Thank you so much for your time and comments. They’ve been tremendously helpful in terms of directing what needs to be fixed or clarified. I think changing previous stuff messes up the save system so I’ll definitely do some editing (will change first sentence) but will hold off adding it in until I can be sure it won’t disrupt saves.
Near future, maybe 2050s, and the closeness to the current society is due to the fact that I’m actually pretty skeptical of change being as fast as the media make it out to be. The main industrial revolution was, idk, ~50 for the whole transition to occur? It’s loosely based off that.
There are arguments that the industrial revolution was kick-started by an influx of wealth (from colonisation) and foreign workers into Britain, allowing for a concentration of ideas and engineering. But what seems to me to be an issue now is that there’s globalisation, and there’s a lot of stuff done online, and resources are diverted into a multitude of scientific pursuits. It seems to be more scattered and disjointed, the opposite of what happened in the industrial revolution, so I figured that any major changes would take quite a while, which is why it really is just the current world with a few tweaks here and there. The bioindustrial revolution was the result of a strenuous burst of collective energy - propelled by growing health awareness - so biotech is much more heavily developed than other technologies, which are more or less similar to what we have now.
The main issue I’m trying to get at is the mismatch between scientific developments and public policy/knowledge. For example, government promotion of free vaccines and cancer tests is quite ineffective - you don’t even have GPs telling patients that such resources are available, so there’s a gap between what’s possible and what’s perceived to be possible. And that is a relatively simple problem, so I don’t see much hope for a post-bioindustrial society. Expectations either under- or over-shoot reality. This is illustrated with the “chirality of a body part” - it doesn’t make sense, and even if the chiral changes as described in the story were possible, it’s bound to have a lot of complications. It’s a scam, basically: high-tech snake oil that feeds on the growing fear of ageing-related complications and an inflated sense of trust in biotechnology.
Do you feel that’s valid or overly cynical?
All the other aspects I’ve tried to touch on (incompetence of governance - as seen today with gene patenting and whatnot -, rampant overpopulation, and more later on) are all related to a lack of thorough communication between the scientific community and the policy makers and general public.
I actually did some research into principles of urban infrastructure, and the mismatch again between scientific/tech developments and infrastructure heavily informs what I’m trying to construct, and also factored into the choice of setting.
BC, actually, but with Alberta’s wolf culling unabashedly transplanted in 
Are you Canadian?
It’s geographically Fort St. John, but is a mix of that and some other big cities I’ve visited. In this story, FSJ (not sure if it’d still be called that, tbh, so it’ll remain unnamed) has a population of over 3 mil and attracts quite a few scientists and engineers, both national and foreign.
The rationale: most [big] cities now already have infrastructures that are temporally marked and designed to suit what the city - and society at large - was at that time. The city I live in now, for instance, population 1.6 mil, is experiencing massive urban sprawl and the public transport system has been stretched thin because the original system was designed to serve the existing city and not the new suburbs, and it’s hard to fix the entire system so any holes are just patched. With advancements in biotech and the increasing problem of overpopulation, more infrastructural holes will appear and more patching up will be needed, so larger cities actually face a bigger problem.
Smaller cities like FSJ (current population 20000), however, have simpler pre-existing transport/electricity/waste/health care/etc. infrastructures, so can more easily adapt and might potentially overtake other established cities in transitioning during a bioindustrial revolution. For example, the unroad entry/exit ramps require specially-designed cul-de-sacs, which aren’t feasible to build in developed cities but can be built in a newly expanding city. Drive out a bit from the outskirts and there’s just farmland and straggly forests (if I remember correctly - it’s been ages), and there’s the huge Alaska highway running through and the Peace nearby. Suitable for accommodating the expansion and infrastructure overhaul required, and so in this story my humble hometown has become a major city. The part where MC lives and works is in the current centre and is the poorer part of the city; the nursing home is on the outskirts of present-day FSJ, and Terkhashvili’s apartment, Easton’s lab, and most other places are in the “new” future parts.
Yeah, that’s a part I’m murky on as well. I figured that since this extension is unnatural, there are going to be some areas, perhaps those controlled by polygenes or homeobox genes (? since telomerase treatments are used in later life) that lag behind, so there’d be a mismatch between some organs. Also, accumulated damage: I don’t think extra telomerase will save organs damaged through lifestyle choices, and since lives are longer more irreversible damage is built up, so a demand for organs would be high (although understandably they would not be prioritised on the replacement list, hence the increase in black market prominence). And the brain I really don’t know about, but since neurons are quite different and the brain seems to be trickier than other organs to regenerate, I’d assume there’d be quite a gap between research and tech on overall ageing and that on the brain.
But that’s all conjecture based on high school understanding of biology, so if you have any ideas or corrections I’d be very grateful to hear them! If I may ask, what’s the related field you’re studying for and what kind of ageing-related research was it that you were involved in?
Um, I am hoping to change that so it sounds more mysterious and creative.
Later on (ch 3/4-ish) MC will find out about this organisation and meet two of its coordinators, who, although they have rather mundane tasks and the time to meet some random nobody MC, are prominent drivers of the organisation’s ideological beliefs. One of them is a Russian immigrant (“the Hammer”); the other is CBC. I’ve therefore titled them to refer to their heritages, but also to the fact that Molotov and Zhou, despite being respectively seconds-in-command to Stalin and Mao, did play important parts in their countries’ policies.
(It’s only meant to be a passing parallel, not political allegory, and though I might invoke some stereotypes in the story, it’ll be for a specific reason and meant ironically.)
Had a look, are you referring to the part where it says “What you’ve learned for the first HELL test:” and all that? (haven’t read it before.) I think I’m aiming for the notes to be more flexible and not to give guidelines for what’s stored, but it’s an interesting idea and might be borrowed in some way later on. Thanks for the suggestion and for stopping by! 
