In a nondescript lab in a juice factory in Florida, young chemist Caleb Lee accidentally discovers a juice formula that stops human aging. When the news leaks, the world erupts in chaos as crowds clamor for the juice. While Lee and his girlfriend flee to a hideaway, Medgar Landros, World Health Organization honcho and ex-special forces battlefield surgeon is summoned to the White House to help respond to the juice, now named the Ponce Factor.
Part rumination on the Great Circle of Life and part kidnap thriller, we follow our hero Landros, Lee, and a cast of characters that includes Pastor Angela Nero, an unscrupulous minister who believes the Ponce Factor has been given to the world's elite to ensure their exclusive place alongside God. As Nero's plot approaches culmination, Landros plans desperate action of his own after he concludes that the government's inept response is leading the world to destruction and Pastor Nero and her followers to immortal ascension.
This road leads to a frantic race to save his own daughter from Nero's plot. Along the path lurks murder, romance, weaponized anthrax, political graft, and a kidnapping ending in a hero's death - all mixed in a soup of profound questions about our world. What will Ponce mean for societies, for institutions, for governments? How does marriage and family work? Children?
These questions swirl around the characters as they barrel down separate paths to a small Washington D.C. apartment where they come together in a cataclysmic finale. The woman who would be God meets the final test -- eternal life or sudden death?
