And Death Shall Be No More

Scott Denning, his face prematurely creased, wizened, and blemished by years of tanning, stepped with bare callused feet upon a platform of fresh, gleaming, and still slightly shifting silver concrete warmed by the unimpeded rays of the midday July, 2022, sun. He brushed his wiry, chest-long hair from his thick framed glasses of tie-dyed colors in order to glance upward at an ever-stretching colonnade of elliptical azure glass intertwined with angular protuberances of pink marble that held upon them balcony after balcony of domed offices, lounges, and laboratories. Noticing an ornament of violet glass below his feet, a line of patterned zigzags delicately imbued into the concrete and stretching to one of the building's dodecagonal vertices, Denning spat upon it. He needed to relieve his mouth of the chewing tobacco, true, but his loathing of the sight had escalated to the extent where he could forbear it no longer. Upon a billboard to his right, gold-plated letters glaringly and, with a ubiquitous presence, spelled out, "Promethean Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the Citadel of Man's Ultimate Mission."