If you were offered a pill that could extend your life not by decades but hundreds of years, would you take it?
Before you answer the question, you should first read gripping political thriller Elixir by Phil Clear. By its tense and climatic finale, the answer to this question will be anything but as simple as first it may seem.
A superior work of speculative fiction that’s as dramatically powerful as it is prescient, the premise is that an American pharmaceutical company, Pure Industries, accidentally stumble upon a new medicine that if taken regularly will arrest cellular decay.
In other words, this treatment, the titular Elixir, represents the “holy grail” that humanity has been desperately seeking since the invention of the graveyard—offering people the chance to extend their lifespan by as much as five times.
Here, it closely mirrors real-world attempts by Big Pharma to halt the hands of time through the rapidly progressing field of life-extension.
But by providing a literary shortcut to that goal’s realisation, Elixir amply and unforgettably demonstrates why this is no gift but a terrible, devastating curse.
We see this tragedy unfold through the eyes of the novel’s main protagonists, Pure Industries’ CEO Tom Shaw and his chief scientist, Elixir’s inventor Dr Rachael Leo.
A white-knight scientist whose principle concern is that the drug reaches and benefits everyone rather than being abused, Leo has the perfect ally in Shaw, who shares her ideals and concern for preventing it fall into the wrong hands while recognising the staggering commercial potential in the palm of their hands.
Unlike Leo, however, he does have an agenda. Professionally, he knows that the treatment will restore the fortunes of a struggling Pure Industries; personally, he has a dying wife who he believes he can save with Elixir.
Calling the rest of the company’s executive board together—comprising Peter Wright, VP Finance, Silvia Lucas, Head of Marketing, and Kyle Byng, VP Business Development—he overcomes their understandable incredulity and gets a consensus vote on launching the product globally as soon as possible.
But their conversation isn’t as private as Tom believes and soon word of a new miracle drug starts spreading, both into the corridors of power, the White House, and the radar of unscrupulous, sadistic and super-rich speculator Theodore Croft.
Recognising this as the biggest money-making opportunity of his shady career, he first tries to buy out the business.
When this fails, and still determined to have Elixir, he initiates a despicable plan.
No matter that, for the sake of security, each member of the board individually only knows a part of the formula. He will extract the information he requires by any means necessary, being more than happy to get his hands dirty in the process.
By the time he’s finished, they will be stained up to the elbows with blood.
Shaw and Leo only begin to suspect that others are trying to muscle in when notified by the police that Peter Wright has been murdered. Having to formally identify his former colleague, Shaw is shocked by the expression of agony locked on his grossly disfigured face.
But he suspects that the US government is behind it, having recently been summoned to meet the president for a fiery meeting during which he, in no uncertain terms, was ordered to abandon Elixir.
Why would the administration come down so heavily? Because the consequences of life extension would, in short, be catastrophic.
You can find out exactly what the problem would be in the exclusive extract from Elixir below, but to sum it up, it would come down to two major issues.
Firstly, from the extreme social pressures that would emerge in a world where a near-limitless, exponentially growing population hit the brick wall of limited resources.
Secondly, from the threat of destabilization that would present given that not everyone would be able to afford the treatment. As the president’s scientific advisor puts it, “Can you imagine how much sooner the French Revolution would have happened if the country had been divided not into haves and have-nots, but into lives and live-nots?”
There’s a delicious irony, milked to the max by canny author Phil Cleary, that the very thing that will render time, essentially, meaningless and survival virtually assured, save for accidents, lands those responsible for its creation into a race against time with not just their livelihoods but very lives on the line.
It’s a rare thing to come across a novel that can simultaneously get the adrenaline pumping while making you think, but Elixir pulls it off in spectacular style.
Here is a story with the highest stakes for those involved—packed with suspense, plot twists and outright terror—that at the same time leaves you pondering the ethicality of life extension.
In a perfect world—where greed, corruption, violence, suffering and hunger—did not exist, the case for Elixir would be clear-cut.
In reality, however, the pure ethical standards as represented by selfless Dr Leo come crashing down when confronted by an apex predator like former Wall Street wolf Theodore Croft.
It’s crushing to see such likeable, idealistic characters as Leo and Tom Shaw being taught this lesson through merciless betrayal and bloodshed.
Then there is the political aspect to consider, with everyone from the president to the FBI and CIA rapidly stepping in, and not always with the most honourable of motives.
Perhaps, though, it is Shaw’s dying wife, bed-stricken with advanced muscular dystrophy, who sees most clearly.
Compelled to take the drug by Shaw, who cannot abide the thought of losing her, she comments with concern about him becoming increasingly comfortable with playing god, as CEO of Pure Industries in charge of who can get access to Elixir and who can’t.
She also observes that there is, perhaps, no value to life extension when you are in constant danger of losing the very things that make life worth living in the first place.
With as many juicy moral dilemmas to bite into as action scenes to gasp at, such as a nightmarish kidnapping and jaw-dropping shoot out, Elixir puts the spine into ‘spine-tingling’.
Remarkably, the book is the debut work of Phil Cleary. You’d never guess it from how polished and expertly constructed this page-turner is.
Even more remarkably, writing has been a pastime for the author rather than the day job. In that capacity, he is famed as one of the UK’s most respected and successful entrepreneurs, co-founding international forensic security technology company The SmartWater Group.
Having been a covert operations specialist in the British police before launching forensic tagging product SmartWater, which is now used by millions of consumers and all UK police forces, he draws upon a unique insider’s knowledge of the criminal and business worlds to make the story thoroughly gritty and credible.
Cleary retired as CEO of The SmartWater Group (now rebranded DeterTech) back in 2021 so, hopefully, he can now devote himself to penning a follow-up to Elixir. The seeds of a sequel are firmly planted in the closing chapters and after reading his novel, you’ll be crying out for it to appear.
Elixir by Phil Cleary is out now on Amazon, priced £9.99 in paperback and £3.99 as an eBook. For more information, visit www.PhilCleary.com.
In this exclusive excerpt from gripping political thriller Elixir by Phil Cleary, set in the White House, we discover why life extension represents a global threat rather than salvation.
Professor Maitland removed her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose for a moment before replying. “Mr. President, did you ever hear the story about the man who invented chess?”
“Alison, what’s that got to do with—”
“Bear with me, Mr. President.” She replaced her glasses. “The story goes that the emperor of India was so pleased with the game, he offered the inventor anything he wanted. The inventor asked for rice. He said he would like one grain of rice for the first square on the chessboard; double that for the second square; double that for the third, and so on for all the squares on the chessboard. The emperor thought he’d got away lightly. He didn’t realize that by the time he got to the sixty-fourth square, he had to give the inventor more rice than had ever been grown in the history of the world. He wasn’t a mathematician. He didn’t understand what happens when a quantity increases exponentially.”
There was silence in the Oval Office as everybody waited for the Chief Scientific Adviser to continue.
“The science of aging is complex,” she said. “It’s not just a matter of extending life, because I think we’re all agreed that none of us want to live to 400 if our bodies deteriorate at the same rate that they do when we’re, say, 80. The key is to slow down—or even stop—the rate of cell degeneration. If we can do that then the human body will continue to function normally throughout the period of an increased lifespan.”
“But that’s … that’s great, isn’t it?”
“Well, let’s think about it. If we halt cellular degeneration in humans, there’s nothing to stop them reproducing.”
“You talk about them like they’re rabbits.”
“No, Mr. President. Humans are a far more successful species than rabbits. We’ve populated every corner of the earth. We can withstand extremes of environment. The current human population is—what?—seven billion? The human female is fertile for a maximum of maybe thirty years. What happens when that becomes a hundred years? Two hundred years? Longer? And what happens when the population stops dying to make room for new offspring? Every child born would potentially become the start of a new sequence of exponential growth.”
The President frowned. “You mean, every new child is like a new grain of rice?”
“No, Mr. President. I mean that every new child is like a new chessboard. It wouldn’t take more than a handful of generations before there are more humans on the planet than have ever lived. And that will keep growing exponentially, like bacteria in a test tube. Now, population growth can be self-limiting.”
“That’s good, right?”
Professor Maitland shrugged. “I’m a scientist, Mr. President. I don’t deal in ‘good or bad’. I deal in facts. All I can do is encourage you to think about how a human population might limit itself. I think we can make a safe prediction that there will be a struggle for resources. These things can be modeled very effectively using fairly basic statistical analysis. There’s a limit, for example, to the amount of food a planet can provide. We’re likely to see starvation on a massive scale. And that’s just the beginning.” She removed her glasses again. “There’s a reason,” she said, “why we’re interested in those labs that we know are carrying out research in this field.”
“And if I may, Mr. President?’ the National Security Advisor interrupted.
The President nodded soberly. “Go ahead, Clifford.” His voice was much quieter than before.
The NSA cleared his throat. “Everything we know about civil unrest,” he said, “tells us that conflict and violence are more likely in situations where a large number of people compete for a limited quantity of resources. That alone suggests to me that widespread availability of a drug such as this will lead directly to incidents that threaten not only our national security, but also the national security of any country where Elixir is available. But it seems to me that there is a more pressing issue even than that.” The NSA paused for a moment. “Mr. President, I know you’re a student of history, and I don’t wish to patronize you. But consider this: Pure Industries, whoever they are, are not a charity. Elixir will be a commercial product, from which they will surely attempt to make as much money as possible. This means that, inevitably, there will be people who can afford Elixir and people who can’t. When you have that kind of division in society, I’m afraid there’s only one consequence. We’ve seen it enough times before, but until now the unit of dissent has simply been the dollar.’ He raised a bushy eyebrow in the President’s direction. “Can you imagine, Mr. President, how much sooner the French Revolution would have happened if the country had been divided not into haves and have-nots but into ‘live and live-nots?’”
