MGold84

Short story - Summer, 2024.

I remember the first time it happened to me. I was sitting on my veranda, drinking oolong tea, and calmly watching my dear Lucia tend to her garden. She had just finished cleaning up the mess that Tom and Jerry, my twin great grandsons, had made over the weekend. Lucia is wont to refuse my help with all manner of physical labor, but no more profusely than she did when the task pertained to those rascals. I think, but I dare not dream of having my suspicions confirmed, that she’s trying too hard to gain their trust and prove her worth to them as step grandmother. It probably does her no favors in their innocent glistening eyes to look as young as she does.

The day is easy to remember because it was also the Sunday after the grand MGold84 gala; the one celebrating the 50’s anniversary of the miracle anti-aging drug. To be more precise, it was the day marking 50 years since the start of the first human trial. Of course, that too, is a small inaccuracy, or rather a public relations white lie. Out of habit, I’d forgotten that this bit of diplomacy is no longer needed. By now, it’s a matter of public record that I, and eleven other lead scientists in the project were using the drug and recording our findings for eleven years before the start of the official trial. When the news came out (I confess here that our own laboratory had leaked the story to the press, perhaps in a display of scientific machismo), many journalists praised us for our courage and our commitment to the progress of medicine. Others were less impressed, calling us irresponsible and egomaniacal. What remained of the press were more ambivalent about our having first dibs of the drug we developed, and busied themselves instead with wordplay, calling us names like “The Lively Dozen” or “12 Healthy Men”.

As it turned out, our trust in the product was not misplaced. At ninety six years of age, I myself felt and looked just as well as I did the day I took my first dose. I was—until very recently —virile, sharp of mind, and happy. The drug, whose pharmacology differed from anything that preceded it, nearly halted all symptoms of biological aging. A millilitre a day, administered sublingually, made the subject damn near immortal. Well, naturally, that’s also a bit of PR tongue-in-cheek. The drug couldn’t stop people from jumping out of windows or walking into traffic. But lo and behold, only a small percentage of our subjects for the past 50 years have died of age-related illnesses. Due to time constraints, we’ve yet to see evidence of MG84 causing someone to live past the natural human lifespan. But by the way things were going, we had high hopes that it would.

As the project’s head scientist and chief of operations, I’ve been extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished. Not only have I felt great myself for the past 61 years, but I’ve helped thousands of people across three continents feel the same way. If not for strict government regulations, millions more would have had access to the drug by now. If anything, it would have given us the scale and resources to start developing an equivalent drug for women.

I must also concede that despite not having been commercialized yet, MG84 had given us - all twelve of us - great financial success: tenure in the country’s best institutes, lucrative speaking fees, research grants, book deals: the works. It’s as if feeling like a million bucks wasn’t enough. But you wouldn’t hear me complain!

As I sat on the veranda of my lake-front estate that Sunday, seeing the beautiful Lucia pruning a bonsai in her lilac summer dress, I felt grateful and proud. This is what it must be like to revel in one’s life achievements, to look back and think, I’ve done well for myself, and I have no regrets.

Exactly as those thoughts flowed through my mind, the unspeakable happened. My body, my most reliable asset, acting of its own volition, doing something unforeseen and untimely. It had never happened before, not in this involuntary way. At first, I brushed it off as a fluke and didn’t speak a word about it to anyone. But when it happened four more times in the course of a week, always in the most inopportune moments, I started to worry. Besides, it was starting to become difficult to hide from my wife. I decided to speak anonymously with a doctor whom I had no personal relationship with, and he confirmed to me what I had read in the medical literature- that a similar phenomenon had been reported, but it’s extremely rare, and often associated with spinal damage or psychiatric illness. Having not had any of those causes myself, my anxiety increased. “Are you taking any medications?”, asked the man on the other end of the line. I hung up.

My professional instinct overcame my pride and I couldn’t shake the suspicion that MG84 was somehow the culprit of my predicament. It was time to get in touch with one of my trusted MG84 colleagues. I picked up the phone and dialled Dr. Sinclair’s number.

“Dr. Kramer. How nice to hear from you.”

“Steve. I have to consult you about something.”

“Actually, Dr. Kramer, I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you. Something strange has been happening to me. It’s embarrassing, but I have no one else to tell. I think it has something to do with MG.“

It’s happening to him too? I got off the phone feeling a sense of impending disaster. Out of all the ways the MG84 trials could have gone wrong, this is not one I could have predicted. Our opposition prophesied all kinds of long term side effects, some plausible, some clearly borne out of wild jealous minds. We’d be infertile, they said, or our children would be born with webbed toes, tails and antlers. Our more conscionable and moralizing critics warned that even if the drug worked, it would usher in a new era of medical apartheid, and called the twelve of us neo-eugenicists. They’d all be having a big laugh now if they knew how it would really end.

Sinclair and I soon found out that all twelve members of our team were experiencing the same side effect and decided to act quickly. We would convene for an emergency meeting to brainstorm about causes, solutions, and decide what the best course of action would be.

In the proceeding passages, I shall refer to my colleagues by their numbers as they appeared in the famous Time Magazine profile; the one that followed the publication of our first breakthrough findings. I myself was number 12, as could be seen on the cover of the magazine, where I was pictured holding in my left hand a test tube of the freshly synthesized golden serum. Please forgive this last bit of vanity, because I morbidly feel that there won’t be more chances to speak of MGold84 with any dignity.

When everyone was seated, I started the meeting myself: “So it is official, gentlemen. We’ve all been afflicted with the same conundrum.”

Number 6, who has always been the most crass of all of us, a maverick biochemist, loudly protested my choice of words: “Conundrum my ass, Kramer. Why don’t you call a spade a spade? We’ve been jizzing non-stop for weeks!”

It’s strange hearing a man of his age and stature speak with such vernacular. Sure, he looks not a day over thirty, but I happen to know that he’s in the tenth decade of his life. “Yes”, I retorted, “the problem is indeed spontaneous orgasms”.

Number 4, looking distressed and sleep deprived, then said, “It’s been a nightmare! I’ve had to wear diapers and I don’t trust myself to drive anymore. It can happen anytime and it happens often!”

Number 7, who sat by fellow pharmacologists number 9 and number 10, seemingly having reached a consensus amongst themselves, rose up to speak and said, “Maybe it’s not a big deal after all. We cannot let this tarnish our legacy! A drug that gives you decades of a young man’s strength and cognition, but ends with chronic bursts of uncontrolled pleasure? I bet many people would still choose that over the alternative.”

In an uncharacteristic spurt of fury, the mildly mannered geneticist number 8 stood up and said, “What pleasure you loathsome imbecile?? I’ve been shooting blanks for days now and it hurts like hell!”

His legs began to quiver as he finished speaking, and he sat back down in defeat, clearly having just had an episode of the side effect. In the short time that we’ve been together so far, this has become so common an occurrence that it was ill-mannered to give attention to it anymore. At any point - between the twelve of us, I would say about once every ninety seconds - someone would start having an orgasm, along with the shivers and the unseemly faces. I must admit, in all my years of practicing medicine and living life to the fullest, never would I have expected to get acclimated to such an ungodly sight. It was even worse when it happened mid speech, or in the few instances, and I thank God that they were few, when it occurred in unison between two or more of us.

Number 3 was nodding in agreement, I wasn’t sure with whom, and started to say, “The optics are indeed bad, but we need to find a medical explanation first. Could it be that this is the body’s stress response to having had such an elevated level of fertility for an extended period of time?”

Number 4 shook his head, saying, “I’m afraid we’re running out of time. Soon enough, we’ll be getting reports that our test subjects are having these symptoms. It started with us because we’ve been taking it a decade longer than anyone else. We must get ahead of this and hire a new PR team.”

A barrage of opinions passed back and forth across the large glass table where we sat, and our collective frustration seemed to grow. Our state of health was also visibly deteriorating by the minute. It seemed that for the first time in decades we were experiencing bodily discomforts exceeding the common cold, and our unpreparedness showed.

Number 1, our most senior member, broke his silence for the first time and said, “You may not agree with me, but I know exactly what’s happening. It’s not an excess of fertility, nor an autoimmune response. This, my esteemed colleagues, is karma. For the past six decades, we’ve been overcome by unbridled pride and self-flattery. I could just imagine your smug faces, and my own as well, every time we met in the past years. We’d speak so vainly about how strong we felt, how we had the biomarkers of a 19 year old athlete. I’m disgusted by the absence of shame whenever one of us spoke of his latest sexual escapades, or his most recent wife who is the age of his grandchildren; how it was a running joke in our group that those women were only chronologically younger than us.”

Murmurs echoed in the room, but no one dared to interrupt him, so he continued, “And on top of that, we acted like we were God’s gift to humanity, because we happened upon a scientific discovery. It’s no secret to you, my friends, that a lot of the work was done by other people to whom we gave little credit. I speak for all of us when I say that along with frailty and disease, this drug stripped me of humility and self-awareness. I have been a colossal jerk! If not for the money, my own children and grandchildren would have disowned me. I’m glad this disease... this curse finally gave me the—”

He interrupted his own speech to have a thunderous moaning orgasm, whose grim reverberations still echo in my head as I write these words. Then, he continued: “— the capacity to self reflect, to reexamine my ways! If this is the only path to atonement, I’ll happily take it. My dear Carol whom I left for a 22 year old after thirty years of marriage is now dead and I can’t even tell her I’m sorry. God, what have I done?”

His speech slowly turned into an extended impassioned cry, and most of us, myself included, moved closer to console him. There might have been a few more orgasms in that final huddle of catharsis and friendship, but I have a feeling that in that instance, none of us cared. We understood what had to be done. We would release a mea culpa, signed by all twelve of us, detailing what we’d learned so far about this side effect, and taking full legal and moral responsibility for what was bound to happen to many if not all of our test subjects.

As I write this from my hospital bed, I am more convinced that my dear friend’s guilt-ridden tirade at the meeting was correct in its essence. The disabilities of age are not mere physical certainties. They also serve as a fail-safe against the inflation of our egos. If we were to live extremely long and healthy lives, unassailed by weakness and disease, our bodies would literally implode with self-satisfaction. This is the tale of how our years of care-free happy lives made our bodies uncontrollably ejaculate. This, indeed, is how we came-of-age.