Breakthrough

Dr. Beatrice Yunez didn’t shout “Eureka” as ancient Greek scientists might have. Instead, she carefully double-checked the bloodwork of the mice in front of her. They nibbled on their pellets, unimpressed with her observation. She’d spent the past three years with them, day in and day out.

She’d privately named the mice after the seven dwarves of Snow White. Grumpy hadn’t taken to the modified virus and died after about a week. Perhaps his name had been appropriate. But the others—they had thrived. And their bloodwork revealed the miracle: all of them were in perfect health. If she didn’t know any better, she would swear that these mice were about eight weeks old, not thirty-six months. Over a year past when most mice died from old age.

Beatrice had no doubt that the implications of this would be far-reaching. She was about to make Techgenes more money than even the greedy corporate pigs who ran it could imagine.

She took a deep breath and blew it out. When she released her findings, she had no doubt that they would change the world.

Five years later

Instead of drinking champagne with the rest of her team and celebrating Techgene’s product release right now, Beatrice was at home, musing about the one hundred and one ways she wanted to murder her former boss.

“You must understand, Dr. Yunez,” Manny Rodriguez had told her a month ago. Her boss always used a smarmy tone that set her teeth on edge. “We’re focused on bringing this one product to market, so we’re closing up R&D.” He put his hands out, palms up, in an extended shrug. A gesture that said, What can I do?

But his expression didn’t quite match up. Instead, he looked smug. She knew in an instant that he was one of the so-called cats who were eating the canary. She just hadn’t known she’d be the one wearing the feathers in this situation.

“You’ll receive full severance, of course,” her boss had added before ushering her out of his office. Two security guards were waiting for her. It was humiliating being escorted out of the door and not even allowed to grab her secret stash of chocolate bars in the bottom drawer of her desk. She hoped whoever found them—perhaps her ex-boss—would choke on them.

The recruiters started calling the next day. But Beatrice, after a moment’s consideration, declined the interviews. Instead, she put her phone on silent and unplugged from the rest of the world. No email, no social media, nothing.

She had a lot of thinking to do. And it had nothing to do with being fired. Rather, it centered around what choice she should make next. And she had a doozy of one staring her in the face.

Long-term effects of the serum hadn’t been studied. How could they have been? It’d only been in existence a few years. Her research had been cut short, but she was the best person to continue to study the effects of the serum. She was the only one, in fact. The job should have still been hers.

Days went by while her thoughts circled uselessly. Weeks. And now she stood here at her window, hesitating. She’d finally made up her mind to… well, make up her mind. Today is the day.

She put down her coffee cup in the kitchen sink on her way to the fridge. She opened the bottom freezer and took out what looked like a kid’s lunchbox. She set it on her counter and took out the vial and syringe inside. After waiting the required half-hour for the serum to unfreeze, she injected the shot into the crook of her elbow.

Afterwards, she sat at her kitchen table, nursing a new cup of coffee. Two years ago, she’d taken the precaution of taking this vial of the serum home—there’d been plenty to use in the lab once clinical trials started, and she fudged the paperwork to cover the lapse. Considering how much the serum cost the public, her action would be considered grand larceny if she were caught. The serum was company property, after all.

And now she was a criminal. If anyone tested her blood, she would end up in jail. For a long, long time.

The process of the viral spread wasn’t fast, but it wasn’t slow either. When she went to bed that night, she stared hard at her face in the mirror, but it just looked like her same old face. Bags under her eyes and smile lines fanning out from the corners of her mouth. Salt-and-pepper hair that she’d always been too busy to dye. She always thought she looked her age, no matter what milestone she passed—when she turned thirty, she looked it. Same for forty. And she probably would have had more parts sagging and more gray hair by fifty—if she hadn’t taken the drug.

She had enough savings to stay out of the job market for a while. Every morning in the mirror, she watched as wrinkles slowly receded, laugh lines disappeared, and gray hair began growing in brown again. Months passed, and she regressed. Her thirties appeared and disappeared, then her twenties came roaring back too. Until she estimated that, genetically at least, her age was barely hovering above teenager.

By the time her money had almost run out, she’d have a hard time not getting carded in a bar. Even though she’d spent painstaking years developing and perfecting the serum, it still amazed her to see such a young face staring back at her in her bathroom. As if the past twenty-five years of her life hadn’t even happened.

But Beatrice had a purpose. She’d taken the drug for a reason, and it wasn’t for vanity. It was perhaps the greatest experiment of her life. She needed to find out what happened to humans long-term under the auspices of the drug. Since she no longer had access to her ex-company’s lab, that meant she would become her lab. Her own body was the mouse, and she could continue her work in private, no matter what the company said.

So, she dyed silver streaks into her hair and perfected the art of makeup to appear older. Even so, when she ran into old colleagues who’d known her for years at biotech conferences, they would remark about how young she looked.

“New lotion,” she would tell them, laughing. Or, “Just got back from vacation—I’m feeling refreshed.”

Few knew exactly what she’d been working on for her old company, since her new job was for a biotech firm that studied genetics unrelated to longevity research. People’s eyes would glaze over when she talked about her day job. Just boring ol’ Beatrice, injecting DNA into gels to study day after day. A career staring at a microscope in a clean suit.

And no more mice to speak of.

Ten years later

“Did you forget to lock up again?” her co-worker Dave asked.

Beatrice felt sheepish. Dave had been the first to clock into work that morning and found the door to the lab unlocked. A big no-no in terms of company procedure. And it wasn’t the first time, either. She’d done the same thing a month ago.

While Dave and she had become friendly in the three years they’d worked together—he was a new graduate, and she’d been his mentor at the company—they weren’t really friends outside of work. However, he’d done her a solid both times and didn’t report her to their boss. She could get reprimanded for it, maybe even written up.

“Thanks, Dave,” she said. Lately, her mind had felt a bit frazzled. It wasn’t just at work she’d noticed small signs of forgetfulness. Perhaps it was because she was splitting her time between her work and her private research at home.

So far, she’d not found any side effects for the serum she’d created. None reported in the media either, not since the product became publicly available. Just praise and amazement at the breakthrough in anti-aging. The serum would replace old cells with new ones slowly, so as not to shock the system. Each new cell was better than the older one, resistant to wear and tear in a way that had never been seen before.

However, the price tag meant a lot of the population would never get the treatment. The majority of people would continue to get diseases and get old and die. The fountain of youth was only for the wealthiest of the wealthy, and lesser mortals need not apply.

Except for her. She was the lone exception, but no one could ever know.

She shook her head and smiled apologetically at her co-worker. “Sorry, don’t know where my mind’s been recently. Won’t happen again.”

Ten years later

“This isn’t like you,” her boss said as she sat across from him. She looked down at her clasped hands, frowning. She didn’t disagree with him, but when he started to talk about stats and facts, she found it extremely difficult to keep her mind on the conversation. Numbers used to be exciting to her, to her line of work. Now, they just seemed immensely boring.

Lately, at home, she hadn’t felt much drive to do more tests on herself either. Like everyone else out there who got the jab, she was doing fine. Great, even. Better than ever. In fact, she was so good that perhaps she could drop the pretense. Maybe she didn’t have to keep dying her hair and pretending to be someone she wasn’t.

It didn’t seem super important to keep up the charade anymore. After all, people here knew her, right? They knew her, and they didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t really getting older. No one had commented on it, as far as she knew. At least not to her face.

Her boss paused and seemed to be waiting for an answer. “Yes, sir,” she said into the silence. Her mind always seemed to be wandering these days. In fact, there were times when she was at the lab and she’d “wake up,” realizing she’d been staring off into space, sometimes for hours. Her productivity was way down, and the numbers didn’t lie.

But all of that was so boring, she felt. What she did—her job. She stared at a microscope day after day. Inserted syringes into tubes. Wrote reports about it. What was the point of it all? She just wanted to be out there doing something… something exciting. Anything at all, other than this.

She jerked her attention back to the room—her boss had been speaking this whole time, and she hadn’t really been paying attention. Not until now.

“Beatrice…” He sighed and seemed reluctant to say the next words. “I’m sorry, but after the accident in the lab, we’re going to have to let you go.”

Anger flared through her, but it dissipated just as quickly. The anger felt residual, as if it belonged to someone else. It had been her fault, she knew. She’d been careless and Dave was the one who’d paid the price. She could see why the company would want her to be gone by the time he came back from medical leave.

Now, instead of anger, she felt a sense of relief. This charade could be over—she didn’t have to pretend to be Dr. Beatrice Yunez anymore. She could be whomever she wanted to be. Her old self as Beatrice seemed… well, old. She wasn’t the same person anymore. She felt… different.

“I understand.” She stood up when her boss did and shook his hand. “Thank you.”

Her casual acceptance of her firing put a frown of concern onto her boss’s face. But she didn’t stick around long enough to see it. She just headed out the door.

Free. She was free!

Ten years later

“Hello, Beatrice.” There was a pause. “Or… are you Beatrice? You’re her spitting image from thirty years ago.”

She looked up from the espresso machine. The name Beatrice sounded familiar, but she wasn’t sure why anymore. For as long as she could remember, her name had been Trish. But her memories sometimes seemed a bit fuzzy, especially before she started working at this coffeeshop down the street from her house a couple of years ago. “Do I know you?”

The man’s face furrowed. There were heavy lines on his forehead, and what was left of his hair was pure white. Again, there was a hint of familiarity at his expression, almost like she might have dreamed about his face once upon a time.

The man shook his head. “I just… well, I guess you can’t be her. You’re too young. Is your mom’s name Beatrice? She and I worked together a few decades ago.” He chuckled uneasily. “Don’t tell me that she’s still sore about me closing her department at Techgenes?”

Trish shook her head. Techgenes was a name everyone was familiar with. Who wouldn’t be? A number of years ago, they’d sold a serum that let people live forever, although they’d had to pull it from the market when the terrible side effects came to light. The families of previous clients were suing because after a few decades, their parents/uncles/grandparents no longer remembered who they were, but became a completely new person. One who had none of the skills or thoughts or personality of who they used to be. They were only the shell of their younger self in their physical appearance.

She frowned. “Oh, you must mean my… my…” The word “mother” seemed wrong—she didn’t remember being raised by someone named Beatrice. But she’d found pictures of a woman who looked a lot like her throughout her house, only older. Perhaps mid-forties. Somehow, Trish knew the woman was gone, although also knew she’d once had something to do with her.

“My aunt,” Trish finished. “People say I look a lot like her.”

And it was true. Every once in a while, she’d run into someone who said that to her. But she never recognized them herself.

“Oh.” The man seemed slightly disappointed at her revelation. “I never knew she had a niece.” He held out his hand and she shook it reluctantly. A feeling lingered in the back of her thoughts that she didn’t like this man. But that didn’t seem possible. She’d never even met him before. “Manny Rodriguez. Please let Beatrice know that I wish her my best.”

Trish didn’t have the heart to tell him that Beatrice was gone. Not dead, just completely and utterly gone. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.

“I will,” she promised.