Oct. 21, 2188
AIKEN SC–Former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond today emerged from more than 180 years in hiding and revealed that, according to his staff of personal physicians, he is the first human to permanently defeat death. For more than a century Senator Thurmond has lived secreted in a hyperbarric, orgone-accumulating subterranean greenhouse buried beneath the Russell Senate Building in Washington DC.
“I drank out of this big hamster-like bottle,” joked the wiry Senator. “I drew the line at having those woodchips on the floor, though.”
His medical team reported through a spokeswoman that the treatment had aimed both to halt the aging process, and to restore some degree of fitness and mental competence to the then centenarian. “In Strom we arrested the aging process by, for the first time, eliminating the shortening of the telomeres in each of his cells. Cancerous cells achieve a perverse and hyperactive immortality through the same mechanism. We, essentially, transformed Strom into a large cancer with the shape and qualities of a human being.”
When asked by reporters why he had waited until now to come forward, Senator Thurmond cited concerns about giving false hopes to his many admirers and former constituents: “When I left public life, I left on a high note, at the top of my game. I was loved. I think I might have been bigger than those Beatles. I didn’t want to tease people by sayin’ now I might live forever. You might never lose me. And then not be able to follow through.”
Several public health and advocacy groups have voiced concern over the treatment Senator Thurmond received. At a recent public hearing, Local Health Coven #32 director Agnes Bar demanded a public accounting of the funds used to support Senator Thurmond’s extraordinary and lengthy treatment. “Some sources have told us that the funding came out of the NSA budget. And why aren’t the doctors identified? They seem only to speak collectively through a PR representative. It sounds like they are the same doctors that started his treatment. At least they talk that way. If so we suspect that they have been giving themselves the experimental treatment as well. That’s not good medicine.”
It may not be good science either. Prominent science and research organizations have universally criticized the methodology of the long-secret experiment. The team’s information gathering and safety protocols seem to have been particularly lax. Often Senator Thurmond was sustained in his automatic environment for decades at a time with neither close monitoring nor human contact.
Thurmond’s doctors acknowledge the shortcomings of the experiment, but point to the results for justification: “Senator Thurmond now tests significantly higher on a range of physical and intelligence tests, and psychometric indicators of his mental stability have improved by orders of magnitude.”
What did the Senator do to occupy his years in recuperative solitude? “I did some light readin’. There was room for my library of old Sears & Roebuck catalogs. I never get tired of reading them. If I got bored I’d flip through my collection of lynchin’ photos. And the Bible too. I also had some movies. Mostly Charlton Heston. Ben Hur, I love that movie.”