The broadcast flickered to life, not with the usual news from the Jupiter mission, but with the digitally smooth face of a 90-year-old actress advertising 'Aeturnum Gel.'

"Why visit the stars when you can be one forever?" she purred to the camera, her smile perfect and unnervingly still.

In the year 2122, this was the obsession that truly pulled at humanity. We had colonized Mars and sent probes past Pluto, yet the final frontier wasn't in the cold expanse of space; it was in the cellular decay of our own bodies. The race was on for true anti-aging not the gimmicky creams sold by corporations, but a genuine technological breakthrough that could slow, or even stop, the clock entirely.

The man who promised to deliver it was the centerpiece of the current news cycle. Dr. Stephen Grigori, looking like the very antithesis of the world's obsession, had announced a breakthrough. He claimed that after decades of work, he was ready to reveal his perfected technology in just three days, on June 9th.

On the news feed, he appeared portly and unkempt, his greasy glasses sitting crooked on his nose. A huge pair of trousers was cinched high on his belly, and the buttons of his straining shirt struggled to hold back an enormous tummy, looking like tiny hands linked against a flood.

At that very moment, hundreds of kilometers away in the rain-slicked alleys of the city of Curica the planned location for the big reveal three figures huddled around a flickering holographic map. They weren't watching the news.

They were planning to steal the future.