Anna Starobinets

spent all of those forty minutes in the corridor, watching the females going through various office doors, all stressed, irritated, accustomed to the terror of the discovery that awaited them, trying to prepare themselves for the worst, but all the same stubbornly clinging on to the best

The empties move with the smooth and swift gait of dancers, as if they have become slimmer, as if they have been made lighter by the emptiness swirling round inside them. The others step heavily, as if they have put on weight instantaneously. Their gaze is turned inward;

Don’t get worked up, I’ve read the Book of Life too and learned the key passages off by heart. But a fact is a fact. The population of the Living has changed and is now three billion and one. And that ‘one’ is your Darling with his ‘void’ incode. I am afraid you have no idea how serious this is. So far no one does

Clearly ones like her are meant to arouse a desire in passers-by to procreate and multiply

ever since she went into the Pause Zone at the Festival for Assisting Nature

She didn’t call me by my name – later I realised why: it frightened her, it forced her to look into the abyss, into that nothingness, into the white emptiness surrounded by the black circle… She didn’t call me Zero. She just called me Darling

For a whole year more she had the right to visit the Reproduction Zone at the Festival for Assisting Nature. The reproductive period officially ends at thirty-five

would have been another eleven years before she would start receiving messages from the local Centre for Population Control with the gentle suggestion that she visit the Pause Zone. Messages like that start coming at forty-five

Messages like that start coming at fifty.

She could have lived for another twenty-six years until a Compulsory Pause. This measure applies to those who are over sixty and do not want to comply with the suggestions voluntarily

Strictly functional,’ that’s what he had said to the decorator, ‘Stylish minimalism.’ He did it all up in socio tones: walls à la inviz and safety furniture in the colours ‘available’ and ‘busy’.