London, Planet Earth

2058

For as long as Dr. Angus McBairn could remember, he possessed the figure of a rake made exclusively from elbows, the social charisma of a shuttlecock and the nose of a russet potato.

Ginger even on the areas of his body that didn’t sprout hair - Angus had spent his life in the shade, hiding from UV light, ambient light; any sort of light really.

His younger years weren’t easy due to ruthless bullying in the schoolyard, and his older years hadn’t offered much improvement.

But in spite of all this, Dr. Angus was content. He was content because he was doing important work, that would surely change the world.

You see, Dr. Angus is a scientist, and a rather good one at that.

In fact, Dr. Angus is the youngest ever chair of Applied Biology at the Imperial College of London, an accomplishment that had required a vast amount of years of lots of very serious work. It also required that he abandon a social life completely (which was the only real reason that friends or a love life hadn’t materialised as yet - or at least that was what he would tell himself).

During his time there, he’d developed a number of projects that extended the human lifespan from 100 years to 135, through a mixture of advanced gene therapies, stem cells and other complicated things that don’t bear going into quite frankly.

These achievements, unsurprisingly, made him very popular with various billionaires who had spent the bulk of their lives accumulating hard currency, only to find themselves too old to spend it.

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But his greatest work was yet to be completed - and it was his crowning achievement. The big one. The great solution that everyone has been waiting for.

Immortality.

Which, unsurprisingly, the billionaires just loved.

For Angus had, after many years and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, built a supercomputer that would finally upload the human mind to a computer, gifting his (presumably unfathomably wealthy) customers with the ultimate reward - life after death.

Billionaires across the world followed his every move, anxiously adding up their chances each day of living long enough for the device to make it to human trials, allowing them to continue on being billionaires for as long as they liked, which was presumably forever.

Excitingly, Dr. Angus’s team had recently managed to upload the mind of a rather nervous rat, making this impossibly lucky rodent the first immortal being in the history of planet Earth (for as long as the computer stayed plugged in, or wasn’t switched off, of course).

As could be expected, this was rather an international sensation in the science world and the popular presses, because for one reason or another death was still broadly thought of as something best avoided altogether if in any way possible.

But the technology wasn’t ready for humans - not yet. For rats are in a lot of ways different to humans, and not a lot similar.

This was a fact that was rather unpopular with his billionaire benefactors, who were impatient and in many instances grievously ill - in particular a pair of ruthless industrialist brothers named Phillip and Herbert King, notorious in equal parts for their investments in all manner of earth-polluting industries and their broad dislike of certain racial minorities.

Phillip King, as it happens, was in fact urgently ill, and as such had a particular need for Dr. Angus’s device in a rather shorter timeframe than the Therapeutic Goods Administration would afford.

You see Phillip King had a rather inoperable cancer, and despite the best oncologists his rather weighty wallet could afford, he in all likelihood wouldn’t make it to Christmas, let alone the next five years Dr Angus needed to get the device to market.

Which was a problem Phillip King intended to solve - by book, or by crook.