Saturday Afternoon

In the year 2099, nobody asked, “How old are you?”
Instead, they asked, “What’s your number?”
The number appeared on every smartwatch at birth. It was simple, impossible to change, and always correct.
Age of Death: 84 years, 2 months, 11 days.
Or 63.
Or 102.
Nobody knew how this technology worked. The company that created it, Chronos Systems, claimed the watches used a quantum algorithm that could see every possible future and identify the one that would happen. Governments had tested it for decades. It had never been wrong.
Not once. Lewis Harper’s number had followed him his entire life.
78 years, 4 months, 3 days.
He was twenty-seven now. The number had become background noise, like the weather forecast or the color of the sky. He knew he would live a reasonably long life. Not extraordinary. Not tragic.
Just average. Most people planned their lives around their number.
Those with short lives rushed through careers, relationships, and adventures. Those with long lives took their time. Lewis did neither.
He worked at a public library in Atlanta and spent most evenings reading old paper books. His friends joked that he lived like someone born a century too late.
One rainy Tuesday, Lewis noticed something strange. His watch buzzed. That never happened.
The death age prediction was permanent. Yet the screen flashed. Recalculating. Lewis stared.
The word disappeared. Then a new number appeared. 28 years, 1 month, 17 days.
He nearly dropped the watch. There had to be a mistake. There had never been a mistake. He checked the date.
According to his watch, he had less than six weeks to live.
For hours, he sat frozen in his apartment, refreshing the screen. The number remained. Twenty-eight years.
One month. Seventeen days. Nothing more.
The next morning, he contacted the prediction authority. They verified his identity and reviewed the data.
The representative’s face turned pale. “We’ve never seen this before.”
“So it’s an error?” The woman hesitated. “No. The system shows the update is valid.”
Lewis hung up, feeling as though the floor had vanished beneath him. News spread quickly.
A changing death age was unprecedented.
Reporters camped outside his apartment. Scientists requested interviews. Conspiracy theorists claimed he was proof that the system had been lying for decades.
Lewis ignored them all. Instead, he began doing something he had never done before. He started living.
He visited places he’d always postponed seeing. He called distant relatives. He apologized to old friends.
He spent entire afternoons walking through parks and watching clouds move across the sky.
For the first time in his life, every day felt valuable. Then, three weeks later, his watch buzzed again.
Recalculating. Lewis laughed nervously. When the screen cleared, he nearly fell off the park bench where he was sitting.
97 years, 8 months, 2 days. His death age had jumped forward almost seventy years. The world erupted.
Scientists demanded access to his watch. Governments launched investigations.
Millions of people suddenly questioned the certainty upon which they had built their lives.
Lewis, however, was thinking about something else. The six weeks.
Those six terrifying weeks had changed him more than the previous twenty-seven years.
For decades, society had relied on knowing exactly when life would end.
But maybe certainty had been the problem all along.
A few months later, after endless investigations, researchers uncovered the truth.
The watches did not predict death.
They predicted the future based on the choices people were expected to make.
Lewis’s original life would have ended at seventy-eight.
But believing he would die at twenty-eight had transformed him.
New friendships, new experiences, different decisions, all of it altered the path ahead for each of them.
The future had changed because he had changed. Soon, the revelation became public.
People everywhere stopped treating their numbers as destiny.
Some quit jobs they hated. Others reconciled with family.
Many finally pursued dreams they had delayed for years. The watches still displayed numbers.
But now everyone understood they were only possibilities.
Lewis kept his smartwatch long after most people stopped looking at theirs.
Occasionally, he would glance at the number on the screen. 97 years, 8 months, 2 days.
Maybe it would stay that way, or maybe it wouldn’t.
For the first time, he didn’t care. The number no longer told him how long he would live.
It reminded him how much living he still had left to do.