I was the only old guy out on the street. Pushing sixty, with a craggy face topped with unkempt mostly grey hair, a bend to my back, and flabby memories of muscle, I really stood out.

  All the passersby around me looked like they'd just stepped off the cover of Sports Illustrated.

  And the only reason I left my apartment that day was to become one of them.

  Whenever I heard "Who wants to live forever?" I've always insisted they couldn't pay me enough to stick around longer than absolutely necessary. Yet here I was, strolling towards the nearest revitalization clinic, cane in hand.

  Strictly speaking, I didn't need the cane. Sure, my knees were busted enough to welcome any weather change with fits of sporadic piercing pain, but I wasn't what you'd call infirm. I simply always considered canes cool. And now that my age allowed me to use one without looking like I was trying too hard, I wasn't about to pass up the opportunity.

  I was still subjected to more than a few sideways glances and heard the occasional snicker behind my back as I walked.

  A preppy kid, who for all I knew could have been twenty years my senior, went as far as to chortle in my face. My subsequent scowl and raised eyebrow seemed to deflate him a touch. The snorts of his two cohorts prodded him into further action.

  "Nice walking stick, geezer," the kid said to uproarious laughter from his buddies.

  I responded by flicking the cane up with my left hand and catching it with my right.

  It was a nice cane. Deep black finish across its length with a golden ferrule and a similarly-colored metal handle shaped like a grinning dragon. I swung the cane over my head and jerked forward with my whole body, hoping they didn't hear the crack in my back this sudden movement produced.

  "You wanna try me, pretty boy? When I'm done with your sculpted mug, you'll need half a day in a revitalization chamber to stop looking like the quarterback of Notre Dame."

  Whether it was my aggressive gesture or the jumbled reference, I convinced the three I was unhinged enough to make good on my threats. With their eyes lowered and curses muttered under the breath, they went around me. I proceeded to the clinic.

  The building was identical to so many others now dotting the streets of every settlement on the planet, be it a sleek urban center or a muddy remote village.

  It was a white rectangular box of two floors with a wide glass door and the words 'Revitalization Clinic' above it. A stylized face in black and white flashing a perfect smile at anyone who approached the establishment was nestled between the words.

  I nodded at the logo and walked through the door that slid open before me.

  The clinic had that same sterile quality you'd expect from a hospital. Only the atmosphere of despair you couldn't escape inside a proper hospital was replaced with eager anticipation here. The procedures were said to be completely painless, despite rearranging both the inner and outer workings of your body.

  Even though I was one of the last holdouts to use a clinic's services, the place was packed. The benches lining the walls were full of people who looked like they were here to audition for a Baywatch reboot.

  The service these clinics provided was a cure-all, face lift, and exercise routine all rolled into one. It wasn't quite immortality, but it was the next best thing.

  According to the specifications, full revitalization would allow you to spend the next two hundred years in perfect health and looking twenty. And not how you looked when you were twenty. How you would've looked if you were a model.

  On top of breathing new life into you, clinics also provided adjustment services. If one day you came in and asked for an aquiline profile, you could then change your mind and go back the next to replace it with a more Nordic look.

  At least that was the theory. In reality, most repeat customers were trying to fine-tune their physiques after initially asking for muscles that made it impossible to get into a shirt, or breasts that put too much strain even on their mint-condition new spines.

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  Under the watchful scrutiny of these physical perfectionists, I had to wait in line to register my ID with a dashing clerk sitting behind a pane of glass at the far end of the lobby.

  As I waited, I started to whistle the intro to The Stranger by Billy Joel.

  My late wife Mary and I fell in love over our collective fondness for the Piano Man. We tied the knot on the day River of Dreams dropped back in '93. This was supposed to be the man's last studio album. The two of us couldn't imagine a better wedding gift.

  Ours was a good long marriage that lasted just over thirty years. We beat the odds on first marriages ending in divorce. And then we also crapped all over the statistics insisting that on average, women lived longer than men.

  Mary passed away in her sleep from a heart condition no one was able to catch in time. Weeks after the funeral, we got a brand-new single from Joel. Listening to it on repeat was the only thing that filled the newly formed void inside me and got me to step away from the ledge formed by my desire to follow Mary into oblivion.

  A bath with a toaster was still in the cards when the next big news broke. The existence of alien life was officially confirmed. Only they weren't space aliens. More like beings from another dimension.

  I was mostly out of it at the time to properly sort through the conflicting reports. When the dust settled, the leading understanding of the events suggested that a particle accelerator smashed a few protons together precisely right to tear the fabric of reality.

  Instead of opening up a black hole that swallowed our solar system, this rift stabilized, leaving behind a crater the size of a large town. And then it let through a delegation of visitors.

  Only high-ranking officials were allowed to interact with the aliens, so I couldn't tell you what they looked like. It wasn't a big loss. They were the advanced kind of aliens that had no need for physical form. And as my downstairs neighbor Cooper, who had an entire wall dedicated to the photos of the airport, put it - you've seen one ball of energy, you've seen them all.

  It didn't take long for the aliens to figure out a way to communicate with us. First thing they did was inform us they called themselves the Sensates, and as a group they were terribly sorry about the incident with the rift.

  I've no idea if that actually happened or if it was a line those in power fed us because they wanted us to like our new friends. After all, what they offered by way of an apology for there now being a smoking pit where Geneva used to be was simply too good to pass up.

  Seeing how the Sensates were creatures of pure energy, you'd think they'd give us new power-generating technologies. But if anything, they viewed electricity as a sort of distant lesser-developed cousin and found our harvesting of it distasteful. They actually turned out to be the masters of manipulating matter. Revitalization technology was their gift to us.

  As I was digging through these memories, the clerk processed my data, handed me a ticket with a number, and sent me to wait for it to come up.

  I had to go upstairs before I found an almost empty bench by a door to what looked like the clinic's administrative wing.

  I rested my bones there, greeting the only other occupant of the bench with a quick nod.

  It took a second for me to realize what I was looking at. A natural-looking man. Well, natural as of a few years ago. The only one other than me in the whole building.

  My benchmate was somewhere in his thirties. His face was heavily pockmarked and had a rough, weathered look to it. His brown hair was loose and wavy, and barring the missing hat, he was wearing an urban cowboy kind of outfit.

  An embroidered shirt under a tan jacket, sharp-tipped boots, and the knot of a bolo tie all stressed his Southern motif to the point where I expected him to yee a haw at me, or at the very least call me a pardner.

  Shattering his mold, he simply returned my nod.

  "Quint Callaway, Esquire," he said.

  "Buck DiGriz," I reciprocated.

  "If you don't mind the observation, you don't strike me as a regular in this here establishment." Quint's drawl was noticeable yet not overpowering, which was surprising considering his getup.

  "What gave it away?" I grinned a smile colored by decades of extensive coffee use at the man.

  "What I'm getting at here is that you've held out for so long already. No need to buckle under society's pressure now, old timer."

  I returned an unsure, "Thanks?"

  I was starting to realize where this was going.

  "Don't be modest. You're clearly capable of resisting the allure of this deviltry," Quint said.

  Aside from people like me who simply never bothered to go through revitalization, the only other bastion of holdouts consisted of assorted fundamentalists who viewed the procedure as an affront against nature. They tried their best to shift the public opinion on this issue. Theirs was a lost cause when one could see the immediate results of revitalization wherever they looked.

  I smiled and told Quint I'd consider his words. Experience taught me that arguing with a guy like that was never worth it.

  He looked like he was about to lay his most persuasive arguments on me anyway, when I was saved by the nearby door to the administrative wing cracking open.

  A woman of indeterminable age but youthful figure stepped out.

  She sighed, looking at Quint. "Mr. Lane will see you now," she said in a tired voice.

  Quint got up and tipped an invisible hat to me.

  "You chew on that, partner." Turning to the woman, he shifted to a dryer cadence. "Don't you take that tone with me, ma'am." As he followed her deeper into the building, I heard him hit her with, "This establishment of yours operates in violation of FDA regulations. I'm here to make sure you follow the darn law. Remember that old thing?"

  Meanwhile, I kept sitting with a numbered ticket in hand and an idle grin on my face for having been called a partner by this Southern gentleman after all.

  My number was about to come up.

  Billy Joel Facts - Chapter 1:

  These are the last words I have to say

  That's why it took so long to write

  There will be other words some other day

  But that's the story of my life

  I'm late, but I'm here right now