The Measure

by Nikki Erlick

Even if they were sent from heaven, or beamed down from outer space, or traveled back in time from the distant future, it was people who decided what to do with them now.

a garden in which many inhabitants had eaten the apple, while the rest remained too scared to bite.

any murderous efforts would inevitably prove futile, so other ways were found to exact pain.

Both embittered and emboldened by the knowledge that they wouldn’t live to suffer a lengthy imprisonment, some short-stringers felt almost invincible. There was no need to fear death row if you were already sitting there.

They forgot that having a long string only promised them survival. It didn’t preclude them from injury or illness. It didn’t mean they would go unpunished.

you don’t want to spend it in a coma or in prison.

“dangerously short strings”—a particularly ill-fated community with members in every city and every country who found themselves staring into a future whose brevity ensured little to no consequences for their actions and whose rapidly approaching end served as a blunt and brutal reminder that there would be no cosmic rewards for ethical behavior, no late-in-life blessings, no tangible motive to do good.

In America, where the populace had proven time and again to be particularly susceptible to paranoia,

Yet there was something about the physical, intimate act of writing a letter that made him want to be honest.

Or are we simply doomed to want whatever we can’t have?

So maybe he’s right, and the strings really do offer a chance to live with fewer regrets, because we know exactly how much time we have to do it.

Theirs was a dangerous profession, and the risk ahead was much easier to accept when that was all it was: a risk, not a guarantee.

Maybe the boxes are like that, too. Nobody can offer any foolproof explanation for them, so they just end up meaning whatever we want them to mean—whether that’s God or fate or magic. And no matter how long your string is, that, too, can mean whatever you want it to—a license to behave however you want, to stop dieting, to seek revenge, to quit your job, to take a risk, to travel the world.

Once you know something, you forget what it was like to not know it.

But if it turns out to be a slow ending, with no shortage of time for self-reflection, then I have to take comfort in the fact that it will not come as a horrible surprise, and I will hopefully have spent the previous 14 years living the way I wanted, so I can look back and feel as content as one can hope to be.

“You know, I watched a lot of people come to the end, and everyone around them kept begging them to fight. It takes real strength to keep on fighting, and yes, usually that’s the right answer. Keep fighting, keep holding on, no matter what. But sometimes I think we forget that it also takes strength to be able to let go.”

“If we can check the strings of every applicant for field agent positions or active military duty, and only send those with longer strings into the field or into combat, then we can effectively eliminate all risk of death. They’re guaranteed to survive.”

there’ll be no jobs left for short-stringers.”

created two classes of citizens, based on strings.”

What’s next? ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ about your string?”

“We segment ourselves based on race or class or religion or whatever fucking distinctions we decide to make up, and then we insist on treating each other differently.

“Nobody seems to care that we all look the same when we’re open on a table.”

I know that life can sometimes feel like a battle to be recognized for who you are, and not your circumstances.

He liked the notion that even buildings could have memories, and could, in turn, be remembered.

Hope for the mother of an ailing child. The grace in knowing that prayers would be answered.

“And eighty percent of success is showing up.”

We don’t just march because we hope it will trigger change. We march to remind them of our numbers. To remind them that they can’t forget about us.”

The more precise the technology, Anthony thought, the more easily the short-stringers could be regulated.

stories of short-stringers approaching the end, with no obvious illness, stalked by dread and uncertainty, hesitating before crossing the street, standing far from the subway tracks. It sounded unbelievably stressful. An awful, powerless feeling.

obtaining special pills, either from sympathetic doctors or dealers abroad, choosing to slip away gently, with their favorite people by their side, rather than wait a few more days for a potentially painful accident.

But did they not share the same rights as the terminally ill?

shorter string foretold a future loss of income.

very small but statistically significant percentage of the American population had departed since the boxes arrived.

trying to sue for full custody of her kids on the grounds that her ex-husband is a short-stringer.

“Even if they have to lose him, at least they’ll know he didn’t want to let them go.”

The great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘It is not the length of life, but the depth of life.’ You don’t need a long lifetime to make an impact on this world. You just need the will to do so.”

For many, the strings were either proof of predestination, or just another reminder of the stark randomness of life, the inequities of luck. But surely the chaos didn’t feel so chaotic if you believed it was part of God’s plan.

To die was still frightening, of course, but so much less dreadful with the faith that there was something beyond this world. The end of his string didn’t have to be an ending if it was the start of something else, something eternal.

people living in places with no Internet. No at-home measurement websites, no way to learn what’s going on in other countries.”

Humans always find a way to adapt, right? But there are lots of people who aren’t even doing that. They’re just . . . continuing on, like before.”

As long as the boy’s string was short—had always been short—then Anthony wasn’t to blame.

I think we’re raised to believe that happiness is something we’ve been promised. That we all deserve to be happy.

Whether the answer was fifty or ninety, she didn’t want any number in her head. Amie’s refuge was found in her fantasies, in her musings about the future. A number would destroy all of that.

Amie’s tendency toward daydreams led to an unfortunate habit of picturing her wedding by only the second or third date, and her imagination had a knack for exaggerating even a man’s most minor flaws.

I’d be knowingly putting my family through such a horrible loss. Choosing to give them a future without their father.”

“It’s just that life is already hard enough, and that would bring even more sadness into it,”

“Do you remember when ‘the strings’ just referred to the string section of an orchestra?”

No matter how much time they may have left, nobody wants to think about the end.

Victorian era, I explain to my students that people back then were surrounded by death.

living long is not the same as living well.