frosting. To taste her again. 

​

He reached for his phone and dialed Anna’s number. After three rings he hung up. Afraid she might answer. They had not talked for quite a while.  They  worked  together, lived together, loved  together. She was the intuitive one, the soft one, the one wanting closeness, communication, connection. All of the things that he was afraid of. The voice of feelings when he got into his head too much. But now he felt alone. Wanting her here.

 

He thought about her everyday, every night, all the stinking time. It had all fallen apart after she lost the baby. Then she lost him. Or better yet “he lost her”. Too much focus on work, avoiding emotional closeness, retreat, fear.All of it. He thought it  would have taken a lot of counseling to work thru it. 

On his desk next to him in the locked drawer was the concoction he had put together after he’d gotten his prognosis.

It was the typical one for assisted suicide. A combination of Sedatives, Phenobarbitol, Secobarbitol,Diazepan and a host of others that he prescribed for himself. Definitely not following in the spirit of the Hippocratic oath. But certainly a lot less painful that suffering with the end stages of brain cancer. He unlocked the  drawer, removed them  and put them in a neat row on  his desk with a syringe.