PROMPT: Science actually discovered immortality years ago. It turned out it was a profoundly bad idea, so they destroyed the knowledge instead of publishing it.
Before getting down to business, you must bear with me while I give you some of the history of our little organization, its purpose and its membership.
It didn’t start as a cult. Just the opposite, in fact: At the beginning, it had been a publishing tree, sort of a predecessor to the modern journal system. Someone who had produced results might send it to a circle of their friends, and if that circle found the results notable, they might pass it on to another circle of interested persons. The repetition of the experiment and the publication of results happened in the same manner, bouncing from one end of the small, scattered circle of interested parties to another.
The initial publication of Jacobsen’s findings had been met with a sort of fascinated skepticism; previous claims about life extension had been made, of course, and always turned out to be either grossly overstated or complete balderdash; and besides, results themselves were very difficult to confirm, requiring, as it were, a lifetime of study. Jacobsen’s results, however, were different.
