Rex Larson woke up that morning, knowing he would climb into bed that night nearly 10 years older.
He felt a fearful apprehension about what he was planning to do. A nervous tension had begun gnawing in his gut the previous night, and none of it had dissipated after six hours of restless sleep in an unfamiliar bed. In fact, he was even more taut now, with the prospect of their impending trip to the age clinic. This would be the last morning he would eat his breakfast as a man in his 30s. (Or maybe that was yesterday; he wasn't sure he was hungry enough to stomach anything this morning.)
He gazed at his wife in the dim morning light that seeped through the heavy hotel curtain. She was still sleeping blissfully. Was she wearing a contented smile, even in her sleep? It sure looked that way, but maybe that was just his imagination.
He sat up for a minute or so, and then quietly got out of bed. He walked an absent-minded circle around the hotel room, and then glanced at the digital clock by the bed. "Just a few minutes after 6 o'clock," he thought to himself. "What now?" He didn't want to disturb his wife, and he wasn't interested in any breakfast. Groggily, he padded into the bathroom for a long and thoughtful shower.
The water was luxuriously hot, in stark contrast to the miniature bar of soap provided by the hotel. Rex didn't like using hotel soaps; he preferred the feel of a heavier bar in his hand. In fact, he usually brought his own soap while traveling, but forgot to pack it this time. "A lot on my mind, I guess," he mumbled to himself, as he unwrapped the small bar of soap.
As he let the water rinse the lather off his body, he reflected about what would happen later that day. It had been nearly 20 years since society embraced the advent of age machines. From the dawn of history, mankind had searched in vain to find a "fountain of youth," a way to slow the sands of time, a way to prevent the inevitability of old age. Finally, in 2213, researchers had discovered a way to make people younger, but it came with a price. Much like the laws of physics are constrained by a conservation of energy; in a similar way, scientists discovered that there was no way to make someone younger, without making someone else older at the same time. It was possible to reverse the genetic effects of aging, but only by taking those years off of someone else.
The early days of reverse aging stirred many heated debates on medical ethics. Some correctly feared that rich people would leverage their wealth, purchasing youth from the general populace - a year or two here, another year there - and thus could buy an indefinitely-extended life, barring any accident or terminal disease. Horrifying rumors circulated as well, about how mentally handicapped children had been unknowingly hooked up to the age machines, to give hospital workers an extra year or two of youth every now and again. However, with so many people greedily trying to amass as much youth as they could, it didn't take too long to discover the limits of reverse aging. A few people had managed to perform the procedure successfully for up to 12, or even 15 years, but, for the most part, anything beyond a decade was exceedingly risky, and usually very detrimental to the subject's health. By all accounts, nature would only let you reverse the affects of aging so far, before rejecting the youth transplant.
