“I’m not a babysitter, Victor,” Galleon said pointedly using the Premier’s first name- something simply not done.

  Galleon was ancient, brilliant, and defective. Withered and gnarled, with silver-gray hair and penetrating blue eyes, he was surprisingly spry and intellectually sharp for a man of any age, no less a 948 year old man.

  Until Olive, he had the highest score on the placement tests at 198. No one else had ever come close. And his exceptional age was maintained through his exceptional brilliance. His understanding of both Prometheus technology and biology was second to none. In the lab he would continuously monitor and ruthlessly target all signs of aging. Even still, aging was inevitable. Killing cancer cells and the like was the easy part. Adding to the length of telomeres at a body-wide level, when starting from the subatomic level without creating collateral damage, was much harder.

  Collectively, due to the interconnectedness of biological systems, the inability of an external AI to monitor every cell when outside of the lab, and the fact that he had to use Prometheus from inside the lab instead of a Prometheus system grafted to his brain and central nervous system, meant that he was fighting a slowly losing battle slightly faster than others with the gift. Father time remains undefeated.

  That said, if it weren’t for his defect, he wouldn’t be nearly so withered and gnarled. For those with Prometheus grafted to them, the aging hit rather suddenly.

  Despite the world's brightest minds spending a profound amount of brain power, time, and money on trying to understand why, Galleon’s defect was still one of the universe’s greatest unsolved mysteries. His body had immediately and aggressively rejected the gift. It had attacked the hardware as if it were anathema to its very existence, despite there being no allergic response to any of the materials used in Prometheus’ construction.

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  “Galleon,” said the Premier, “I’m so sorry, but there’s simply no one else.” The Premier suspected that Galleon was mostly posturing. All all, the opportunity to mold the only other mind in history to rival his own would probably be a temptation too great to resist.

  “Fine, but we do it my way. Here, outside in the garden at my home. No listening in, no visual feeds, nothing! Complete privacy. If you scratch that itch, I’m done! All you idiots would probably just misunderstand everything anyways!”

  The Premier chuckled. ‘Idiot.’ The Premier’s biologically implanted AI immediately fed him the details of that word. Described in a published work in the year 1912 of the Middle Era by Edmund Burke Huey, ‘idiot’ didn’t just mean unintelligent, it was actually used for a time as the lowest formal standard of intelligence, describing the mental equivalent of the average two year old.

  “Really, Galleon? Idiot?”

  “Yes! But even a two year old wouldn’t bungle things as bad as you have a habit of doing!”

  The Premier shook his head. As with everything Galleon said and did, his comparison of brilliant intellectuals to toddlers was as intentional as it was obscure. Galleon didn’t even have an implant to help feed him these obscure references. The Premier then considered the very real possibility that despite Galleon’s defect, he might actually be the intellectual equivalent of a toddler to someone like Galleon- a sobering thought that made him very thankful that this crotchety old man didn’t also have the gift.“

  Fine Galleon, have it your way. She’ll meet you here twice a week. There will be no surveillance.”