Free The Eternal World by Christopher Farnsworth

bopping to the music blaring through his earbuds.
    The door closed behind him, sealing the room like a vault. It had been constructed to demanding specifications. Completely soundproofed, it was a reinforced steel box wrapped in concrete and framed inside the girders on the top floor of Conquest’s office tower. It was impervious to any kind of radio wave, and used sophisticated jamming and baffling devices to prevent electronic eavesdropping. No one was going to get interrupted by a call on their cell phone while inside the boardroom. The only signal coming in or out was over a broadband cable with military-grade encryption.
    The boardroom also served as a panic room, with storage tanks under the floor containing its own air and water supply, if it ever became necessary to lock out the entire outside world.
    As soon as the door was shut, Simon stood straighter and yanked the earbuds out of his ears. Of all the tiresome requirements of his public face, the music was the worst. Call him old-fashioned, but he did not find repetitive shouting of obscenities at all entertaining or restful.
    The other members were already at the table. There were four of them. Conquest’s board had more members than that, of course. Twenty-six at last count, not including the various subcommittees and part-time advisers. But that was the public board. They met in a different room.
    This was the place where the real owners met. This was the Council.
    Max was in his place, immediately to the left of Simon’s chair. Sebastian and Peter flanked him. Antonio sat alone on the other side of the table.
    Each of them had a glass. In front of Simon’s empty chair was a crystal pitcher, filled with water, next to his own glass.
    “Gentlemen,” Simon said, signaling that it was all right for the others to speak. In these meetings, they always used formal, Castilian Spanish. Despite everything, they held fast to some traditions.
    “Simon,” Antonio said. “You look well.” He was currently stuck in his midforties, and they all knew he hated it.
    They learned they aged faster the more time passed, if they didn’t have the Water. None of them knew how long they might last without a regular drink.
    But they had to get older, just a little, or the world would discover what they were. They had to perform a balancing act. So Simon and the others had been succeeding themselves as father to son for generations now.
    It was, frankly, exhausting. And painful. The interim period was the hardest. Carefully measuring the dosage, waiting for the change to be complete, and handling the physical pain as one advanced and retreated over several decades in the space of a few hours. Simon no longer remembered what real aging was like. Every time he was cut off from the Water—even willingly, even to advance the deception—a piece of his mind worried that he would never get his youth back, that this would be the time the miracle didn’t work.
    It lasted for only a few seconds, but it was still terrifying. Simon suspected that they would all dry up and blow away if they tried to live like normal men again. The accumulated weight of centuries would crush them to dust.
    In earlier times, even thirty or forty years before, it was easier. The press didn’t care as much about the private lives of the rich, and there was a certain distance enforced by wealth. The last time Simon had succeeded himself—gone from Simon Oliver II to Simon Oliver III—there had been a discreet funeral notice and a few faked pictures. These days, he had to contend with amateur paparazzi hunting for cell-phone videos, demands for childhood photos from supposedly respectable publications, and coroners and authorities who were increasingly difficult to bribe. He’d been forced to create a whole separate identity for himself, a celebrity image shiny enough to distract attention away from the fact that the supposed father and son were never seen in the same time zone, let alone the same room.
    On