The Resistance

battles first.’
    Peter looked up at him for a few seconds, then took a deep breath. ‘You can count on me, Pip. I’ll find out what’s going on.’
    ‘Good,’ Pip said, his voice matter-of-fact now. He pulled out a file and handed it to Peter. ‘Take this. Read it. Absorb it. Then get rid of it. And Peter?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Good luck. Take care. And take care of Anna and Ben, won’t you?’
    ‘Of course.’
    Peter left the room, making his way back along the corridor, past the gruff guard, through the passageway to the shop, then out into the road. He walked back along Old Compton Street, down towards Piccadilly, then jumped on a tram heading north towards Tottenham Court Road and, after that, another one heading south again. Eventually, he arrived at Waterloo Station to get his train home. Keep them guessing, he thought to himself. If the Authorities were watching him, and he was pretty sure they were, then he wanted at least to make their job more difficult.
    He got off the train at Surbiton and looked around in disdain. A few months ago, he and Anna had been living in Bloomsbury, in the house that Anna’s parents had lived happily in for years. It had been a lovely house – big and rambling, sunny and warm, a place as different from Grange Hall as it was possible to be. But soon after he and Anna became Legal, the letters started to arrive, then the official visitors, all saying the same thing: that the house was too big for them, that they would be better off in a ‘more efficient space’. They’d resisted, at first – after all, the house was theirs, inherited from Anna’s parents. But gradually, the visits had become more regular, the letters more threatening, until even Pip had shrugged sadly and told them that the move was probably inevitable, unless they wanted to antagonise the Authorities, that this fight was probably one that wasn’t worth fighting. And so they had been moved to a box in the suburbs, where two shopping centres had replaced the high street, and the residents saw them as intruders.
    Of course, the Authorities hadn’t publicised his and Anna’s escape to freedom; they didn’t want people knowing that they’d outwitted the Catchers, that they’d got out of a Surplus Hall alive. Nor had the Authorities said much about the death of Anna’s parents, or the murder of Peter’s father. They’d done their best to brush the stories under the carpet, to lose them in a mass of red tape. But stories like that didn’t die very easily. Word had got out, newspapers had printed photographs of him and Anna with headlines questioning the effectiveness of the Catchers, asking whether the ‘Life for a Life’ policy should be revisited. No one wanted any additional burdens on the world’s meagre resources and that was all he and Anna represented to most people. So neighbours avoided them, shop assistants regarded them warily and passers-by either stared at them curiously or pretended they didn’t exist. Not that Peter cared. He knew he had as much right to be there as anyone else. More right.
    Thrusting his hands in his pockets, he walked through the Amenities Park, where various outdoors exercise classes seemed to take place at every hour of the day. There were people running, jogging, touching their toes, stretching their muscles – a grand exhibition of strength, of energy, of life. Or, rather, fear of dying, Peter thought cynically.
    It wasn’t just death that people feared, either; it was ageing, decay. Legs and arms could be replaced; key organs could be regrown. But those little lines around the mouth, that lethargy in the morning that started to last all day, the feeling of having seen it all before – these were things that had to be fought. Peter had read all about it in The New Times and the lifestyle supplement of Staying Young , usually whilst waiting for appointments with his assimilation counsellor. The scientists had done their bit, the journalists would write; it was up to individuals to maximise the potential of Longevity – to live their lives to the full, to maintain a youthful energy and enthusiasm.
    Or they could bow out gracefully and leave youth to the young, Peter thought. They could take a long hard look at themselves – at their endless, boring lives – and ask whether death might not be such a bad idea after all. People might think they had learnt to delay the inevitable, but underneath the veneer of Longevity, if they were honest about it, they