There are places that live more in an idea than in geography, even when the name on the map is real. Santa Fe is one of them for me. The name belongs to a real place. The institute I mean is an idea, and it stands wherever the story needs it to stand.
I imagined it between a monastery, a university and a laboratory, with corridors that smell of old paper and warm stone. People gather there whom the world considered too independent, too strange or too bold. Outsiders. Heretics of knowledge.
The man who leads the Institute is one of them. He discovered what was meant to be a blessing: longevity.
Someone who lives two hundred years can still believe in progress. Someone who lives two thousand begins to see its consequences.
A question has echoed across the centuries in many voices, and this story gives it one voice more: should we do everything we are able to do?