The Living One (Живущий)
by Anna Starobinets
Synopsis
After a global catastrophe called the Great Reduction, the number of people living on Earth has become fixed, remaining a constant 3 billion. This stability is based on the common notion of continual reincarnation. There is no death, as the main social byword suggests—just a brief “pause,” or “ninety seconds of darkness.” After these ninety seconds a person is conceived again. No wonder all humankind is considered one composite organism called The Living. Every person has an in-code that keeps track of information about all their previous incarnations.
Family and country are now of no importance. Every person can be reborn anywhere on the planet, issuing from their previous incarnations rather than biological parents. Society is global, and attachment to parents and children is denounced as a deviation. All people (or, rather, all the particles of The Living) in this society are connected directly from the brain to the social network (called Socio), where they can surf on various levels simultaneously. Needless to say, the first level—that of reality itself—is barely used, and usually ignored.
The particles of The Living live happily and die happily, according to a government-determined schedule, and it seems that nothing can threaten this stability. Yet . . . there is one man born without an in-code (i.e. without previous incarnations)—a spare human being. His birth increases the number of The Living by one, which threatens the harmony of The Living. So who is Zero? This is the question Zero himself is desperate to answer. From early childhood he shows deviations. He is attached to his mother; he is loved by pets, who normally are scared of The Living. After his mother’s death he is sent to the correction center where kids with bad “karma” are kept. There he makes friends with Cracker, who actually invented Socio in one of his previous incarnations. Cracker helps Zero to flee and to eventually find out that this whole comfortable, logical, and fair world rests on lies. It is probable that even the proverbial “incarnation” is just a result of astute manipulation. Zero soon gets to know that the slogan “There is no death” is meaningless—actually, it’s all there is.