Futures Near and Far (4 page)

“Yesterday I called him a cold son of a bitch,” Cheryl said.
“So he decided to prove me right.”

I checked the temperature coding for the closet, and found
it set at minus 200°C. I ordered it back to normal. I didn’t need a goddamn
deep freeze in my home. Hadn’t since nanotech had eliminated the need to store
food.

“Oh, don’t do that, Mom. He wants to stay dead the whole
twenty-four hours.”

I frowned, puzzled until I recalled that if a body is
essentially intact but in a continually lethal environment — hanging from a
noose and standing in a deep freeze would certainly qualify — the nanodocs hold
off on repair until either the circumstances change or, at the twenty-four hour
mark, they abandon the body and generate a new one from the person’s latest
scan. I suppose it could annoy Suicidals to go to all the trouble of killing
themselves only to wake up a few minutes later.

“That’s his problem,” I
retorted, and stepped over the corpsicle.

“Mom. You’re so brusque.”

It took concentration, but I made my next comment even more curt and dismissive — trying to play my
role. “Don’t tell me you recycled the gun? Couldn’t you and your friends
have used it on each other for target practice?”

“Oh, Mom, that’s old. Jacques and I used to do that back in
dorm days.”

I folded my arms across
my chest. “Is there something I can do for you today? Or are you going
to keep cluttering up my apartment?”

“Sorry about that,” she said, and shrugged. “It’s day
twenty-nine. When a person’s got so few hours to live, what’s wrong with
raising a little hell?” She rocked the hammock chair until the ropes creaked in
the hook.

“Give me a break, Cheryl. If you had any intention of
following through with this suicide petition, you’d be off somewhere all alone,
and you’d stop bothering those of us who have lives to conduct.”

“Who have you been talking to? Dr. Branson? That sounds like
her.”

“Ellen has helped me
realize what I should have done with you a long time ago. I’ve decided to take
her advice.”

I squinted at her, and finally pinned down what seemed
strange about her looks. She wasn’t wearing the morph she’d favored lately.
She’d gone back to the one I had most often given her during childhood, the one
which I suppose qualified most as her own. She hadn’t used it much over the
years.

“Dammit, Monica,” she said, practically spitting out the
comment. “I mean it this time.”

“What is so bad about life, Cheryl? Why do you want to die?”

She stared as if I were crazy. “What’s not wrong? The planet’s overpopulated. The rules have all
been around for hundreds of years. A
nobody like me can’t make a place in
the world.”

“You were eight years into an apprenticeship. You were
making headway.”

“C’mon, Mom. It was interior decorating. The only reason I
got as far as I did was that no one could tell when I did a bad job. Sort of
like therapy.”

“It was something you stuck to. It was a sign of maturity.
You can’t expect to get to master if you don’t stick with something.”

“Right. Get to master. What are the averages now? Thirty years of apprenticeship, fifty years as a
journeyman, and then being a master doesn’t mean jackshit unless you’re so outstanding and kiss so much ass that
your peers declare you an adept or a maestro. What the hell do eight
years matter?”

“It’s the longest
you
have ever lasted,” I snapped.

Tears began to swim in the corners of her eyes. “You act
like I mean as much to you as a turd you grunted out in the woods a hundred
years ago. You don’t care if I do it, do you? You brought me into this
fucked-up world and now you won’t even help me
slide out. I’m
glad
I killed you!”

All I wanted was to stop here, and take her in my arms. But
I forced the words out, though I was so cotton-mouthed they ripped my throat.
“You’re right. I don’t care. I’ve given up, Cheryl. I hope you do it. I’ve made
arrangements with the Reproduction Review Board. They qualified me for a new
baby.”

Cheryl blinked through her tears. The hammock chair ceased
swaying and quivered to a stop. She stared at me open-mouthed. “You can’t do
that. Nobody gets more than one kid these days.” The sarcasm and stridency had
left her voice.

“Sure I can,” I said. “Now that my request is on file, if you’re archived any time before you turn a
hundred years of age, I can get reproductive dispensation. You’ll be
categorized as an abortion.”

I waited for her reaction. I hadn’t raised my voice, and now I stood calmly, maintaining my stern
glare, holding back the shuddering in
my bones much like the crew of the
Enola
Gay
must have poised while their bomb plummeted toward Hiroshima.

She didn’t speak. She sat there wide-eyed, gulping air, tears streaming down her cheeks. Finally she
whispered a single word, so softly I couldn’t hear her.

I thought nothing was happening, until I noticed a faint,
bitter-almond undertone to the aroma of sea salt and hibiscus wafting from the
window. “What’s that odor?” I asked. Suddenly my limbs sprouted lead weights.

“Cyanide,” Cheryl said in an utter monotone. “I’ve got my
filters set for it. How about you?”

Of course I didn’t, because setting one’s filters to that
degree removes all scents from the air. I hadn’t worried about poisons, since
the nanodocs can usually render them harmless before they cause any suffering.
But cyanide, as I recalled too late, is so fast that it’s easier for the little
machines to let a person die, wait for the air to clear, and then revive the
corpse.

“So long, Ma,” Cheryl
said as stars flashed behind my eyes. Their light filled my vision, leaving me
blind as my knees crashed to the floor. I was out before my head struck.

I woke up to the hiss of steam. Groaning, I rolled over to
search for the source of the sound.

It was Jacques. He was enveloped in a cloud of mist. No
doubt his docs were accelerating the thaw.

I scanned the room. Cheryl was gone, leaving her “friends”
behind.

The first thing I did was toss the hanged girl over the
balcony. Jacques followed, fingers and all. I didn’t give a hoot what the
neighbors thought of bodies on the lawn.

Then I sat down, right on the carpet, too drained to make it
to a chair. The shuddering started.

I’d done it. Dr. Branson would be proud of me. I’d called
Cheryl’s bluff.

If it were a bluff.

The shuddering turned
into sobbing. The tears burst out of me like rivers. My throat felt as if I’d
swallowed thistles. I grabbed the end of the carpet and tried to wipe my
face, but all that did was soak the tassels. I cried until I couldn’t breathe,
and then I cried some more.

When I could finally
stand up, and later, when I could finally walk, I stumbled into my bedroom. I
recoded the picture frame on the nightstand to the scene I’d kept there for the
past half century or so: my daughter, blowing out the candles of her birthday
cake as she turned four years old.

Earth is glorious from a hundred miles up. At least, I’ve
always thought so. Especially when I’ve exited my pod, told the craft to return
to the planet, and I can just float there, suspended above that big blue sphere
with nothing but a body shield, a cartridge of oxygen, and my surfboard to keep
me company.

This was one vista I’d never shared with anyone, not even
Jacques or Giselle. Oh, they knew about Earth surfing. After all, it had been a
fad for centuries. Jacques had even told me about the portable scanner I could
use to record and transmit my cusp-of-death configuration to the Net, so that
when I was reconstituted my new body would remember
as much of the emotional high of the experience as possible. The two of them indulged in the sport as often as I.

But never
with
me.
This was my own, my favorite, my private means of suicide.

I hadn’t activated the scanner this time. Why should I
record experiences that weren’t going to be plugged into a new body? This was
it
.

Oregon and the western coast of North America had just
emerged from the terminator. Morning, the thirtieth day. If my eyesight were good enough, I could’ve spotted my mom
down there.

Not that Monica mattered. She hadn’t answered my Link call
when I arrived up here. She really didn’t care.

“Access suicide petition,” I murmured.

The Net’s clear tenor voice responded with shocking speed.
“Suicide petition active. Day thirty. Upon your confirmation, your nanodocs
will be disengaged and your scan will be transferred to archival storage.”

Fog shrouded the Golden Gate. The jet stream poured its
usual funnel of rain clouds across Puget Sound. The Willamette Valley warmed to
the rays of the newly risen sun. I’d lost sight of Portland as dawn had doused
the lights of the city. Now it hid in the greens and browns of the continent,
as if it didn’t exist at all.

What was one city in the
history of a planet five billion years
old? What was one more woman in the miasma of the human race?

No one would miss me. Just tag me as a fetus, aborted in its
two hundred forty-ninth trimester. A statistic. Check me off the list — it’s
the only way left for humanity to make room for new folks, not counting spewing
them into the colony worlds.

So big a planet. So little a me.

“Do you confirm?” asked the disembodied voice.

My surfboard itched for the press of my Velcro-soled boots.
My mind filled with the memory of the heat glowing just outside my shield, the Earth looming below, larger and larger. No
matter how many times I do it, the anticipation of death sends the
tingle down my spine like ultimate sex, as dependable as a narcotic. And then
there’s the cool bliss of the Big White Light.

I wonder if there’s a God? Is St. Peter pissed off at how
few people have been streaming through those pearly gates lately?

Hey, Pete, here I come. Don’t be lonely.

“Confirm petition,” I said.

“Petition granted. Your
nanodocs have been disengaged and
your scan has been archived. Permanent suicide is now your option.”

I licked my lips and took my stance on the board. With those
ominous words, I had become the proverbial acrobat,
treading the tightrope without a net. Sweat pooled at the end of my
nose, prevented from dropping off by the proximity of my shield.

I aimed the board so that the tip obscured my view of Oregon. Too bad I couldn’t target my mother’s
apartment — not that anything solid
would make it far enough to create an
impact crater. I wondered if she were awake yet. Wasn’t much chance
she’d stayed up late thinking about me.

So much ocean down there.
The amniotic fluid of the whole planet.

My eyes widened. I cued
the Net. “Access Reproduction Review Board database. Do you have a birth
request from Monica Taylor, I.D. 555-94-1830-66-291?”

“Negative. No such request on file.”

That sneaky bitch. She’d
actually had me believing it.

Did it make any difference that she was bluffing? I was
still up here, at the upper reaches of the atmosphere. I still had a decision
to make.

Maybe I could hold off
for a few weeks. With my docs out of commission, I could apply to become a
Christian Scientist or a member of the Society of Mortals. Giselle had done it
once. She’d said it was the most exciting period of her life, knowing she could
really croak at any time, even by accident.

Mom would be left wondering exactly when I’d actually cash
in. Or when I’d strike next. Or—

Who was I kidding? I was talking about only one thing here.
Life was rearing its fuzzy little head in front of my carefully painted vision. I’d lost the moment. The worst part
of it was, if I couldn’t do it now, under these circumstances, when could I?

Probably never.

“Erase petition,” I said, sighing. “Reactivate docs and
retrieve scan.”

“Acknowledged.”

I’d always thought I would do it someday. I always thought it was just a matter of time. Suddenly all
those six thousand temporary suicides seemed like some hoary old game, a behavior based on a false assumption about
myself.

I had no idea where to go from here. I didn’t really like
it. But I knew who I had to ask for advice. I had a hint I could reach her now.

I activated the Link. “Mom?” I asked.

Her voice came through quietly and clearly, unaccompanied by
a visual. “I’m here.”

Her hoarse, strained tone
put an uncontrollable quiver into my smile. “Mom, can we talk?”

“Yes. If you’ll let Ellen be there later on.”

An image came into my head of Monica staying up through the
night, pacing, asking the Net every five seconds if I’d cancelled the petition,
unblocking the Link the instant I did so. My
throat ached with a sweet, powerful tightness.

“Get some rest, Mom. I’ll
be there soon. I’ve got a couple of things to do first.”

“I’ll be here.”

I smiled wryly at the
big, beautiful planet that had given me so much shit, and would give me lots
more. Only a crazy woman would go
back. Sighing, I activated the scanner. Aiming the surf board at the
night-shrouded Pacific, I glided into the atmosphere. I made one hell of a
meteor.

And within minutes, I was reborn.

Return to Table of Contents

Identifying the
genesis of a story isn’t always possible, but I know where this one came from.
The underlying scientific premise is the brainchild of Robert A. Fleming,
friend, maniac, and a true patron of the arts.

Bob works at the cutting edge of technology. There are
only a handful of people on the planet capable of persuading chips, boards,
optical circuits, and non-sinusoidal wave generators to do what he and his wife
Cherie Kushner make them do. I wish I could properly convey what it is like
looking over their shoulders as they make improbabilities into reality. Perhaps
the process is best typified by one of Bob’s stock explanations: It’s called
pulling a miracle out of your ass.