When your body runs down, you get in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and hand them your credit card. So long as you have a million dollars in the bank, then you could reset your age to any one of your choosing. People could also sell their skills. So many would spend their whole lives becoming talented pianists, poets, polymaths, and then sell their skills for youth ad infinitum. Jutel Dicuth is a raging polymath who can paint, sculpt, write formal poetry, and play six instruments. He earns doctorates in anthropology, art history, slipstream physics, and more. Then, he sells it all. Instead of turning himself into a young adult, like anyone else would, he turns himself into a baby. There are no children in this world, nor is there God. So he is seen as God. People come near and far to see this child and try to decipher what this baby babbles about. Soon everyone turns themselves into a baby. On December 31, AD 3000, the last person converts into a baby. Eventually, the machines that make people young break down.

People gain immortality by making copies of themselves called “farlies”. This farlies are stored in safe spaces like Farlie Centers, or anywhere with liquid nitrogen and terabytes of storage. If you died, your farlie would be activated, and you would be reborn. Society only killed the people too terrible to live. Eventually, those terrible few start hiding their farlies. Bad Billy Beerbreath starts a wave of crime after hiding 100 farlies and activating them all at once to attack all the Farlie Centers. On New Year’s Eve, AD 3000, the criminals are in charge of the world.

No one dies unless they want to, or are talked into it. So Manny O’Malley, an advertiser, comes up with a subtle pitch. Instead of the typical military narrative that you should become a soldier to “be all you can be,” he uses an argument that life does not matter and that nonexistence is a gift. They set Death Valley up as a battlefield and charge people to fight. O’Malley is killed on the battlefield. His final words, “Oh shit.” A worldwide referendum decides that everyone will go to Death Valley for one last ultimate battle. On the eve of the new century, AD 3000, O’Malley’s ad campaign achieves its goal: a world that consumes itself.

No one has to die so long as one person loves them. But Custer Tralia is adamant he can live as a hermit. He comes out of the womb with teeth and bites his doctor. He breaks up love training sessions in middle school with toxic farts. He celebrates puberty by not washing for a year. He forms a Masturbation Club and lets no one in. He graduates college and finds peace in wild with wallabies and dingoes. One day, Parky Gumma tracks him down. She heard about the famous Custer the Hermit. She tries to be one, but then decides she wants a bath and to be loved. She cleans herself up and lays naked before him, and Custer falls in love.