O Death, Where is thy Sting?
Author: Bill Cox
I know you came here to be entertained, to read a slice of sci-fi, but I’ve no choice. What you’re about to read is the horrifying truth. I’ve tried posting it elsewhere, on message boards and forums across the internet, but they get me every time. You might think that the internet is the wild west, but they actually control it absolutely. Anything they don’t want you to know about, anything published on any website anywhere, they can take down instantly and cripple that website with a virus. It’s the keywords they look out for.
But here, perhaps, there’s a chance that this will stay up for a while. The keywords appear here quite often. They’ll have this site marked down as fiction, so I can publish the truth here and maybe, just maybe, they won’t notice.
I joined them when I was 22, having just graduated from University. They gave me a job offer with a salary I couldn’t refuse. It’s the student debt, that’s the trap. I left Uni in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds, so obviously I couldn’t turn down a job offer, even if it looked too good to be true.
They flew me out to the island. It’s somewhere out in the Pacific, one of those tropical paradises owned by billionaires that has the added benefit of being isolated from everywhere else.
Do you remember Dolly the Sheep and the media hoopla that accompanied her birth? She was the first cloned mammal, way back in 1996. You can still see her stuffed remains in the Royal Museum in Edinburgh.
Do you ever hear about cloning these days, almost thirty years after Dolly? There’s nothing in the media about it at all. Don’t you think that’s a little bit weird? They own the media, of course. You only watch or read what they want you to.
Would you be surprised to learn that human cloning was actually perfected just five years after Dolly’s hooves first set foot on this Earth? The harder part was consciousness transfer. That took another ten years. In 2012, Ernst Jaager, a Swiss billionaire dying from stage four pancreatic cancer, was the first human to have his consciousness downloaded into a cloned body. The first person to become functionally immortal.
That tropical island I worked on? It’s one of a dozen around the world where cloned bodies are grown and stored. Us workers are given five-year contracts, but it became obvious to me that it wasn’t just our contracts that were terminated after five years. They can’t risk the truth getting out!
So I escaped from the island and they’ve been hunting me ever since. I can’t go home, or visit family, because they have those places staked out. They have virtually infinite resources and all I have is the truth, which they try and squash at every opportunity.
So there it is. The rich don’t die anymore. They have no intention of sharing this technology with you. All these powerful people that you think died over the past decade – they haven’t! They’re still alive, in youthful versions of themselves, keeping out of sight, with full access to their wealth, pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
I know this is a fiction website, but maybe enough people will read this and believe. Perhaps word of what’s happening will spread and people will rise up. Rise up against our lords and masters, who, having reached Eternity, intend to pull the drawbridge up behind themselves, leaving the rest of us to suffer the agony of mortality.

The Past
365tomorrows launched August 1st, 2005 with the lofty goal of providing a new story every day for a year. We’ve been on the wire ever since. Our stories are a mix of those lovingly hand crafted by a talented pool of staff writers, and select stories received by submission.
The archives are deep, feel free to dive in.

Flash Fiction
"Flash fiction is fiction with its teeth bared and its claws extended, lithe and muscular with no extra fat. It pounces in the first paragraph, and if those claws aren’t embedded in the reader by the start of the second, the story began a paragraph too soon. There is no margin for error. Every word must be essential, and if it isn’t essential, it must be eliminated."
Kathy Kachelries
Founding Member

Submissions
We're open to submissions of original Science or Speculative Fiction of 600 words or less. We are only accepting work which you previously haven't sold or given away the rights to. That means your work must not have been published elsewhere, either in print or on the web. When your story is accepted, you're giving us first electronic publication rights and non-exclusive subsequent publication rights. You retain ownership over your story. We are not a paying market.

Voices of Tomorrow
Voices of Tomorrow is the official podcast of 365tomorrows, with audio versions of many of the stories published here.
If you're interested in recording stories for Voices of Tomorrow, or for any other inquiries, please contact ssmith@365tomorrows.com

