The Longevity Fortress

Humanity's last measure of fairness is dead.

The rich stay young forever, while the poor are worn out by forty. This isn't a wealth gap. It's biological segregation.

As the elites of the floating city argue at the Longevity Conference over how much of the western district's medical pod budget to cut, a line of ground-level laborers stretches from the medical pod entrance to the next intersection. Three hundred people's knees ache beneath the same night sky.

In the council chamber, Su Yanci holds back his colleagues' urge to crack down. In the control room, Lu Chen clutches the robot backdoor key, afraid to press it. Deep in the labor district, Chen He finds a note tucked into the pages of a book. It contains just one word: “Continue.”

All nineteen thousand patrol robots in the city have core directives bound to the accounts of technicians who are still aging.

Those technicians are still alive. They're waiting.