There’s an eerie calm on the streets when night falls.
There are a few isolated incidents, a couple of guys turning up with a bag of stones, realising nobody else is there, throwing them at road signs, then trundling off home.
Members of the WOCO Protection Force who are on riot duty this night largely sit in vans at assembly points, waiting for the order to go, go, go; an order that never comes.
And it isn’t just street disturbances that are down. Throughout the world, divisions of the WOCO Protection Force report one of the quietest nights of criminal activity they have ever known.
It isn’t an easy calm. The streets that bore the brunt of previous riots steam like a battlefield. Sure, the fighting has stopped, but nobody knows if it’s a ceasefire or a lasting armistice.
A pensive calm descends on streets in New York, Beijing, Moscow, Istanbul and pretty much everywhere else.
It follows a day during which, wherever you were, there was only one topic of conversation. *Had science really discovered a way of bringing the body clock to a halt?*
There have been a lot of advances in medical science recently, thanks to gene targeting and replacement. In developed nations, people can look at a steadily rising life expectancy figure and feel they will be unlucky if they don’t reach it.
But this is on another level. This is too huge a shift to contemplate without your brain twisting itself in knots. Everybody everywhere has a need to talk about it.
Alice Bryant goes to her local supermarket and, as usual, loads her trolley with all manner of organic vegetables, low-fat drinks, and vitamin tablets. She’s never been sure if the vitamins do her any good, but she’s too afraid not to take them.
“You won’t be needing those soon,” says a burly man in the same aisle.
Alice would normally feel uneasy about a stranger speaking to her. But today she smiles. Life seems less threatening. And although the sun still refuses to shine, the clouds at least seem brighter.
Halfway across the world, Darius Coutinho holds a gun to the head of a man who owes him money, a lot of money.
“Next Tuesday,” says the man, his lips quivering, sweat beading on his forehead.
“Next Tuesday?” Darius is curious at the choice of day. “Why next Tuesday?”
“I got something big coming in. You said fifty percent, but I can give you seventy-five. Just give me till next Tuesday.”
Darius knows that nothing will happen next Tuesday, that this “associate” of his won’t have the money by then, either.
But Darius doesn’t pull the trigger. He risks his reputation on the street, risks being taken out by a rival gang sensing a new weakness, risks his livelihood.
He risks all this by lowering his gun.
If he’d blown this guy’s head off his shoulders, he would have denied him a chance of immortality. For some reason this seems unfair today. For the first time in his life, Darius thinks killing is kind of callous. He doesn’t understand why he suddenly thinks this, he just does.
And he also thinks of his sister, his little sister. He hasn’t called her for a couple of months.
“Next Tuesday. But not an hour later,” he says, and lets the man go.
Darius isn’t the only one feeling “different”.
There is still a day to go until the WOCO announcement. It gives people plenty of time to speculate.
A historian, writing in a newspaper, compares the sense of expectation to an event way back in the last century — the moon landings.
*The days before the moon landings,* he writes, *people didn’t believe that man could walk on another planet. It was too unreal. They fully expected the first man to try it to perish in the attempt. They knew the moon wasn’t made of cheese, and had no life forms on it, but they assumed something catastrophic would happen anyway. It was just too much to think that an astronaut could climb down a ladder and go for a walk on the moon, let alone play golf on it.*
*It could never happen.*
*But it happened.*
*Nearly eighty years later, this evening has a similar, illusory quality.*
The historian has a point.
Bars do a roaring trade. People just want to get out and talk. They don’t have much knowledge to back up their opinions, but they give them anyway.
A barfly claims to know a man, who knows a man, who knows a man, who knows all about this immortality thing. He can tell you all about it — if you buy him a drink. Hell, for two drinks he’ll get his friend to put you on the immortality shortlist.
It’s a very strange night.
It’s the night everybody turns into a philosopher.
