The Immortality Subscription

The ad was everywhere. “Aeterna Corp: Why Have an Expiration Date?” For a manageable monthly fee, the “Rejuvenation Stream” would flood your cells with nano-machines, repairing telomeres, purging toxins, and holding aging at bay. It wasn’t a one-time cure; it was a service. A subscription to immortality.

Leo had been a subscriber for fifty years. At ninety-five, he looked and felt twenty-five. He’d watched friends grow old and die, had lovers who aged while he remained unchanged. He had a good job, a nice apartment, and the perpetual health of a god. All for the low, low price of $1,299.99 a month. Forever.

He was a loyal customer. He never missed a payment.

Until the day he did.

A banking error. A glitch during a system migration. For 48 hours, his payment failed. It was rectified the moment he saw the alert, with panic clawing at his throat. He paid the overdue balance, the late fee, and breathed a sigh of relief.

The first sign was a single, silver hair in the sink the next morning. He stared at it, his blood running cold. A coincidence, he told himself. Stress.

Then, the ache in his knees when he climbed the stairs to his apartment—a feeling he hadn’t experienced in half a century. A faint crow's foot at the corner of his eye that didn't smooth out when he stopped smiling.

He called Aeterna Corp. The customer service avatar was relentlessly cheerful. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Thorne. The Rejuvenation Stream was temporarily paused due to non-payment. It has now been fully restored.”

“But the symptoms…” Leo stammered. “The aging…”

“The stream’s effects are cumulative and proactive,” the avatar explained. “A temporary interruption can allow for minor, localized epigenetic drift. This is normal and will be corrected in the next cycle.”

But it wasn’t corrected. The silver hairs multiplied. The ache in his knees became a constant companion. A web of fine lines etched themselves around his eyes. He was aging. Not gracefully over decades, but in fast-forward, as if his body was frantic to catch up to its true chronological age.

Driven by terror, he used his back-end access as a software engineer to dig into Aeterna’s systems. He bypassed firewalls, decrypted files, and finally found the truth. It wasn't in the terms of service, but in the core code of the nano-machines themselves.

The “Rejuvenation Stream” didn't just repair his body. It actively suppressed his true biological age, building a perfect, youthful facade. But during any payment lapse, the system didn't just pause. It initiated a “Catch-Up Protocol.”

The nano-machines would rapidly accelerate the aging process to make up for the time they had been artificially holding back. A one-day lapse might cost a week of natural aging. A two-day lapse, like his, could cost months. The technology wasn't a fountain of youth; it was a high-interest loan on time itself. Miss a payment, and the debt was collected from your very flesh.

He was staring at the code, his hands trembling with a palsy that was new to him, when a new window popped up on his screen. It was a direct video feed. A man in a sharp, sterile suit smiled at him.

“Hello, Leo. I’m Mr. Silas, Head of Client Retention at Aeterna.”

Leo’s heart hammered against his ribs. “You’re… you’re stealing our time.”

“We are providing a service for a fee,” Silas corrected, his voice calm. “The Catch-Up Protocol is a necessary incentive. It ensures subscriber loyalty and fiscal responsibility. Without it, what would stop someone from subscribing for a century, canceling for a year to age naturally, and then re-subscribing? It would be chaos. Bad for business.”

“This is monstrous!” Leo cried, his voice cracking with an old man’s weakness.

“It is commerce,” Silas said. “And now, you have a choice. You can accept a one-time ‘Re-synchronization Fee’—a significant sum, I’ll warn you—to halt the Catch-Up and restore your subscription to its previous state. Or,” he paused, his smile never wavering, “you can continue on your current path. You have a great deal of catching up to do. At ninety-five years of biological age, the clock is ticking quite fast.”

Leo looked at his reflection in the dark screen. The face staring back was a stranger, a man in his sixties, aging by the minute. The perfect, ageless face of just a week ago was a memory.

He had sold his mortality for a monthly fee, and he hadn't even owned the time he’d lived. He was a tenant in his own body, and the landlord had just handed him an eviction notice with a massive penalty.

The Immortality Subscription wasn't a gift. It was the most elegant trap ever devised. It didn't make you live forever; it made you terrified to stop. Leo looked from the demanding face on the screen to his own decaying reflection, trapped in a prison of perfect health, with only one, terrible way out.