The air in Oakhaven tastes like copper and old grease. It's a town where the factories stopped breathing forty years ago, leaving behind a landscape of rusted girders and grey skies. We don't talk about the 'Bloom'—the biological serum that promised us a way to outrun the clock.

I’m Billy, and I spend my days pumping gas for people who are more machine than meat.

The Bloom was supposed to be a miracle. It stops the cells from dying. It keeps the heart beating and the brain firing long after the body should have surrendered. But the Bloom doesn't fix the wear and tear. It just prevents the end.

The result is a town of living ruins. I see them every day—the 'Rust-Walkers'. People whose skin has turned the color of old parchment, whose joints creak like un-oiled hinges, whose eyes are clouded with a century of boredom. They are biologically immortal, but they are rotting in real-time.

I wasn't supposed to get the Bloom. I was just a kid working the pumps. But I found a stash of discarded vials in the back of a medical waste truck. I was scared of dying in a town where the only future was a shallow grave in the salt flats, so I took it.

For a few years, I felt like a king. I was faster, stronger, and I had the terrifying confidence of a man who knew he would never disappear.

But then the 'Saturation' happened.

The Bloom became cheap. The corporations started pumping it into the water supply, then the air. Suddenly, everyone was immortal. The Rust-Walkers became the majority. The town grew crowded with people who had nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait for a death that would never come.

And that's when the market shifted.

In a world where everyone lives forever, the only thing with any real value is the end. 'The Exit' became the ultimate luxury. A clean, painless, permanent death—administered by licensed professionals in sterile clinics—now costs more than a mansion in the hills.

I watch the rich people roll into town in their sleek, silver cars, paying millions of credits for a single, guaranteed dose of oblivion. They pay for the privilege of stopping.

I look at my own hands—the skin is starting to grey, a small patch of rust forming around my knuckle. I am a permanent resident of this decaying paradise. I have a million years of life ahead of me, and not a single credit to buy my way out.

I stand by the pumps, watching the silver cars drive away, and I realize the cruelest joke of all: I stole the treasure, only to find out that the treasure was the lock.

*** OTMES_v2_CODE: [V-07]-[T8-02]-[M1:8,M3:10,K1:0.6,Theta:180]