Literature / The Future (2013)

The future. The immortality was finally achieved, and no one has to die from the old age anymore. But everything comes at a price, and the price of eternal life is that you would never have children — unless you're willing to sacrifice your own eternity to give them theirs, by willingly registering your child and getting injection of "ax", a drug which strips you of your immortality — and accelerates your ageing.

Any illegal parents gets forcibly injected with "ax", and their children gets taken to the special boarding schools, where they gets trained to act as the police force to deal with other illegal parents, taught to hate their parents and seeing their service as the "redemption" for the crimes of their parents.

Welcome to the utopia. Welcome to the future.

The Future is a sci-fi novel by Dmitri Glukhovsky, which discusses the topic of immortality — and why humanity isn't ready for it.

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Tropes:

• Above the Influence: Yan tries to resist Anneli's attempt to have sex with him in the park, as she's drugged at the time, and he's not okay with it going that way, as it's not her conscious decision; he fails.
• Affably Evil: Shreyer is always nice and cultured, even when he's angry at Yan for failing him. This doesn't stop him from uttery destroying his life once Yan angers him enough.
• Anti-Hero: Yan zigzags between unpleasant Nominal Hero, driven by his weird, forbidden love to Anneli rather than any genuine heroism, and borderline Villain Protagonist.
• Arch-Enemy: Yan really hates 503 ever since the boarding school. It's mutual, as 503 hates him in turn because Yan has condemned him to rot in the boarding school forever, and he barely made it out, despite 503 being willing to left the old hatred behind.
• Arch Nemesis Dad: In the penultimate chapter, Yan learns that the person he hates the most (after 503, who already perished by then) — Rokamora — is his biological father. This comes as surprise for Rokamora as well, as their hatred is mutual.
• Asshole Victim:
  • The mob of Pakistan thugs who came after Raj's head gets burned to death. This happens after them killing an old man and being ready to lynch the entire family, over perceived "crime". No one feels sorry for them, in-universe or out.
  • In his final appearance, 503 gets beaten to death by Yan, who only realises whom he just killed after removing his mask and seeing 503's forehead smashed into bloody mess. No one calls him out on this, as no one feels sorry for the guy.
• Attempted Rape: 503 nearly raped Yan at one point back in boarding school. Yan only managed to avoid it because he accidentally peed due to stress, which distracted 503 and allowed Yan to bite off his ear.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Beatrice Fukuyama choses to explode entire tower along with herself, the rest of activists and the attackers, rather than being caught (again) and used in the Party's propaganda, posthumously.
• Big Brother Is Employing You: Yan works for Falange, a special organisation which tracks down illegal children and puts them to special boarding schools where they would be trained into new Falange recruits.
• Big Damn Heroes: Yan zaps 503 and takes away Anneli for the reasons unclear even to himself. She was about to be killed, assuming she wouldn't die from the injuries caused by 503 and his group.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Devendra dies just a page away from the birth of his grandson, who looks nearly identically to him. The family being Indians, they acknowledge it as a sign of reincarnation, and names the boy Davindra as well.
• Boarding School of Horrors: The boarding schools not so much raises the children, as breaks their will and shapes them into the loyal servants of the Party of Immortality. They aren't allowed to have names, only numbers, they're indoctrinated to hate their parents for the "crime" of giving birth to them (in fact, telling this to their face and rejecting them is one of the mandatory challenges, so-called "the Ring", as the parent is always the one to call), and horribly punished for breaking the rules by being sent to "the Crypt", which either breaks your or kills you. But the worst part are the other "cadets": it's "kill or be killed" environment, with little control from the "teachers", so horrible abuse, including sexual, is rampant. The protagonist, Yan Nachtigal, has graduated from one of such boarding schools, and his flashbacks to this experience is shown as subplot.
• Call-Back: In their first meeting, Ellen tells Yan about the ember, how it preserves the fly inside it, forever unchanged. In their last meeting, she compares herself to a fly in the ember, meaning that just like that fly, she would remain trapped forever, with no hope for changes.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Anneli finally has a chance to talk with her mother, Margo, and call her out on everything bad which had happened to her due Margo's unwillingness to take responsibility — Anneli being risen by only her father, who was then injected with ax because Margo valued her career over her family and not bothering to register pregnancy; Anneli being forced into the boarding school; Margo's quick decision to scoop out the damaged organs (rendering Anneli sterile) without even trying to help her, while being ready to make yet another family and illegal child (Anneli suspects that once Margo loses interest to them, she would leave them for death as well).
• Celibate Hero: Downplayed with Immortals. They are not prohibited from having sex, but they are strictly forbidden to have any sorts of romantic attachments, as it may lead to them betraying the system and trying to start a family.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • In earlier chapters, there's frequently-mentioned screen portraying Toscana in Yan's condo. When Anneli (drugged at the time) sees it, it motivates her to go and find this place in reality. This sets in motion the chain of events which leads to Yan falling in love with Anneli.
  • Besides the screen, another often-mentioned element in Yan's condo is the old, worn out Micky Mouse mask; it gets used by Anneli when going to find Toscana, to hide her face. At least with police, it works.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • One of the earlier chapters has Yan visiting the public bathhouse, and (unsuccessfully) trying to reanimate the drowned guy whom he calls "Fred", which leads him into conflict with the administration, as they value comfort of their clients over saving someone's life, and it looked "too disturbing". Much later "Fred" emerges again, as Yan gets arrested for "killing" him.
  • One of the tasks Yan receives from Shreyer involves arresting Dr Beatrice Fukuyama, who works on the virus capable of suppressing the ax, which the Party of Life plans to spread across the world. In the end, Yan uses another virus created by her to destroy the immortality, as by that point he grows to agree with her views.
• Contraception Deception: Rokamora tries to explain (not even excuse — he knows that this is inexcusable) himself running away after impregnating Anna by her not warning him that she quit using contraception, so the pregnancy (and the horrible price one of them has to pay for it) took him by surprise.
• Crapsaccharine World: The Future calls itself "Utopia novel", but to actually be happy to live in such "utopia", you have to give up love, family, children, faith, personal space and sense of life. Most people are perfectly fine with that, being completely unaware that there are fewer and fewer resources and living place. But the protagonist isn't part of this happily ignorant society; he's the member of Falange, the special structure build up from "illegal" children who're "paying up" for the crime of being born with eternal service to maintain the system, and through him, we see that this "utopia" is actually a nightmare.
• Creative Sterility: Beatrice points that humanity basically stopped creating anything meaningful as soon as it became immortal, dedicating all its time to making fun and pointlessly spending day by day, month by month, year by year.
• Crippling Overspecialisation: Disney went out of business due to their entire business being dependant on the children and families, and the new world having neither. Barely anyone remembers them now, though Yan has an old, badly-aged mask of Micky Mouse which he bought at some point for the reason unknown even to himself.
• Crying Wolf: In boarding school, 55 was infamous for his constant lies, to the point that when he actually tells the truth for any reason, no one believes him.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Even before the revelation of the true horrors Yan lived through in the boarding school, many hints were dropped to indicate that he lived through something very nasty before the start of the story. The similar hints then starts dropping for Anneli, who later gets revealed to live through the same nastiness, but, unlike Yan, she managed to run away before they broke her.
• Dead Guy Junior:
  • Devendra's grandson gets born right after Devendra's Heroic Sacrifice, and looks almost like him. Believing that it's a reincarnation, the parents calls him after grandfather.
  • Doubly Subverted with Yan and Anneli's daughter; as Anneli died giving birth to her, Yan is reluctant to call the girl after Anneli, as it would mean trying to replace her; but at later point, he comes up with another name — he calls her Anna, after his mother, whom he finally forgave after learning her true story.
• Death by Childbirth: Anneli dies giving birth to her and Yan's twins. One of the twins dies too, but the first baby, a girl, survives. Yan calls the girl Anna.
• Dirty Coward: Rokamora lied to Anneli about his true name and pretended to be in love with her, but the moment he gets confronted by Yan, he tries to sell her out to save his skin, and then abandons her to her doom. Anneli eventually realises that he lied to her all that time, and falls in love with Yan, who came to kill her — but actually saved her, both from his subordinates, and from this life. Erich Shreyer later reveals that Rokamora's cowardice doesn't end on just that, and that Anneli wasn't the first woman he impregnated and run away to save his skin. Even Rokamora admits that he's a coward, though he regrets being one.
• Downfall by Sex: Yan's life went downhill once he slept with Anneli and ended up impregnating her.
• Driven to Suicide: Ellen Shreyer jumps from her tower, no longer being able to live as Shreyer's "pet" and seeing no sense in her life, especially without Yan.
• Dying Race: At some point, India and Pakistan have wiped out each other in the nuclear war. The few survivors managed to escape to the other countries as illegal immigrants; they are still at each other's throats. What little is left from their territories were annexed by China (now called Indochina), which tries to clean up the nuclear mess to make the territory suitable for colonisation.
• Ear Ache: 503 loses his ear when Yan literally bites it off. This happens when 503 tries to rape Yan.
• Establishing Character Moment: In his first appearance (in flashback), 503 tries to rape Yan. In another, he actually rapes Anneli, causing her to have miscarriage. He wouldn't become any better from here.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Erich Shreyer sincerely believes that he loved Anna — despite being the one who made her life into eternal hell. When Anna run away from him, only to end up pregnant from another man, Erich spent four years searching for her and readily accepted her back; since she refused to terminate her pregnancy, he allowed her to be "axed" (Yan was put into boarding school on Shreyer's orders), after which he put her under luxury house arrest, while keeping her drugged to make her last days "happy". He completely misses anything wrong with that, sincerely believing that he did his best for her. When he puts Ellen into similar conditions (minus drugs), she ultimately offs herself.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: Rokamora portraits himself as the heroic activist fighting to abolish the cruel Law of Choice, and make people free to make families and raise children. In truth, he's a Dirty Coward who's ready to sacrifice his wife and unborn son to save his skin. He's perfectly fine with provoking the slaughter to gain supporters, but would never put his life at risk.
• Fantastic Underclass: In the world of eternal youth, those who no longer have it (universally — due to injection of ax, to create a family and make the children, which the propaganda portraits as something bordering on extreme perversion) are considered to be the lowest class; no one likes them, seeing them as some sort of abominations, possibly contagious, and wants to avoid them. No one wants to hire them, many companies refuses to service them to preserve their reputation of prestigious business, and they are forced to live in ghettos, not even because the law presses them there, but because it's the only place where they can live.
• First Person Narration: The novel is narrated from Yan's perspective all the time.
• Foregone Conclusion: The last chapter where Basil appears has him telling Yan that he wants to desert and escape Europe. We already know that it didn't end well from Yan regularly referring to Basil being dead. And indeed, the very last lines of the chapter tells that he was caught and executed.
• Free-Love Future: The future society sees nothing wrong with having lots of sex, sometimes even in public. However, forming stable couples is frowned upon, as it's considered to be "weird" and "old-fashioned"; the reason for latter, of course, is to discourage people from making babies.
• Freudian Excuse: Yan acts as the utter jerk nearly constantly. The series of flashbacks to his days in the boarding school shows that he had incredibly horrible childhood, and nearly everything bad — his pathologic hatred for people who chose to make children, extremely negative opinion about both his mother and the Christianity (as it brings associations with the day his happy life has ended), and even his claustrophobia — can be traced back to him being taken away from his mother, and raised in the boarding school which put its best efforts into breaking him and reforging into a tool.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: So-called "happiness pills" is the (legal and highly advertised) drug which makes the person "happy". You just have to keep consuming them. This also makes people lose track on time. Yan quit using them, despite multiple people's recommendations.
  • Yan drugs Anneli with those pills in attempt to deal with her depression. He exceeds the recommended dosage, which leads to her forcing him to go on adventure, nearly getting them into trouble by her crazy behaviour, and then forcing him to have sex with her.
  • Yan spent his month-long "vacation" by consuming those pills and going to the bathhouse, which led to him losing track on time until the day he was invited to the Party's summit has come.
  • In her last days, Yan's mother Anna was kept constantly drugged with those pills by Erich Shreyer, who sincerely believed that he makes her "happy" by doing so. He completely misses anything wrong with it.
• Gilded Cage: Shreyer keeps his women near himself, all the time; they have everything they may want — except for freedom... which means that they don't have anything.
  • Ellen Shreyer isn't actually happy in her role as Shreyer's wife at all, and desperately seeks any way to break away from this routine. This includes her cheating on Erich with Yan (with whom she actually fell in love with). When she learns that Yan doesn't reciprocate the feelings, and now she has no chance to escape her "happy life", she soon choses to jump from her tower to end this miserable life.
    Yan: I really do care what would happen to you!
    Ellen: Nothing would happen to me! Nothing ever would happen to me! I would stay in this luxury penthouse, under glass roof, young and beautiful, like a fly in the ember, and nothing ever would happen to me!
  • Yan's mother was actually Shreyer's first (or at least previous) wife. She suffered the same way as Ellen — trapped in the luxury conditions which actually feels like a prison to her — with no ways to escape. This was the reason why she chose to run away, to try to start a new life. The rest is history.
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: Ellen cheating on Erich with Yan retroactively becomes sympathetic once it gets revealed just how tyrannical, Gilded Cage-style their marriage is, with Ellen desperately seeking to break away from it, and believing that she found a new love — only to learn that she can't be with Yan, and he actually loves another woman. This is when she breaks, and choses to jump from the tower.
• Hannibal Lecture: Yan tries to insult Father Andre, his orientation and his religion, to gain the sense of victory at least in that. Andre counters everything he says, ultimately leaving Yan no choice but to shut up.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Yan just can't decide on which side he is, all his life. In the boarding school, he tries to resist the indoctrination, but breaks and becomes Immortal. Yan can't decide whether to follow Shreyer's orders and kill Anneli, or help her to escape; in the end, he tries to smuggle her to Barcelona, where he nearly starts a new life with her. Then, after the police force escorting Panam president on official visit gets massacred by the angry mob agitated by Rokamora, Anneli runs away, while Yan rejoins the Immortals during their raid on the city. Then Yan gets backstabbed and "axed", and, in the last ditch move, uses the virus developed by Beatrice to wipe out the immortality for good, knowing that he wouldn't live to see the results.
• He Knows Too Much: Yan is forced to shoot El, as he knows too much and may ruin his plan how to save the world, as he's too stubborn on maintaining the law to keep quiet about it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Davindra willingly goes outside and provokes the thugs. This leads to him being beheaded with a dull saw, but prevents Raj from rushing outside in attempt to play a hero and thus opening the way for thugs to kill off the rest of the family (which was their plan all along). As result, everyone else stays inside and manages to fight off.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The thugs came to kill Raj's family. They gets killed when he, with Yan's help, throws some oil on them; to their doom, the thugs were mostly armed with torches... The result was nasty.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: A prostitute whom Yan hires during his moment of internal struggle, which involved talking with god and his mother, blaming them for everything which has happened to him, sees that despite looking like he's completely nuts, he actually needs her presence, and doesn't try to distract him or run away, allowing him to let it all out (which help him to fix up his mind). She's noticeably more empathic than nearly everyone Yan ever encounters.
• Hope Spot:
  • Yan and Anneli seemingly manage to find a place where no one would find them — Barcelona, the state within state where no Immortal can show up without being lynched. Unfortunately, it's exactly when Ted Mendes (the president of Panam) decides to visit Barcelona, disturbed by persistent rumours that it's a ghetto inhabited by people who live in horrible conditions, rejected by Europe; and it's when Rokamora decides to re-emerge and agitate the people to attack the police forces protecting Mendes, which, in turn, gives Bering (one of the leaders of the Party of Immortality) an excuse to send the Immortals (in full forces) to Barcelona and wipe it out for good. It would only go From Bad to Worse from here.
  • Yan seemingly finds a clinic which may suppress ax in his body, buying him more time. Turns out that it was a scam, and now he has even less time left to live, and no money.
• Hufflepuff House: Entirely of the story takes place in Europe. The other countries gets only background mentioning, though three of them gets more than the others:
  • Panam (short for Panamerica) frequently gets background mention, but has little influence on the plot. However, the visit of their president, Ted Mendes, is what indirectly triggers one of the novel's Wham Episodes.
  • Russia is the country which invented the immortality serum — and used it only on its leaders, as well as for profit. It gets mentioned several times as one of the main hellholes of the world due to their leaders' horrible "profit first, population be damned" management. It's also implied that Yan's mother may be from there, judging from her name and surname.
  • The China is barely described, aside from the fact that they castrated all their males, with their expansion in Siberia (sold to them by Russians) and in India (they are clearing out the radioactive wasteland) getting more attention, but just barely.
• Hypocrite: Rokamora is the high-ranking member of the Party of Life, which fights for abolishing the controversial Law of Choice, yet when his life gets put at risk, he tries to sacrifice Anneli and her child to save his skin. Even Yan gets surprised by this.
• I Have Many Names: Yan always introduces himself under fake name to the other people. Anneli for some time knows him as Ejen (Yan later tells her the real one), Beatrice Fukuyama knows him as Jacob, and when he was arrested for killing "Fred", the police called him Nick, as it was the name he used in the bathhouse. Those are just the plot-important ones he uses.
• I Have No Son!: Inverted. It's standard practice in the boarding schools to force cadets to go through "the Ring" challenge; it involves them getting called by the parent who got injected with ax for their birth, and tell them that they don't consider them to be their parents, that they hate them, and would become the Immortals to find and punish the others like them.
  • Just like the other Immortals, Yan hates his mother and regularly blames her in his internal monologues for giving birth to him instead of aborting him or doing everything officially, thus dooming him to such crappy life despite it being perfectly known how the illegal pregnancies ends. But his true memory frequently tries to break through his indoctrination. In the end, he learns the truth about his mother, and forgives her.
  • Anneli was taught to hate her father (the one who got injected), just like the other cadets, but she actually hates her mother instead, as she's the one who got away with it because she didn't want to take any responsibility. Anneli doesn't consider Margo to be her mother, and still can't forgive her, feeling that she'd betrayed her and her father (who raised her basically by himself up until they were forcibly separated).
• Insistent Appellation:
  • Until Yan came at terms with the fact that this is his daughter, he persistently referred to the baby as "it", to everyone's annoyance. The word is even marked with italics in the text for emphasis.
  • Beatrice knows Yan as "Jacob". She ignores him when he says that his real name is Yan, saying that it means nothing to her; it was Jacob who changed her life, so she would call him that.
• Intimate Psychotherapy: At one point, Yan visits the church-turned-brothel (complete with thematic fetish cosplay), which leads to rather surreal scene, as it's not clear what exactly he wanted to find — a brothel, or a church, as the scene mixes up both. In the end, him talking with the prostitute (who played Maria) fixes up his mind, with no actual sex happening.
• Important Haircut: Anneli asks Yan to help with shaving her bald, as the old haircut reminds her too much about Rokamora (it was his favourite).
• Ironic Name: The Party of Life is supposedly run by the people who're perfectly fine with blowing up the entire towers full of millions, if not billions, of people, to make their point. The irony gets lampshaded by Shreyer. And it's not merely the propaganda of their enemies, as we meet at least two of their leaders willing to do exactly that (and one actually doing).
• It Is Dehumanising: When Yan annoys the people around him enough by persistently referring to his newborn daughter as "it", he gets told to start referring to her as "she", and give her a name for once. He does the first thing almost immediately, but it still takes time to come up with a name.
• Jerkass: Yan acts like a massive jerk for most of the story; even his inner thoughts are very negative. The only moments when he's not like this is when he's with Anneli. Most of it can be traced back to boarding school, but he continues acting like this even after becoming an outlaw and ditching his old loyalties.
• Karmic Death: Invoked by Shreyer, who wanted for Yan specifically to kill Rokamora, knowing that Yan is actually his son. He considers this a fitting death, as Yan becoming Immortal is Rokamora's fault in the first place, because he chose to run away instead of taking responsibility, thus depriving Yan of happy life.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • Yan shoots El offscreen between the end of the penultimate chapter, and the start of the final one. We learn why he did this only later.
  • When Yan sees digital copy of Rokamora announcing his surrender and disbandment of the Party of Life, he's sure that the real Rokamora was already killed by that point.
  • At some point after freeing Yan, Ellen chose to jump from the top of her tower. Shreyer tells Yan about it in one of his calls once he discovers it.
• Like a Son to Me: Shreyer makes offhand comment that for him, Yan is like "the son [he] never had". Despite the clues indicating that Yan may be indeed his son, it turns out that Yan is a son of Shreyer's late wife (from another man), and Shreyer tries to accept him in her memory.
• Lost Lenore: Erich Shreyer really loved Yan's mother, Anna. Even after her death (despite her running from him and conceiving a child from other man), he still keeps her old room intact, and forbids Ellen from changing anything there.
• Malevolent Masked Men: The Immortals always wears masks when on-duty (Apollo masks for men, Athena masks for women); said duty involves taking away the "illegal" children to be trained as more Immortals, while their parents gets injected with ax. The "teachers" wears the masks of higher gods; for males, it's Zeus, for females, presumably, Hera.
• Mal Mariée: Being Erich Shreyer's wife means living in the Gilded Cage, forever. This's what led Anna to run away with Rokamora in hope to see some freedom (and because she wanted babies, while Erich was sterile) — only for him to leave her once she got pregnant, being too scared to take responsibility. Ellen Shreyer cheats on Erich with Yan for the same reason (Erich later reveals that he was aware, and actually introduced them for that exact reason, thinking that this means throwing the dog a bone), as it's the only piece of freedom she has.
• Manipulative Editing: The movies available in boarding schools are intentionally picked and edited in such a way that they starts looking like advertising "making families would end badly for you" morale (which they're trying to enforce, as part of indoctrination); most watchers misses blatant plot holes created by this. Yan and Basil's favourite movie is not an exception; they only finds the whole copy much later, as adults, as sees that the movie actually had the opposite morale.
• Meaningful Rename: The boarding schools' graduates are forced to take different surnames, as part of them rejecting their parents.
• Mistaken for Gay: At one point Yan gets mistaken for gay by another gay, who tries to flirt with him. When Yan realises this, he insults and threatens the guy.
• My Greatest Second Chance: Anneli's mother, Margo, now deeply regrets not taking any responsibility for Anneli's fate and thus allowing her husband to get injected with ax, and Anneli taken to the boarding school. She now works in Barcelona, helping the other mothers, and has another child with her new husband. When she gets called out by Anneli, who still can't forgive her, and who then suggests her to do everything officially this time and get injected with ax to prove that she's changed, she agrees. Fortunately, Anneli is unwilling to go through with it, she's satisfied with her being ready to do it, showing that she's sincere, thought she's still unwilling to have anything with her.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Anneli tries to repay Yan for his help, and find his mother. This alerts Shreyer. While the attack on Barcelona ultimately happens for unrelated reason, this later leads to Shreyer realising that Yan has betrayed him, both Yan and Anneli being "axed", and Yan nearly dying in the custody.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: When the squad of Immortals comes to take away his daughter, Yan tries to resist and beats one of them to the point of breaking his skull in the forehead, killing him. After removing the mask, he realises that it was his Arch-Enemy, 503.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • When Yan sees 503 raping Anneli (the order was to just kill her), which brings back the memory of Yan himself being nearly raped by him, Yan zaps him to comatose condition.
  • The final flashback to Yan's past shows him, Basil and the rest "graduating" from the boarding school, forming a new dozen in which he would work from now on. This dozen also included 503. But there's a last ritual left — as they would work together till the end, each one should say whether they believe that someone of them shouldn't leave the boarding school — dooming them to stay here forever. By that point, 503 seemingly changed, stopping acting like asshole, but Yan still condemns him, despite everyone else forgiving him. In any other situation it would be extremely cruel, but if there's any person deserving this, it's 503.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Yan has nothing positive to say about gays, christians, children and parents, and never holds up. Generally, people around him react negatively to it.
• Population Control: Each major nation described (aside from Russia, which is another story) has its own way to maintain the population even with immortality involved:
  • As Europe is severely overpopulated, the people are forbidden to make babies. The people who conceive ones gets a choice — terminate the pregnancy, or inject one of the parents with ax (ageing accelerator), so they would quickly die and the baby would eventually take their place. Those who try to hide, gets injected by force, and their children gets taken away and trained as the members of Falange — the special organisation which tracks down such illegals and deals with them. To reduce amount of people who still tries, the government uses aggressive propaganda which portraits having children as perversion, procreation instinct as barbarism, and the old age as the punishment for one's inability to make the right choice.
  • Panamerica (also known as Panam) has quotas on people who are allowed to have immortality, with everyone else being mortal. The only way to earn immortality is to wait till someone dies, and buy their quota on the incredibly expensive auction (and prices keeps going up each year). This system frequently results in one's children (and their far descendants) ageing on the eyes of their parents, while immortals themselves often gets assassinated to free up their quotas. The current system is maintained by Republican party (currently ruling), while Democrats are (unsuccessfully) pushing for installing European-style system (everyone gets immortality, but childbirth is limited).
  • China (now known as Indochina) took even more severe approach than the others; all their male population was forcibly sterilised, and anyone who finds a way to make babies anyway, gets executed.
• Posthumous Character: Basil is long dead before the story starts. Yan frequently remembers him, while the series of flashbacks shows both Yan's past and the history of Basil's downfall.
• Pragmatic Pansexuality: Anneli exploited a (female) doctor falling in love with her (or, at least, lusting after her) to fake her death from the illness instead of being transferred away after failing "the Ring" challenge; said doctor later smuggles her to Barcelona, expecting that Anneli would keep contact with her; Anneli didn't.
• Rape as Drama:
  • 38 was picked by a couple of particularly brutish "students" as a target for their abuse, likely for his "cute" look (Yan compares him to cherub). In return for protection, he's forced to sleep with them, which he clearly dislikes. They seemingly stop once they notice the Implied Death Threat in his promise that he "would never be hurt again", and realise that it's not the empty warning.
  • Anneli's presence in the plot basically starts with her being cruelly gang-raped by the Immortals, particularly 503. This leads her to massive stress, not in the last turn because it causes miscarriage (she was on a third month of her pregnancy at the moment). Then it gets revealed that Anneli was so injured, she's unable to bear children anymore.
• Rapid Aging: Ax (short for "accelerator") is the special drug which neutralises the immortality vaccine, and causes rapid destruction of the body, killing off the injected in roughly ten years at best. As additional effect, it renders the person sterile. Both Yan and Anneli gets injected with double dose of it towards the end.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: Anneli is dead, Yan is about to die too, and his enemies are just as powerful, while his daughter is forced to leave Europe, to be raised by her grandmother and never remember her parents. But he manages to release the virus which would spread around the world and make the immortality serum useless — giving the humanity one last chance to save itself. There's a reason why the novel ends not with "the end", but rather "the beginning".
• Really Gets Around: Judging from what both he and Shreyer says, Rokamora used to sleep with any woman he meets. The only times he tried to make a stable relationship were with Anna, then with Anneli, but both times he run away after impregnating them, due to being too scared to take responsibility.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Cadets who fails "the Ring" challenge (they are tested on the polygraph to see that they don't lie) gets taken away. No one knows for sure what happens to them, only that they "never leave the boarding schools" (which may mean anything). Anneli later reveals that they gets trained as "teachers", who then gets permanently assigned to boarding schools to train the other cadets, with no chance to ever leave. This explains why they are so abusive.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Erich Shreyer, of all people, tells Jesus Rokamora why he's an utter douchebag, countering almost all his attempts to defend himself. While Shreyer himself is no saint by any measure, nothing he says to Rokamora is wrong; here's everything: Rokamora's hypocrisy, his extreme cowardice, him dumping all fault on other people. However, past certain point, it stats getting less about Rokamora's faults, and more about Shreyer's "awesomness", allowing Rokamora to regain some points.
• Recurring Dreams: Yan keeps seeing dreams either about the boarding school, or him going to those Toscana hills, so he may reunite with his mother (no matter what he says about her during the day). Those dreams are very painful for him, so he prefers to use sleeping pills to see no dreams at all, but they not always works. The dreams about Toscana stops when Yan falls in love with Anneli, as she "overwrites" them.
• Red Herring:
  • During his attempt to escape the boarding school, Yan gets joined by 38 and 220 — the cute constantly abused boy who wants to escape this hell, and the resident snitch who tries to blackmail Yan into cooperation right from the start, respectively. To Yan's surprise, it's 38 who rats them out, not 220.
  • Right after Anneli tries to find Yan's mother by using her own ID (which alerts Shreyer), the huge police force arrives into Barcelona. However, as it turns out, it's here not for them, but to protect Panam president, Ted Mendes, with his official visit.
  • Yan is highly implied to be Erich Shreyer's illegitimate son. In truth, turns out that Shreyer is sterile, and Yan's mother conceived from another man. That's why Erich acts so strange to him — he tries to accept the son of his late wife as his own.
  • When Yan's life goes to hell, it's implied that the reason for that is him being caught sleeping with Shreyer's wife Ellen. Turns out, Shreyer doesn't care — in fact, he allowed Ellen to sleep with Yan as "a gift" (for both); Erich doesn't care about his wife's infidelity. The true "crime" Yan was punished for is unrelated.
  • Anneli dumps Yan to return to Rokamora after his broadcast where he lies that he actually cared about Anneli and was separated from her by force. Soon afterwards, Yan gets "axed" for impregnating Anneli, meaning that Anneli officially registered her pregnancy and chose Yan as the one to die, while still staying with Rokamora, which Yan understandably considers to be a betrayal. After almost a year, when Ellen manages to take him out of jail (where he awaits the trial for crime he didn't commit, which very likely may happen when it would be already too late for him), Yan manages to find Anneli... and it turns out that she was "axed" too... because she has twins. Yan immediately forgives her.
• Replacement Goldfish: Ellen is basically Erich Shreyer's attempt to replace Anna, rather than the real person whom he loves. Not that his love would be much better.
• Replacement Scrappy: In-Universe; Anneli replaced much more popular girl as the number 1, which the former 1's friends didn't take well (feeling that she "doesn't deserve" to take her place), and did everything in their power to make her life a living hell.
• Resignations Not Accepted: The Immortals are forced to keep serving to "redeem" their "crimes", forever. They have no right to resign, and if they try to desert, they would be hunted down, ritually castrated and sent to the grinder. Just like happened to Basil.
• Room 101: The appropriately nicknamed "Crypt" is the box where they put the lawbreaking cadets. They keep you there, without food, water or opportunity to use a toilet, until you break and start to beg for forgiveness, regretting all the past mistakes — or die. No one comes from there unchanged, and everyone's is justifiably afraid of it.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: Exaggerated. Despite being the nation whose scientists invented the immortality vaccine, Russians chose to secretly use it only on their leaders, and then sell it to America and Europe, lying to their society that the experiment has failed and horribly killed the test subjects. This was three hundred years before the start of the story; in the present time, their old leaders are still in power, while the people themselves are barely holding up to life, dying from hunger, infections and ongoing civil war, with average lifespan being reduced to thirty years. They are taught to believe that the world outside is even worse, but some people are still trying to escape.
• Sadistic Choice: The controversial Law of Choice in Europe. If the couple manages to conceive (despite all propaganda agitating not to), they have limited time to register the pregnancy, which would lead to one of them being injected with ax — a chemical which would not only suppress their immortality, but also quickly age them, killing them in ten years at best. Alternatively, they can terminate the pregnancy, so neither parent has to die. Not registering the pregnancy at all and going on hiding would only result in the parents hunted down, one of them "axed" anyway and the child being taken away into the Boarding School of Horrors; most gets caught very quickly, some manages to hide for years, but the end is always the same; no cases of parents hiding for more than five years are known.
• Sex Signals Death: In Europe, if a new baby gets born, one of the parents has to die, by being injected with ax — ageing accelerator — which leaves them ten years to live at best. This is what caused the deaths of Yan's mother and Anneli's father, and what made them both "axed" for conceiving on their own; Anneli ultimately dies giving birth, while Yan lives long enough for the story to end.
• Sins of Our Fathers: If you make babies and don't register the pregnancy (which would require one of the parents to get injected with ax and die after several years), the child would be taken away and put into the special boarding school, where they would be trained in horrible conditions to become the Immortals — special forces tasked with finding the other "illegal" children. Amongst the other things, they are taught to hate their parents as criminals, who committed the worst crime of all — gave birth to them; having to talk with your parent (the one who got the ax) and telling that you hate them and don't recognise as your parent is actually mandatory part of the training, with only one attempt given. The eternal life of servitude is their "redemption".
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • Shreyer's father worked on his own version of immortality serum. He died of old age before he got the chance to finish it, and then the Russians came up with their own variant, also revealing that his method was doomed to fail anyway.
  • Basil wanted to escape with his new woman out of Europe and start new life. They were caught, with him being executed, and her likely being injected with ax.
  • Played With regarding Yan. Sure, everything in his life was destroyed or taken away — his friends, his family, his love, even his own life is about to end — but he doesn't care, as it's the first time when he actually does something by himself, and his last act is to give the world a hope for the future.
• State Sec: The Falange, whose members are known as Immortals, is the special structure in service of the ruling party, the Party of Immortality, in charge of finding and punishing the "criminals" who dare to procreate out of system; the parents gets injected with ax, while children gets sent to the boarding schools to be trained as new Immortals. A lot of people actually dislike their brutal ways, but as long as the ruling party remains in power, it wouldn't change a one bit.
• The Stool Pigeon: In the boarding school, 220 was infamous for his ability to get along with everyone. However, people who trusts him tend to get into trouble as their secrets "somehow" gets learned by the teachers. They are careful enough to not use that info right away, to make it harder for their snitch to get caught.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Basil was the only one who came through the Falange training without breaking and without losing ability to love — his mother, and the woman he fell in love with later. This got him killed. Yan's soul tears apart between hate born out of mixture of his upbringing and envy to Basil remaining human despite everything, and genuine adoration he has for his best and only true friend; Yan frequently laments that he had to die for his dreams.
• Tragic Keepsake: The screen in Yan's apartments is set to always show Toscana hills. The reason for this is because it's the last thing which reminds him about his late friend Basil (particularly, their favourite movie they used to watch together), and because he keeps seeing the dreams where he (as a child) goes there, and reunites with his mother.
• Trauma Button: When Yan sees 503 raping Anneli, it immediately reminds him how he was nearly raped by 503 himself. Then 503 makes another unwarranted comment, and Yan snaps and zaps him with a shocker into comatose condition.
• Vestigial Empire:
  • Europe is on the brink, as overpopulation and lack of both resources and territory pushes it to the brink, with common people slowly, but surely losing more and more of their comfort. Also, the immortals suffers from Creative Sterility and can't come up with anything useful for survival, or any true art. The civilisation is already way past its glory days, and continues decaying.
  • With its leaders gaining immortality, Russia started descending deeper and deeper into abyss, and by the start of the story, it lacks natural resources, particularly oil and gas (everything was sold out to Europe and Panam), rivers (the same), and now it sells out the last thing it has — territory — to Indochina. People, meanwhile, are beyond poverty, are dying from the once easily curable illnesses, and have average lifespan of thirty years. On top of this, they're suffering the civil war, with unclear perspectives for the nation.
• Villain Has a Point: When Shreyer gives Rokamora "The Reason You Suck" Speech, he's mostly right. Unfortunately, he fails to see keeping Anna trapped in the Gilded Cage as anything bad.
• We Can Rule Together: Everything what Yan went through was Shreyer's attempt to "prepare" him and raise him in such a way that he would be ready to become the son Shreyer never had (even if he's not his biological son, he's still the son of Anna, Shreyer's late wife). In the end, he gives him a chance — he may give up his daughter, and stay with Shreyer, or persist and be destroyed. Yan asks for more time, which he actually uses to finish his plan, knowing that Shreyer would soon catch up and kill him.
• Wham Episode:
  • "The Purgatory" chapter, where Barcelona gets destroyed, all its denizens "axed" and deported, and Anneli disappears, presumably returning to Rokamora. This puts an end to Yan's attempt to start a new life.
  • "The Time" chapter, where 503 gets Yan "axed" for impregnating Anneli, and arrested, permanently shattering his ties with the old life.
  • "Rokamora" chapter has a talk between Yan, Rokamora and Shreyer, finally answering all the questions about Yan's past, and the past of his mother — completely changing a lot of things.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: The running theme of novel. The immortality doesn't worth it.
  • The immortal people are frequently stated to be tired, bored and soulless people with no any future or past, only the meaningless present with no sense in life. And "soulless" here is not a figure of speech; it's indeed stated several times that the immortality somehow robbed people of their souls, on genetic level; by "souls", the novel means ability to love, to create, to live.
  • Devendra states that he doesn't want eternal life, as it takes away the reason to live; in fact, he doesn't want anything eternal — it's the fact that things are with you temporarily which makes them worthy. He gets proven right soon afterwards, when his Heroic Sacrifice gives his life much more meaning in death than most people in Europe have in their entire existence.
  • Beatrice Fukuyama spent much time trying to find a cure for ax, not in the last turn because she was "axed" herself for having illegal son. After Yan destroyed her lifetime work on Shreyer's orders, she realised that there's no reason to fear death — it's only natural; the one thing they should fear is the eternal life. Her second invention, which she dedicated to Yan, who opened her eyes on it, is the cure for immortality, which she wants to spread across the world, sincerely believing that this is a salvation. Yan refuses to believe at first, but ultimately he's the one who releases it in the world.
• You Are Number 6: Until you "graduate" from the boarding school, you're not allowed to use your name (even if you had one before) — in fact, cadets are explicitly forbidden to use any names or nicknames, only the official numbers. This is done to further dehumanise them. Amongst the others, we learn about 717 (Yan), 503 (Arturo), 906 (Basil), 220 (Victor, the resident snitch), 38 (abused boy) and Anneli (1).
• You Have Failed Me: Shreyer states that Yan being "axed" is his punishment for keeping screwing up, despite repeatedly receiving additional chances. He may make up his mind and start behaving now (and receive a treatment suppressing ax), or die.

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