Pills and Starships Read online

  But Den was too sad, and when I was about ten and Sam was eight he wrote some fond messages on face to all of us and went for a DIY.

  So other than us, my dad has no family left.

  After the trip he and my mother seemed hollowed out.

  I browsed that the final dinosaurs, before they went extinct around sixty-five million years ago, were duck-billed creatures that walked around eating plants. Hadrosaurs. They had these big bony crests on their heads. They lived in North America, not too far from here.

  Those dudes were some weird animals. You kind of look at pictures of animals like that, with giant head crests, and you think: Fail. They look so outlandish, those critters. Impossible. It’s really not too surprising that they’re gone.

  Still, it’d be way more awesome if they weren’t.

  Actually, that was the last nonavian dinosaur. The real last dinosaurs are the birds.

  And maybe us.

  DAY TWO

  ORIENTATION & RELAXATION

  Theme of the Day: Loving

  I don’t recommend family therapy.

  At least, not if you’re in a Final Week. It might be okay if your family was in a regular frame of mind and all you had to argue about was something like who was on the face too much playing what my dad calls “frivolous games” like Serial Murder 6. Or if you had words about who was shirking their turn to empty the human-waste compost.

  But what happened with us wasn’t pretty.

  We went into the hearing room feeling low—not Mom and Dad whose pharma is already giving them a lift, but Sam and I. The hearing room is where you do the listening. Our service corp is really into its jargon—all the corps pretty much are, they call the trademarked words their “language technology” because they’re into owning every detail of the styles that they’ve branded—so rather than therapy they like to use these words that end with -ing. They say that makes the process more about being and nowness.

  Right before we left, Jean said to me and Sam: “Life is a gift that’s wonderful and yet oh so fleeting. Does a butterfly complain about having to pass into nothing?”

  “A butterfly doesn’t say squat,” interrupted Sam. “A butterfly’s a retard.”

  Jean patted his shoulder. “A butterfly spends all its time living—flitting between the fragrant and colorful flowers. Experience your parents’ time with you not as an automatic entitlement that everyone has, oh my no. That’s really obsolete thinking. Think of it as an act of bountiful giving, leading to a bountiful letting go.”

  Our service corps can’t get enough of “bountiful.”

  So there we are, in the hearing room in our nubbly beige hotel robes, all sitting on these tatami mats around a burbling water feature full of rounded rocks, with wave lightforms rippling on the fabric draperies and some kind of quiet hippie flute music tinkling from invisible speakers.

  Tall bamboo plants in water, liberally placed.

  In comes the therapist, a/k/a the Vessel for Receiving.

  I swear, that’s what they call them. Vessels for Receiving.

  Sounds like a toilet, huh.

  So then our personal VR, a whiter-than-white lady with flowing blond hair and a long, light-blue robe that gives her a kind of princess aspect, sits herself down in our circle, smiles serenely, and purrs, “Welcome, all. Let us hold hands. Be in the gathering.”

  The water burbled, the flute warbled.

  But Sam has a knee-jerk reaction to corp jargon. “I’m not even doing this for five minutes if you’re going to use those full-of-shit, empty expressions,” he said. “We’re not sheep and we’re not brainwashed. At least, not all of us are.”

  “An angriness,” said the VR, and smiled again in a saintly way as though the “angriness” was a special treat. “Sam is your name, I know. Sam, please allow me to be your vessel for feeling-receiving. My name is LaTessa. You may offer your angriness to me. That’s what I’m here for, Sam. I will receive the anger you’re so abundantly giving.”

  She had him for a minute with that one. His jaw unhinged and his mouth hung open, à la moron.

  “Please, honey,” added my mother, who had a decent tranquility vibe going due to her Day One pharma regime. “An open mind, okay? Remember what we discussed. Anger is fine, anger is absolutely what happens. But also—try openness. Try being open, if you can.”

  “Open yourself to possibility,” said LaTessa.

  That snapped him out of his gape-mouth deal. “There’s open, and there’s gullible.”

  “All the expressing is welcome,” said LaTessa, lilting and silvery. “The angriness is so natural, Sam. And we are not here for a judging; we are here for a listening and a loving. Offer the angriness to me and I will be happy to hold it for you. Nestling the angriness next to me, Sam, I will take care of it.”

  So this went on for a while, with Sam saying the whole thing was crap and LaTessa saying nothing except that she welcomed his angriness and she was there for receiving.

  Personally, I was wondering when she would get tired of all the gerunds they were making her use and call someone in to give Sam a quick shot of trankpharms and keep the session moving.

  But she never did.

  I won’t say that she wore Sam down—that would be a definite exaggeration. Still, after a few minutes of acting out he settled into a kind of slump and stopped looking at her when she talked. He wasn’t going to walk out, because he didn’t want to hurt the ’rents’ feelings that badly. He wasn’t willing to go that far, I figure. So all he could really do was sulk.

  There was mandatory hand-holding after that and my mom and dad said how painful it was to leave us. They said it was the hardest thing they ever had to do and they didn’t mind dying at all, they only minded having to leave the two of us. They said why couldn’t it be a better world, why did the world and our ultimate history break their hearts like this? My dad said he was angry with the dead people a long time ago who didn’t stop the warming before the feedback loops started. He talked louder and louder and said they were energy hogs and food hogs and overall hogs for a super-easy life. He kept saying “hogs.” Just hogs hogs hogs.

  LaTessa said calmly that she received his anger, and the world was yet only the world, it was a sunset-time glorious nowness of being.

  Very insightful, thanks for that, I thought.

  She never said “but,” she always said “and.” I don’t think there are any buts in language technology.

  At that point I was suspecting maybe she was actually a member of the Hot Earth Society, who welcomed the chaos as an end to sin. But I didn’t ask, because the session wasn’t about her and who cared what she thought anyway.

  My parents had made peace with leaving the friends and acquaintances they still had, they told LaTessa.

  “Some of our friends are already thinking along contract lines themselves,” my mother added.

  My father nodded and said they had an understanding, their generation. They felt for each other, but they also knew what time it was. (Whatever that fossil expression meant. My dad’s the worst when it comes to using fossilized expressions.) So they didn’t worry so much about their adult friends.

  Then my mom looked over at Sam and me and averted her eyes. “But my—I mean—it’s a cliché, I know, but it’s so real to me: it seems like yesterday they were babies. I held them and wanted to protect them forever.”

  Then she started crying; she was sobbing even though the pharma was making her smile while tears ran from her eyes. But I have to say, that smile made it worse, not better. My father’s eyes were wet and he got choked up, but in his case the tears didn’t actually come out.

  I started blinking rapidly.

  I was wishing my own pharms were more powerful, at that point. I mean I know maybe it’s weak—Sam thinks it’s weak to use pharma every day, lately he’s been suggesting pharma should be for special occasions. I don’t know where he gets this stuff—a rebel listserve or somewhere like that. Sometimes, even though it’s weird, I can a
lmost see his point of view, but other times I feel like, Come on, small angry-dude brother, live a little. Everyone can’t be wrong. Can they?

  Plus there have been times I was on pharma when I saw things I’d never have a chance of seeing flat. Pharma can turn the ugly into the beautiful.

  Of course, it can also work the other way around.

  Sometimes a visionpharm helps me work on my collection. I don’t need it, but I can definitely use it to good effect. Once or twice I’ve found things whose loveliness I wouldn’t have seen without the pills I was on. But, see, that loveliness is real, because later, after the pills wear off, I can still see it in the collected thing.

  For instance, this one day I took a visionpharm because I was sad—a facefriend had caught a bug called Marburg and she died. I’d really liked her, we’d been gaming for over a year and vidconfing for just the last month or two; she had freckles and a sweet smile. I didn’t want moodpharm, for some reason, I wanted visionpharm instead.

  And after I took it I was wandering in the complex thinking of her and I found a plain rock. Somehow the rock became lovely to me, like I could see pieces of stars in it, pieces of primordial matter. In that plain rock I can still see the beginning of every­thing.

  Even when I was flat again, I still loved that rock.

  Mostly what Sam objects to is the controlling attitude that pharma has, their ads and slogans that make it seem like if you’re not on mood-management pills 24-7 then you’re callously “playing mood roulette.” They try to make it seem like you’re an irresponsible person if you’re not a max-dose regular. Selfish and flaky—even a little bit insane.

  It used to be they just hard-sold the pharma to grown-ups, but now they figure they have to capture the youth population too. We’re getting older and sooner or later, they figure, we’re going to get hella depressed.

  So they’re already grooming us to have an eventual death wish. I mean it’s obvious, we’re not stupid. And in a way I guess it’s creepy, yes, as Sam has said to me more than once. But then it’s also nature. Is it more creepy or more natural? I can’t decide. I mean, it’s always been natural to die. And wise to accept death since it’s the biggest fact of life. Blah blah.

  And yet.

  Sam says he has nothing against death, in and of itself. What he doesn’t like is management, which he refers to as “pharmacontrol.” He and his hackerfriends on face like to get mad and they have their own lexicon of angry words. Among the hackerkids there are a bunch of different factions; some say they don’t believe in pharms at all—though most of their parents make them stay on their daily doses anyway, of course—while other ones only believe in fastpharms because they don’t think being sped up is bad. They think it helps their rebel cause.

  Some of them wear their hair in old-time punk styles to show us all what big rebels they are. That always makes me laugh—the mohawks and silly drawings shaved into the stubble and all that—but not in front of Sam.

  “He’s fourteen,” is what my mother’s said to me about Sam and hacking. She smiles and sighs.

  Anyway, the session was carnage. The blinking didn’t contain my tears and soon I was pitiful, I had the runny nose going on, and I even started to hiccup at one point from the crying jag. So I promised myself I’d take a stronger cocktail as soon as we got back to the suite. There are different levels you can opt for at any point, if you’re not doing great at the so-called coping.

  I was thinking: I just want the sadness to go away. Or at least be a lot less so I can stay relatively calm and stop blubbering. I don’t want me falling apart to be my parents’ last sight; I want to get through this with a bit of grace.

  I decided to try to collect something really soon, because that always makes me feel better. Collecting focuses me.

  This isn’t exactly a feel-good diary, is it? But don’t worry, I promise it’ll get better. So if anyone’s out there, please keep reading: it’ll be roses soon because I’m dialing up my pharma.

  Before long it’ll be one big, long love-in.

  It’s morning now, the morning of Day Two, and this is our Personal Time. Mom and Dad are walking along the cliffs again and looking out at the ocean; they’re kind of obsessed with it. They keep thinking they’re going to see surprising life jump out and flash in exuberance—that suddenly some great ancient creature is going to surface from beneath the waves.

  They know, rationally, that it’s impossible. But there’s this part of them that doesn’t quite believe that, either. After all, the ocean is deep.

  But the ocean is also turning anoxic, the scientists say. It’s happened before. It happened, for instance, 250 million years ago in the Great Dying, otherwise known as the P-T extinction event—the biggest mass-death event in Earth’s history. Before this one, that is. So now it’s happening again. The seawater got more acid from all the carbon it was storing, which we pumped into the atmosphere and sank into the water. And so the ocean food web has mostly collapsed, from the bottom to the top in a ripple effect, first the corals and mollusks and other animals with shell-like coverings, when the more-acid seawater stopped them from growing those shells. Next it was the animals that ate them, sea otters for instance, and then the animals that ate them, etc., all the way up to marine mammals like whales and dolphins.

  And these big burps of methane are bubbling out of the seas along the continental shelves and causing even more heating up—along with the methane burps from melting perma­frost, which brought about the tipping point. So now we’ve got the feedback loops.

  And doom, and end of planetary life, and shit.

  Unless the scientists are completely wrong.

  It sounds flat negative, I know, but I’m actually in a good mood this morning. There are hummingbirds here!

  I’ve seen them before in zoos and parks, but never just buzzing around wild. They can flap their wings ninety times in a single second! And fly backward. They’re like jewels. They have shimmers, green and purple and golden.

  I wish I could collect the sight of them, like on my hand­face vidcam, but I don’t have it with me. And you can’t collect them for real, of course. People used to collect animals by killing them, though, back in the clonal period, when white people were going around killing the other kinds and taking over their countries.

  Back then collecting meant killing.

  But I found something cool. It sits in my favorites box with the other things I couldn’t stand not to bring. It was half a broken egg, just fallen on our balcony here. I have no idea where it came from; I haven’t found a nest and there aren’t any trees up here. But there was the half-eggshell, when I stepped out this morning, delicate and white. I’d never touched an eggshell before. We get synth-chicken eggwhite in bottles, once a year.

  The eggshell is so fragile and thin I can hardly believe it would keep anything alive. It’s preposterous! I feel like saying. And yet I’m pretty sure that’s just what eggshells do. What I found was closer to two-thirds of an egg than half, I think—you can see how the top would be shaped, the slightly pointed top that separated from the rest.

  I look at it and I don’t know if the bird inside it died or hatched and flew away.

  So as I was saying, the ocean—which used to contain oysters and orcas and who knows what all, even these bizarre creatures called seahorses—mostly has bacteria now and amoeba things and schools of mutated jellyfish.

  Plus of course the garbage vortex and mile-wide chemical streams.

  But still Mom and Dad stand at the edge of the bluffs, their arms around each other’s waists, and look out over the faraway waves like anything could be there—like those waves might still be the glittering roof over a marvelous underwater kingdom.

  Sam’s lying on his bed reading. He brought an antique book that was a gift from my father. Lord of the Flies. My dad split his collection between us, but I haven’t read any of mine yet.

  Me, I’m sitting here on the balcony watching the palm trees swaying in the breeze, listening to t
he fronds rustling, looking at my eggshell, and thinking about the Twilight Lounge. We went there after the nightmare therapy session and our massages, to eat dinner and relax. At first I’d been creeped out by the parts of the hotel that were set apart for contract people, but it turned out to be okay.

  Though maybe a bit hardcore.

  It’s kind of this skydeck setup, this restaurant, bar, and pool platform that juts out over the cliffs and looks like a big transparent bulb. You have a 360-degree view, there’s one of those pools with a waterfall at the end that makes it look like it’s just disappearing into the sky or ocean, depending on your angle. We sat at a poolside table and had our drinks in hand—my parents’ were custom-made pharmabevs since it’s a delicate balance; as far as I know ours were just generic—and were waiting for food when suddenly soft music started and this water show slowly began.

  Out of the pool, where luckily no one was swimming at the time, rose these mermaid creatures on a platform, with long green hair and silver-green tails. It happened kind of gradually: their heads came first, from the water, and then their curled bodies on these fake rocks with fake seaweed and white round things sticking to them, some kind of extinct mollusk, I think, from when we still had them.

  The mermaids had seals at their feet, not real ones obviously but pretty good robotics. And they were singing a beautiful song. It was ethereal, if that’s the right word. Like it was both coming from them and not coming from them at once.

  And when I say them I mean not only the mermaids but the seals too. The seals had mouths and they opened and closed along with the music. From where I was sitting I could even see the eyes of those robot seals, these big, black eyes, and they looked deep and wet and sparkling.

  I’ve never seen a live music show before—that kind of crowdscene has been against the law my whole life—only virtual shows on face. I mean the animals were robots but the mermaids looked like real people, beautiful women wearing tails. So I was really excited and so was Sam. We were under a spell right away.