COTE : Three days of happyness

A Promise For Ten Years Time

When I was first told about how I could sell my lifespan, what immediately came to mind was a morality lesson from elementary school.

We were ten-year-olds who still didn’t know how to think for ourselves, so the teacher for our grade, a woman in her late twenties (Sae), asked us something like this:

“You’ve all been told that a human life is something that can’t be replaced, and it’s more valuable than anything. Now, if it were given a monetary value, how much money do you think it would be worth?”
She then took a thoughtful pose. I thought her way of asking the question was inadequate, personally. She was silent for a good twenty seconds, still holding a piece of chalk and staring down the blackboard with her back to the students.

While she did that, the students earnestly mulled over the question. A lot of them liked the young, pretty teacher, so they wanted to say something pleasing that would get them a compliment.
One smart-aleck raised her hand.

“I read in a book once that the total life expenses for a salaryman are about 200 million to 300 million yen. So I think the average person would be somewhere around there.”
Half the students in class oohed and aahed. The other half looked bored and fed up. Most of the students hated that smart-aleck.
The teacher managed a smile and a nod. “That’s certainly true. Maybe grown-ups would give you the same answer. One answer could be that the money spent throughout a lifetime is equal to the value of that life. But I want you to get away from that line of thinking. …I know, let’s do an allegory. The usual hard-to-understand allegory.”
No one understood what the… figure the teacher drew on the board in blue chalk was supposed to be. You could look at it as a human, or as a splotch of gum on the road.

But this was exactly her intent.
“This "Something of Unknown Nature” has more money than it could ever need. But the Something longs to live a human sort of life. So it’s trying to buy someone else’s life. One day, you suddenly walk by the Something. And when you do, it asks you: “Hey, you wanna sell me that life you’re going to lead?”… says the Something.“
She stopped the story there for a moment.

"If I did sell it, what would happen?”, an overly-serious boy asked after raising his hand.

“You’d die, surely,” the teacher flatly replied. “So you’d refuse the Something, for the time being. But it hangs onto you. "Well, just half is fine. Wanna just sell me thirty years off the sixty you have left? I really need it, y'know.”
I remember thinking as I’d listened to her with my chin in my hands, "I get it.” Indeed, if it went down like that, I really might have felt like selling. I have limits, and it seemed apparent that a fat short life would be preferable to a long thin life.

“Now, here’s the question. This Something who longs to live a human life must have assigned a per-year value to your remaining life, yes? …I’ll tell you in advance, there’s no right answer. I want to know what you think, and how you came to that answer. Now, talk with your neighbors.”
The classroom began to buzz with conversation. But I didn’t take part in any of it. To be exact, I couldn’t.

Because like that smart-aleck who came up with the answer about lifetime expenses, I was one of the class stinkers.

I pretended I wasn’t interested in talking about it and just waited for time to pass.
I heard a group sitting in front of me talking about “If a whole life is about 300 million yen…”

I thought. If they were 300 million, then…

I wouldn’t think it odd if I were 3 billion.
I don’t remember what the results of the discussion were like. Barren arguments from beginning to end, that much was certain.
It wasn’t really a simple enough theme for elementary school kids to tackle. And if you got a bunch of high schoolers together, they’d probably bring sex into it somehow.
At any rate, I clearly remember one girl with gloomy prospects fiercely insisting “You can’t assign a value to a person’s life.”