The Larazus Paradox

Dr. Eleanor Voss never set out to make humanity immortal. She only wanted to slow the quiet unraveling of life. For decades, she toiled in the depths of Vantor Biotech, perfecting what would become the Lazarus Treatment—a genetic breakthrough that halted cellular decay. At first, it seemed like salvation. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, and frailty vanished. Time became something to hold, rather than something that slipped away.

But eternity is not as kind as it seems.

A New Dawn

The first to receive the Lazarus Treatment were those who could afford it—the billionaires, the lawmakers, the visionaries. Their ageless faces became the blueprint of the future, their decisions stretching across centuries instead of fleeting decades. They lived without urgency, without fear of the unknown. And as they lingered, the world beneath them shifted.

The middle class drained their savings for a chance at time, mortgaging futures they would never again worry about. But the poor? The forgotten? They watched as a new kind of aristocracy took shape—an empire not of bloodlines, but of eternity itself.

Progress stalled. Careers froze. The young, once inheritors of the earth, found no place waiting for them. The immortal elite clung to their positions, to their power, their wisdom calcifying into something immovable. And so, resentment grew like roots beneath concrete, unseen but inevitable.

The Rebellion of Time

By the third decade of immortality, cities were no longer built for change. The same leaders ruled, and the same voices dictated the future. Outside their shimmering fortresses, the unenhanced—those who aged, who still felt time’s touch—began to revolt.

Theo Kim, a neuroscientist who had been denied the treatment, emerged as the quiet storm. "Life’s meaning comes from its limits," he preached. "Without an end, we are nothing but ghosts in an unchanging world."

The Reclaimers rose under his banner. They did not seek violence, only restoration. But to the elite, to those who had tasted eternity, the Reclaimers were terrorists, radicals, a threat to the fragile utopia they had built. Tensions simmered. Protests turned to clashes. And then, something began to unravel—something even Eleanor Voss had not foreseen.

The Mind’s Fracture

For all its perfection, the Lazarus Treatment had a flaw.

The body remained young, but the mind—never meant to hold centuries of memories—began to crack under the weight of time. At first, it was subtle. A name forgotten. A dream mistaken for a memory. Then came the paranoia, the confusion, the sudden bursts of rage.

The oldest recipients of Lazarus began to break.

Some clawed at their own skin, screaming at shadows only they could see. Others withdrew into themselves, lost in an endless loop of decades-old thoughts. Their minds, untouched by time’s erasure, became prisons, every moment piling atop the last until they could no longer distinguish the past from the present.

And then, the worst discovery of all: there was no cure. No way to reset, no way to forget. The mind was not meant to carry forever.

The Choice

Dr. Voss watched as her creation unraveled. She had given humanity a gift, only to realize too late that it was a curse. And so, in the quiet of her lab, she created one final serum—a way back. A cure for immortality.

The Reclaimers took it, smuggling it past towering gates, slipping it into the veins of those who longed for escape. Some fought the treatment, unwilling to let go of eternity. But others, tired, fractured, and lost, chospe the relief of an ending; they chose to feel time move again.

As for Eleanor Voss, she sat in the dim glow of her office, the serum in her hands. The world outside raged, torn between forever and the fragile beauty of life’s brevity. She had spent so long defying death. And now, for the first time in decades, she made a different choice.

She pressed the needle into her skin and closed her eyes.

For the first time in a lifetime, she felt something she had almost forgotten.

The gentle pull of time.

And she smiled.