by Alison Irvine

Rose sat on the peeling white deck chair, her coffee cradled between both hands, staring out at the rain-dappled horizon. She was forty-six, she reminded herself, not sixty, though the heaviness in her chest felt older. Her friend Molly’s beach house was all driftwood and pampas grass, a cheerful kind of shabby, and it wrapped Rose like a warm blanket on a winter night.

She had come there for a break — not exactly a holiday, just three hours stolen from the fluorescent hum of the hospital several blocks away, where Jack, her husband, slept uncomfortably, still hooked up to more wires than seemed possible for one human body.

Jack would be home soon. He’d had a “major medical event” — that’s what the sign outside the ICU called it, in plain black sans-serif. Now, thanks to the Government Self-Health Mandate—Update 53c, he’d need to permanently wear “the patch”: a thin sensor glued to his chest, sending tidbits about his heartbeat, steps, oxygen levels and blood viscosity to the sprawling servers of the National Health Directorate. And also, Rose reminded herself, to the smiling actuaries at their insurance company.

She sipped her coffee, hands trembling, silently wondering: How did we get here?

Once upon a time, Jack had been fit — or at least, he seemed so, and health was a thing. They’d made the transition from the much-maligned seed oils to beef tallow because the podcast doctor with the big glasses swore “ancestral fats” were the way forward. Salads dripped in homemade vinaigrette, cookies baked with “ethical” eggs, nothing wrapped in plastic, nothing with ingredients you couldn’t pronounce. They had even tried intermittent fasting, though Jack had given up after looking hangry for a week.

She looked down at her watch. Government-issue, child-proof band. She’d bought her own, of course, “voluntarily,” because being offered a discount on her electricity bill felt like the same thing as having a choice. Now, Jack didn’t have a choice at all.

“He’s going to hate this,” she said quietly to herself.

Jack, who’d started muttering “nanny state” during the pandemic and never really stopped. Jack, whose grumbles about “Surveillance Wellness” had become background noise to their evenings, somewhere between conversations over monitored fridge food and the neighbour’s dog barking at pizza delivery drones.

Now their grocery bill would download straight to the cloud, chalking up every box of biscuits and rating their shopping basket on a neat little scale. The last pamphlet from insurance congratulated them: “Your UPF (Ultra-Processed Food) Score This Month: 18!” Like a school report card, complete with a smiling broccoli sticker. The implication was clear: strawberry yoghurt can kill you but fret not, our algorithm cares.

She should have worried more about their steps, she thought. Or maybe she should have worried less — less about steps, and more about the way Jack picked the burnt bits off white toast, or the grim look he gave mashed potatoes after the latest TikTok exposé. Or maybe she just should have voted differently, somewhere back in the timeline, before step counts became a matter of national record.

But what could she change now? She could banish chips from the house, but nothing could stop the streaming of Jack’s heartbeats through cyberspace. She could swap jobs, take up power walking, become the world’s most enthusiastic celery-juice-drinking-jogger. But none of it would return those years of thinking they were fine because “everyone” said they were fine.

Molly, practical and breezy, appeared on the porch. In her hands sat a plate, crowned with the most extravagant slice of carrot cake Rose had ever seen — an architectural slab, draped in thick white icing, the colour and shape of snow as drawn by a child.

“Brought cake,” Molly said triumphantly, pushing it into Rose’s view.

Rose laughed, a laugh with a crack in it, and raised her coffee cup in a small salute. “Carrots — they’ve got to be healthy, haven’t they?”

Molly grinned. “Absolutely. Practically a salad.”

As Rose lifted the fork and let the sugary triumph of carrot and cream take over, she thought, for the briefest moment, that maybe the only thing wrong with the world was that no one had invented a happiness score for moments like this.

FOOTNOTE: Robert F Kennedy says his vision is for every American to be using a wearable device within 4 years.