Free Fiction: Start the Clock

Frankly, we were excited. This move was what our Pack needed—the four of us, at least, were sure of it. We were all tired of living in the ghetto—we were in three twentieth-century townhouses in Billings, in an “age-mixed” area full of marauding Thirteens and Fourteens and Fifteens. Talk about a people damned by CDAS—when the virus hit them, it had stuck their pituitaries and thyroids like throttles jammed open. It wasn’t just the giantism and health problems caused by a thirty-year overdose on growth hormones, testosterone, estrogen, and androgen. They suffered more from their social problems—criminality, violence, orgies, jealousy—and their endless self-pity.
~ "Start the Clock" by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin Rosenbaum's short story collection The Ant King and Other Stories is now free for download. Most of Rosenbaum's stories are more fantasy than science fiction, but "Start the Clock" takes place in a future where a virus has arrested development, resulting in a world full of chronological adults arrested at the physical age of 15 or 9 or 3. What might happen when it becomes possible to restart aging? Read the story:

• Read "Start the Clock" in The Ant King and Other Stories
• Listen to "Start the Clock" at Escape Pod

(via Boing Boing)

Tags:science fiction, biology