Second Childhood

In a future where death has been engineered out of existence, humanity grapples with the unexpected side‑effects of living forever. Society has erased the very concept of suicide, conditioning people to accept endless life as the only moral path. Amid this sterile permanence, Andrew Young, a five‑thousand‑year‑old public servant, confronts a weariness that no amount of duty or honor can soothe.

Desperate for an end, he appears before the Immortality Commission, presenting a meticulous record of his contemporaries who have perished in accidental, reckless ways—deaths that now seem the only loophole left. He petitions the board to authorize a “discontinuance” of his own life, arguing that true immortality must be genuine, not a forced endurance of endless monotony. The hearing forces the commissioners to confront a question they never anticipated: what does it mean to give a person the right to die when death itself has been outlawed?