D-day
Tuesday, 7:53am, in the middle of late October. The kind of day where the brown leaves turn to mush like melting snow. James Crosby, Jimmy to his friends, was pacing the high street of the busy commuter village in which he lived with his wife and two kids. Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds could be heard leaking out of the ajar door of Mr Walden’s DIY store as he fiddled with the “Demon Strike Firework Box” on display in the window. He stared through Jimmy as if he were hollow. For Jimmy was anonymous to almost everyone in his village. He would never normally be seen walking down the high street. Indeed, he would most likely be hurtling along in his 19 plate Audi A4, in a rush to get to work, or somewhere.
But today Jimmy needed to walk. He needed the fresh air.
31 December 2022.
The date rattled round the brick walls of his mind, like a washing machine on an endless spin cycle. His chest tightened before he remembered to breathe again. He scooped his hands deep into his pockets to grab his iPhone 8, before tapping in his password with shaking fingers.
3 new voicemails. All from Kate. She would be worried. She would be really worried. He’d never walked out in his pyjamas halfway through his cornflakes before. His thumb hovered off the reply button, whilst he decided if he should call back.
But before he muscled the strength to press it, his eye caught the number 207 bus as it came rumbling around the corner towards him. Instinctly, he stretched out his arm, beckoning it to stop. The bus’ wheels screeched as the driver slowed to stop by the pavement’s edge, splashing dirty water from a puddle up onto his bare ankles. He put the phone back into his pyjama pockets and clambered on.
“Left that a bit late didn’t ya,” the driver scolded, in a rough West Country accent.
“Yeah,” Jimmy replied, feigning a smile.
“Where you going?” The driver asked, roughly.
“Dunno,” Jimmy said, shrugging his shoulders.
“What?” The driver scrunched up his face and stared at him.
Jimmy searched his brain for a collection of words that might make some logical sense. But nothing in his brain made sense any more.
“Clifton Suspension Bridge,” he mumbled, finally.
The driver looked at him strangely, then pressed one of the buttons on his electronic pad.
£6.50 flashed up in block green digits. Jimmy dredged his pockets once again, this time for the change.
“Not a great day for sight-seeing,” the driver commented, nodding his head towards the wet, grey mist outside. Jimmy glared at him as he placed the coins on the tray, “No, it’s not,” he replied, coldly. There was an uneasy pause before the driver scooped the coins off the tray and tipped them into the machine. He let out a snort of disapproval in Jimmy’s direction before he shifted his view back to the road and set off.
Jimmy rocked back on his feet, before he ripped off his ticket and stumbled down the aisle.
The bus was empty barring a young woman sitting primly on the front seat, and a teenager immersed in his headphones on the back row. Jimmy decided to sit opposite the woman.
As the bus meandered it’s way through village after village, Jimmy’s attention fixated back to his iphone, and more specifically the app that was causing him all this trouble. The reason why he had inexplicably stormed out of the family home without so much as a goodbye or a see you later.
The “D-Day” app - a revolution in health care at your fingertips. A present from his wife last Christmas. It was supposed to help motivate him to keep fit. A bit of macabre fun to jolt him out of his midlife crisis. But it had only propelled him into a nightmare.
31 December 2022.
The gimmick behind D-Day is that the app uses the latest medical and electronic technology to analyse a customer’s diet, habits, genetic make-up, mental and physical well-being, all with the singular aim of giving the user their estimated date of death. It sounds ridiculous. Why would anyone ever want to know? But it was very popular, a best seller, even at £999.
Jimmy’s mum blamed Kate for it all. If she had never bought him that God-forsaken monstrosity, all of this would never have happened.
So, as Jimmy stared into the water droplets sliding down the bus’ window, Jimmy’s mind drifted back to where it all began, 10 months ago, on that mild Christmas Day morning.
It was 14 degree Celsius in fact, a strong south-westerly wind causing a warm Atlantic front to lash rain in waves against the patio window. Kate and the kids dragging him out of bed at 6am, hungover from the four glasses of sherry he had consumed the night before watching Michael MacIntyre’s Christmas Show. That perfectly wrapped present staring straight at him from the top of the pile under the sparkling tree. Him wondering what she might have bought him. No doubt it would be infinitely more thoughtful and interesting than the Christmas flowers and theatre gift vouchers he had bought her. He remembered longing after that neatly- wrapped box, his heart briefly remembering the anticipation of being a child.
And there it was. The D-day device, a kit so expensive that only John Lewis sold it. A pristine sheen black box, so tantalizingly advertised on TV, containing a collection of carefully packaged, minute medical equipment. Most of Christmas Day was spent doing the tests. There was a small metallic patch he placed on his chest so that the app on his phone could monitor his heart rate. Then Kate hovered the phone over his entire body so that it could perform a full body scan. Next was the small device that he used to pinprick his finger and a thin sheet of absorbable paper to drip the blood onto, which the phone duly scanned and uploaded into the app. Last, there was the horrendously intrusive 100 question interrogation of every element of his life. Likes, dislikes, habits, vices, sexual activity, bowel movements. All the results were gathered and loaded into the app, and then an anticipatory two-hour wait whilst some mind-boggling data algarythm trawled through his genetic make-up, lifestyle and blood results to give him, drumroll please, the date he was going to die. His D-day.
31 December 2022.
He would be 43 years old. That made him want to vomit up his Christmas pudding. Kate told him to forget about it, there was probably a mistake, come and watch Harry Potter, have a chocolate, a drink, whatever, just forget we’d ever done the silly thing.
He spent Christmas Day night fiddling with the metallic patch on his chest, wondering if they’d done something incorrectly. The patch was designed to track his every move, monitor the contents of every food he consumed, log every physical activity he undertook, decipher every changing detail of his blood work, giving him an insight into how each action would impact his future. He had been for a 20 minute walk between The Queen’s Speech and Top of the Pops, partly to clear his head, partly to see if he could get the God-damn thing to give him some more time. But it didn’t.
It’s probably broken, said Kate on Boxing Day as Jimmy sulked in his room. Jimmy ignored her and fiddled with it some more. She forced him to take it off before they went on a 3 day New Years break to Centre Parcs. But it still bothered him. He spent most of the holiday walking around the lake in the freezing cold pondering why it was telling him such a ridiculous date. So when back home, he scooped everything back into the pristine black box and returned it to the manufacturer. They apologized and sent him a new one. It arrived in the middle of January. He practically clawed the parcel out of the delivery driver’s hands, tore apart the packaging and speedily ran through the tests. A two hour agonising wait, until the familiar ping on his phone.
31 December 2022.
Annoyed, he ordered one for Kate. Another two week wait while he researched problems with the D-day App on the Internet. No-one seemed to be having the same problems. Everyone loved it. The box duly arrived and they did exactly the same procedures on her.
24 February 2065
She would be 87.
Jimmy spent hours in his study whilst he was supposed to be working thinking about how on paper, the D-day App sounded like a brilliant idea. It is beginning to save the NHS millions, it gives people personal responsibility for their actions and the very latest up to date information as to how their actions are influencing their future. The app analyses absolutely everything about your health - if you are carrying a virus, it knows, if you have a muscle or bone injury, it suggests you go to the GP. It warns you about changes to your heart rate and blood pressure. Twelve months on the market and GP visits are down 25%, early cancer diagnosis up 3-fold and targeted medicines are ordered directly to the pharmacist, saving prescription processing times, but also bringing more people into treatment. Everyone is a winner. It is revolutionizing the health of the nation.
There was only one problem. His was faulty.
31 December 2022
No matter what he did, the date never changed. When Kate ate a Chinese takeaway, she lost a month from her D-day. When she went to the gym, she gained two days. But Jimmy’s never changed, no matter what he did, it always stayed on the same bloody date.
31 December 2022.
He contacted the manufacturers. They sent him another sparkly new box. By now it was early spring and he had started going running most evenings after work. But the third box told him exactly the same message as the first two.
So he went online in search of answers. Several D-day internet forums had sprung up since the launch, where people shared tips, tracked progress and set themselves goals. He trawled through practically every post to see if others had experienced the same.
Nobody.
So he gravitated towards the conspiracy theorists at the edges of the forum. There were the usual nut-jobs telling him about the complex algathrthyms behind the technology, how it was the government reading our minds and controlling us. Others said it serves him right for being a capitalist whore, and that there are some things you shouldn’t play with. A few encouraged him to kill himself to prove the machines wrong.
Kate asked him to stop thinking about it. He had stopped going to bed with her by the time summer arrived, wasting what little night there was desperately searching for answers.
His best friend Gavin was going to be 84.
His next door neighbour 75.
The teacher at his son’s school 91.
The postman would make it to 101.
Bill at work was the only one who got some bad news. But he had simply laughed when he found out about the 6 and a half years he had left. “Sounds about right”, he had said in his thick Geordie accent. But he was 61, morbidly obese and two heart attacks in.
So why was someone like Jimmy, an active, non-smoker, occasional drinker going to die at 43? There was no history of disease in his family, he hadn’t been to the GP since a bout of glandular fever when he was 19.
It made no sense at all.
He began researching whether the date had some cosmic significance. Was Earth going to position itself into line with Venus at the same time as the Sun entered its 3rd trimester, whilst Saturn simultaneously performed a trick shot of potting Pluto into a black hole after cannoning off Jupiter, meaning he was almost certainly doomed?
And then it all just became too much. On a drizzling Tuesday morning in October, eating his soggy cornflakes, thinking how desperately he didn’t want to go to work, up popped a piece of research on BBC News about how the D-Day App owners had just issued a press release stating that the device had a 97% accuracy rate based on analysing the first 1,000 people to die who had registered with the D-day device.
He had choked on his cornflakes, before scattering the bowl across the floor and storming out of the front door.
And now he was sat here on the bus, staring into nothing, on his way to nowhere.
