Agent Pitch Finalist #37 - The Long-Timers

THE LONG-TIMERS
YA Sci-fi/Thriller
77,000

Query:

Seventeen-year-old Remy’s parents invented a drug that extends human life by two hundred years—as long as you can pay the all-powerful Company for those daily pills. Society has fragmented into the long-timers who live in constant fear of losing everything, and the short-timers who would do anything for a few extra years.

Remy isn't worried. Thanks to his parents, he's got a guaranteed lifetime supply of the drug. But his perfect life dissolves when Soren, an old man who worked with his parents, thrusts a note intended for his father into his hand. The note says he wants to meet because he's going to the press with their secret. Remy tells his father about the meeting—and just a few hours later, Soren is dead.

Now, for the first time, Remy's obsessed with something other than parties and girls. Someone killed Soren to keep him quiet, and Remy's parents might have had something to do with it. He seeks help from Liv, a short-timer who knows her way around a security system, and together they break into his parents' secret lab in the Company stronghold.

When they find the horrific source of the drug, Remy begins to question the morality of his existence... and he must decide if a few hundred years can possibly be worth the price.

First 150:

My uncle was only 152 when he died, but five hundred people showed up for his funeral anyway. No one seemed very interested in his corpse, though—they were much more into comparing designer outfits and telling stories about their neighbors. When anyone did remember Uncle Devin, rotting away in his fine mahogany box at the front, it was only to cast a scornful look in his direction.

I knew exactly what they were thinking.

What a loser.

Hey, it made sense. I was his only nephew, and I thought he was a loser too.

I picked at a loose thread on my suit pants as the funeral reader started in on the list of accomplishments.

Sorry, Uncle Devin. No matter how much Dad paid this guy, I'm not buying it.

"Then, when he was only eighty-three," the reader intoned, "Devin left home to make his way in the world."