BF1 ORIGINAL FICTION
BORROWED YEARS
For two hundred years, Briony Staveley has defied aging. But when the treatment keeping her alive begins drawing regenerative capacity from other people, she faces an impossible choice: accept someone else's sacrifice or risk losing the extraordinary life she still loves.
ABOUT THE STORY
How much of someone else's future are you entitled to take?
At two hundred years old, Briony Staveley has become a living symbol of humanity's greatest medical achievement.
For more than a century and a half, revolutionary Somatic Renewal Therapy has kept her biologically young. Now, with a new public program promising to make extended life accessible beyond the wealthy, Briony believes the future has finally caught up with her dream.
Then, during the celebrations marking her two-hundredth birthday, she collapses.
Hours later, Briony begins recovering.
But her beloved great-great-granddaughter, Marnie, becomes inexplicably ill.
As doctors investigate, they uncover a terrifying consequence of the treatment that has sustained Briony for generations. Her body's regenerative reserves are failing. And the biological system determined to keep her young has discovered another source of renewal.
Other people.
With Briony's health deteriorating, medical researchers confront a possibility as extraordinary as it is disturbing: carefully controlled contact with a compatible person might restore her strength.
But nobody knows the true cost to the person giving that strength away.
As an ambitious longevity pioneer argues for voluntary donors, a determined physician demands proof of safety, and Briony's family struggles with the difference between love and obligation, the promise of longer life begins to reveal a darker reality.
When a woman willingly offers to accept the risk in exchange for financial security, the questions become almost impossible to answer.
Does consent make every sacrifice acceptable?
Can a future be fairly priced when nobody knows how much of it might be lost?
And if another person can save your life, does wanting to survive give you any claim over theirs?
BORROWED YEARS is a powerful, thought-provoking speculative novel about longevity, family, medical ethics, consent and the unsettling difference between having the right to live and believing someone else must pay for it.