The anti-gravity hover ambulance lifted off in a halo of dust from the special landing pad that he’d had built in the grounds of his home on the tax-free haven of the Isle of Morrisons. Inside he lay on a stretcher plugged up to a rats’ nest of wires and tubes. The man was one hundred and sixty-nine years old and barely alive. The pilot/paramedic headed the flying machine east across the Irish Sea, soon they crossed Liverpool Bay and without pause began travelling inland. High above the town of Stoke-on-Tescos, the pilot tilted his control column, causing the rotors to swivel in their housing, and the craft turned south. About an hour after take—off from the billionaire’s island they glided in to land at their destination, the giant laboratory complex that he had had constructed on the outskirts of Milton Kwiksave Old Town, Berkshire Sector.

This was where they were working on a cure for death.

The patient’s name was Edmund Chive and he had been a happy but poor man until the age of twenty-eight when he had become immensely rich by inventing a new kind of thing: not a completely new thing but an exciting new twist on a thing that had been around for years and everybody had got used to and a bit bored with. If he had invented a completely new thing he probably wouldn’t have prospered because the geniuses who do that seldom do; it is the plodders who come after who make the gravy. At first all the money had made his life great: three girls in the bed, four Ferraris in the garage, that sort of thing. Then one day while he was licking crème fraîche off a light-skinned Dominican lesbian, a bad thought descended like an anti-gravity hover ambulance. It was an idea so horrible to him that it froze him in mid-lick with his tongue sticking out and dairy product dripping off it. His life was so great, so brilliant, so fantastic, so wonderful, he thought, and yet one day it would end — because he was at some point in the future going to die just like the lowliest tram driver. That couldn’t be right, could it?

From then on his money was spent not on making his life happy but on making it infinite. He sought a cure for death and hired the finest anti-death scientists to bring it to him. The answer lay somewhere in genetics, they were all sure of that.

While he waited for the cure to be discovered he employed the finest health experts to keep him in the best shape for the longest time. His days were entirely taken up with yoga, exercise, positive visualisations; his mealtimes were taken up with munching his way through piles of fibre, nuts and raw vegetables. He kept away from women and wanking because the Bhuddist monk he employed on a part-time basis told him to on no account spill his vital fluids into women or paper tissues. He didn’t watch TV because his fourth, ninth and twenty-second personal trainers had told him that bad ideas leaked out of the set from news programmes and made the watcher lethargic. And he didn’t mix with people because he might catch something.

So he lived for one hundred and sixty-nine years, though they were not by and large happy years, certainly not the latter ones, for although science could extend life it turned out it could do very little about curing the painful conditions that came with ageing. Just as Alzheimers only came to be known about once people started living long enough to get it, so as humans started passing the hundred and thirty mark in large numbers a huge variety of new conditions appeared, all of them excruciatingly painful and many of them embarrassing and depressing. Apart from the usual faithful companions of old age, Arthritis, Angina, Thrombosis, Prostate Cancer, there now appeared illnesses such as Poliakoff’s Syndrome where the sufferer’s body fat became so tired and worn out that it caught fire and burned from within like a fire—bombed council house, there was Clutterbuck’s Disease in which the excessively old person’s bones calcified to such a degree that they more or less turned into a pillar of salt, and the memory loss that occurred in those of seventy, eighty, ninety, was replaced by memory gain in those of one hundred and thirty, forty, fifty. But the memories that re-appeared were entirely faulty so that many aged folk ended their lives thinking they were chickens or trees or Bruce Springsteen (apart from Bruce Springsteen himself who thought he was Dag Hammersholt, a secretary general of the UN in the 1950s).

So Edmund Chive’s health gradually deteriorated, despite all the effort of the finest medical minds in the world, and he was in the middle of his eighth bout of pleurisy and on his twenty-seventh pet labrador called Sparky 9 when the call came from his scientists that they had made the breakthrough and they were there. The cure for death was waiting for him in a glass bottle. The hover ambulance kept on permanent standby was started up and the journey was made.

The two scientists in charge of project CFD, Professor Drew Cocker and Professor Lindy Wheen, were waiting for their benefactor as he was wheeled into the central chamber of the complex.

Edmund Chive managed to crowbar open his clag encrusted eyes and croak at his two hirelings, ‘Where is it?’

‘We’ve got it here, Mr Chive,’ said Professor Cherry holding up the bottle. ‘As we thought, the answer is essentially a question of genetic mutation, by altering the DNA chromosome of—’

‘For God’s sake, inject me, there’s not much time le—’ said Edmund and then he died.

But this was not the end for Edmund as he had feared it would be. After he died Edmund felt himself travelling down a long, gently sloping tunnel. It reminded him of the time in the happy days before he was rich when he’d been to a water park and had dived down a spiral tube, head first. There’d been no time for that in the last one hundred and forty-one years. Following some seconds, or perhaps minutes, it was hard to tell, of gentle floating, a bright white light appeared, small as a pinhole. He drifted towards it as it grew in his vision. The light resolved itself into the end of the tunnel; light as a rice cracker he slipped out of the tube and into a huge vaulted chamber lit by a kind, lambent light. Waiting for him were a group of people all smiling at him. The first person there he recognised was his father, not as he had died, etiolated and grey, but fit and hale as he had been in his late forties, behind him was Edmund’s mother as she had been around the time of the war in Korea, a beauty capable of stopping air traffic. Behind them in a spreading phalanx were all his uncles and aunts, his friends, his teachers from primary school, girls he had slept with at university still looking as they had then, and running in and out of their feet all the pets he’d ever had, Sparkies 1 to 8, cats and kittens, lizards and snakes. Edmund’s father approached him, his hand outstretched, his smile rueful. ‘I bet you feel like a right silly cunt now, he said as he embraced his son.

‘Fucking hell, yes,’ exclaimed Edmund. ‘What a twat! I didn’t think for a second there was a cunting afterlife!’

His mother came up and took him in her arms. ‘We were all silly shites,’ she said. ‘None of us shagging believed there was anything after we fucking died.’

Without looking at himself Edmund knew his body was as it had been when he was thirty-five years old, round about the time when all the exercise he was doing had temporarily given him a physique that was buffed and perfect, glowing with health and happiness. ‘So is this bollocking heaven?’ he asked.

‘Fuck knows,’ laughed Abigail Watts, the first girl he had had sex with.

‘This might be heaven or it might just be another stage on the shitting journey,’ said his Uncle Leon.

‘There is still pain here,’ said his father,’… and death.’

‘But it’s a different kind of pain and a different kind of death,’ explained his primary school teacher Miss Wilson. ‘A better kind.’

Suddenly Edmund was embarrassed thinking about what he had caused to be done back in the life before. ‘Erm, I think I might have made a bit of a fucking rick back … erm … there,’ he mumbled.

‘What’s that son?’ said his dad.

‘Well, I’ve… fucking invented a fucking cure for death. I’m not sure anybody else will be coming here soon.

Everybody laughed like a drain at this.

‘Knackers,’ said his mum.

‘Fuck ‘em,’ said Uncle Leon. ‘If they don’t want to come that’s their twatting problem.’

‘They can stay where they are, the wankers,’ said a man who’d been his best friend over a century ago.

‘Well, that’s a fucking relief,’ said Edmund.

‘I’m fucking gagging for a pint,’ said Miss Wilson.

‘Let’s go then,’ said Edmund’s dad. ‘The rest of you tossers coming?’

There was a general murmur of assent and they all went off to get what constituted, in this new place, pissed.

Back in the previous life Drew and Lindy stared at Edmund Chive’s cadaver, lying mute and sparkless on its trolley. ‘Well, this is unfortunate,’ said Drew.

‘Bad timing,’ said Lindy.

‘What do we do now?’

They both knew what they were talking about: the little glass bottle.

‘No point in wasting it,’ said one.

‘No point at all,’ said the other.

So they injected themselves with the anti-death serum. Then stood in silence for a few minutes. Finally Drew said, ‘Fancy a coffee?’

Lindy looked into an infinite future of coffees, coffee after coffee after coffee for tens of thousands of years.

‘I think I’ll wait till later,’ she said.