Lifetime Appointment

I was perhaps the most controversial pick since the inception of this great nation. A quick glance at my credentials wouldn't set off alarms to anyone (except the most fringe sides of the political spectrum). I was a constitutional law professor at Harvard, it only lasted a few years. Other passions called to me, things that I had to respond to. My father had died early in 2015, and although I had no proof at the time, I knew it was from lead exposure in the water at his Michigan home. That set a fire under my ass. It was something that kept me up at night, something that I just had to fight for. And who could've blamed me?

I'd lost two elections before I finally won a congressional seat. What's there to say? Campaigning on health and safety regulations might be fairly bipartisan, but it certainly isn't sexy. It doesn't draw any of the single-issue voters. So it took me a while, and a good deal of my savings to get there. It took even longer to pass any legal reform in regards to water safety. It was a struggle to give those regulations any teeth. I needed to give them just enough of a bite so that they'd be enforced, and so that I could try to prevent anyone else from finding the same fate as my father. Ten years, that took. I'd gone grey, I'd started to wake up in the night just to take a piss three or four times. I involuntarily grunted whenever I tried to get out of my chair, and I needed a stronger pair of eyeglasses just to read. I had to face the fact that my own mortality was at stake.

A bit ironic, so much time spent to ensure that my father's fate wouldn't happen again, and in that time my own fate grew so much nearer. That couldn't happen, not yet.

They're going to call me in soon, to a room very similar to the room that I spent ten years of my life sitting in. Today it'll be a role-reversal of sorts. Normally I'd be the one listening, occasionally asking a question or two, but today I'll be the one answering them. Today is my confirmation.

When I woke up one morning with an aching back and a throbbing headache, (I'd only had one and a half pints that night before) I knew that I had to act before I was too weak to qualify. You see, I'd met a lot of lobbyists during my time on the hill. Weapons, of course, and oil guys too. A lot of them. Wall Street, as well. Of course, just to fulfill the stereotypical lobbyist collection, pharma corps too. I learned a lot about those industries talking to their representatives, and I think that's why they liked me. Most of us in the house didn't want to, they followed a simple dogma: the less I know, the better. I'd be lying if I said I didn't use the same once or twice, but for the most part, I wanted to know more about their lives.

While talking to a pharma lobbyist over drinks one night, he told me about an experimental drug that he'd heard of just through the grapevine. Something in the works that could limit the effects of ageing. I'm not a biologist, neither was he, but he told me that the errors in DNA replication could be fixed rather permanently.

Maybe the death of my father inspired a fear in me, it certainly would explain the passion for water safety. I volunteered, and the company was more than happy to take me on. They wanted someone high profile, someone that they could point to as a success story. By God, if today goes well, they'll get it. It will go down in the history books.

I had that treatment five years ago, and my doctor is stunned that I haven't aged a day since then.

I'm about to step onto the floor of the Senate to be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States, a lifetime appointment. A controversial position for a man that now will never age.