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‘Time,’ said Wilde. ‘As in, we don’t have much.’

‘Well,’ Tamara said as the boat grounded, ‘we’re at the Fifth Quarter. Let’s get a move on.’

12

Near Death Experience

Annette had the tubes in her right arm, I in my left. Her left hand reached out and caught my right.

‘Scared?’ I asked.

‘A bit.’

‘Me too.’ I squeezed back.

The township hall was packed with mature people, older people, people like us; on our backs on trolley-beds looking up at the roof-panels. Green-tinged daylight, green-smocked technicians, everything slow: an underwater feel. Big machines connected to the tubes infiltrated tiny machines into our blood. Not nanotech, not full cell-repair, not yet; but it gave us a chance of living until that came along. In the seven decades we’d been alive, our life-expectancies had already extended by at least another four. We felt better than we had at fifty. We looked – well, the early anti-ageing treatments made your skin tougher as well as tauter, so we looked a bit sundried, a bit smoked.

This treatment was different. We hadn’t had it before, though I’d had a microbot injection to deal with a worrying prostate enlargement some years earlier. Now, the microbots had expanded their capabilities, and by one of those trade-offs characteristic of the Republic, the state Health Service was offering these capabilities to citizens in exchange for their state pension rights. The deal was more political than economic, but it had a certain elegant symmetry: swap retirement for longevity and a degree of rejuvenation, and you can work till you drop.

It would never have passed under the old laws. It was risky. One or two in a thousand died under it, though whether they died of it was another matter. It was a heart problem, hard to predict. If you had it, it would get you anyway, soon. So the health companies and the Health Service said.

A technician walked up between our beds, gently parted our hands.

‘Ready?’ she said.

‘Yup,’ said Annette.

‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ I said. I attempted a grin. ‘Who wants to live for ever?’

‘Well, I know you do, Citizen Wilde. Good luck.’

Here comes nothing, I thought.

She pressed a switch, sending a short-range radio signal to the microbots in my blood and in Annette’s.

I felt my heart stop. It had to. The microbots needed a steady platform for fast work around the vagus nerve, and to give them a chance to shove neural growth factors and cloned foetal nerve-cells across the blood-brain barrier.

Colour faded out, then light. Consciousness went down completely, as in sleep. My heart re-booted with a painful power surge and consciousness came back up, crashed, restored from memory and came up again. I raised my head weakly and looked at Annette, who opened her eyes and stared at me and smiled.

‘We made it,’ she said.

‘We’ll make it,’ I said. ‘We’ll make it to the ships.’

I tried to sit up.

‘If you don’t stay where you are for another half hour,’ the technician admonished, ‘you’ll not make it to the door.’

Out, into the Greenbelt street, under the greenhouse sky. We made our way through the usual Pro-Life picket, who kept yelling ‘Murderers!’ at us from behind a line of armed Republican Guards. It was the foetal tissue – cloned from our own cells – that we’d allegedly murdered, according to the leaflet from the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child that some poor addled soul shoved in my face.

‘SPUC off!’ I called back. ‘You can go to hell! We aren’t even going to die!’

‘Do you wish to make a complaint, citizen?’ the nearest Guard asked me, not turning round.

‘It’s OK officer,’ Annette said, grabbing my elbow and pulling me along. ‘Free speech…and you shut up!’ she added to me.

‘OK, OK.’ I walked quickly, shaking inside. Nothing – not Communists, not fascists, not authoritarians of any stripe – ever aroused in me the same homicidal rage as the Pro-Lifers. Whenever I came across them exercising their rights, I made damned sure I exercised my own.

I’d got used to living