In a world where aging is a crime and the elite buy immortality, a forty-two-year-old archivist named Aris flees the sterile city for the ruins of the old world. Carrying ancient, "illegal" seeds, he joins a band of outcasts and discovers that nature has a violent, biological memory. As the city sends its machines to sanitize the "rot," Aris leads a rebellion of the wrinkled and the weary, proving that a life defined by its end is the only one worth living.