Immortality

After Kendo class, Chiho asked where they were going. Hikaru had said, "I want to have a good steak but at someplace I haven't been before."

Chiho's heart rate immediately sped up. This was her chance. She and Aimi knew what Hikaru's favourite food was so they had scouted almost every steak place in and around Yokohama and Tokyo city.

They knew that Hikaru's favourite place was the Steak Ranch (Suteki Bokujo) which was the most popular steakhouse franchise in the world. It's an Ireland-based steakhouse with international restaurant chains.

There are two types of steak houses in the business, Steak Ranch for budget steaks and Steak Ranch World (Suteki Bokujo no sekai) for the highest-grade meat.

First-class meals are at least over a hundred dollars (over 11000 yen). Steak Ranch World's most expensive dish is at 500 dollars for one serving of dry age A5 Wagyu (beef).

Cheap steaks at the ranch cost about 30 dollars per dish while the higher-grade Wagyu cost about 450 dollars per kilo, which is 135 dollars for a 300-gram steak being the most expensive dish at the budget steak ranch.

Wagyu is the name of Japanese beef cattle which are bred for physical endurance so that their fat is interspersed in their meat. The fat spreading through red meat like white roots gives it a marbled appearance. When eaten, the steak can literally melt in your mouth like butter and that's because the monounsaturated fat has a low melting point.

If Chiho and Aimi found a steak house better or comparable to the budget steak ranch then maybe Hikaru will appreciate the thought. Chiho and Aimi would lookup for new places to go and read their reviews twice every month. They've been to almost all the 4+ star steak houses in a 100km radius. The only places they haven't been being the really expensive ones which were out of their budget. The average Japanese person eats an A5 grade Wagyu every few years!

At last, Hikaru and Chiho had sat down on a grill table inside Kobe steakhouse where they serve one of the best varieties of Wagyu meat, Kobe steak. The dish was 90 dollars for a 200-gram cut. Chiho had decided to eat grilled salmon and salmon skin salad with tosa vinegar dressing for 24 dollars as she wanted to save the money for Hikaru's dish, but Hikaru offered to pay for both their steaks.

Hikaru knew that Chiho would pick this place because of Aimi's memories. He also knew that they had gone into one of the best steak houses in Tokyo but they had walked out embarrassingly when they saw the menu.

He would have tried that place since he accumulated over a thousand dollars from absorbing people and coincidentally their wallets. Unfortunately, he hadn't practised nor absorbed enough of the dollar bills to pass them off as an original. With the reproduced dollar bills equivalent to a counterfeit, he wasn't sure if he would get caught with it or not.

With this in mind, he had leisurely picked some wallets while he was waiting for the assimilation of his victims to finish. Still, he only had 200 dollars in his wallet. He didn't want to use money from his savings account.

'Hmph'

The world still runs on money but how long will he be under their shackles? And with his body, was there such a thing as immortality?

Hikaru could stimulate his human body's growth if he wanted to but there was no point as he could shapeshift into any size and face. He could turn into a 20-year-old man or woman. Gender was meaningless to him as well. He was no longer human and should be referred to as 'it' instead of 'him'.

As he pondered, his mind had subconsciously linked to his cells. The extra-sensory ability of his cells provided the detailed third-dimensional spacial data that he can analyse and project within his mind. This gave him a 360-degree vision which he could rotate.

He changed to a bird's eye view and saw many of his parasitic cells floating around. As he is in human form, some of the cells were disguised as human cells whereas others were in their base form. Surprisingly, the parasitic cells were smaller than the human cells but many times more compact. They also had an irregular round and wavy shape, much like scrunched up frills.

As if his body was doing a search enquiry, he felt drawn into the answer that his view zoomed into the cell nucleus at the chromatin which looked like a web. This is the DNA in its uncondensed state.

A chromosome was focused on where he could see DNA repeats at its end. This was a telomere. A protective cap at the end of chromosomes which shorten each time the DNA replicates. A simple analogy would be that telomeres are the plastic ends of shoelaces that prevent them from fraying.

A cell would divide again and again until its telomeres depleted and they would die from apoptosis - programmed cell death. During apoptosis a cell would trigger a domino effect in which the result ruptures their membranes, essentially making them pop.

The life span of a dividing cell is known as its Hayflick limit which can be measured in the number of times it can divide before dying. As people get older, each of their cells has lower Hayflick limits than their embryonic counterparts. Meaning, even if one were to be as healthy as possible, they would still die from aging.

Most animals produce a protein called telomerase which repairs the telomeres by adding more of the repetitive sequences found in the telomeres. However, telomerase production is halted in most somatic cells after passing the embryonic life stage. Hikaru could see the end tails of his chromosomes were still long but they were gradually being reduced to dust.

Hikaru began hijacking all his cells and flipping on the telomerase gene. DNA transcription began and telomerase proteins began to grow, starting with one amino acid. Amino acids began lining up waiting for the ribosome to stick them to the growing end of the protein like a hovering drone connecting Lego pieces.

Hikaru watched as each cell had their newly produced telomerase seep into their nucleus through nuclear pores. When the cells began DNA replication, the telomerase binds to the end of chromosomes. The telomeres were lengthened before DNA replication ended.

Hikaru had just repaired all of the telomeres in his chromosomes. His cells were genetically young as if they had never aged since embryonic development. Now Hikaru's cells can self-replicate infinitely.

Human cells can divide for about 40 to 60 times on average before it cannot divide anymore. He had removed his cells Hayflick limit with just a thought. No longer will he be governed by the same molecular clock that plagues others. Hikaru had become the world's first immortal.