Marcus Webb had been late three times this month, and his boss had not said anything yet, which was somehow worse than if he had. The silence was a loaded thing, sitting in the corner of the open-plan office like an elephant that everyone had agreed not to notice. Marcus knew it. His boss knew it. The only person who seemed oblivious was the new intern, a kid from NYU with a haircut that cost more than Marcus's first car and a confidence that suggested he had never once worried about anything in his entire privileged life.

"Rough morning?" Sarah Chen asked as Marcus dropped his bag onto his desk. She sat two rows over, in analytics, and they had developed the kind of friendship that consists entirely of coffee runs and shared complaints about the building's HVAC system.

"Rough month," Marcus said. He opened his laptop, closed it, opened it again. "You see the memo about the抗衰老 program?"

Sarah's eyes went narrow. "The what?"

"The anti-aging program. The one the firm is subsidizing for senior partners. Gene therapy. Telomere extension. The whole pitch."

Sarah leaned back in her chair. "Yeah, I saw it. They're offering it to VPs and above. Five hundred thousand dollars worth, fully covered. I heard the waiting list is six months long."

Marcus nodded slowly. He had not told Sarah about the money. He had not told anyone about the money. But the secret was sitting inside him like a stone, and he could feel it growing heavier with each passing hour.

"Have you thought about it?" Sarah asked.

"I'm a senior associate," Marcus said. "I make two hundred and eighty thousand a year. Before taxes. After the city take, after the firm's cut, after my rent in Williamsburg, after my student loans, after my mother's medical bills—"

"Marcus."

"I can't afford it, Sarah. Even with the subsidy, I'd have to dip into savings. And the savings are for my mother. And my mother is sixty-two and her cholesterol is—"

"I know your mother's cholesterol."

"And you know my mother's cholesterol," Marcus said, "so you know that she's not going anywhere soon. She's a strong woman. She's going to outlive me by thirty, forty years if the genetics hold. And I'm supposed to sit here and tell you that I need half a million dollars to add another two centuries to my own life when I'm thirty-eight years old and I still can't afford to buy a apartment in the same borough as my mother?"

Sarah was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Is it just about the money?"

Marcus looked at her. He looked at the fluorescent lights overhead, the humming, flickering thing that had been installed last year and still didn't work properly in the corner by the break room. He looked at the half-empty coffee pot on the counter. He looked at the faces of his coworkers, all of them staring at their screens, all of them doing the same work they had been doing for ten, fifteen, twenty years, all of them slowly aging under the fluorescent lights while the senior partners on the forty-second floor were injecting themselves with something that would make them look thirty for another hundred years.

"No," Marcus said. "It's not just about the money."

"What is it about, then?"

Marcus thought about this. He thought about the email from Dr. Okafor in the genetics division, the one who had explained the science over lunch last week. The science was sound. The science was beautiful. The science was available to anyone who could pay for it, and the firm was paying for the people at the top, the people who had already won, to win for longer.

"It's about the math," Marcus said finally. "I did the math. If I take the money—if I move it through the shell accounts like they showed us in the compliance training, the stuff we all half-listen to and then forget—the discrepancy won't show up for six months. Six months. In six months, I'll have taken the first dose. I'll have started the treatment. I'll be two hundred and fifty years old before anyone knows I stole the money."

"Marcus," Sarah said, and her voice had changed. It was no longer the voice of a colleague sharing coffee complaints. It was the voice of someone who had just realized that the person sitting across from her was standing on a ledge.

"In twenty years," Marcus continued, almost to himself, "I'll have a clean record. Twenty years for five hundred thousand. That's nothing. That's a parking ticket with extra steps. And in front of me will be two hundred and thirty years. Two centuries. I'll see the next ice age come and go. I'll see—"

"Marcus."

Sarah stood up. She walked over to his desk and put her hand on his arm. Her hand was warm. Her hand was real. Her hand was the hand of a woman who would be sixty-two in thirty-six years and who would be worried about her cholesterol and her mother's health and whether she had remembered to turn off the stove that morning.

"Who will you be," she said, "when all those years are over? Who will you be when you've seen everything and done everything and there's nothing left to see and nothing left to do?"

Marcus looked at her hand on his arm. He looked at her face. He looked at the fluorescent light above her shoulder, the one that was still flickering, the one that had been flickering for a year and nobody had fixed because the building manager said it was more cost-effective to replace the bulbs one at a time than to do the whole thing at once.

"I don't know," he said.

"Then maybe," Sarah said, "you should just go to work."

She went back to her desk. Marcus opened his laptop. He started checking the figures. They were the same figures they had always been. They would always be the same figures. The numbers did not care about immortality. The numbers did not care about anything. They simply were.