Tony pushed back against the headrest, the dry leather upholstery creaking slightly from the pressure. He’d been driving for hours and was restless. He’d rolled the window up and down, talked to himself, fiddled with the radio but the stations quickly fuzzed into static. He thought of stopping to stretch his legs but didn’t want to risk arriving after the hotel bar had closed. He was on tour for the Affiliation of Alternative Medicine Association hosting a booth at nontraditional medicine events up and down the west coast. He didn’t much care about the AAMA and thought the name a bit stupid.
“Affiliation Association? Is that like a team gang? Or a herd flock?” people asked him, repeatedly. He tried to spin it as being all-inclusive and welcoming to a broad range of people and interests.
The American Medical Association had threatened to sue unless the Alternative Medicine Association changed their name. During a conference call, one of their lawyers came up with adding “Affiliation of” and it stuck. Whatever. Just more bottles of crap to sell. Tony didn’t believe in Alternative Medicine any more than he did the so-called legitimate pharmaceuticals he hawked previously. He graduated college with a marketing degree, was handsome, personable, and a bit lazy so sales was a natural path. Selling drugs promised good money with minimal effort; chat up the doctors, bring their staff a catered lunch, throw the occasional dinner event and call it a day.
One of his drugs, ArthriNo, was born when a chemist figured out how to flip an ibuprofen molecule into a mirror image of itself — which could be patented as a new drug. In tests it worked better than ibuprofen, and a massive marketing push implied it would allow the old to dance, hike, jog, hug grandchildren and garden without pain. Once it was in wide release it had the unhappy effect of causing hypertrophy in connective tissue so that tendons and ligaments tripled in size, leaving the patients pain free but unable to move.
He also sold Renuvojoy, an antidepressant that made mice and monkeys very happy. They sat blissfully in their steel cages watching a Sanford and Son episode on a continuous loop. Human trials again had showed great promise with no significant adverse reactions. Renuvojoy was a major hit and began to challenge the mighty Viagra in profitability. Unfortunately, after a decade of use the medicine built up in the optic nerve, causing irreversible blindness and searing pain. Some patients actually tore their eyes out attempting to quell the fire. Others, committed suicide to end their suffering but thanks to the antidepressant effects died with a smile on their face.
Tony shifted from company to company for a few decades, but as Big Pharma dollars shifted to consumer advertising the work dried up. Thus he found his way to alternative medicine. His task at the conventions was to educate providers about continuing medical education opportunities offered by the AAMA, to recruit more members for the Association, and to put a professional face on a mostly haphazard industry. Slogging through crappy hotel lobbies, driving the barren highways of the west, and charming alt-med weirdos was a thin echo of his high salary, noon-to-three, Big Pharma gigs. He had applied for other, easier, sales jobs but was undercut by younger, fresher, more up-to-date shills. He was stuck attending airport hotel conventions in low ceilinged exhibit halls.
It was at just such a convention that Tony met Joel, the inventor of RePeel. During lulls at the conferences, Tony would wander to the other booths to recruit new members. Joel sat meekly at his table, with people stopping to take a free pen or piece of candy, leaving his pamphlets untouched. Joel was a wormy guy, with a slouch, thinning hair, and a Wal-Mart suit who was trying to sell a beauty product. As he told it, RePeel would rejuvenate your skin back the vitality it had when you were twenty, with no wrinkles, blotches, or scars. But after one look at Joel, people moved on. Tony listened patiently to Joel’s pitch but became confused almost immediately. Joel was a technician, not a slick. Tony felt sorry for him and offered to buy him a drink after the conference closed for the day. They met up in the hotel bar. When Tony arrived Joel was stirring his bowl of peanuts with his finger and nursing a tonic water.
After Tony cajoled Joel into polishing off a couple of Rob Roys in him, Joel told Tony the story of how he came up with RePeel. He was working at a tech start-up as a grunt programmer but his dream was to be an inventor. Ranking near the bottom in lines of code produced, he had been warned to speed it up or he’d be fired. Riding the light rail home, he peeled an orange and noticed how the rind tore smoothly from the pith. As he separated the wedges, an old lady across the aisle dropped her coin purse. In a happy act of kindness, passengers knelt to help her gather the coins. Joel watched the many hands passing coins to the woman who gratefully held her coin purse open to the crowd. He noticed her fragile, velum-like skin, scattered with liver spots, ropy veins standing out like earthworms. The skin of the hands pumping coins into her purse looked firm in contrast; plump with life and vitality. He especially noticed the hands of a college student as she slipped coins to the old woman. Her skin was unblemished, like the wood inside a freshly peeled stem; perfect and smooth and vibrant. He noticed the orange peel in his own hand, and knew he was on to something.
Joel understood that the pith of the orange skin was chemically similar to the stuff that gives young skin its vibrancy: collagen. Using a CRISPR DNA sequencer that he got on E-Bay, he managed to develop a technique for genetically extracting and recombining genetic material from an orange peel with human DNA. Given his limited funding, he arranged a study on Russian prisoners looking to make some extra money. Joel sent his recombinant DNA in pill form to the prison officials. Prisoners took the pills and were filmed in their cells to monitor the response. At first there was some concern because the prisoners’ skin became discolored and stiff, and then started to crack and peel. But then the old skin sloughed off and robust, firm, spongy skin replaced it. The new skin remained raw and fragile for a few days, but soon became better than new. The prisoners were free of tattoos, all their wrinkles were gone, and all their scars disappeared. Bald men had their hair restored and even the oldest prisoners looked to be twenty years old. The guards started giving it to their wives and girlfriends, and demand started to grow, but Joel didn’t have the means to make more. Nobody would finance him based on footage from Russian prisons.
Joel showed Tony the footage, explaining his frustration over his lack to success.
“I’ve turned back the clock! I’ve made people young again! But no one believes me. They think it’s just a scam.”
“Well, look at yourself,” Tony said, “You’re not exactly a strong endorsement for the product. Why didn’t you try it?”
“I did. This is what I looked like when I was twenty.”
“Sorry,” Tony said. “Look, give me one of the pills and I’ll try it. I know everybody in alternative medicine and have connections to the big drug companies, and they can fund a lot marketing for a piece of the action.”
“Ok, but you’ll need someplace to stay for a few days. You’ll need help getting the old skin off and waiting for the new one to firm up; like a lobster shedding its shell.”
Tony took the pill that night and Joel agreed to be his caretaker. When he woke, Tony felt like he’d been coated in mud and left to dry. His skin was stiff and brittle.
“How do you feel?” Joel asked.
“Like a worm left on the sidewalk. Get this off of me!” Joel broke away bits of Tony’s old skin like paper-mache from a piñata. Underneath was pink, tender skin as fresh and sweet as a new baby’s belly.
“The baby skin only lasts a couple of days, then it will firm up and look like the perfect skin of an acne-free teen.”
“Holy shit Joel, we’re going to be billionaires. You’ve got yourself a partner.”
***
RePeel Salons became as common as Starbucks. Anyone who had taken it painlessly removed his or her old skin to reveal a firm, fresh, wrinkle-free skin beneath. Joel’s genius was to invent a pill that would restore one’s youth. Tony’s was to have Joel reformulate it into an injection only available only in the Salons, where trained staff would help you peel away your old skin and protect the new one until it became firm enough for use. Humans became like crabs, hiding in dark corners on spa beds, waiting for their fresh skins to mature, and paying through the nose to do it.
It became impossible to tell how old anyone was, except by the rasp of their voice or the wateriness of their eyes. The obituary page was filled with photos of what looked like young adults who had served in distant wars and were survived by great, great grandchildren.
RePeel had a near monopoly over the skin rejuvenation business. Many cosmetic empires fell and fortunes faded. Other companies worked to duplicate Joel’s product, but weird results like turning people’s blood to orange juice or causing them to grow a thick layer of pith under their skin making them look like the Michelin Man soured the public on anything but the original recipe. RePeel’s market share expanded and when the company went public it became flush with cash and the bottomless greed of entitled shareholders.
Joel was featured in countless articles as a maverick genius, possibly besting even Steve Jobs. He appeared on magazine covers, was Time’s Man of the Year, gave lectures at MIT and Stanford, and became a close friend of Mark Zuckerberg. Tony was happy with the money.
***
A rumor began to circle the Internet that Lancôme cosmetics had developed a method to literally melt away fat. If true, it would mean the end to obesity, could cut into RePeel’s market share, and give Lancôme a product that even the young would want. Panic struck Joel and Tony’s shareholders, and they worked to develop a fat-melting product and get it to market before anyone else. Joel once again turned to food for inspiration. He noticed how the fatty part of bacon melted away as it cooked, leaving behind mostly intact meat, or muscle. He reasoned that if he could lower the melting point of human adipose tissue, it would simply drain away. After months of work he extracted a gene from coco butter and spliced it into the fatty tissue of pigs. After the injections, the pigs became svelte. The fat left the body as greasy excrement but took only a week to pass; the marketing department did not see this as a problem.
Under pressure from the Tony, Joel went straight from pigs to injecting test clients at salons in select markets around the world. The injection worked as promised, and it turned out that Lancôme’s story was a ruse to try and drum up venture capital. They named the new injection Antipode, and RePeel’s stock split more times than Apple and Microsoft combined. The company geared up for worldwide distribution, running factories around the globe day and night to manufacture fat melting elixir as quickly as possible.
Obese people around the globe lined up in folding chairs waiting at the RePeeled Salons for weeks until the much promoted day that Antipode injections would change the lives of overeaters everywhere.
Reports of the first deaths lit up the Internet the next day. The injections were not only melting all the fat, but all their connective tissue as well. People were dropping into piles on the floor like entrails in a slaughterhouse. The dead became no more than a loose pile of bones and organs floating inside in a skin bag. Overwhelmed by the number of dead, all that could be done was to super-glue all the orifices and dispose of the bodies as quickly as possible.
It was later revealed that the problem lay in a mistranslation of the formula from English to Chinese, where the majority of RePeel’s Antipode factories were located. The company was belly up in a matter of weeks, but litigation from around the globe kept teams of attorneys busy for decades.
Joel was heartbroken. The respect he’d enjoyed had dissolved into bags of human soup. He tried to get funding for his idea to combine a cat and a dog into a new pet, which he called a Cog; but no body returned his phone calls. Joel died in a freak accident when one of his Cogs jumped up to greet him, licking his face with its rasp-like tongue. Joel was overtaken by an antibiotic-resistant infection and that he didn’t survive. His Cogs were sterilized and lived out their days on a ranch in Wyoming meyowling at the moon each night over the loss of their owner.
Tony had cashed out just before the release of Antipode when the stock was at its peak. He spent years on the lam, staying in world-class hotels in countries that lacked extradition treaties with the United States. He eventually settled in Saudi Arabia and became a golfing buddy with one of the princes who helped him to secure a pardon from President Trump.