Image by Tom from Pixabay

Neorah hated walking under the Kaidler building. It reminded her of several glass coffins stacked on top of each other. In essence, that was what it was. Sealed inside each of the crystalline pods was someone deemed important enough to preserve through time, frozen in cryo sleep, until such time as they were deemed necessary – or until life saving technology could be adapted to help them – and they could be woken up again.

Some of those pods were over two centuries old. The Kaidler Company had been at this for a while. Some were relatively new, the last pod having been added to the stack only a few years earlier. The government had put a block on any more cryo sleep experiments until it could be proven to be effective. That didn’t mean the Kaidler Company was through with its game. It just kept changing the rules.

Now it was offering “youth treatments” to help “revitalize aging bodies.” They were scum as far as she was concerned, and she hated the fact that they were preying on the most vulnerable members of the population. She made her way past their corporate headquarters to the small apartment block where her grandmother lived.

She knocked on her grandmother’s door and a stranger opened it. “Neorah, it’s so good to see you,” she said.

“Who the hell are you, and where is my grandmother?” Neorah asked.

The woman laughed. “Neorah, it’s me. Your grandmother.”

“The hell you are,” Neorah said.

“Neorah, you know those ads for the youth treatments at Kaidler? I had a couple done over the past month,” the woman said. “They really work. I’ve lost forty years off my looks. You’re seeing me how I looked when your mother was born.”

“Gran, what the hell? Kaidler are a bunch of scam artists. That can’t have been cheap. How’d you pay for it?” Neorah asked, walking into the apartment.

“I sold some of my stocks and took the treatments,” her grandmother said.

“Gran, those stocks were supposed to set you up for the rest of your life. That’s why grandad bought them,” Neorah said.

“I don’t need them anymore. I can go out and get a job. I can set myself up with my own retirement fund now,” her grandmother said. “I have a chance to live my life again.”

“Gran, those treatments only reduce the physical signs of aging, from what Kaidler says. You’re still a sixty three year old woman under that skin. You’re not physically capable of working,” Neorah said worriedly.

“That’s not true, Neorah,” her grandmother said. “The nice people at Kaidler assured me the treatments reverse all the effects of aging, including the damage done to my organs and my bones.”

“That’s not possible, Gran,” Neorah said.

“It’s very possible, Neorah,” her grandmother said. “You just don’t like Kaidler because you’ve bought into all the propaganda against them. They’re a good company. They want to help people.”

Neorah bit her tongue. Her grandmother had fallen victim to the company’s corporate bullshit, the same as so many other elderly people had. “If you say so, Gran,” Neorah said, instead of what she was really thinking.

“I’ve even got a date tonight,” her grandmother said with a grin. “With a very handsome young doctor.”

“I hope you have a lot of fun, Gran,” Neorah said with a sigh.

“I do too,” her grandmother said with a twinkle in her eye.

Neorah left after having a few more minutes’ worth of a conversation with her grandmother. She felt very uneasy about the whole situation. Kaidler were a bunch of scum. She knew this. Yet there seemed to be nothing anyone could do to stop them. Neorah knew one day their whole web of lies would fall apart on them. She just hoped people like her grandmother wouldn’t get hurt in the process.