Chapter 1
1.
Fifty years later. From the small window of his isolated prison cell, Dr. Damian Vale watched the city lights appear one by one beyond the walls. The evening siren echoed across the prison yard. The world remembered him as a monster. Dr. Vale had heard that word so many times that it no longer wounded him. Monster. Criminal. The scientist who believed humanity itself could be redesigned. The same world that had condemned him was collapsing under the same weaknesses he had spent his entire life trying to remove. Corruption. Greed. Fear.
The hunger for power. They said he had experimented on human beings. They were right. They said he had changed them. They were right. Again.
But they never asked the only question that mattered.
If everything he claimed was impossible...
Why was he still alive?
One hundred and twenty years old.
***
His heart remained strong, his hands did not tremble, and his eyesight was still sharp enough to read the distant lights beyond the walls. Biology insisted he should have died decades earlier. For generations, humanity had asked how to survive disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart failure, and aging. As if they were laws of nature. A faint smile touched his face. Then quietly, almost to himself:
“I never wanted superior people.”
“I wanted children who would never bury their parents at fifty.”
“I wanted mothers who would not die from cancer.”
“I wanted minds that would never stop learning.”
“I wanted scientists with enough years to finish their work.”
“I wanted artists with enough time to create everything they carried inside them.”
Outside, lightning illuminated the clouds.
Strength was never the objective.
Time was.
His eyes remained fixed on the distant city.
Almost no one remembered how it had all begun.
They remembered the trials.
They remembered the dead.
They remembered the monster.
They had forgotten the dream.
The old man smiled.
Not because history had forgiven him.
It hadn’t.
He whispered one last sentence into the empty cell.
“Aging is not destiny.”
“It is chemistry.”
Forty years earlier...
***
