* * *
The one fad the Wilkinsons had resisted as pointless, possibly tasteless, and at length banal was switching race. After all the historical agony over skin colour, perhaps it was passingly notable that virtually no one amongst what were once called “minorities” or “black and brown people” or “people of colour” and finally “seeable people” exhibited the slightest desire to become white. Repigmentation and plastic surgery were all in the other direction, to the especial consternation of Jamaican Britons and black Americans, who could no longer distinguish their “real” brothers and sisters from fraudulent undercover crackers masquerading as hip and taking full advantage of their wholesale permission to use “the N-word” in all its six-letter glory. Black communities objected that they were being “infiltrated,” “robbed,” and “mocked.” Yet bills to forbid the practice as the ultimate “cultural appropriation” were struck down by the courts, because lawyers defending the bans were unable to cite what legal principle the new conversion therapy was violating. Although the fashion eventually burnt itself out, the one positive result of no longer being able to distinguish between bona fide black people and the secretly naff incognito kind is that no one gave a toss any more what colour you were, until the very word “racism” came to refer innocently to an enthusiasm for driving cars around a track very fast—as in, “Yeah, Lloyd just bought another Ferrari, because he’s really into racism.” Besides, towards the end of the infatuation with skin treatments, the most popular hue was Smurf Blue.
War, too, was defunct. Sacrificing droves of citizens gifted with eternal life was unthinkable; famously, during the final attempted conflict, between Canada and Lapland, conscripts with too much to lose had refused en masse to fight. Criminal violence had also dried up. Murder seemed only more grievous when victims were robbed of godlike immortality, and “life imprisonment” might entail banishment to a small room for thousands of years.
Nevertheless, what with the odd accident, not to mention the perplexing raft of suicides whose rising incidence became the subject of numerous hand-wringing long-form essays, a smattering of replenishment human beings were still allowed to gestate. Kay and Cyril were fortunate in having already borne a family, but without lucking out in the Population Replacement Lottery, harder to win than the old kind with buckets of cash, their great-grandchildren were unlikely to become mothers and fathers. Being so scarce, children were universally spoilt, and immoderate doting didn’t have an improving effect on the adults they became. Proud parents often kept their small people indoors, because word that a proper child had been spotted on such-and-such a street spread like wildfire, and in no time queues of rubberneckers would form, taking photographs and begging to pat the urchin’s soft little head. Whereas in times past many parents had felt a touch of melancholy when offspring seemed to grow up too quickly, modern parents met the moment when their specimen of an endangered species turned twenty-five with full-tilt desolation: from then on physically ossified, their erstwhile status symbol looked abruptly like everyone else.
That said, young people who were authentically young—who not only looked twenty-five, but who’d truly been alive for only twenty-five years or so—were much sought after. Their artlessness, ignorance, transparent pretension to sophistication, unconvincing simulation of world-weariness, fierce certainty about what was wrong with society and how to rectify it, and genuine hunger for the experiences that their chronological betters had sampled up to the eyeballs? Well, the whole authentically fresh-faced package was intoxicating. They fell in love! Wretchedly and unrequitedly, and they thought they were going to die! They converted to Islam! They had crises of faith, and unconverted from Islam! But it took disappointingly few years for that faux world-weariness to morph into the real thing.
Every funeral was as costly, elaborate, and crowded as the ceremonies that once mourned a head of state. The public gloried in marking an event that was so rivetingly irrevocable. Indeed, the public had acquired an appetite for death, the sole remaining taboo; what replaced pornography was illicit videos of gory expiration by a raft of creative means.
Film, television, theatre, and fiction crafted before the Retrogeritox watershed—aka “pre-Retro retro”—were also unfailingly popular. For the narrative arts had gone flat. The quality of “edginess” was consigned to a bygone era. As stories cleansed of ageing and mortality didn’t appear to function, all contemporary plotlines came across as inconsequential. Even grand star-crossed romance no longer scanned. What was the big deal? If a relationship doesn’t work out, get over it and find someone else. Whenever modern directors attempted to recreate the epic tragedy, the most emotion that could be summoned from an audience was, “Well, that’s too bad.” Thus Kay never wearied of David Lean, and Cyril had now seen Cool Hand Luke several hundred times.
A birth here, a death there, but for the most part the human population of planet Earth was fixed. In the absence of an asteroid to take them all out of their misery, the people alive now would be the same people alive thousands of years hence. Perhaps that should have presented this uniquely privileged generation the opportunity to become wiser, better educated, more well-rounded, more compassionate, more insightful, more hilarious, and more spiritually advanced than their predecessors. Yet as for the cultivation of these many desirable qualities, most regular people soon approached a hard limit, whilst the truly distinguished members of this perma-cohort—the few artists who showed early promise of creating truly moving contemporary work against the odds, the scientific geniuses, the visionary philosophers, the great leaders—were the most likely to blow their brains out. The evidence was in. The betterment of only one human attribute was demonstrably boundless: the capacity to be dull as dog dirt.
* * *
“So, what do you think?” Kay proposed over still another wild mushroom fajita; it was tough to decide between eating the perfectly crisp, superbly gooey wafer and throwing it at the wall. “Should we kill
