Lifetime

Part One: The Choosing

Maya Chen stood in the sterile white chamber of the Population Control Bureau, her hand intertwined with her partner Dmitri’s. At 87 years old—though her body remained as it had been since her 25th birthday—she had lived through the entire history of the Halting. She remembered what it was like before, when people grew old, when they died without permission.

“You don’t have to do this,” Dmitri whispered, though they’d had this conversation a hundred times. 

“I know,” Maya said.

The technician, a young man who might have been 30 or 130, smiled professionally. “Have you decided whether you wish to know your assignment?”

This was the question that divided society more than any other. The Knowers versus the Unknowers. Those who wanted to count down their days versus those who preferred to live as if immortal until they weren’t.

Maya had watched friends choose both paths. Her former colleague June had known—42 years, 7 months, 3 days—and had lived each moment with excruciating intentionality, checking off bucket list items like a woman possessed. She’d died on schedule, in her sleep, having carefully orchestrated every second.

Then there was Sophia, who had refused to know. She’d lived 11 years of apparent recklessness that was actually profound presence, then vanished one night, her children finding her peaceful in bed. Those 11 years had seemed both eternal and impossibly brief to those who loved her.

“I don’t want to know,” Maya said.

Dmitri exhaled. He’d been afraid she’d choose to know, to turn their remaining time into a countdown.

The technician nodded and pressed a button. Somewhere in the depths of the building, an algorithm spun. A number appeared on his screen—a number Maya would never see.

“Ms. Chen, you’ve been assigned your term. Please extend your wrist.”

The chip insertion took thirty seconds. A tiny device, smaller than a grain of rice, now carried the code of her extinction. It would monitor her circadian rhythms, wait until she reached the deepest phase of sleep, and then send a signal to her brain that would stop her heart. Painless. Instant. Merciful.

“Mr. Kovalenko we located your chip certification and Ms. Chen, we just need your fingerprint and your john hancock.” said the smiling technician.

Maya didn’t hesitate. Finger, stamped. Signature, signed.

“Congratulations to you both. You may conceive at your convenience.” 

Part Two: The Living

Eighteen months later, Maya and Dmitri held their daughter Aria for the first time. The infant’s face was wrinkled, red, ancient and brand new all at once—a reminder that humans still entered the world the old way, still began as helpless creatures despite all their technological mastery.

“She’s perfect,” Dmitri breathed.

But Maya felt a shadow she hadn’t anticipated. Every moment with Aria was now borrowed time. Each first—first smile, first word, first step—came wrapped in the knowledge that Maya might not see the next. She might have a hundred years. She might have a hundred days.

She watched other parents in the park, playing with their children, and tried to guess who were the Temporary (as parents were now called) and who were the Eternal (the childfree). The Eternal moved with a certain carelessness, a luxury of infinite tomorrows. The Temporary had a quality she could only describe as luminous attention.

“Do you regret not knowing?” Dmitri asked one evening as Aria slept between them.

Maya considered. “I regret that I’ll never regret it,” she said. “If I die tomorrow, I’ll wish I’d known, had more time to prepare. If I live to see her grow old—” She paused. The language was wrong. Aria would never grow old. “—if I live to see her at 150, I’ll be grateful I didn’t waste decades dreading this.”

Part Three: The Mathematics of Love

(t.v. heard through the open kitchen window): “Cooked in-flight, drone delivered pizza is as fresh as you can get. — News station opening music sounds — We welcome you back from commercial break. As the death toll continues to rise in last night’s attack on Eternals by temp extremists, experts—” 

Noticing that Aria was listening, Maya calmly stood up from her crouched position to close the window.

In between slurps of tap water straight from the garden hose, Aria calmly, but genuinely asked,

“Mom, when are you going to die?”

They were planting tomatoes in the vertical garden of their apartment. Aria’s hands were dirty, her Halted body still seven years old in perpetuity, as it would be until she chose her own 25th year to freeze.

“I don’t know, sweetheart.”

“Don’t you want to know?”

Maya set down her trowel. “Knowing wouldn’t change anything. I’d still love you the same amount. I’d still plant tomatoes with you on Saturdays. The days would just feel… heavier.”

Aria frowned. “Ms. Torres at school says her mom knew. She had exactly 50 years. She died last month and Ms. Torres says it was good because they did everything they wanted to do.”

“That is good,” Maya acknowledged. “But some people spend so much time doing everything they want to do that they forget to do nothing at all. Do you understand?”

Aria shook her head.

“Right now, we’re planting tomatoes. That’s all we’re doing. If I knew I only had a year left, I might be thinking: ‘Should we be planting tomatoes or should we be going to Paris or climbing a mountain?’ And then I wouldn’t really be here, with you, with the dirt under my fingernails.”

“Oh.” Aria processed this. “Can we still go to Paris though?”

Maya laughed. “Yes. Someday.”

Part Four: The Glitch

Aria was 31 (and still looked seven, having not yet chosen to restart her aging) when the glitch happened.

A solar flare, they said later. An electromagnetic pulse. Whatever the cause, 10,000 chips worldwide simultaneously displayed their remaining time on the skin of their hosts, appearing like tattoos on their wrists.

Maya was at the grocery store when she felt the burning sensation. She looked down.

4 DAYS, 7 HOURS, 23 MINUTES

The numbers ticked down as she watched.

All around her, people were screaming, crying, staring at their wrists in horror or relief. Some wrists showed decades. Some showed hours. One woman collapsed—her display read negative numbers. She should have died three years ago; the chip had malfunctioned, giving her stolen time.

Maya’s first thought was surprisingly calm: Four days. I can work with four days.

Her second thought: Aria.

Part Five: The Compression

Maya had often wondered how the Knowers lived, what it felt like to watch the countdown. Now she understood. Four days was simultaneously an eternity and nothing at all.

She didn’t sleep that first night. Sleep felt like theft, each hour of unconsciousness one fewer hour of consciousness. She sat in Aria’s room, watching her daughter sleep in the body of a child but with the mind of a woman who’d lived three decades.

Sitting in the dark room, a dark excuse of a joke came to her mind: 

“We chip ourselves, think we have everything figured out and forget that we’re still floating on a rock in infinite space. One little sun burp and our whole ant farm gets shaken—”

A surprising voice disrupts the thought.

“Mom?” Aria stirred, noticed the glowing numbers. “Oh no. Oh no no no.”

“It’s okay, sweetheart.”

“It’s not okay! Four days? That’s nothing! That’s—” Aria dissolved into tears.

Dmitri appeared in the doorway. With a forced smile that was spread too thin to cover his grief or guilt.

“We should do something,” Aria said desperately. “Everything. Anything. Paris. The Grand Canyon. We need to—”

“Aria.” Maya took her daughter’s face in her hands. “Listen to me. We’re going to do exactly what we would have done anyway.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow—today, I suppose—is Saturday. We’re going to plant tomatoes.”

Part Six: The Garden

They planted tomatoes.

Maya’s hands shook slightly as she filled the containers with soil. The numbers on her wrist had dropped to three days, counting down with mathematical precision. She could feel Aria watching her, cataloging every movement, trying to memorize her mother in real-time.

“Tell me about the before,” Aria said suddenly. “When people aged.”

Maya sat back on her heels. “It was slow,” she said. “You didn’t notice it day to day, but then you’d look at photos from a decade ago and be shocked. Your body would betray you gradually—knees that ached, skin that thinned, memories that slipped. It was terrifying and humiliating and…”

“And?”

“And there was something beautiful about it too. You knew you were running out of time, so you appreciated things more. A couple married for 50 years would look at each other with such tenderness because they could see the time they’d shared written on each other’s faces. Every wrinkle was a story.”

“But they also knew they’d lose each other,” Aria said. “Eventually.”

“Yes. But they knew how they’d lose each other. To age, to decline, to the natural order. Not to a lottery. Not to random chance.” Maya paused. “Though I suppose all death is random chance, really. We just used to pretend it wasn’t.”

Dmitri brought them lunch. They ate slowly, savoring flavors that suddenly seemed profound. Maya noticed everything: the exact shade of green in the tomato leaves, the warmth of the synthetic sunlight, the sound of Aria’s laughter when she spilled water on herself.

This was what the Eternal took for granted. This was what the Temporary had always known to treasure.

Dmitri desperate for any sort of relief from reality, “Remember when I met your mother for the first time at the BBQ?”

Maya immediately snickered. Dmitri had been holding onto this memory as a failsafe, knowing that it would make Maya laugh no matter the ambiance. It was now or never.

Dmitri now with confidence knowing that the humor was welcome, “At the time, I was still an Eternal… your mother hated my guts. In her mind, I was the reason for your rebellion from orthodox temp life… you weren’t chipped yet because of me, and —Dmitri brought both hands to his mouth to resist laughing before the punch line—  and she ran straight up to me and said “Eternals are either gay or selfish, so what are you?””

Dmitri, Maya and Aria all shared a fantastic belly laugh.

Part Seven: The Philosophy

That evening, they were joined by Maya’s old friend Kenji. He was 214 years old, Eternal, a scholar of the philosophy of death.

“The Halting was supposed to solve death,” he said, pouring tea. “Instead, it just redistributed it. Made it transactional.”

“A life for a life,” Maya said. “It’s biblical, really.”

“It’s perverse,” Aria interjected, anger flashing. “They tell us overpopulation is the problem, but really, they just wanted control. They wanted to make sure only the ‘worthy’ had children. Only those willing to sacrifice.”

“Is sacrifice not worthiness?” Kenji asked gently.

“Forced sacrifice isn’t sacrifice at all!”

Maya watched her daughter’s passion with bittersweet pride. Aria had been having this argument for years, had joined activist groups demanding reform, demanding that procreation be decoupled from mortality. But the mathematics were iron-clad: the planet could support X billion Eternal humans, or Y billion with natural birth and death rates, and the Lottery was the compromise that preserved both choice and sustainability.

“You’re right that it’s not fair,” Maya said. “But fairness was never the goal. Survival was. Continuation was.” She glanced at her wrist: 2 DAYS, 14 HOURS. “And it works, doesn’t it? The population is stable. No one suffers the deterioration of aging. And every child born is desperately, intentionally wanted.”

“But at what cost?” Aria demanded.

“At this cost,” Maya said simply, gesturing to her wrist. “And I’d pay it again.”

Part Eight: The Unknowing

The next morning—1 DAY, 9 HOURS—Maya woke to find the numbers gone.

She stared at her wrist in confusion. The chip was still there; she could feel its slight weight beneath her skin. But the display had vanished, taking with it the certainty she’d had for the past two days.

“It’s happening everywhere,” Dmitri reported, scrolling through news feeds. “The glitch is reversing. The displays are disappearing. They’re saying it’s a system-wide reset.”

“So I could have more time?” Aria asked hopefully.

“Or less,” Maya said. “The display might have been wrong. The chip might recalculate. I could die in an hour or live for decades. We’re back to not knowing.”

She felt a wave of relief so powerful it nearly knocked her over. The countdown had been a special kind of torture, each second both precious and painful. Now, once again, she had infinite time until she didn’t.

“I thought I’d want to know,” Maya said. “The glitch gave me what I thought I wanted. But having it taken away…” She laughed. “I’m grateful.”

Aria hugged her fiercely. “We still don’t know. You could still die today.”

“I could have died every day of your life,” Maya pointed out. “That’s what it means to be Temporary. To live perpetually in the space between now and the unknown.”

Part Nine: The Ordinary

They fell back into routine. Weeks passed, then months. Maya didn’t die.

Aria finally chose to age again, allowing her body to grow to 25 before Halting. She looked like a woman now, though Maya would always see the seven-year-old in the garden, dirt under her fingernails.

They planted tomatoes every Saturday.

Maya was in a meeting at work—she’d been promoted, had written a book about parenting in the age of the Lottery—when she felt the first flutter. A slight irregularity in her heartbeat, there and gone.

The chip.

She was in her car when the second flutter came. She pulled over, hands shaking. She was 20 minutes from home. Would she make it?

She called Aria. “Sweetheart, I think—”

A few seconds of silence.

“But it’s the middle of the day. You’re not even asleep.” Aria said immediately. “Stay where you are. I’m on my way.”

“No,” Maya said. “Go home. Go to Dmitri. I think I need to—”

The third flutter. The chip was preparing, finding the rhythm of her sleep cycle, except she was awake and it was confused and—

“This is just another malfunction.” assured Aria.

“I love you,” Maya said. “You were worth every second. Every second I knew about and every second I didn’t. Do you understand?”

“Mom—”

“You were worth it all.”

Maya reclined her seat, closed her eyes. She thought about tomatoes growing.

About Aria’s first laugh. About the before-times, when aging was slow and death was expected but never scheduled.

She thought: I’m 104 years old. I’ve lived for 79 years since the Halting. I was assigned a term and I don’t know if I’m dying early or late and it doesn’t matter.

She thought: What a gift. What a strange, terrible, beautiful gift.

The fourth flutter came and didn’t stop.