It was half past nine. The lab was silent, save for the hum of the servers and the rhythmic, mocking blinking of the monitor.

  Red.

  He slammed his fist against the desk.

  "Not again."

  Everyone else had already gone home. They had given up—not only on the night, but on the project itself. Five years of work, millions in funding, and it had all dwindled to this: a dark room, a cold cup of coffee, and a failure rate that refused to budge.

  A bead of sweat traced a path down his cheek. He didn’t look away from the screen. He couldn't. He had sacrificed everything for this project. Failure was not an option—not after all he had lost.

  He stood up, his chair scraping violently against the floor, and walked to the window.

  Below the facility, the ocean crashed against the shore, the moon casting a silver path across the water. It was peaceful. It was infuriating.

  His eyes landed on a young couple walking hand in hand along the shore. They were laughing, oblivious to the fact that they were dying, second by second.

  That could have been his life—if he had chosen differently. For a moment, a sharp ache caught him off guard. He could walk away. He could go home.

  But he had no home.

  His mind drifted back to the slums. The smell of rot. The coughing of children who never made it past six. Survival there had been a miracle. His mother had resented him for it; his father had been swallowed by the violence of loan sharks. He had learned young that the universe was cruel, and that the only escape was knowledge.

  He looked at the couple again. They were fragile. Finite.

  No, he thought, his grip tightening on the windowsill. I am not going back to being helpless.

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  He turned back to the desk. The humiliation of defeat was the only thing keeping him upright. He could practically hear the investors laughing—those small-minded vermin who cared more about quarterly profits than the evolution of the human species. He would not let them win.

  A knock at the door jolted him.

  He spun around to find a young technician standing there. Matthew. Mid-twenties, pale skin, exhaustion in every movement.

  "Matthew and I are leaving now, sir," the young man murmured.

  "I thought everyone was gone," he replied, his voice raspy.

  "Any luck with the code?"

  "Not yet." He forced a thin, painful smile. "But I haven’t lost hope."

  It was a lie. He had lost hope hours ago.

  Matthew nodded slowly and slipped away down the corridor.

  He was alone again. The only sound was the ticking clock. He sat back down, his mind running in an unfamiliar rhythm—faster, sharper, almost electric. He looked at the failure on the screen. He looked at the helix structure.

  Something was missing. Some elusive link.

  He reached for his coffee mug, eyes fixed on the red text.

  Wait.

  It wasn't a coding error. It was a redundancy. The cells weren't dying; they were fighting the regeneration cycle.

  Click.

  The mug slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor. Brown liquid splashed across his shoes, but he didn't flinch. He didn't breathe.

  A smile, small and disbelieving, crept across his face.

  "This is it."

  With trembling hands, he began typing. His heartbeat roared in his ears. Euphoria surged through him, but he forced himself to stay focused. One wrong keystroke could ruin everything.

  He finished. He reviewed the draft. Once. Twice.

  This was his last attempt. If it failed, he would walk away from not only the project but also his life.

  He pressed Enter.

  The screen went black. Then: LOADING...

  Thirty minutes. Thirty long, unforgiving minutes.

  He stared at the screen without blinking, lost in a haze of adrenaline. He had plans—grand ones. If this worked, nothing would ever be the same.

  The screen blinked.

  Green.

  He froze. For a moment, it felt like a hallucination. A cruel trick of the light.

  But the green glow remained, illuminating the dark lab.

  A shout burst out of him, ragged and raw.

  "I DID IT!"

  The echo bounced off the empty walls.

  "I DID IT!"

  He raced outside, breathless, stumbling toward the railing. The sea stretched out before him—moonlit, endless, alive. The stars glittered overhead, cold and unreachable, but they didn't look so far away anymore.

  He took a long, deep breath, tasting the salt in the air.

  He had done it. Science had won.

  For the first time in his life, he wasn't afraid of running out of time. He let out his breath and enjoyed the scenic view.

  Now, he could do this for all of eternity.

  For he had just discovered the secret to immortality.