The thing about five million dollars is that it sounds like a lot of money until you realize it's the price of two hundred extra years. Then it just sounds like extortion with better marketing.

I sat at my desk in the accounting firm on Lower Manhattan and stared at the numbers on my screen and tried to make them mean something different than they did. They didn't. Five million dollars. That's what GeneTech charges for a single extension. Five million for two hundred more years of breathing and paying taxes and watching your friends die.

The technology works. I'm not a cynic about that. The injections stabilize telomeres, repair cellular damage, extend the average lifespan from eighty to three hundred and eighty years. If you can afford it, you basically become middle-aged forever. Your skin stays firm. Your memory stays sharp. Your knees don't kill you when it rains.

If you can afford it.

I'm Mike Harrison. I'm thirty-four years old and I make sixty-two thousand dollars a year doing tax returns for small businesses in Queens. I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights that smells like boiled cabbage because the woman on the fourth floor is always boiling cabbage. I have a girlfriend named Sarah who works at the library and has opinions about everything and loves me in the way that people love each other when they're both tired and neither of them has figured out what they want to do with their life.

Sarah chose hibernation.

That's the other option, apparently. If you can't afford the extension, you can pay for a year-long sleep in a cryogenic pod. You close your eyes in 2024 and open them in 2025, and the world has moved on without you, and you get to skip all the parts you weren't ready for.

"I'm not ready for this," she told me three weeks ago, sitting on the fire escape behind our building, smoking a cigarette she didn't need to smoke because she doesn't actually like cigarettes. "Everyone is so tired, Mike. Everyone is so tired and angry and running in circles. I just want to sleep through it."

"Through what?"

"This. Whatever this is. The waiting. The wondering if it gets better. It doesn't, does it?"

I didn't have an answer. I still don't.

Johnny Wu, my colleague at the firm, is part of an anti-extension group called The Water Line. They believe that extending life for the rich while the poor die at eighty is morally indefensible, and they organize protests and write pamphlets and try to convince people that mortality is a feature, not a bug.

"It's natural," they say. Like death is a feature of being human, like breathing and blinking and feeling sad on Sunday evenings. I think death is a bug that someone figured out how to monetize.

On April Fools' Day, the office got a call from the IT Republic.

This had been building for months. A group of tech bros had declared a virtual nation on the internet, registered a domain, printed passports, and were now claiming to be a sovereign state. On April first, they declared war on the world.

Or at least, that's what the news said, and the news is always saying something, and most of the time I don't listen, but that day I listened because my hands were shaking and I couldn't stop thinking about the five million dollars sitting in the account that was supposed to fund my extension and was currently one bad day away from being gone.

The news anchor, a woman with perfect hair and eyes that had seen too many press conferences, explained that the IT Republic had announced a "global wealth format." All digital money, all bank accounts, all cryptocurrency—everything would be erased at midnight. The world's finances would be wiped clean and restarted.

My five million dollars. Gone. Just like that. One click and my two hundred years of extra life evaporated into pixels and regret.

I called GeneTech. They confirmed it: if the wealth format occurred, my application would be void. The money would be gone. The extension would be impossible.

I sat in my apartment that night and watched the clock tick toward midnight and felt something I hadn't felt since I was a kid and my father had taken me to see a thunderstorm and I had understood, for the first time, that the world was bigger and more powerful and more indifferent than I was.

Midnight came. The wealth format did not occur.

The IT Republic had lied. It was an April Fools' joke. A prank. A elaborate piece of theater designed to make people feel the taste of panic and then give them relief, so they would appreciate the relief and maybe, just maybe, think about why they were so afraid in the first place.

I sat in my apartment and stared at the ceiling and laughed. I laughed until my ribs hurt and tears ran down my face and I couldn't breathe. I laughed because I had spent three weeks agonizing over five million dollars that I didn't have, because I had imagined myself as a victim of fate when I was really just a victim of my own stupidity, because I had almost transferred money I didn't have to a company that would have given me two hundred years of life I wasn't sure I wanted.

Sarah came home from the library at 3 AM and found me sitting on the floor, still laughing, still crying, still unable to stop.

"What happened?" she asked.

"I almost bought eternity," I said. "And then I realized I don't want it."

She sat down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders and I leaned into her and we watched the sunrise through the window, and the sky was the color of weak tea, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I declined the extension. I stayed thirty-four years old, which is to say I stayed thirty-five the next year and thirty-six the year after that, aging at the natural rate, the rate that all humans age, the rate that gives life its shape and its urgency and its terrible, precious meaning.

Sarah came back from hibernation a year later. She was the same height, the same color hair, the same sharp intelligence and soft laugh. But she looked at me differently, like she had slept through the part of our lives where we were confused and angry and running in circles, and she had woken up in a world where I had made a choice and she wanted to know what that choice said about me.

"I didn't buy it," I told her.

"Good."

"How did you know?"

"Because you're you, Mike. You're the kind of person who notices when the world is boiling cabbage and thinks it's weird but doesn't complain. You're the kind of person who sits on the fire escape and watches the sunrise even though you know it's just gas molecules burning. You're the kind of person who would refuse eternity because eternity sounds like a long time to boil cabbage."

I kissed her and we made coffee and went to work and filed tax returns and lived our lives at the normal human rate, which is to say slowly enough to matter.

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