Category: My Poetry & Fiction

Moratorium

So, in this story, the big news was that people had stopped dying.

It never seemed to violate any causal laws – it was, rather, just an accumulation of “good luck” of various kinds. Hospital patients experienced recoveries, bullets missed vital organs, things malfunctioned in bombs, and automobile accidents were just freakily free of casualties. It took a while for people in general to take it seriously, though statisticians, doctors and the like became aware pretty quickly that something strange was going on.

The first to “test” it were the suicide attempts: these simply always went wrong in some way, as many suicide attempts do anyway, but now, such attempts always went wrong. Psychopaths soon were soon testing it too: attempting ever-more grandiose murders or massacres, only to have things go wrong in weird, Rube-Goldbergesque ways. Likewise, combatants in wars simply couldn’t succeed where death was inevitable.

All of this is to say that in fact disease and misery failed to disappear. Many people continued suffering, but for any case where such suffering neared death, things just “went amiss” in some way: some bit of luck came along and they stayed alive after all. Famine victims would suddenly find food relief, and anorexics would suddenly just lose the motivation to starve themselves to death. The mortuary industry, the first to actually notice, suffered quickly. Less quickly, but over time, hospital ICUs noticeably filled up with people who should have been dying. Instead, they were just stringing it along.

After the first several weeks, scientists, in a dead panic (undead panic?), tried to study things in earnest, at the statistical level. What they found was that suffering seemed to be neither increasing nor decreasing, in absolute terms. Though the number of people in ICUs had risen at first, it had simply leveled off at a higher number, and an equilibrium seemed to have been reached where spontaneous remissions and recoveries offset maladies. Anecdotally, fewer people were going to hospitals with previously life-threatening injuries or diseases, and simply recovered at home.

Confidence grew that death was no longer a possibility. Ecologists noted that the “moratorium on death” definitely did not, in fact, apply to any species besides humans. There was something strange and exceptional going on, at that level. The religious of all stripes became increasingly alarmed, or alternately, expressed that they felt vindicated. Clearly, it was some kind of miracle or end-times. The legal system had to adjust – with no murders to solve or prosecute, they had to satisfy themselves with lesser crimes. Concepts such as “attempted murder” began to seem ridiculous.

Philosophers argued about the free-will of murderers and suicides being thwarted by eerie powers. People began to panic about overpopulation again, whereas before there had been increasing concerns about declining fertility. Indeed, fertility continued to decline precipitously, in the same way that it had been for decades. Population scientists speculated that in fact the decades-long decline in fertility had surely been the first indicator that death, too, would be on the way out. It wasn’t that the decline in fertility had been able to find causes, other than vague sociological ones: people just weren’t wanting children.

And now, people didn’t need children, either.