The Impregnable Life of Mortimer Finch

Mortimer Finch was not merely cautious; he was an architect of hermetic hyper-precaution. His home, a bio-dome of titanium and triple-filtered air, stood as a monument to the eradication of risk. No gluten, no germs, no sharp corners, no sunlight (skin cancer, obviously). Mortimer’s diet was a symphony of beige, his movements a ballet of measured slowness. He avoided people, pollen, and particularly precarious puddles. He lived 87 years, a pristine bubble of existence, smugly defying the very concept of "accident".

One Tuesday, reaching for his ergonomically designed emergency hydration pack on the top shelf (because gravity, while a constant, was not to be *tempted*), Mortimer's femur, a bone that had never so much as brushed a stair, gave an audible *snap*. Decades of vitamin D deficiency, a direct consequence of his rigorous sun-avoidance protocol, had rendered his skeleton as fragile as his ego.

He lay there, on his specially padded, antimicrobial floor, the emergency button inches from his perfectly manicured, germ-free hand. He'd designed the shelf to be high to prevent children from reaching it, never considering *he* would be the child of his own over-engineering. As the light from his UV-filtered, full-spectrum lamps dimmed, Mortimer’s last thought was a bitter chuckle. He had outsmarted plague, famine, and war, only to be felled by the very fortress he had built. Life, it seemed, found a way to be utterly unoriginal in its cruelty.