Intro

Everyone knows McDonalds.

It’s pretty much a staple of growing up.

We all know it’s not a great dining experience, but it’s familiar, it’s easy and it’s comforting.

It’s the wearing PJs all day version of eating out.

Comfort food, I guess.

People talk about how it’s just the same as when they were a kid.

But it does change.

It just does it real slow.

You realise that. When you get to my age;

How much things change if you give them enough time.

I’d love to say everything changes, a nice little cliché, but it’s not true.

Money, Sex, Greed.

They don’t change.

There are still people who live in mansions and there are still people who live in cardboard boxes.

The girls who work at McDonalds - just like the rest of us - fall somewhere in the middle.

When I was a kid working McDonalds was a shit job. You’d do it in collage to make some cash, of if you were down on your luck while you hoped for something better.

It’s pretty much a gig-for-life these days.

These days, you can’t get much better than a couple of dollars an hour, dorm accommodation and a gene Refresh every ten years.

There are downsides ... they don’t get to Reimage themselves like the rest of us when they get a Refresh.

They get a little leeway, but the company picks the height, eye and hair colour, and a few other little things they deem needed for the job.

But, they get to look between fourteen and twenty-four, a decent income and two days a week off. And they get that - barring an accident or giving up - pretty much forever.

Of course, they have to be OK with wiping down tables and fucking customers forever.

Yeah, that’s one of the things that’s changed about McDonalds since I was a kid.

Back then you weren’t allowed to pay for sex, just like you couldn’t fuck in a restaurant or take whatever drugs you wanted.

I’ll admit I wasn’t in favour of all the changes; I even joined a couple of protests when they scrapped the minimum wage.

We were fighting a losing battle though.

By the time they got around to women’s rights, immigrants and age of consent I’d learnt to keep my head down rather than lose it.

The last real protest was population control.

The last stand of the democrats and the liberals. The last battle against darkness some called it.

And it really was a battle, but I was getting close to my hundredth birthday by then.

I watched it on the news.

It’s didn’t go well.

Before they’d finished filling the body bags, they started putting birth control in the food and water.

At the time it seemed the world was going to shit.

I knew I should care more about it, but I was just playing down the clock really.

A few more years, of aches and pains, rushing for the bathroom in the middle of the night and waiting to join my wife.

I guess you’d call it a low point.

The world didn’t go to shit though ... well not as bad as some figured.

Ok, you had to be registered and in a ‘good Christian marriage’ before you’d get the counteragents that would lead to pregnancy.

But people stopped talking about that real fast when Refresh got its release.

What does medical science do when it’s cured every disease?

It goes after the real money spinners.

They’d be talking about it for decades, doing it in bits and pieces, while the technology slowly came together.

Turning back the clock.

It was the magic pill...

Ok, it was the magic ‘step in a big booth for six hours and have every cell in your body re-written’.

It hurt like a motherfucker, but it got the job done.

You’d step out of that booth – if you were still among those of us who could step – as a younger version of you.

It raised a lot of questions and it cost a lot of money.

If you want to talk about Us and Them, Have Vs Have not, here was the real dividing line:

People who lived forever and people who died.

I was a hundred and four when it went mass market, and I was a hundred and eight when I got through the waiting list.

It was a hard choice for some, but I had nothing left, it was the only one for me.

It cost me my house, pension, savings ... everything.

And it wasn’t a guarantee.

Year one they had a 30% success rate.

Let’s just say you don’t want to hear about the 70% ... most of them only lasted a day or so anyway.

They’d refined it by the time I went in, but the older you are the trickier it is. Cells degenerate with age, it all become a little ... tricky.

56% was the number they gave me.

A 56% chance of starting over young with just the shirt on my back.

A 44% chance of being buried in the same shirt.

If they’d said it was a 1% chance of success, I’d probably still have done it.

I’d spent the last year in a wheelchair and my eyes were starting to go. My doctor said I could last another 10 years ... my eyes maybe one.

No fucking way was I spending ten years in the dark missing my wife and trying to roll myself to the bathroom three times a night.

Turns out I was wrong.

No way that shirt way fitting.

It turns out smoking does stunt your growth; your genes don’t give a shit though. They don’t know about all the burgers and beers, the busted knee or the lack of exercise. Your cells just take the blueprint for what you were supposed to be, and Refresh builds it up from vats of proteins and calcium.

In the few moments I dared to hope it would work I had dreams that I’d march out, fit and healthy and go straight to a bar.

In the end I stumbled out and then slept on a friend’s couch for 19 hours.

Things look hard when you’re a kid starting out in the world with nothing. You fumble for the way, make your mistakes and slowly find your feet.

I have to tell you; round two was pretty fucking easy!

I’d been a carpenter before and I’d worked the job sixty years, well into my eighties.

I still knew a few guys and made a couple of calls.

Sixty years’ experience in a twenty-year-old body is a pretty easy sell, especially when the pitch is to a guy, you’d taught the trade too.

It was a cash in hand gig, just what I needed.

The wages were good, the work felt great after the chair, and the girls ... man, by the time you hit seventy you forget what a teenage girl’s ass feels like

The end of my first day, I hit a bar, got wasted and then fucked a sixteen-year-old up against the wall outside.

She was kinda chubby, but pretty.

I loved it and she thought she’d won the fucking lottery.

I rediscovered girls and teenage stamina, she thought she was hooking up with some hot college guy.

The first time I’d been young I’d be picky - chased after the hot girls, ignored the plain.

This time they all looked like goddesses to me.

MILFs in their forties, impressionable young things, bar sluts and chunky girls with acne. I was over a hundred years older than some of them and they thought I was some young stud.

It was a damn good second youth.

I’d calmed down a bit by a hundred and twenty, my body was hitting its 2^nd thirties, I’d set up on my own and the work was flooding in.

I bought a cheap little house and did it up – I even started up a saving fund, so I’d be able to Refresh again.

But tech marches on.

Refresh was still pricy, but it wasn’t eye watering any more ... that was reserved for the next big thing.

Reimage.

It was a simple concept.

If you’re recreating the human body from its blueprints ... why not change the blueprints a little.

It was just the basics as first. Eye colour, Hair Colour.