The Prometheus Gene

Dr. Francesca Crickson—Frankie, if you met her in a bar or at the kind of lecture where they served pinot in plastic cups—did not mean to upend death. But death, like most overrated institutions, was due for disruption.

Frankie wasn’t a mad scientist. She wasn’t even particularly ambitious. She was the kind of person who always had cold coffee on her desk and socks that didn’t match. She just happened to be very good at noticing things the rest of us were too busy dying to see. Literally.

Her breakthrough came not with a bang, but with a mouse named Clive. Not because she particularly liked mice (or particularly hated them), but because she simply couldn’t be bothered to do the paperwork with the International Review Board. She liked her vino red, not her tape.

Clive had lived well past his expected expiration date, spry and smug at the ripe age of 1,200 days, still outrunning the treadmill he had long since ceased to need. It was no accident or luck of good genes. Unless you counted his fated encounter with Frankie ‘luck’. Basically, she wielded the scissors of DNA to splice his genes, telling the cells—very politely—to stop panicking about aging. Instead of the usual telomere attrition and fear-induced cellular collapse, Clive's body just... rebooted. Not back to infancy (thank God), but to a prime state. Thirty-five in mouse years, or whatever that translates to in human metaphors.

Naturally, once she published, the world descended on her lab like a pack of vultures in lab coats and Prada shoes. They begged, threatened, and offered her chairs at Harvard, yachts in the Maldives, and one Saudi prince offered his favorite wife in exchange for an early trial. He wasn’t sure if he meant her for experiment or barter. Either way, she declined. Not out of ethics—ethics had become negotiable somewhere around her third postdoc—but because she found most people annoying. Hence, the mice.

Eventually, after a six-month media blackout and one fairly embarrassing TED Talk titled “What If You Never Had to Die?” Frankie emerged with “The Prometheus Gene”.

It had a nice ring to it. Classical. Doomed.

The marketing team—because of course there was a marketing team—loved it. "Prometheus gave fire to man," they wrote in the brochure. "Dr. Crickson gives us time."

The tagline left out the part where Prometheus ended up chained to a rock with his liver eaten daily by a bird, but nuance never did test well in biotech branding.

The procedure wasn’t surgical. It wasn’t even particularly invasive. A retrovirus carried the edited gene sequence into the body. Within weeks, the subject’s cells began to express a cascade of proteins that effectively turned back the biological clock—not to zero, but to a safe and attractive thirty-five. Everyone’s favorite LinkedIn headshot age.

It worked. Too well.

The first human subject was a Holocaust survivor named Miriam Rothschild, age 92. Six weeks after receiving the Prometheus treatment, Miriam was wearing stilettos and delivering a speech at the UN about the perils of forgetting history, in flawless French. She wore a leather jacket. The world lost its mind.

The billionaires were first, naturally. Jeff Bezos grinned his way through five resets before his eyebrows disappeared entirely. Governments followed. Scandinavia subsidized the treatment. Japan tied it to productivity bonuses. China turned it into a loyalty program.

The U.S. took a more American approach: you could have your Prometheus shot if you gave up Medicare and Social Security. It was basically extinct, anyway.

Frankie watched all of this from a safe emotional distance. She had her own reset at 47—mostly to prove it worked, but also because her knees were starting to revolt. Afterward, she described the feeling as “being reborn but still pissed about the same things.”

What she didn’t tell the press was what happened after the second reset.

And the third.

Because here’s the thing: we’re not built for forever.

Somewhere between the third and fourth treatments, subjects began reporting strange symptoms. Memory lapses. Emotional flattening. Apathy. One man, formerly a theoretical physicist, forgot how to make toast but could still recite the theory of quantum entanglement. Another wept every time she looked at her own reflection, claiming she no longer recognized the woman in the mirror.

They called it “The Fading”.

It wasn’t Alzheimer’s. It was something subtler. Not decay—drift. Like a ghost version of yourself had slowly taken the wheel, and you were now riding shotgun.

Frankie tried to explain it in an internal memo: “The Prometheus Gene preserves the body but not the narrative self. Identity requires entropy. We are built on forgetting.”

The board deleted that sentence before publishing.

By Year 10, entire neighborhoods were repurposed as memory care compounds for the Faded. They were designed like sitcom sets from the 1990s. Staff dressed in denim overalls and sang jingles. One facility had a working Blockbuster. Patients seemed calmer in curated nostalgia. Less likely to ask why they were still alive.

By Year 15, death was considered a lifestyle choice. By Year 25, most governments required new Prometheus recipients to sign waivers acknowledging the potential for “perceptual drift and derealization phenomena.” But by then, it was already too late.

Human culture, stripped of urgency, began to rot from the inside. Art got boring. War got slower. No one wanted to be first in line for anything, because lines never ended. People dated for decades, married and divorced multiple times without ever hitting menopause. A man in Denmark adopted his ex-wife just to split the inheritance tax. "Time is a flat circle," he said, winking. No one laughed.

Frankie kept resetting. She told herself it was necessary for the research. But even she noticed the thinning.

She stopped dreaming.

One day she forgot the smell of her mother’s perfume.

Then she forgot her mother’s name.

Eventually, she couldn’t remember if she’d ever had a mother, or if that was just an early test subject implanted in her long-term memory to see if familial ties affected Fading rates. She kept journals. Reams of them. But they felt like fiction written in her handwriting.

She gave one last keynote speech in Geneva. They asked her if she believed the Prometheus Gene was worth it. She said, “I used to believe we were meant to live forever. Now I think forever is the punishment. Not for us—but for time.”

She disappeared a few months later. Some say she walked into the ocean. Others claim she uploaded herself into an offline server farm buried under Iceland, where the cold would preserve whatever was left of her. The Prometheus Foundation denied all rumors.

A century has passed since then. Earth is quiet now. The True—those who refused the Gene—live mostly in reclaimed rural zones, growing vegetables and dying with dignity at inconvenient times. The Prometheons—yes, we kept the nickname, like a bad tattoo—float in orbital colonies, sipping algae cocktails and browsing AI-generated novels that never end.

And then there’s us. The Faded.

I’m writing this from a chair that looks like it belongs in my grandmother’s living room, in a memory district modeled after 1998. There's a lava lamp in the corner. Someone keeps playing Enya.

I was once a poet. Maybe.

Or a scientist.

Or a very talented liar.

I don’t remember anymore.

But I remember this:

There was a woman named Frankie. She gave us fire. And then she watched us burn very, very slowly.