The Declaration

used to be called the government) made it illegal to take the drugs if you didn’t have Aids or cancer, because they were worried about things called pensions and people being a Burden on the State.
    Dr Fern died eventually because he wasn’t allowed to take the drugs any more, but a few years later, the Authorities realised that with Longevity, people wouldn’t have to stop working. If people didn’t get old, and they didn’t get ill, the government would save lots of money. By then Longevity drugs were being taken by people anyway, only they were doing it illegally. There were lots of people saying that Longevity drugs should be legalised, and so in 2030 the Prime Minister commissioned a trial. And when he realised that there were no side effects and that people could now live for ever, he decided that this was a breakthrough, and the biggest drug companies in England got together to start producing Longevity drugs for everyone.
    That’s when dying stopped, first in Europe, America and China and then, gradually, everywhere else. Some countries were late adopters because the drugs were expensive, but then terrorists started to attack England because they wouldn’t give everyone the drugs and soon after that the price got lower so everyone could have them.
    ‘And what do you think happened, then?’ Mr Sargent always asked, his beady eyes searching out someone in the classroom who would encapsulate the fundamental flaw in the programme.
    More times than not, Anna would put up her hand.
    ‘There were too many people,’ she would say seriously. ‘If no one dies and people have more children, there’s nowhere for everyone to go.’
    ‘Exactly,’ Mr Sargent would say. And then he would tell them about the Declaration, which was introduced in 2065, and which said that people could only have one baby. If they tried to have another, it would be terminated.
    Then, a few years after that, they realised that one baby was still too many. So in 2080 the new Declaration said that no one could have any children at all, unless they Opted Out of Longevity completely. Every country had to sign the Declaration and Surplus Police, or Catchers, as they began to be called, were responsible for tracking down anyone who broke it.
    Opting Out meant that you were allowed to have a child. ‘One child per Opt Out’ or ‘A life for a life’, as the Declaration put it. But that meant you would get ill and then die, so Opting Out wasn’t very popular.
    People who Opted Out were regarded with suspicion, Mr Sargent told them. Who would die just to have a child, when you didn’t even know if the child would be any good? Of course, there were some selfish, criminal people who didn’t Opt Out and still had children to suck up the world’s natural resources and ruin things for the Legal people . . . but they all knew about that, didn’t they? That was why Grange Hall existed – to give the Surpluses that resulted from such criminality a purpose; to help them learn their responsibilities and to train them to provide a useful service to Legals. Surpluses weren’t allowed Longevity drugs either. ‘Why prolong the agony?’ Mr Sargent said.
    And that was the point at which Peter arrived. The door opened, Mrs Pincent walked in, and Peter followed. Anna didn’t know he was called Peter then; when she first saw him walk through the door into the Science and Nature lab, she only knew that this, finally, was the Pending Surplus. That he hadn’t been taken somewhere else, after all.
    Everyone was looking at him, sneakily. Without letting anyone see that she, too, was shooting little looks at him, Anna noted that he was tall and gangly and had very pale skin that had some dark marks on it that could have been bruises but could equally have been dirt. It was his eyes that really stood out. They were brown, which wasn’t particularly interesting, but they were different from the other Surplus’s eyes. They darted around the room, stared, then flickered away, before darting around again like they were looking for something and digesting information. Mrs Pincent didn’t encourage eye contact and if you were caught looking at something, or someone, when you were meant to be working, you often got a clip round the ear, which meant that generally speaking Surpluses spent most of the time with their eyes cast downwards. The new Surplus’s eyes were openly inquisitive and defiant, Anna thought to herself, and that could only lead to