Palo Alto, California – Tech mogul Victor Hale, the 58-year-old founder of EternalForge Labs, met an untimely end yesterday during a late-night session in his home biohacking chamber, tripping over a tangled iPhone charging cable and tumbling down a flight of stairs.
Hale had poured over $500 million into his personal quest for immortality, funding everything from cryogenic sleep pods to experimental telomere-lengthening serums that he tested on himself daily. Colleagues described him as a visionary obsessed with outliving mortality, often boasting in board meetings about how he’d “upload his consciousness to the cloud before anyone else could spell ‘algorithm.'” The fatal mishap occurred around 2 a.m., when Hale, bleary-eyed from injecting his latest anti-aging cocktail, failed to notice the cable snaking across the floor amid his array of smart devices. “He was always saying death was for amateurs,” quipped his chief scientist, Dr. Lena Voss, “but who knew the real killer was Apple’s finest accessory?”
Hale’s wife, Miranda, discovered him at the bottom of the stairs, surrounded by shattered vials of his proprietary youth elixir. “Victor spent years dodging virtual viruses and AI apocalypses, only to get taken out by a cord that wouldn’t stay put,” she said, shaking her head while sorting through his collection of smartwatches. “He even had a robot butler to fetch his kale smoothies—why couldn’t it coil the damn cables?” First responders confirmed the accident, noting that Hale’s immortality suit, a $2 million exoskeleton meant to enhance longevity, had been left charging in the next room, rendering it useless.
In the wake of Hale’s death, EternalForge Labs announced it would pivot its research to “everyday hazard-proofing tech,” including self-retracting cables and AI floor scanners. Investors, undeterred, are already buzzing about the potential IPO for what they’re calling “ImmortalCord,” Hale’s ironic final legacy.