The Big Trip Up Yonder

In 2158, humanity has conquered death. Everyone takes Anti-Gerasone, a cheap medicine made from mud and dandelions, and no one dies of old age anymore. The result is a world of chronic overcrowding, processed seaweed diets, and desperate families trapped in houses stuffed with generations of the living. The only way out? The 'Big Trip Up Yonder' - suicide, performed hopefully by wealthy old folks so their heirs can finally inherit. Gramps Ford has been threatening to make this trip for fifty years. He was already 70 when anti-aging technology arrived, so he alone looks ancient - a withered relic in a house full of frozen-faced twenty-somethings. His heirs wait with barely concealed impatience, trapped in a grotesque holding pattern of eternal waiting. Vonnegut's deadpan satire asks: what happens when we get exactly what we think we want? Immortality turns out to be a prison, and the only exit is a dark joke.