The Corona Decameron

In 1353, the great Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio completed his Decameron. It consisted of 100 novellas, framed as the stories told by a group of friends over the ten days they spend isolating themselves from the Black Death. In the current time of self-isolation and quarantine – less apocalyptic, maybe, but no less serious – the need for stories to occupy the time is equally as great. Here are fifty to help pass the time. None are particularly fleshed out. Please feel free to browse them, imagine them, or adapt them as you like.

I Fire at the toilet paper factory! Supply crashes just as demand goes through the roof. One man is tasked with finding an alternative for humanity – and he’d better be quick.

II The vaccine for Covid-19 grows in a woman’s unwashed coffee mug in the office while she’s working at home.

III A devoutly religious mother overhears her daughter using an incredibly profane song to time her hand-wash.

IV A girl manages to avoid touching her face for so long that all the itches gradually join together and the face turns inside out.

V An abridged biography of the bat that first spread Covid-19 to humans.

VI An American man and a French student meet up in Vienna six months after a brief, spur-of-the-moment fling they had there. They find themselves trapped together for another three months after Austria goes into lockdown.

VII An eloquent moral fable that reminds everyone to wash their hands right now, as soon as you read this.

VIII A mum reads on Facebook that drinking lemon juice can cure the virus, so she embarks on a high-octane lemon heist to squeeze as many as possible in the local reservoir.

IX A man is disgusted by idea of everyone naked when working from home, but when someone’s monumental cough at the supermarket covers his last set of clothes, he has to go nude for a day while they’re being washed. He finds it freeing and gets that damn chip off his shoulder.

X The WHO decides the virus needs another rebrand. Covid-19 is now called VV-Flantonic 335265.

XI An ill man forms an underground club where fit people gather to catch the virus from him, allowing them to gain immunity. The police descend as some participants fall seriously sick.

XII A sequel to the lemon story. Locals begin to wonder why their hands are still sticky after washing them for twenty seconds – however, that fact stops them from touching so many surfaces, giving them a lower infection rate and lending credence to the mum’s theory.

XIII The Further Adventures of Tedros: WHO chief Tedros Adhanom has run out of toilet paper in his house and needs to buy some more. This everyday errand turns into an extraordinary mission, thanks to the crisis Tedros is only too familiar with.

XIV As the BBC’s news output is reduced to a minimal level, Reeta Chakrabarti starts her own guerilla news organisation broadcasting from her loft.

XV Two teenagers go on a first date, and it goes very well – however, after they’ve already arranged a second meet-up, he takes off his facemask and she realises for the first time just how abhorrent his breath is.

XVI Another eloquent morality fable, telling people not to call the emergency services or 111 if their symptoms are only mild.

XVII Al Stewart sits down to write a coronavirus parody version of Year of the Cat.

XVIII A crack team of scientists from across the UK attempt to find a way to make potatoes last as long in the cupboard as pasta or rice, thus freeing the nation from the hell of having only two options for their meals’ carbohydrate base.

XIX Self isolation leads a man to discover he can turn his head 360° if he concentrates. He plans to save this skill for the ideal moment after the crisis dies down.

XX A polar bear finds true independence is a bitter pill to swallow as he leaves home for the first time.

XXI The Further Adventures of Tedros: The WHO chief finds out his driver at an official event is named Ted Ross. Fun ensues when the man sent to fetch Tedros ahead of the keynote speech takes Ted Ross instead.

XXII As social distancing drags on, live-streamed solitaire begins to take the world by storm. Before long, hundreds of thousands of tins of food are being bet on the results – but the game has a dark underbelly the public is not aware of.

XXIII In 2055, a new fashion craze appears for the “Covid look”, where you grow your hair out without styling it as if all the hairdressers and barbers are off work.

XXIV An Italian man keeps singing from his balcony, despite being terrible at it. His neighbours hatch a plan to stop him, without having to leave their homes.

XXV A woman emerges after isolation speaking a uniquely evolved version of English, seemingly adapted to function best when you’re only ever talking to yourself.

XXVI The World Health Organisation is sued by a group representing philanthropists who throw banknotes from their balconies to crowds gathered below: the Hurled Wealth Organisation.

XXVII A third eloquent morality fable, teaching people to stop touching their eyes, nose and mouth.

XXVIII Benevolent aliens arrive on Earth, having been summoned by the 1977 Carpenters single Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. However, they turn less friendly when they learn they can’t meet Karen Carpenter.

XXIX Giovanni Boccaccio falls through a wormhole in 14th-century Florence and lands in the west end of Glasgow in 2019. He decides to perform at a spoken word night, but the locals struggle to understand his medieval Tuscan vernacular. How can he find his way back home if nobody knows what he’s saying?

XXX After a Jet2 flight is ordered to turn around on its way to Spain, authorities decide the safest plan of action is to keep the plane in the air until the end of the pandemic, refueling it occasionally B-52 style.

XXXI The owners of all the world’s biggest sun cream companies come together on a conference call for the first time, to try and figure out a way to keep people using their product when they can neither go abroad nor even leave their house.

XXXII A man has a really nice beer in his fridge that he’s been saving for a very special occasion. After recovering from the coronavirus and making it through two weeks of self isolation, he weighs up the pros and cons of finally cracking it open.

XXXIII The Further Adventures of Tedros: WHO chief Tedros Adhanom attempts to make hand sanitizer from scratch, following an online gif recipe. Inevitably, it ends in him ruining his kitchen.

XXXIV Two friends make a bet over who can get their picture in the newspaper first. The one who wins does it simply by leaving the house wearing a facemask, leading to swarms of press photographers running after her.

XXXV Alan vs Predator.

XXXVI Two fish discuss their theories about what’s going on with the humans.

XXXVII An eloquent morality fable, telling people to call friends and family who might be feeling lonely or frightened during their isolation.

XXXVIII A young brother and sister, facing an indefinite amount of time off primary school, decide the time is right to embark on their passion project: a shot-by-shot remake of Misery.

XXXIX A woman is one stamp away from getting a free cappuccino and slice of cake from her favourite cafe when the whole country goes on lockdown. She must do everything she can to ensure the place will open the minute the curfew ends.

XL Something that plays off the fact Andrex sounds a bit like anthrax.

XLI A future professor gives a lecture on the topic of human knuckles and their function before they disappeared from the species as a result of the Great Sanitizer Knuckle-crumbling of 2020.

XLII A first person account of me trying to find out where all my towels are disappearing to, when I live on my todd and nobody could possibly get in to nick them.

XLIII A Youtuber realises she doesn’t have an excuse to stay away from work, as she already works from home – in fact, her audience is baying for her to actually increase her output to give them something to watch. She must come up with a very complicated lie to convince the fickle YouTube fanbase.

XLIV The Further Adventures of Tedros: WHO chief Tedros Adhanom starts up his own TikTok account in an effort to get his “test, test, test” message across to Generation Z.

XLV We get highlights from one man’s descent into savagery over the course of a week, as he goes longer and longer without going into the office or seeing anyone else. Then he runs out of pasta, and he is forced to leave the house to visit the shops.

XLVI The lone worker in a distillery, on a remote Scottish island where he is the only resident, tries to follow the situation using the few scrambled messages that come through on his ancient phone.

XLVII A fifth eloquent morality fable, telling people to end the anti-Asian racism.

XLVIII Ferris Bueller’s Six Months Off.

XLIX A sequel to story XVIII: The scientists have finally managed to do the impossible and grow potatoes that last for weeks without going rotten. There’s just one problem – they’ve also become sentient.

L Centuries in the future, two business leaders shake hands without being entirely sure why they’re doing it. They’re the first people to shake hands since the coronavirus pandemic. There’s something comforting about it that they can’t quite describe, something primitive. They’re connecting with mankind’s past by connecting with each other. With it comes the knowledge that a new normal is still a normal, and that people can be instinctively decent, and that big shocks are sometimes necessary for positive structural change. The world, despite things, looks bright.

Leap Day

Years ago, Hugo had read a story about an assassin in the Middle East. His target had been so important and so well-guarded that the assassin was captured immediately after the killing, alive, and taken to face justice. The authorities, aware that the killer was likely to be celebrated as a martyr, delayed his execution for a number of years. Then, when the leap year arrived, they did it on February 29, and therefore denied his followers an annual commemoration.

Since he learned that story, Hugo’s perspective on the Leap Day had completely altered. He saw it not as a curious by-product of our calendar system, but as an opportunity – a day when none of his actions had consequences. A day when he would be able to do all the things he had been afraid to do for months and years, because finally he wouldn’t have to worry about the pang of guilt he would feel on that date the following year… or the year after that… or the year after that. And by the time the next Leap Day came around four years later, any reserves of guilt he had felt would have dissipated.

This was Hugo’s plan. Between the March 1 following one Leap Day, and the February 28 four years afterwards, he would swallow every misfortune and every slight made upon him. He would swallow it all – but he would log it. Every time he stepped in some dog shit when stepping out the door, every time he was patronised at work, every time his girlfriend didn’t shut the freezer door properly, he would stay silent, and he would take a mental note of the offender and their transgression. In his mind it would stay, until next Leap Day. In my mind it will stay, until next Leap Day.

The final long February at the end of the four-year wait was a difficult one, with inconveniences piling upon inconveniences. He was diagnosed with some terrible lung infection, and when he was standing in the rain outside the hospital, with the awful haircut he got the week before, the bus pulled round through a puddle and soaked his shoes. Then the driver swore at him. But Hugo just breathed deeply through his nostrils, sticking to the plan, and sat by the window in the seat behind the wailing baby. It was easy for him to internalise everything, because these things happened to him all the time.

There was a week to go. It was almost Leap Day.

Hugo lay in bed on the night of February 28, watching the minutes work towards midnight on his phone, the screen illuminating his face. If his girlfriend had been awake, she might have been able to hear the rush of blood to his head when the clock tipped over to 0000. His heart pounding, Hugo slammed his phone on the bedside table, switched the lamp on, turned over and shook her shoulders.

“Hey,” he whispered. “This isn’t working. As in, we aren’t working. I think we should just end this relationship now. I’m going to go through to sleep in the living room for the rest of the night, I’d like it if you could get out the house before I leave for work in the morning.”

She stirred a bit, then shuffled towards the wall. Clearly, she hadn’t fully grasped what he was saying. Hugo smiled and got out of bed. It was Leap Day at last! Everything that had been suppressed within his mind could now come bursting out. He lay on the living room sofa, but he couldn’t get to sleep. Before the sun rose over the horizon, he crept through to the kitchen, took all his girlfriend’s prepared meals out of the freezer and put them in the sink to defrost. He left the flat and slashed some of his neighbours’ tyres. He shat on the dog-owner’s doorstep. He dug up the flowers in the communal garden that gave him hay fever and poured salt on the earth so nothing would ever grow again.

Hugo was still outside when his work day began. Without going home to get changed out of his pyjamas, he marched through the city and into the office. He poured all the salt that hadn’t gone over the garden soil on his boss’s keyboard, then threw the cellar across the room. With his bewildered colleagues looking on, he grabbed the edge of his desk and shook it violently, yelling at the top of his voice. He smashed a mug. He gave the cleaner the finger. A hand was placed on his shoulder, and he was asked to go home.

When he arrived back at the flat, his girlfriend had gone. Maybe she had registered what he had said after all. Maybe she had been waiting for him to say something like that for a while. In any case, the flat was cold and quiet, and the food had been taken out of the sink. They had been together for a couple of years, but this was their first Leap Day.

It was strange, Hugo thought, how thinking in terms of Leap Days changed the way time looked. His grandad had died when he was seven years old, and there was only one February 29 when they were both alive. His parents were together for six years before they had separated – again, amid that odyssey of a romance, with its astonishing depth and complexity, amid all the fights in the kitchen and kisses in foreign countries, amid the dancing and drinking and loving, they were only a couple for one Leap Day. It seemed impossible.

Hugo’s perspective on the day had shifted again. Now, he saw the Leap Day as a precious capsule that represented a significant portion of his life, good or bad. Obviously, this particular one was quite bad. He looked at the clock. It was 10am. Quite a lot of damage had already been done. Accepting that the next four years were likely to be spent undoing the last four years, Hugo moved his blanket and pillow back through to his bedroom. There was no day like a Leap Day to sort himself out. Spring, after all, was on its way.

The Decade Ends

We can look at the end of a decade as the culmination of ten years’ history building on top of itself, ready to burst and spill out into the next decade at midnight on Hogmanay. It may be simplistic, inaccurate and unhelpful, but we can still do it. It’s possible to look at 1929, and see the excess of the preceding decade culminating in Black Thursday and the Wall Street Crash. It’s possible to look at 1939, and see the toxic politics of the preceding decade culminating in the outbreak of the Second World War. It’s possible to look at 1979, and see the drabness and cynicism of the preceding decade culminating in the election of Margaret Thatcher and a radical redesign of British society.

Like I say, this is a crude way of looking at history, but it’s not entirely useless. If we agree that history is an awful lot more complicated than that, we can still use the decade as a framing device, an arbitrary chapter in an infinitely long book which nevertheless tells its own story. Where did we begin these ten years? Where are we ending it? And what happened between those two points to lead from one to the other?

I remember thinking in an early part of the 2010s that this was not a particularly exciting time to be alive – keeping in mind that ‘exciting’ isn’t always a positive term. Things were relatively comfortable, and society seemed to be moving in a direction I was happy with. Equal marriage bills were passing all over the place, an intelligent and generally reliable man was running the free world from the White House, progress was being made in areas like the environment and minority rights. Of course, there were horrors and disappointments, but none that felt terrible on a historic scale, and none that shook the feeling that, on the whole, good people were gaining ground while awful people were losing theirs.

I made a Facebook account in 2011 (a little late), and a Twitter account the following year, and found them both pleasant enough. On Facebook I found it more fun to confuse people by filling my ‘about’ page with a load of nonsense, saying I was born in 1906 and living in Libya. (I was fifteen, with a crap sense of humour.) On Twitter, I quickly got bored of following celebrities and people I knew, and began to pay attention only to people who were interesting or funny. I never took either website seriously. Still, I don’t think I was shielded entirely from their consequences. On more than one occasion, I held a daft opinion because people I liked on Twitter held it. On more than one occasion, I was tricked into believing something before it was proved wrong.

And I should have realised earlier than what was fermenting online was affecting life beyond the computer screen, too. People were prizing immediacy over accuracy, and people preferred to learn things that confirmed their views over things that shook them. The internet offers unlimited immediacy and unlimited view confirmation, and the planet settled into it quickly. I settled into it quickly. The quality of having a short, punchy, simple message – which, of course, has always been important in politics – soon became more crucial than ever. The qualities of being sarcastic, and of being capable of taking the piss out of those you disagree with, also became crucial, since this did well online. It also succeeded in polarising people, and polarisation was fast becoming the top political strategy.

Were we always this polarised? Since I came of age in this decade, I can’t really compare the current situation to an earlier one. I’m told the internet has made things worse, but I wonder if it just seems that way because everybody is gathered in a single place, when before they were geographically distant. It’s easier to shout at each other, and the differences are starker. I’m sure the web hasn’t made things any better, though. I think it’s likely that the 2010s will be remembered as the decade the internet turned sour, at the same time as it was becoming more ubiquitous and more vital.

I imagine it was some point in 2015 when I noticed the world was becoming a bit more exciting – again, not necessarily a positive term. My comfort was slipping away. The unpleasant sensation that something inexplicable was happening – a shift in momentum – rose with the ascendancy of Donald Trump. It reached a sickening peak with the murder of Jo Cox. It felt like the gears were slipping. Before I could grasp what was going on, the loudest voices for causes I support – women’s rights, minority rights, the environment – were protest groups, and no matter how passionate they were, the most powerful man in the world was still a sexual predator, a racist, a climate change denialist, who gained his political energy from belittling those causes at every opportunity.

I watched as politics in Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, India, Brazil and the UK swung to the right, in response to – well, a multitude of things. Exhaustion. Irritation. Boredom. All understandable, but the ferocity with which it manifested itself was astonishing. The internet was driving the polarisation, and the polarisation was driving the vicious antagonism, and it was all happening in a feedback loop, constantly pushing to a new level. The volume of the clamour kept growing, until… now. It’s still growing.

It’s possible to look at 2019, and see the toxicity of the internet and the polarisation of society in the preceding decade culminating in the election of Boris Johnson with a huge majority in the House of Commons. It’s possible, but it’s unhelpful. The forces that put him there are not going to slow down or change direction just because an arbitrary slice of time has ended. Black Thursday spilled out into the 1930s with the Great Depression. September 1939 spilled out into the 1940s with the Second World War. Thatcher’s election spilled out into the 1980s, and beyond, with seventeen years of Conservative governments.

This chapter may have ended, but the book goes on. There’s no such thing as a clean slate, a fresh start. History will keep building up on top of itself, regardless of the number with which the year ends. And on top of all that, my nose is running and I’ve got a sore head.

A Romance

We swing down into the vestibule of a church, as a man quietly walks the short distance from the main body of the building to the garden outside. He is alone. As he crosses the threshold, the cold of December penetrates his shirt. He should have worn a jacket. He exists right on the edge of romance, like he has done for the last six months. He is like a person scraping the last dribbles of soup from the bottom of a bowl, determined not to let any of it go without being savoured as much as possible.

Half a year ago, he had been out shopping in a city he wasn’t very familiar with, looking for the breakfast cereal. When he had resolved to ask one of the shop assistants where to find it, one had appeared at the end of the aisle – she was gorgeous, with her wavy hair and her oversized work fleece. He went up to her and asked her where he would find the cereal, and she had smiled and told him to follow her – her accent was beautiful, and on the walk over he would casually ask her inane questions about the shop just to hear her answers. He suspected she knew this. They reached the cereals, and as she was walking away to finish whatever task he had interrupted, he glanced up for another look at her. She was glancing back at him, with a small smile. He gave her a small smile back.

While he was packing his bag at the checkout, he considered why he was feeling so light. He realised it was the first time someone had looked at him that way since his last relationship had ended, months and months before. Months and months. It had been so long. He wasn’t prepared to let a chance like that disappear. He packed up his bag, paid for the shopping, then went back into the aisles to find her again.

She was restocking kitchen towels. This time, when she saw him, she gave him a bigger smile.

“Hi again,” he said. “Look, I’m only in this city for a couple of days, and I was wondering if you wanted to grab a beer or a wine, or whatever you like, just tonight or whenever you’re up for it?”

“Yeah, that would be nice,” she said, in her accent. He hadn’t really prepared for anything beyond asking the question, and so he said “Great!” and fumbled about a bit, getting the receipt from out his bag, tearing off a small piece and writing his number on it. “I’ll give you this, just send me a text and we’ll organise something.”

“Sounds great,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.” As he left again, he knew she was watching him, and as soon as he was out of her view and out of the shop he did a small dance with the shopping bag, then half-ran in excitement through the car park. He was too old to be so childishly joyful about getting a date, but it was such a rarity that he allowed himself this.

She sent him a message fifteen minutes or so later, telling him when she got off work, and they arranged a time and a place to meet that evening. Her name was Sophia, a beautiful name. It was a wonderful night. They went to a bar, and he explained what he was doing in the city and how it was his first time there, and the plans that he had for the time he wasn’t working. She talked about growing up in a different part of the country, and coming to the city to get her degree, and how she spent every evening frantically sending away applications for graduate jobs that would allow her to leave the supermarket. Then she offered to show him her favourite parts of the city at night, and they went out to walk the streets together, and they talked, and she was so funny. After midnight, as they stood beside the river, she asked him if he wanted to stay at her place that night. He couldn’t believe his luck.

Over the remaining days he was in the city, they met up a few times for drinks or lunch, and during the times they weren’t together they were messaging each other. It was a rush to the head, the tumultuous early days of a romance where every new fact he learned about her somehow made her more attractive, even if it was weird as hell. She collected toy cars, and she had a couple hundred of them. She could only eat bagels with nothing on them, but she was crazy about bagels with nothing on them. Her whole family stayed barefoot while at home, and she couldn’t fully relax if she was still wearing socks and shoes. She made him happy, but it was a particular kind of smitten-romantic-happy that he hadn’t felt in so long.

When he left the city, he was determined to keep it flowing even as he accepted there was no way it was going to work out in the long term. Sophia seemed to feel the same way, and she kept updating him on her job situation and the strange people she met at the supermarket. For a time, he could fool himself into thinking something true was happening. Something that would last. But as the weeks went by, her messages became less and less frequent, until she didn’t reply at all. His last text to her just floated there, without a response.

To send her a follow-up, he decided, would mean admitting to falling for a complete fantasy, and it would mean betraying his own desperation. She lived in a place far away, somewhere he had no plans to visit again. It would be selfish to try and make her go along with it any further. It was a fling, a holiday romance, and if she was able to let it go, he should too. So he let her go.

He clung on to the romance, though. He craved that intoxicating knowledge that somebody could find him attractive, and want to spend time with him, and so he kept it with him. As the months went by without any hint of a relationship materialising, he crawled into himself, as if going into hibernation, and decided to retain the energy that was created over those few days in the city for as long as he could. It was desperate, and it was pathetic, but nobody would know except him, and he needed it until somebody gave him that look again.

Six months on, and he is still alone, of course. He will never get more romance for as long as he is unprepared to give some of his own supply away. It is a bitterly cold December day. After a few steps outside, the man turns around and walks back inside the church.

Strangeness, Boofen, Ignorance

In a forest where the rocks grew out from the loam like mushrooms, on the slope of Großer Winterberg, I sat beneath a shelf of sandstone and unpacked my rucksack. I had been hiking through a thick mist for the full day, only interrupted by the occasional torrents of full-force rain, and I had decided that this point in the early afternoon would be the ideal time for me to stop getting wetter and start trying to dry off. In this part of Saxony, the weather had eroded small nooks and cubbyholes into the soft rock of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, and visitors to the region liked to take advantage of these small, dry, relatively warm places as sites for a single night’s camp. They had a name for this practice: boofen. At my wettest point, I saw a ridge rising from the ground deep in the forest to my right, and decided this would be the night for my boofen.

The rain, mercifully, had failed to penetrate the waterproof sac within my bag, and my sleeping bag, small pillow and change of socks remained dry. I laid my roll mat over the bed of dry leaves and spiders, changed into my warmer clothes, and climbed into the sleeping bag. It was still early in the day, but I needed a head-start in warming it up with my body heat. I watched the rain fall, barely two feet from my place of rest. There was only the sound of the rain dripping down the branches of the pine trees.

It stayed that way until the forest grew dark, just the noise of raindrops on needles. Then, when the sky had turned deep indigo, and I could hardly make out the roof of my nook, and the cold had settled on my head and neck, a siren began. It rose and fell, a clear sound though it came from far beyond the woods. Not an ambulance or a police siren – it was some sort of alert system, I assumed, to tell the nearby villages on the banks of the Elbe that something was about to happen.

Sigmund Freud once wrote that he was unable to enjoy music – he said, “Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.” That has stuck with me, because I cannot imagine a more miserable way to live. Freud could not understand why music had the effect it did, and so he hated the effect. He had to truly know something to be able to appreciate it. But it is one of the most profound pleasures to be confronted with something truly strange – something you are powerless to analyse, and something you decide you will never understand.

It’s not a matter of basking in your ignorance, it’s about recognising ignorance as one of life’s universal truths. When we are born, we are ignorant of everything beyond the reach of our instincts. When we die, we’re not that much further along. That is as true for Archimedes, Tolstoy and Arendt as it is for somebody who closes their eyes and ears and refuses to ever leave a single room for their entire lives. Humanity makes remarkable efforts to reduce that ignorance – and thank God we do – but in the end, the universe will always remain a locked safe.

We can quantify gravity, but we’ll never be able to say why gravity exists in the first place. No amount of scientific experimentation will explain why Freud, or anyone else, is moved by music.

And so, it can often be comforting to acknowledge something uncanny – even if it’s not quite as sublime as the power of music. Acknowledge that its effect doesn’t come from what you know about it, but from what you don’t know about it.

When I was preparing to go to sleep, below a shelf of rock deep within a German forest, a siren began. I listened to it rise and fall for a couple of minutes, then it stopped. And nothing happened. I closed my eyes before they could adjust to the dark, smiled, and settled in for a night’s rest.

The Ubiquitous Extraordinary

Rick arrived on set a couple of hours after the catering staff began serving breakfast, so they were out of warm stuff. He had to settle for a paper bowl of Crunchy Nut, without any milk, since the few pint cartons that were left were being saved for the cups of tea that would be consumed over the course of the day by the cast and crew who were staying on this side of the planet.

His equipment was already there, of course. It would be far too expensive and time-consuming to dismantle it all so he could take it home with him at the end of the day. Nowadays, all of the major film studios had it installed, as did most of the major workplaces around the world. And they all needed someone like Rick to work it. It was a good time to be someone like Rick.

Until he got his phone call, though, there wasn’t much for him to do. For the time being, Rick took a seat beside the enormous machine and got started on his cereal.

It didn’t take long before the director noticed him from across the main sound stage. She approached him with some urgency.

“Any word from any of the destinations?”

“Nah, nothing yet,” answered Rick. “Like I said yesterday, the forecast from Cape Horn looks promising, so I’ve talked to my friend Javier over there and he’ll give me a call when conditions are right. I’ll let you know.”

“Great, that’s perfect. There’s a bit of extra make-up to be done anyway.”

“No worries.”

The director nodded and left to talk to someone holding a boom microphone.

Rick had finished his cereal, and was halfway through reading a magazine article, when his phone started buzzing next to him on his seat. It was Javier.

Once everything had been confirmed, Rick powered up the machine and made his way over to the director. He told her what Javier had said on the phone, and she immediately clapped her hands loudly to get the attention of the crew.

“Right guys, that’s everything set up for Cape Horn. Rick will start taking people through, and as usual it’ll be the first aiders who are going first. Could someone see if Lucia and Chris are finished and get them through here, please? Thanks.”

Three people carrying first aid cases made their way over to Rick, and he ushered them over to the machine. As they knew, three was the maximum capacity. Two other first aiders were staying in the studio. The three beside Rick stepped into the machine without thinking twice, even chatting casually among themselves as the door was slid shut behind them.

Rick took his seat beside the machine again, and pulled a small screen towards him. He searched for ‘Cape Horn’ in the onscreen catalogue, and once he found it, double clicked its icon. He got up, checked that the door was securely locked and sealed, then flicked a switch and pressed two buttons. The loud noise coming from the machine, a strange Shepard tone and stereophonic grunting, was unignorable and caught the attention of everybody else on the sound stage.

After fifteen seconds, it stopped. A short moment later, Rick got another call, this time from Elaine on the medical staff, telling him that they had arrived in Cape Horn safely. Even after his many years on the job, Rick still couldn’t help using a bit of showman-style exaggeration when he opened the machine door to reveal that the three first-aiders had completely disappeared.

Next up were the lighting people, then the sound people, then the camera people, with about a minute between each group to allow the equipment to resettle. They would be back in a few hours, so a full crew wasn’t needed. Finally, the director arrived with Lucia Penrith and Chris Kingston, the two stars of the film. Once they had been zapped to Cape Horn, only Rick was left. Javier had told Rick on the phone that he wasn’t going to leave the house to operate the machine on the other end, so he’d have to transport himself over too. This wasn’t unusual, and there was a dashboard inside the machine to allow for it.

Getting zapped wasn’t the most pleasant feeling in the world, but he couldn’t argue with the convenience of it. It must have been a nightmare back in the old days, when studios would have to pay for hugely complicated equipment that could replicate extreme weather – enormous wind machines, sprinkler systems that would have to be refilled with water for every take. There was no way to take advantage of the fact that those exact conditions were happening somewhere on the planet, for free! It must have been so frustrating. The immediacy of this new technology allowed crews to travel exactly where the weather was, before it disappeared. Costs had fallen dramatically. Yes, the equipment cost a crazy amount to buy and install, but eventually, it paid for itself.

Inside the metallic booth, Rick flicked a switch and pressed two buttons. There was an incredible heat for a short second, then it got considerably colder. When the noise had died down, he unsealed and slid open the door, and stepped out. A sign on the brick wall to his left bore the letters ‘C.T.S.’; Chilean Teleportation Services.

The landscape outside was at once both desolate and almost shaking with elemental fury. Through the open entrance to the primitive building housing the machine, he could see thick rain flying past horizontally, flaying the grass from the ground and leaving chaotically furrowed quagmires of mud. Fearsome, charcoal-grey storm clouds filled the sky, seeming, at the highest points of this undulating land, close enough to the ground to be touched.

Stepping closer to the door, Rick saw the director conversing with the lighting people. Turning around and seeing him, she gave him a huge grin. Stretching her arms out at her sides, her sodden hair blown across her face by the wind, she yelled:

“It’s perfect!”

Rick returned her smile and gave her a thumbs-up. Lucia and Chris were talking to each other, standing, and getting as soaked by the rain as possible. The director soon announced that they were going to try and get the scene finished as quickly as they could, so as not to waste any studio time and so as not to damage the equipment any more than necessary. The lighting had been set up – quite incredibly, given the conditions – and the cameras were ready to run. The two leads got into their positions.

The film was named Tame Tea-Roses. Lucia was playing a character named Ruth, a careless and misanthropic anarchist with heavy eye make-up and shaven armpits, while Chris was playing Arnold, a corporate spokesman with managed stubble. They were in Cape Horn to film the scene in which Ruth is finally won around by Arnold, and they embrace in the middle of the pouring rain. Her mascara was already smearing down her cheeks, and his baby-blue shirt was clinging to his gymnasium-muscular frame. The director stood behind the camera with a copy of this scene’s script in a see-through plastic folder.

“Action!”

Lucia took both of Chris’s hands and stared up into his eyes, which were streaming with tears from the incessant wind colliding with his face. Her cheeks were brick-red with the cold, and her hair flapped about, slapping both her face and Chris’s.

“Arnold,” she yelled through the gale. “Is this the last time we might ever see each other?”

“I can’t imagine fate would allow our story to end this way,” he screamed in reply. “But who could have predicted, when we first met outside that socialist bookshop in Coventry, that it would lead us here, to the end of the world, in the middle of this tempestuous storm?”

She ran her fingers through her hair in a futile attempt to dictate which way it would blow.

“Our story is epic and desperately convoluted,” she shouted in his face. “You changed the way I see the world, Arnold, you tamed this gothic heart of mine. If it wasn’t for my husband and his wicked Swiss mother, I’d throw myself into your arms and show you what you mean to me… with my lips.”

“Oh Ruth, they can’t dictate your life in this lawless region!”

“Then let’s never leave!”

Lucia and Chris embraced, and smacked their mouths together. Their faces were both soaked with rain, and their eyes were screwed shut from passion and the weather. As they held each other, the camera began moving back, capturing the two bodies slowly disappearing into the rain and the vast landscape. Rick understood that this was the shot that would play under the credits, before the screen faded to black.

“Cut!” shouted the director, and when she had made sure that the cameraman had stopped filming, she ran over to the couple to tell them that they no longer had to embrace. From afar, she motioned to Rick to start getting the machine powered up so the team could make a quick exit.

When Rick turned back to the primitive building, he noticed something minor: he hadn’t quite fastened the door properly on his way out, and it was swinging about wildly. Upon entering, he could see the damage the weather had caused. The rushing wind had rattled the machine, and shaken its joints until wires were poking from cracks in great bundles. The rain, too, had got into the building, and judging by the wetness of the exterior, there wasn’t much time left before it got into the electronics, too.

Rick stuck the upper half of his body out from the doorway, and waved to everyone to come as quickly as possible. The filming equipment had been dismantled, and the crew began running towards him. He took the screen, then found and double-clicked the icon for the home studio.

They exited in the opposite order to that in which they came: the director, Lucia and Chris first, then the camera people, then the sound people, then the lights people. The time needed to reset the machine made Rick tense every muscle in his body, as the walls around him began to creak. He rushed the medical team in, flicked the switch and pressed the two buttons.

He was alone. The roof was really moaning now. He opened the machine’s doors to ensure that the medics had vanished, which they had, then he stood back. A beam from above him split, slicing through the top of the machine and exposing the inner mechanics: circuit boards, spiralled electromagnets and a bewildering amount of wiring. As the beam collapsed, it tore a hole in the roof, through which came a barrage of rain, entering and soaking the machine. Before fully considering the position that this left him in, Rick knew he had to get out of the building.

Outside, there were cracks and fizzling and groans, and eventually fireworks of sparks shot through the hole in the roof. The wind was stinging Rick’s screwed-up face as he looked on. He turned to watch the dark clouds make their way over the sea before floating across the wild, cragged landscape, intimidating him and the ruined shack behind him. He watched the rain inject itself inches deep into the soil, splattering against itself. And he could watch the wind conduct it all, swinging torrents of precipitation around an axis before flinging it towards the earth or sea.

He might as well have been living in the Bronze Age. The teleportation engineer struck entirely inadequate by the wind. Wasn’t that just the story of it all?

He stood up, and began making his way down to Javier’s house.

February 2018

One Catch

Rachel wanted to go away to Australia for a month, backpack around the place, surf, make new friends, barbecue, that sort of thing. People had offered to come with her, and she’d asked people if they wanted to come with her, but now she was just going to go alone. She’d taken the time off work, so now she felt completely committed to the idea. It was just a case of getting there.

She went through the usual Skyscanner process, visiting Kayak, HostelWorld, Airbnb, trying to map out the whole month’s travel and accommodation, but before long, flights were piling upon flights, and trains, and buses, and the whole endeavour was turning into the most almighty faff. Rachel brought it up with her parents, and they advised her to find a travel company. They’d take on all the hassle of organising everything, save you the time. You’ll have to pay them a bit, but if they’re looking for the cheapest options along the way, you would probably end up actually saving money. Yes, the parents did have a point. She would have a look online.

The problem was, every quote she got from every travel company was absolutely extortionate. Who knows how much of their own cost they were piling on top? She was preparing herself to just accept the faff of taking on all the jobs herself, and was beginning to open up flight-related tabs on her browser, when she spotted an offer far down in the Google results. What was this? Twenty quid for flights over to Melbourne? Free accommodation for four weeks? A ticket to travel anywhere in the country, on any mode of transport, for a tenner?

The name of the company was the One Catch Travel Company, and below their name on their website was the tagline: “Call us. We’ll explain everything.”

What did Rachel have to lose? She was happy to embrace the idea of living through the cheapest means possible for a month. She could slum it in terrible hostels, and she wasn’t too put off by getting around the place in a twin-engine utility plane, or one of those single-person railway cars where you have to pump on a handle to make it move. It was a backpacking trip, after all. Living on the bare minimum was sort of the point.

So, she called up the company.

“Hello, this is the One Catch Travel Company. This is Kyle speaking, how can I help?”

“Hi there, I was just looking through search results for a travel company to help me organise a trip to Australia, and your name popped up. It kind of stood out to me, for obvious reasons.”

“Because of the massively unlikely price offers we made?”

“Well, yeah. I wanted to ask you about those. Are they genuine? Surely not?”

“They are 100% genuine. We can get all of that organised for you. Just give us your details, no extra fees, no nothing.”

“There is a catch, though?”

“There is one catch, yes. That’s the reason we’re called the One Catch Travel Company.”

“Could you tell me what the catch is?”

“If you like,” said Kyle. “Your flight over to Melbourne will be in the height of luxury, business class, free champagne, buffet. Then you’ll get to stay in this wonderful, big hotel-spa, and you’ll have access to all the facilities, and it won’t cost you a penny. That place will serve as your base of operations for the month you’re staying in Australia, between your excursions to Sydney, Perth, Surfers Paradise at the Gold Coast, Byron Bay and Darwin, where you’ll spend a weekend scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. We provide that framework, but you’ll be welcome to swap some things for other things, extend your stay in certain places, sleep in hostels if you’d rather have that atmosphere. And it’s all-inclusive, food, drink, alcohol, the lot. It will be the trip of a lifetime, and we can guarantee you will love every second of it. Then, when you arrive back home, we will completely wipe your memory, and you will forget it ever happened.”

“Hmm? Sorry, I was getting a bit carried away, what was that last bit?”

“That was the catch. When you get home, you won’t remember a thing about the holiday you just took.”

“Oh. Well, in that case I won’t bother. Thanks anyway.”

“Hang on, why not? I’m offering you the holiday of a lifetime here. I can guarantee you will be bursting with pleasure every second you are away.”

“Yes, but I won’t remember any of it. So, for the rest of my life… it’ll be like it never happened.”

“But it did happen. Look, as you can maybe imagine, I get a lot of people calling me up to ask about this, and it never stops amazing me how many people have the exact same attitude as you. People who believe that if you don’t remember doing something, there was no point doing it in the first place. It’s astonishing, how much weight we place on memories over almost anything else.

“I’m going to say something now, and I can imagine you rolling your eyes at it because it sounds like something you’ve heard forty thousand times before, but I want you to really concentrate on it and understand it. Remembering is overrated. Doing, being, feeling, seeing, listening, all that present tense stuff, the stuff that’s happening to you right now, that’s what we should be focusing on. If you are warm and full with joy right now, who cares if you remember feeling that way? What’s important is that you’re feeling it.

“Look at those people who start to lose their memory towards the end of their life. What does that mean to them? Was their life a waste of time, because the perfect moment when they were alone on a beach abroad, and they felt the warm water around their feet – because that moment has evaporated out of their mind and been lost forever? No. Stop worrying about whether you’ll remember something, and just soak it in. The only things you really need to remember are your friends’ names and the way home from the pub. That’s it.”

Rachel paused for a while at the other end of the phone.

“Kyle, I… I’m beginning to realise that if I tell you I now want to go to Australia with your company, I won’t get the response I want.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I lied earlier on about the catch. The real catch is that we aren’t a real travel company at all. It’s just me, and a phone, and I’m trying to get people to properly appreciate the holidays that they do end up going on. Sorry.”

“That’s a pretty big catch.”

“Yeah.”

That all happened a year and a bit ago now. Rachel ended up organising everything herself, of course, but as far as I know it all went smoothly. I saw her for the first time in ages coming out of the cinema at the weekend. She was looking tanned and very happy. I stopped her on the street, gave her a quick hug, and asked her how Australia was. She said she didn’t have a clue.

Tipping Point

“It’s a game show, it’s on ITV at four o’clock between Tenable and The Chase,” said Mark. He was speaking on the phone to his gran, who had called him for a catch-up just as he was approaching the doors of the TV studio in Bristol. “Ben Shephard hosts it, the one who used to be on GMTV, yeah. I’m not going to explain the whole concept, it’s a bit complex, but there’s a big machine and you put coins in it, and you have to answer questions to put the coins in it. Then if the coins fall right, you win money. You should definitely just watch it. I don’t know how long it’ll be before my episode’s aired, no, but they’ll maybe tell us today. Right, I have to go, love you, bye.”

As it is for most TV game shows, there was a long process to go through before you got on Tipping Point. Hundreds of folk will have applied to be on it, then those hundreds will be whittled down to a few who go along on auditions, then after the producers have decided which of the auditionees had the right look and personality for TV, it would be a couple of months before they would actually be invited along for filming. Mark had gone through that whole process now, and he was not feeling dispirited in the slightest.

The truth was, Mark loved Tipping Point. He loved Countdown, and Tenable, and The Chase, and Pointless, but there was a special place in his heart for Tipping Point. He loved his job, but the shite hours meant his working day ended at half one, leaving him too exhausted to leave the house, and the daytime game shows had become a significant part of his life. Tipping Point, to him, was the easiest of the bunch, and he got a certain dopamine thrill from continually smashing out right answers while the contestants equivocated between the two wrong ones. He knew that if his coins fell in the right place, he could win the top prize of £10,000. So, he had applied. And now, here he was.

I won’t bore you with the details of the day. Several episodes were being filmed back-to-back, so he met the three contestants he would be playing against and a number of contestants who would be playing in other episodes. The producers welcomed the large group, explained everything they would need to do, introduced them to Ben Shephard, and then, four at a time, took them through to the studio itself. Mark didn’t have to wait too long before his group was brought through.

Before long, they were filming. Ben did his introductory piece to camera – he had to record a new one for every episode, saying exactly the same thing, because the studio would “get letters” if they just recycled one clip – and then he was briefly chatting to each of the contestants about their lives, working his way along the line towards Mark. First, there was Jenny, who was a nurse from Manchester: “That must be a really tough job, but I’m sure it’s very rewarding.” Then there was Gill, a retired schoolteacher from Reading: “So what do you get up to in your spare time these days?” Then there was Alan, a civil servant from Cardiff: “I won’t ask for any details about what that job involves!”

Then Ben turned to Mark.

“And finally we’ve got Mark from Edinburgh. What’s your line of work, Mark?”

“I’m a laboratory assistant, Ben.”

“Great stuff. Is it fulfilling?”

“What?”

“Is the work fulfilling? When you finish your day, do you feel like you’ve accomplished something worthwhile?”

“I suppose I do. The hours are a little antisocial, but…” Mark laughed a little nervously.

“It’s just, I read your form before the show and it said you were working in Portsmouth. That’s a long way from Edinburgh, and surely you’d want the work to be worth it if you were leaving so much behind.”

“Well, it was a job that related to my degree, and it leaves room to progress in my…”

“Did you leave anyone behind, Mark?”

Mark didn’t know why Ben Shephard was asking him this. He didn’t want to answer, but the studio was so quiet and the other contestants were looking at him.

“I left behind some family, a few friends, but I’ve made some new ones…”

“I’m talking about relationships. Did you have to end anything?”

“Well, there was a girl, yes…”

This time Ben didn’t interrupt him. He just looked and nodded his head to encourage him to go on.

“There was a girl. Though it wasn’t me who broke it off, it was her. We’d been going out for years, seven incredible years, and I knew she wouldn’t be able to move down south with me, but I thought we could somehow make it work. It scared me to bring it up, so I just didn’t. Then, about a week before I left, we were talking over breakfast, and I could see something was wrong, so I asked her about it. She said she had been thinking about me moving away, and even after everything, she just couldn’t see us keeping this thing going, and it really broke her heart, but she didn’t think there was any other way. I tried to argue with her, but ultimately I knew she was right.

“The thing is, even though she said that, and she told me she loved me, there was a voice at the back of my head telling me that for most of those seven years, she had desperately been trying to find an excuse to break up with me. I thought that if I had meant anything to her, she would at least have tried to keep it going, at least have pretended that we could have made it work for a month or two. But it seemed so easy for her to just end it, with a single sentence. She made it sound as if the whole thing hadn’t mattered to her at all. After seven years. God.”

The room was quiet for a second, then Ben said, “You’ve been in Portsmouth for a while now, though. Have you been looking for anybody new?”

“No,” said Mark. “I just can’t imagine myself with anybody else.”

Ben was still standing behind his lectern. “We’re going to edit all this out, Mark, but seriously, you need to sort yourself out. It’s been ages.”

Mark looked at Ben, and he just saw contempt in his eyes. He really hated him, and the feeling was mutual.

“OK, let’s play Tipping Point!”

The game progressed well for Mark. He had the second highest amount of money at the end of round one, but sneaked past Gill the retired schoolteacher during round two and stayed in the lead from then on. In the final round, where he had to make the golden jackpot coin fall to win the grand prize of £10,000, he answered every question right, dropping his coins in and getting the jackpot coin to fall in no time at all. He watched Ben Shephard pretend to be thrilled, pumping his fists and coming over to shake his hand.

“That was astonishing Mark, excellent work! Now you’re £10,000 richer, what are you going to do with the money?”

Mark stared directly into Ben’s eyes, so deeply he could see the contemptuous ringmaster inside, and said, “I’m going to buy the biggest television I can find, and I’m going to watch nothing but fucking Tipping Point until the day I retire.”

He smiled when he took the cheque from the producers afterwards, and he did exactly as he had promised.

Surroundings

She had packed all my books away already, in the holdall I kept beneath our bed. I suppose that was the time she processed what she was about to do, when I was at work, and she was alone in the house, carefully placing each book away. I wasn’t granted any time to process it. I just came back one day, and my books were already packed, and she was telling me that she felt our relationship wasn’t going anywhere, and it hadn’t been going anywhere for a while. And since she had put so much effort into accepting that fact and coming to terms with it, no, she wasn’t able or willing to give me a chance to prove things could change. It happened that quickly.

So, while she was out seeing her friend, I packed the rest of my stuff in shoeboxes and rucksacks. There was nothing more convenient in the house to use. I didn’t know what I could take and what I couldn’t. We’d been together so long, everything was both mine and hers. Finding that dividing line, the one that she had clearly felt widening, was difficult for me. I took what I could, clothes, toiletries, as much as I could carry, packed them all away and put them beside the door. When she came back that afternoon, I gave her a hug for the final time, gave her a shaky and bewildered apology, and said goodbye. Then I began to walk to the bus station.

The streets were unusually quiet. Often, when I was walking on a deserted street, I would close my eyes, and see how long I was prepared to hold them shut before my fear of walking into a wall or out onto the road overwhelmed me and I had to open them again. I was doing this on my walk towards the bus station. While it usually gave me a fine sense of sweet panic, on this occasion the game relaxed me. With my eyes shut, I would suck thick air through my nostrils and expel it from my mouth. It was good to have something else to focus on. My heels scraping on the pavement, the oddly velvety sound of bicycle tyres on smooth tarmac.

I could never hold my eyes closed for longer than a few seconds at a time, so I decided to challenge myself. There were no cars around, and the pavement ahead of me was as straight as I could ask for. I closed my eyes, sucking the air through my nose, and kept walking forward. After seven or eight seconds, my mind began to shout to me, telling me I was veering off the straight line, and I should look where I was going before I tripped and fell. I did not listen to it, and I found that if I ignored it, eventually the voice would go away. I had worked past it. I was still walking forward.

If I thought I felt the kerb beneath my right shoe, I would slightly adjust my course to the left and keep going. My mind seemed to be leaving me alone now. I had been walking with my eyes closed for about thirty seconds, and every time I believed I was growing wobbly on my feet, I told myself I was not wobbly, I was confident and able and strong, and my legs would react accordingly.

At some point, after forty or fifty seconds of walking straight ahead, my mind appeared again – it wasn’t there to frighten me, but to calmly remind me that considering my pace and the last image of the road I had registered, I would be coming to a corner soon and I should check where I was. I decided that was sensible, and so I opened my eyes.

But my eyes weren’t open. Or, with them open, I could only see darkness. The same strange, deep-red darkness I saw when my eyes were closed. I shut them again, then opened them again. There was no difference. I couldn’t see. I dropped the bags and boxes I was carrying on the ground and sat down, feeling around the slabs of the pavement. I reached out to try and find the grassy verge on my left, but all I could feel was the pavement’s cold concrete, and I reached out to try and find the kerb and the road to my right, but all I could feel was the pavement’s cold concrete, and when I crawled back over to where I thought I had started, I could no longer find the bags and boxes I had put down only a few moments before.

I splayed myself out on the pavement, reaching as far as I could with my fingers and feet ­– I was sure I looked ridiculous, but I had only just lost my sight, so I felt I could justify myself to anybody who did pass me – but I could touch nothing except pavement and air… then I pushed myself from the ground and stood up, took some shaky steps forward, my arms out in front of me the entire time, searching for a building, or a fence, or a pole, or another person who could lead me… to the bus, possibly, or to their home, or a hospital, somewhere I could just lie down on a bed and try to think about what was happening to me. I turned to my right, deciding that if I could find the road I could orientate myself. Three steps forward. Another three. Still pavement slab beneath me. The road was not where it should have been. The sound of the city was still present, the noise of cars in the distance and wind coming down the street. I could feel the wind on the side of my face. But there was only slab beneath me.

I started to run, as fast as I could, at first in a straight line but then in all different directions, desperate to crash into something that could reassure me what was happening made sense, but I never even felt a different surface under my feet. The cars in the distance never got any closer. I had no idea how far I was from my bags now, nor even if they would still be there. The familiar world had vanished. All I knew was the past, and that meant nothing at all now. There were no names I could call out. I sat myself on the hard ground, lowered my head, and waited for somebody new to place their hand on my shoulder.

Pithecanthromum Musculodamin

The new drug pithecanthromum musculodamin was hailed by Time magazine as cracking open a new frontier for humanity, if only people were willing to learn how to pronounce it. They put the syringe on the front page in lieu of its inventor: filled with a golden-brown liquid, it appeared to be a friendlier version of heroin. Only, pithecanthromum musculodamin was not an opiate, depressant or stimulant. It had no addictive qualities, no dramatic side effects, and it only had to be used once. The syringe would be inserted into a nice, healthy big muscle, the golden-brown liquid would be injected, and the lifespan of the recipient would be increased by roughly 100%. The rich went mad for it.

Of course, the true effects of the drug could only be observed as the time passed – the scientists knew the effect it would have on a lifespan, but not the effect longer lifespans would have on the recipients and on wider society.

French billionaire Antoine Calment was among the first to try the treatment. He was able to afford it, and he really did not want his son to inherit his business, so he was willing to pay for it. He had gone through a briefing ahead of the injection, where doctors explained in basic terms what would happen to his body. In short, the rate of degeneration in his cells’ regeneration would decrease, and the only part of him that would age was the only part of him that perceived time as anything other than a physical process: his brain.

Calment was a smart man – in the business sense of ‘smart’. That is, he trusted nobody as completely as he did himself, and his veneration of himself bordered on the religious. As such, he was intensely optimistic about his own future, so long as it was solely he who dictated it. And as such, when he heard that his brain would be the only part of his body to experience the passage of time, he interpreted that as meaning he would only get gradually wiser as he approached his 200^th birthday.

Calment was not particularly smart in the worldly sense of the word. He failed to consider that as he grew older, he would perhaps not grow in wisdom, but in confusion. He would get confused about the language being used; he would get confused about the technology being used; he would get confused about the things that were allowed to be broadcast around the country, and he would get confused about how society got into that shape when he was living through it the whole time. The further the recipients of pithecanthromum musculodamin travelled into their old age, the further they got from their childhoods: as a result, they got more and more idealistic about those childhoods, and they got angrier and angrier about the way the world had deviated from that ideal.

This effect was particularly potent in the mind of Calment, who vowed that he would fight for a return to the France of his youth with all his might. He was joined in this pursuit by a significant number of his fellow ‘users’ from around the world, and so began an international political movement devoted to promoting the pithecanthromum musculodaminites to as many influential positions as possible. It wasn’t too difficult to convince voters of that which they themselves believed: that their seventeen or eighteen decades on the planet gave them the edge in terms of experience, and therefore they knew what was best for their respective countries.

The movement was an unparalleled success – within three years, 10% of those aged 150 or over were serving as a president, chancellor, prime minister, Taoiseach, pope or equivalent for some nation or another. The life-extenders were irresistible with their combination of condescension, indignation and bewilderment. In Calment’s France, a law was passed that every new addition to the dictionary and every new significant piece of hardware would have to be approved by a state-appointed committee of over-160-year-olds.

The elders would project their own confusion on to the rest of the population, and the rest of the population would adopt it as their own. They saw new things not as interesting, but as threatening and confusing. They lost their cultural curiosity. They looked to their leaders to save them from these terrors, and return them to the idyllic scenes of their lost childhoods. So, pithecanthromum musculodamin did indeed crack open a new frontier for humanity, but the barrier that was built just beyond it was five miles thick and close to impenetrable. Mankind no longer had any appetite for innovation.

Antoine Calment died in his sleep aged 210, having served as president of France for four decades. He was succeeding by his protégé, Marie David, 47 years his junior. She vowed to continue his vision, of a country that was divided not by class, but by age – an age that anybody could reach, provided they could afford the injection. France never did return to being the place envisioned by Calment, for the simple reason that such a place never existed, but under the guidance of the miracle drug, the next best result had been achieved: history itself had come to a stop.