“A toast,” said Da, and forty-one hands raised forty-one glasses. “To family!”

Da’s children and their children and their children chorused, “To family!” and drank. Da had his own bottle. His daughter sat beside him, smiling uncertainly, and his nurse hovered nearby.

At the other end of the long table, one of Da’s great-granddaughters leaned against one of her second cousins. “I can barely understand him,” Ji whispered.

“Same here,” Piet whispered back. “And look, he can hardly even sit up straight.”

“I don’t want to live long enough to be spoon-fed and wear diapers.” Ji covered Piet’s spotty trembling hand with her own.

“Old age ain’t for sissies, that’s for sure.” Piet adjusted the implants hidden under his flat cap, increasing the video feed and reducing the audio. At his age, the brain could only handle one or the other.

At the head of the table, their great-grandfather emptied the bottle and his reserves of patience. His dearest who happened to be nearest tried to soothe him. He responded with increasing irascibility and then with shouted commands. The patriarch might be physically diminished, but he still had power and wealth, and he was accustomed to throwing tantrums with those.

The nurse released the chair and eased it away from the table. Da slapped her hand and tried to get to his feet. She then had to lift him bodily and strap him in. His doctors, always close, now swarmed the chair and urged him to relax.

He protested that he didn’t want to go to the medical suite. He didn’t want his cognitive pathways reinforced, his immunity tweaked, his endocrine system re-tuned—even if he had built this island and everything on it for exactly this purpose.

Ji observed, “He’s not really thinking straight either.”

“He ordered them to follow this protocol, even if he objected,” Piet said. “Now he’s denying he ever said that. I wonder if his memory is failing, too.”

Da tried again to overrule his staff by the strength of his lungs, but the crowd wheeled him inexorably toward the door. He was going down for a nap whether he liked it or not.

“I’d call him puerile, but that would be juvenile,” Piet said.

“You’re not funny, you know,” Ji said fondly.

Piet stood and helped Ji stand. Others were rising as well, many heading to their own afternoon naps. In various modes and speeds they exited onto the terrace and dispersed into the gardens sheltering the guest bungalows. “Let’s go to the family room.”

Ji and Piet crossed the patio and circled around the koi pond. A rivulet burbled from the pond into a mossy channel that meandered artfully down the lush, dense lawn. A distant scintillation betrayed the sea beyond. The view was fabulous.

They entered the family room to find nobody and nothing inside. The hall contained only a floor-to-ceiling screen on the west wall. This showed an image taken from the moon, all stark shadows and gorgeous Earth, just as Da had seen it from his lab a lifetime ago.

When the two of them were standing before the image, Piet asked, “Are you ready to do this?”

“I suppose we must.”

“Age before beauty,” Piet said. He leaned forward and spat on the wall.

“Oh, honestly,” said Ji. But as quickly as that, the moistened screen absorbed the sample, processed it, and pronounced Piet’s full name. Then the Earth-rise image disappeared and they saw Piet’s genealogy in relation to Da. The diagram was about as large as an actual tree. They scrutinized Piet’s node, a dead-end branch since he had no children. His karyotype showed the genetic sequences he shared with their ancestor. Some, the more important ones, were highlighted in red.

“Now beauty,” said Piet.

“Oh, I just don’t know.” Ji pressed down on her cane so that it folded like origami, then snapped into rigidity as a three-legged camp stool. She sat and clasped her hands in her lap. “I don’t want to see what they’ve discovered in the last 30 years.” Flat on the floor, her old-lady shoes pulsed slightly, forever checking her balance. “I’ve had a wonderful life. I had a fine career. I’m having a great retirement. I have you and we have many years ahead of us.”

Piet rested his hand on her shoulder. “We could have children of our own.”

“Oh, god! That would be awful!” she exclaimed. “It’s not fair to expect your children to baby you at the end of your life, just because you babied them at the start of theirs. No. I have savings to last another twenty years. That’s enough.”

“We’re sure not going to inherit anything.” Piet craned his neck up at Da’s portrait, glowering down at them like an eagle on a redwood. “And it’s not as if employers are begging for my resume. Why, oh, why didn’t I become an invertebrate marine biologist?”

“You needed your backbone?”

“Okay, a biologist studying marine invertebrates. Come on, your turn.”

She shifted her weight, her shoes helped her stand, and her seat folded itself up again. Leaving Piet’s flow-chart in place, she pressed her palm to the screen’s surface. She and Piet stepped back as her skin cells were analyzed and her name pronounced.

At that, her genealogy exploded outward into the room, tracing her connections to Da and to Piet. She had to tunnel through the rhizomes of their family tree to find her node. “Do you remember when we met? The first time Da summoned all his descendants, this tree was a lot smaller.”

“I remember.” He had reconsolidated that memory many times. “We discovered that we were distantly related.” Piet strode from the wall to Ji’s rootlet. “About ten paces.”

“A lot of other lineages have come in since then. Da’s bloodline is getting diluted.”

“Those whippersnappers might not have enough of his DNA to bother with.” Piet admired Ji’s red-dotted karyotype. “But you, you have all the right alleles, baby.”

“And look, a 99% chance of surviving the treatment,” she said glumly.

“So, let’s do it. Let’s turn around.” Piet tried to catch her eye. “We could be young again.”

“We could be dead.”

“Old age will do that too, you know.” He followed her back to the wall, where she erased the projection. When the screen cleared they saw the gardens outside, new crocuses and ancient relatives nodding in the breeze.

“‘Grow young along with me’!” Piet declaimed. “‘The best is yet to be.’“

“Look at that.” Ji pointed. Across the lawn and right into a bed of daffodils scampered a little boy no less than three years old—but getting younger every day—followed by a pre-teen girl and a uniformed woman. “I’m sure he never got his nap.” Ji smiled as the girl leaped into the flower bed. The nurse sped up to go around it. The children laughed and wrestled in the soft dirt, crushing the short green spears.

Ji crossed her arms and said, “Don’t you ever call me ‘baby’ again.”

“We won’t end up like that.”

“How do you know? Da wants to stop youthening, and that’s all he’s been working on for the last thirty years.” With almost unlimited funds, his own progeny as research subjects, and ever-increasing desperation. “That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it? To give the scientists more research data on the age-reversal treatment?”

“Well, that, and to collect the huge bribe he’s offering us to participate.”

“Piet, come with me.” Ji led the way through the open doors back onto the patio. “Turn your hearing up.” They didn’t have to walk very close to the daffodil bed to hear Da begging the girl to tickle him more.

“Okay,” she answered, obliging, “but you have to promise to tickle me when you’re grown up again and I’m little. Promise?”

“More!”

“You remember we’re going to grow up right here and all our friends will be here to take care of us.”

The nurse warned, “Don’t upset him.”

Ji and Piet crossed the lawn and stepped over the narrow stream. The giggling faded behind them. In the rose garden, two elderly men crossed their path. “I won’t do it,” one griped. “I am not walking my own mother down the aisle.”

“And I am not calling that guy ‘Dad,’” said the other. “He’s half my age, for Chrissake.”

“She can get Grandpa to do it. He’s her father, not me.”

“Yeah, Gramps refuses. Acne.” The speaker shrugged. “He’s going through an awkward phase.”

Ji and Piet reached a gazebo banked with azaleas. Inside a woman pleaded, “I love you. I turned around for you.”

“You were my professor,” another woman answered. “I thought you were supporting my career. Now you’re saying you’re in love with me?”

“It wasn’t appropriate then, I know. But now we’re the same age. We can be together.”

“As I get older and you get younger? Oh, my god.”

They had to go forward or retrace their steps, so Ji paced deliberately into the structure, eyes on the ground. Piet snuck a quick glance at the couple, but he couldn’t guess who was who. He thought one woman had graying hair and the other was going brown. But he might have it backwards.

This would be the way of the future, he thought. Athletes bested by their coach’s parents; actors reprising their every role in reverse order; grizzled veterans mustered out of the service when they grew too young to enlist.

“What a mess,” Piet whispered. “If everyone could turn around, we’d all end up lapping ourselves.”

“That would be messy.” Ji’s expression as they left the gazebo was both perplexed and disgusted.

“I mean, right now it’s only Da and his descendants who can turn around. But eventually they’ll figure out how his genes work, and then everyone will cycle around like racers on a track, growing younger than their grandchildren and growing old again with their great-great-grandchildren.”

“And you want that? Seriously?” Ji lowered her audio feed and restored her vision while fluffing her hair into tiny whitecaps. The path continued on a gradual downward slope and retaining walls rose on either side. Finally they walked into a cool tunnel under the inscription: TURRITOPSIS DOHRNII, THE IMMORTAL JELLYFISH.

A step or two farther, and they were inside the aquarium. The jellies bobbed and drifted on either side, trailing their ectoplasmic tendrils like Ophelia’s tresses, almost invisible until they happened to float in front of the magnifying glass. There they abruptly loomed into view, translucent, opalescent, and aimless as newborn clouds.

“Looks like something you would sneeze into a tissue,” Piet said.

“Not something you would eat.”

“You mean drink. They’re mostly water. You just chop them up for a refreshing beverage.”

“Ick.” Ji grimaced. “Using a living creature as a canteen.”

“But that’s the whole point. They go on living. What doesn’t kill them makes them younger. Other lifeforms have a regrettable tendency to drop dead, especially in space. But not the immortal jelly. It’s Snot Impossible! It grows up all over again.”

Ji strolled along the tunnel, head turned to study the exhibits. “Piet,” she said. “You’re not making a good case for another lifetime of this.” Most tanks held adult jellies, medusae resembling old-fashioned cloche hats on strings. But several tanks seemed empty, and one held polyps. The video screen next to the tank showed clips of Turritopsis dohrnii medusae reacting to trauma by turning back into their immature forms. “I still don’t see how this ability could work in humans.”

“Da claims he wasn’t studying age-reversal. He was only studying their regenerative capabilities. Here’s what I think. Late one night, while conducting forbidden experiments, he lost his temper, broke the vials of hybrid DNA and infected himself, slipped, grabbed a live wire, and woke up the next morning as The Incredible Jelly-Man.”

“Right. An accident.”

“Does whatever a jelly can.”

“Except stop getting younger. He probably expected to become a teenage polyp and grow old again from there.”

“Imagine his disappointment.” Piet snaked an arm around Ji’s waist. “I bet you were a beautiful teenage polyp,” he murmured.

Ji turned within the circle of his arm. “That was an earlier chapter of my life. This life, the life I’m still living. The one I haven’t finished.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “The trick to making great art is knowing when to stop. When you read a book, you go from start to finish. You don’t read it backwards from the end.”

“Unless it’s a murder mystery. I always read the last page first to make sure I like the ending.”

Ji cast a quick glance heavenward, then resumed walking down the corridor. She reached the doors to the research institute. The aquarium displayed only a fraction of the specimens under study throughout the building. Understanding how a lowly invertebrate could transdifferentiate its somatic cells into earlier versions of those cells, and ultimately into the equivalent of stem cells, was big business. Da’s research in the lunar lab had enabled humans to regenerate limbs with the finesse of lobsters.

And, after fifteen or twenty years, Da discovered that he himself was regenerating. No one expected their bones to grow denser in one-sixth gravity. What would make collagen return to wrinkled skin and eroding joints? Make cilia and villi and hair and telomeres grow back? By the time he was one hundred and ten but looked seventy, he realized he might not drop dead at his lab bench after all.

Piet palmed open the doors. The Treatment Manager immediately spotted them and swooped across the lobby. “Tell me you’ve decided!” Tilda caroled. “You can start today. A painless injection of retrovirus with magical immortal DNA! From our magical immortal Turritopsis!”

Ji smiled weakly.

“Ah, Tilda,” Piet said, “it’s not the fall that kills you. It’s hitting the ground.”

“Now, you’re not going to fall out of a sub-orbital jet. You’re just going to float! Weightless! Like a jelly!” She had a grin like a Chinese dragon and she immobilized Piet with it. “If you don’t like heights you can use an immersion tank. You’ll be together. Holding hands.” Her eyes widened. “How romantic!”

“About as romantic as a near-death experience can be,” Piet acceded.

“None of that now!” Tilda wagged a finger at him. “You won’t know anything about the trigger. It’s not traumatic for you. You’ll just go to your happy place for a few minutes, and when you wake up, you’ll be a few minutes younger than when you went in.”

“I think Piet is saying that it’s not the injection that kills you. It’s the effect of the retrovirus,” Ji said. “If the non-human gene transcription doesn’t start the right cascade of human gene activation leading to backward ontogenetic development, the process can accelerate aging instead of reversing it.”

“Which is why,” Tilda said solemnly, “it is so important that those of you with such exceptionally propitious characteristics undergo the transformation. We must continue our research to better understand how aging is regulated, both going forward and going backward. When we learn how to switch between the two, think of the benefit to the human race.”

“Yes, well ...” Ji backed away, toward the exit to the outside world. “I’m not saying no.” She activated the door and plunged through to freedom. In a minute, Piet followed her.

“You’re not saying no?”

“I’m saying I don’t want to be rushed into risking our future just to advance scientific research or further the ambitions of the patriarch.” She stood on the pavement, blinking in the afternoon sun. She waved an arm at the stone wall and the open-ocean tanks beyond. “He got to come back from the moon. He built a whole island. He’s already lived longer than anyone in history and had more money and success than anyone deserves.” She turned and walked away from the door. At the corner of the building the lawn swept down and the little brook ducked under the sidewalk on its way to the sea. “And now I’m supposed to feel sorry for him because he can’t reverse the reversal? Can’t grow old all over again, to keep bossing people around and getting richer for yet another lifetime? Or maybe forever?”

She scowled at the mansion, resplendent up there beyond the greensward. On the patio, umbrella-shaded tables awaited the cocktail hour. A few people were already lounging.

“‘I only lived twice,’“ Ji mocked their ancestor. “Oh, boo hoo.”

“Yeah, what a baby.” She didn’t hear him. Piet amplified his own vision, letting the sound of the wind and waves grow muffled behind him. They strolled over the grass toward the house. Ji extended the four legs at the base of her walking stick for extra stability.

This would be the way of her future, she thought. Needing a cane to walk up the gentlest slope; increasing reliance on sensory augmentation and assisted memory consolidation; a long, controlled glide to a gentle landing. It was right and good. It was good, but it would never be better.

“Look at those scrubs,” Piet snorted.

“Who?” Ji spotted Da toddling about. His daughter scooped him up and put him in his elaborate chair, then pushed him around the patio and positioned him facing the ocean. The nurse approached, wiping her hands one over the other like a praying mantis. Her uniform was blotched with topsoil. “That’s the universal gesture for ‘I just changed a really full diaper.’“

“Not her scrubbing, her scrubs.”

“Hey, Piet.” They were getting closer. “Can you see Da’s face?”

He stared. If he upped his vision any more he’d become deaf to his own repartee. He thought his great-grandfather was rather flushed. The caregivers were behind the chair, chatting, occasionally squinting into the lowering sun. “He’s not yelling at anyone. Something must be terribly wrong.”

“What if he’s choking?” Ji waved her stick and shouted. Someone on the patio rose and started toward her, thinking she was calling for help. “No!” she bellowed. “Da! Da!” She accelerated to her top speed, a full-throttle mosey.

The nurse finally stepped forward, glanced at the old folks, then into the chair. Galvanized, she snatched the child up and tossed him over one arm, thumping him on the back.

“See?” Ji panted.

What they saw was the little body doubled over the woman’s arm, and then an even littler body squirting out of her grasp and hitting the lawn. What she held was a sodden lump of clothes, which she clutched reflexively and then dropped, screaming. She was covered with blood.

The twelve-year-old screamed too, and dashed toward her naked, crawling parent. She lunged and he scuttled madly away; she fell to her knees and enveloped his writhing body. He squirmed out. In a full-blown tantrum he rolled away downhill, propelled by his wind-milling arms and legs. Her two-armed push-up revealed her own clothes, coated with gore. She jumped up in hysterics and blocked the first medics responding to the cries. The toddler thrashed violently, purple with rage, and convulsed across the grass.

To Ji, the shrieks were faint but the mottled creature plunged right into her field of vision, magnified a hundred-fold. Clumps of hair and grass stuck to its balding head. The yowling maw loomed into view, teeth receding into its gums.

“Oh my god oh my god.” Piet grabbed her arm. Her vision wobbled, lost the target, zoomed in and out, and refocused on a dark slime trail across the sod.

“He’s in the stream!” Ji smacked her walking stick on the ground, de-crystallizing it. She pulled at the components and got the seat deployed on its tripod.

“Over here.” Piet dragged her. Ji thrust the seat into the water and grasped two legs of the tripod. Upstream, medical personnel rushed frantically around, misunderstanding the emergency.

A small lump slithered into the seat and lodged there. Piet bent over and picked up an infant. Ji dropped her folding stool and clutched her head. When she could focus her eyes, the wrinkly homunculus was soiling Piet’s hands.

“Stop screaming,” she said. Piet held the mess at arm’s length and she grabbed it; the creature was so slick and wriggly that she had to press it against her blouse to keep her grip. Though she tightened her hands to contain the writhing mass, she felt a weight slither loose and drop. She looked down. Between her wrists an umbilical cord dangled with a caul swinging at the end.

“You’re the one screaming!” Piet screamed.

She flung her arms apart. She couldn’t help it. The fetus and its umbilical cord spun through the air like a bolas. Da’s physicians stampeded toward the spot and dropped onto hands and knees, searching through the grass for a length of membrane, a blob of mucus, anything. Eventually they all sat back, gaping, and held out their wet empty hands.

A girl’s voice wailed “I’m sorry” over and over. Staff members poured from the mansion; a medical alarm blared; Da’s doddering offspring emerged to accost one another about all the damn noise.

Piet plunged into the stream and swished his hands in the water. Ji ripped off her blouse and flung it away with a shudder. She retrieved her wet chair, which furled into an umbrella. She hauled Piet out of the channel.

“Don’t baby babies, she said.” His shoes squelched as he staggered across the lawn. “Oh, boo hoo, she said.”

“He’s gone. Just like that.” Ji shivered in her sensible short-sleeved undershirt. “He just ... he just regressed into nothing. He had been youthening in real time. Then it got faster. Then it just accelerated more and more.”

“So, he was youthenized,” Piet said dazedly. “He died of youthenasia.”

Ji turned her back on the scene and headed for the ocean. “I think he was heading for the ocean,” she realized. “It must have been his brain. You can’t reinforce adult synaptic pathways in an immature brain. Babies don’t retain memories like we do.”

“Then he couldn’t grow up again anyway. Without his memories, he wouldn’t be himself.”

“He wasn’t himself.” She reached the sidewalk, crossed it, and rested her forearms on the warm stone of the seawall. “His neural architecture must have collapsed.”

Behind her, Piet kicked off his shoes. “Well, that would explain the giggling.”

Ji dropped her face into her hands. Up on the terrace, voices rose like the whirring of disturbed hornets. Doctors explained themselves until they realized no one demanded an apology. Relatives that Da hadn’t even known by name suddenly had questions for his lawyers. Hunched over the parapet, Ji’s shoulders were shaking. Piet moved to stand beside her.

“Aw, sweetheart,” he said softly.

She straightened up, gasping for breath, and laughing so hard the tears ran down her face. “Marry me!” she exclaimed. “We’ll turn around. Let’s do it! For better or worse! Till birth do us part!”

“Darling, this is all so sudden,” Piet deadpanned. He studied her face. “Are you serious?”

“We’ll never get a better ending to this lifetime. Let’s go right now, while the offer is still good, before Tilda finds out about Da.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “It won’t be forever.” She burst out laughing again. “I just want to remember the look on your face for another hundred years.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” They linked arms and moved toward the door to the lab. “Then let’s go already. Chop chop. We’re not getting any younger. Not by standing out here. But,” on the threshold he paused, “did we agree? No kids?”

“No kidding.”

Before she followed him through the door, Ji took her umbrella, formerly her cane, before that her camp stool, and propped it against the outer wall. She wouldn’t need it again. But perhaps it might be found and put to good use by someone else. Say, someone who was getting old.