The Great Ascetics were a social elite devoted to extravagant modes of self-preservation. Their Golden Age, of sorts, has found its place among most accounts of mid 21st century history. Spanning barely 300 years (or three Ascetic Generations), that age is commonly agreed to be the period between the end of the Cold War and commencement of the Second Space Race.
The massive surplus of military hardware - particularly aircraft - on either side of ideology between these two periods, allowed pharmaceutical experimentation on a scale unlikely to be repeated.
Even as Soviet troops crushed the Popular Front in Baku, the safe money was being spent in the factories of Tupolev, Sukhoi and Boeing.
But barely 50 years later it would all be over; beauty's place taken by a return to curiosity.
To the mirror born, it was not uncommon for the offspring of two equally devout Ascetics to live to around 150 (and never looking much worse for all those years, if they could afford the latest treatments).
Perla Fortuita - regarded as the first of their strange clan - fended death with a revolving diet of detoxifiers, and the dermatological soup she massaged into her still perfect skin, every hour of every day. Every minute if she could.
Millions of pounds went into these lab masterpieces: cutting edge compounds, polymers and silicates, handily explained to the likes of Perla (by Perla) as Elastic Scaffold, Micro Bead Suspension, Pro Tensile Formula, and the like.
Her makeup bag full of small pouches, boxes topped with gimmicky nozzles; detachable applicators, was one part of an arsenal including hair dye, teeth whitener, botox and bulimia that lead the last stand against the hitherto unnamed threat (pseudonym: Age), which had recently been identified by her sponsors as a cost effective entity to pick a fight with.
Earth, for years never implicated in the crime, had long been the enemy to wrinkle-free living, for as sure as it encouraged the apple from the branch did its displacement of space induce one's sag.
So would run today's advert at any rate, and from the little she now knew of such things, Perla wandered for a second into abstraction and whether, perhaps on other smaller worlds out there beyond today's bright blue sky, there existed a race of lucky, eternally beautiful beings, without need for...Oh shut up you silly thing!
Perla shook her head and reached a product from her makeup bag. It bore the same insignia as all therein: A black dot tracing an eliptical orbit around a central nucleus. A suitable statement of intent, reasoned Pharmo Corp's graphics department. The building blocks of life being as good a first blow as any against their impending war on Mother Nature. It was the next natural step.
Across the airfield the crew would be setting up in the back of the Vomit Comit: one of several frontline military aircraft set aside for PC to ensure they didn't take this lucrative deal abroad.
Perla practised her lines in front of her mirror.
Above the gust of idling jet engines outside, she raised her voice: clear as a bell thanks to Pharmo Corps' vocal chord therapy programme, which she'd enrolled upon to eliminate the croak of 70 appetite-fending cigarettes a day. She'd had her stomach stapled since.
'Look, see how gravity rolls right off with just one course of five pre-paid flights from Pharmo Corp zero G procedure. Give it to a loved one for just...' Here there was a [Brief Pause] where they'd dub the price in later - company directors still awaiting the outcome of peace negotiations between two two-bit nations, betting the MOD would raise its price if talks turned to civil war and the aircraft ring-fenced to make aid drops: An unfortunate colonial responsibility that would raise the treatment's price to cover today's ad campaign.
It left PC CEOs in the rare position of desiring resolution and harmony. They sat, huddled beneath a marquee next to the runway, watching a live feed from the UN; friends in palm oil producing nations casting their votes accordingly. The camera crew boarded the plane. The plan was simple.
Climb to thirty-two thousand feet, then pitch the aircraft into nosedive until it matched earth's trajectory through space - thereby attaining zero gravity. Enough treatments a year could solve sagging, didn't you know?
Perla, already perfect, just hoped she wouldn't throw up again.
Little could she have predicted her fate that day, but this was just the start for PC. The company were already concocting a plan to convince frequent fliers that the Coriolis effect was having an affect on their facial symmetry, and that a course of anti gravity treatment in both Britain - and the Corp's new southern hemisphere base in Belize - was needed to correct any feature disharmony experienced while crossing the equator.
So long as the earth kept spinning then these two phenomenal pieces of marketing were set to jolt share prices favourably.
As the years went on her looks - despite even these multimillion pound treatments - faded, and Perla (aged 156) graduated from being face of the company, to guinea pig.
Even by the end of clinical trials she had spent more time in zero gravity than every member of the Apollo missions combined. It is now estimated she spent more hours in flight that any other human being in history.
Forced into retirement by chronic muscle atrophy, her later life is a sad story.
Her children - who went on to found the great Ascetic dynasties of the day - disowned her.
Like the Great Ascetics that followed, her age increased in line with resentment towards youth, so that a strange bitterness typified parental relationships, though it was really just the common abandonment issue: time having run off without her.
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