Free The Methuselarity Transformation by Rick Moskovitz

the Cascade Mountains felt surreal. His efforts had enough of an effect upon the march of HibernaTurf that by summer it had covered only the eastern third of their pastures, while most of their neighbors’ pastures had already been wiped out.
    By the following spring, the devastation was nearly complete. HibernaTurf blanketed ninety percent of their land while their cattle crowded into the remaining grassland fighting to eke out enough nutrients to survive. Their flesh and muscle gradually melted away until they could barely stand. The lowing of the starving beasts was heartrending. As they grew weaker, they were sent one by one to slaughter before becoming totally helpless. The killings were for their own good. They were too far gone to salvage even the hides.
    Marcus watched the herd dwindle, overcome by his impotence to save them. In the throes of helplessness, he began running and soon was covering more than ten miles a day. Weakness, he was learning, was fatal. He was determined from then on always to be strong.
    Hugo was among the last to perish. Marcus insisted on being present when he was euthanized and held his head as he died. The boy’s anguished wails rang out over the din of the last surviving animals and brought their cries to a momentary halt.
    Once the last of the herd had been slaughtered, there was nothing left to keep the Takanas in New Quest. They packed their belongings in a trailer and made their way north looking for another place to settle and start over, but patches of HibernaTurf were sprouting all over the landscape and beginning to merge into a continuous blanket. There was nowhere else to go.
    They wound up in Seattle, where Marcus’s mother found a job as a veterinary assistant, while the only work his father could find was as a technician in a meat growing factory. As a farmer, he’d developed skills in meat handling that proved useful enough in the vat industry for him to earn a living, but he detested having to participate in it, sinking steadily into despair. Even with both parents working, the family barelyscraped by. In the spring of 2037, when Marcus was not quite 18, his father suddenly collapsed and died.
    Marcus finished high school and took over his father’s job in the meat vat factory, giving up his dreams of becoming a biologist and saving the world from HibernaTurf. The only remnant of his life on the farm was the microparticle body art he gave himself as a graduation present. On his chest was the head of a bull. It’s tail in the background rose in the form of a tree, with the roots and branches braided together, an affirmation of life’s flow. The image, invisible at rest, waxed and waned with his metabolic rate. When he was at peak arousal, smoke seemed to spew from the beast’s nostrils. Hugo would always remain vital and close to his heart.
    What Marcus left out of the story was the remarkable turn of events that enabled his dream to revive. That Ray Mettler was ultimately responsible for making Marcus Takana’s work possible was an irony for which only Terra and her shadowy organization held enough of the puzzle pieces to appreciate.

9
    FROM THE MOMENT Lena left, darkness infiltrated Ray’s heart like tendrils of a vine that gradually encircled and threatened to crush it. She was right, of course. Their home had become a hollow prison for them both, devoid of joy or meaning. It was a place for him to wait. But for what? He no longer had any idea what, if anything, would ever make him happy. At the end of the long, dark tunnel there was no glimpse of light, no end, no destination. For all the disharmony between them, Lena’s presence was all that separated him from utter desolation.
    His real prison wasn’t his home, but his thoughts, which were now spinning out of control. He should have been happy. He had enough wealth to buy whatever he needed or wanted, even the promise of immortality that was supposed to lift the burden of perpetual worry about illness and