Notes to Self (23 page)

“Hey,” I said. “Can I come in for a little bit?”

“Yeah.” He opened the door and nodded upstairs. I followed him to his room and sat down on his desk chair. I noticed right away that all his Firefly posters were gone. The room looked plain, like mine. Reno sat on his bed and set his laptop on the floor. He didn’t say anything and I got the impression he’d rather be doing whatever it was he’d
been
doing online than deal with me.

“I’m sure it’s obvious why I’m here,” I began.
God, why couldn’t I sound nicer?
I thought. It’s like I wanted to skip over the part where I actually said I was sorry.

“Not really,” he said.

I sighed. “Sorry. I...uh, I wanted to say I’m sorry for how I acted the last time we talked. I was an idiot.”

He looked at me, probably trying to decide if I was being sincere.

“I really am sorry, Reen. I…I guess the real reason I was so mad at you was that you didn’t, um,
don’t
want to, you know, be with me. But I can accept that. I still want to be your friend.” The words tumbled out of my mouth quickly. I couldn’t meet his eyes. I understood why some people decided to go years and years, or even decades, alone. It had to be easier than this.

“Oh.” Reno paused for a long time and adjusted his glasses. I heard him take a deep breath, so I looked at him. His eyes were serious. “That’s not what I want,” he finally said.

“It’s not? Look, I know I’m a pain in the ass, but that’s really kind of harsh.”

“Robin. Calm down. Don’t confuse me. Look, I just freaked out that morning in the tree because you were so different than you used to be, and I was worried it wasn’t real. I couldn’t believe that we were finally, that we could be…” He stood up from the bed and walked over to me. He held out his hand and I took it.

“We can.” I took a deep breath. “I want to.” I stood in front of him, so close I could smell his soapy, cinnamon-y smell. He squeezed my hand and I felt my heart flutter…or maybe it was my stomach. Whatever bad feelings there were between us disappeared when he touched my face and tilted my lips up to his. When he kissed me, his lips were soft and more assured than they had been in the magnolia tree. I kissed him back, thinking about what my mom had said about waiting to see what happened next. This was what happened next. This.

Time seemed to stop as I melted in to him. My eyes closed and all the heat in me gathered in my lips as they moved against his. It was like we’d always been like this, like there’d never been another way to exist. I felt one of his hands on the small of my back and the other on the tender part of my neck. I wanted to stay like this forever.

After our fall from the Sling Shot, I felt guilty every time I laughed or felt good because Emily couldn’t feel those things. But this was different. I didn’t feel guilty anymore. I almost felt like I was living for both of us now, like I had to have a life that was twice as big. If Emily had to sleep, I had to be awake. For real awake. Like this.

“I missed you, Robin,” Reno said with glittering eyes, as he pulled back a couple inches.

“Me too,” I answered. We kissed again and stood there, together, holding on. Living.

CHAPTER 51

STILLNESS

On New Year’s Day in the late evening, I rode the bus to visit Emily. It was mostly empty and I didn’t have to sit by anyone. I looked out the window, wishing it would snow. I wanted a white blanket to cover up the world, to make it clean and magical for once, to depress the tourists. I felt healed, different, and I wanted the world to look different too, to match my insides.

I had a knitting project in my hands, but I wasn’t knitting. I was terrible at it despite Susan’s best efforts to teach me; I don’t even know why I brought it.

I remembered this other time I was riding the bus with my mom, years ago, and a crazy old man was ranting in the back. He was so disruptive and so persistent that the bus driver actually pulled over to make him get off. Before the old dude stepped out the door, he yelled one more thing. He was glaring right at me so intensely I’ll never forget it: “No one knows anything, little girl,” he growled. I looked at him with my gray eyes; I gave him my full attention. “Don’t be afraid,” were his last words as the bus door closed behind him.

When I reached Emily’s darkened room, something was strange. The air smelled fresh, even though her window appeared to be closed. I wondered who had messed with the room vent or whatever and why it had never been done before. I sat down by my best friend’s bed and reached for her hand as I always did. We sat like that for several minutes, quiet, just being together. Emily’s stillness was something I was used to now. She didn’t want anything, didn’t need anything. She just
was.

The fresh air began to feel cold to me and I rubbed my eyes. The walls of the room were almost wavy; I guess I hadn’t slept much the night before. It was very dark in the room, but a light on Em’s bedside was on and seemed to be getting slowly brighter. I opened my mouth to tell her about all the completely boring things I was doing over Christmas break (learning to parallel park, among them), when I realized the light on her bedside was so bright it made my eyes water and blink.

Then I felt something.

Emily squeezed my hand.

“Em,” I whispered. “I’m here.” I held my breath.

She squeezed my hand again—the slightest pressure, as if a kitten was trying to hold my fingers between its paws—as tears gathered in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. “Please come back. Please,” I asked. I touched her face, praying she could hear me.

Her eyes fluttered.

Reset.

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank Aimee Tritt, Brad Carman, Stephen Barbara, Jennifer Lohr, Ann Angel, Stuart Perelmuter, Julie Mitchell, Linda Artz, Karen Meyer, Jennifer Bauer, Brett Mobbs, Karen McQuestion and Stefan Streit.

Avery Sawyer is also the author of
THE FOREVER CONTRACT
,
a dystopian young adult novella. Here is a bonus excerpt of this piece:

CASEY

All anyone ever talked about these days was going into the system. Most of us turned seventeen this year, and you couldn’t go in until your seventeenth birthday.

“But what will it feel like?” we asked each other in class, when we were supposed to be writing lab reports or graphing equations. “What if it hurts?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” the decided ones said. “My best friend Shana went in last month and I chat with her every night. She says it’s amazing—you get to do whatever you want.”

“That does sound pretty decent,” the doubtful replied, throwing back a gel pack. We all had gel packs for lunch; water was scarce and the gel was supposed to rehydrate you even though it never felt like it did.

There had been a drought and record high temperatures all over the country as long as anyone could remember. We lived with the constant whirr of weak air-conditioners and uncertainty in our small prairie town. A long time ago, the town boomed thanks to large deposits of natural gas, but that was all over now. Most people had left, but a few thousand hunkered down and built concrete block houses. It wasn’t quite as hot in the summer here as it was farther south, so we figured it could be worse. No one had seen green grass in years; everything was dirt and dust and dead trees. It was actually illegal to plant your own garden because everyone knew you’d try to water it in the middle of the night when no one was looking. I kept planning to cut my longish brown hair into a pixie to make one-minute showers easier to manage, but I just couldn’t do it.

My brother Benjamin had gone in a year ago. Our parents were upset—they didn’t believe it was a good idea, because once you went in, you couldn’t come back out. “But I’ll never be able to give you a hug again,” my mother had wailed. “It’s not normal.”

“We’ll talk every day on screen,” Ben had replied. “And you can join me any time and give me a hug inside.”

“I doubt two avatars hugging really feel anything,” Mom had said ruefully. “It’s all made up. A fake world, a theme park, a game.”

“No, it’s not, Mom,” Ben had insisted. “It’s whatever you want it to be. Don’t you ever get tired of being thirsty? Of feeling pain?” He knew she’d suffered from arthritis for years. He wanted to sell us all on the idea, on the plan, but I knew my parents would never go in without me, and I wasn’t old enough then.

“Please don’t do it. I don’t trust it,” she’d begged.

“The system isn’t some monolithic thing, you know,” he’d tried to explain. “It’s the first true democracy. You upload your consciousness to the forever system and you’re free to live as long as you want, however you want. No more pain, no more heat, no more awful dust, no more work. Just pure thought. It’s what our species has always been meant for. Suffering is for philosophers. Not for me.”

“You’re free to live and play as long as the system has power,” our father corrected him. “What happens if the grid goes down?”

“Won’t happen, Dad. Why are you so negative?”

Our parents were still part of the faction who believed it would get better in the nuts-and-bolts world. That the rain would come back, that the changes we were seeing around the globe were temporary. They were different than most parents in our town. Most parents felt that
anything
was better than life as we all knew it. As a result, there were almost no young adults around anymore. It seemed like everyone seventeen or older had gone in. You almost never saw a twenty-something at the supply store or the school. Older people could go in if they wanted to, but they were more reluctant. They weren’t completely comfortable with the technology—they wanted to give it a few more years.

Things had gotten worse gradually. My mom talked about citrus all the time. That’s the thing she missed, she said. Grapefruit. A slice of lime in soda water. We couldn’t get citrus fruit anymore, and I couldn’t even remember what it had tasted like. She said I’d loved oranges as a toddler. We were the lucky ones, though. A lot of families didn’t have enough to eat. Food was very expensive, so meals were skipped. People ate rice and beans. It was awful. We at least had meat once or twice a week.

In any case, Ben had signed the Forever Contract and went in, and like my mom said, we couldn’t hug him anymore. His avatar looked like him, only better somehow. His hair seemed thicker onscreen; his arms and body leaner and more muscular. I wanted to ask him if he’d done
it
with anyone in there, but I couldn’t. I was his sister, and little sisters didn’t ask big brothers that sort of thing. Besides, I could read about it anywhere. Every report coming out of the system said sex inside was amazing. Indescribable. Much better than it could ever be in real life—with no worries about pregnancy or diseases. The system didn’t have babies, which sounded perfectly fine to me.

Still, I wasn’t sure. My boyfriend James was a really good kisser and I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would prevent me from being in his arms. When his lips touched that spot on my neck, right below my ear, I felt more alive than I ever had. How could immortality and nice muscles compete with
that?

Besides, James wasn’t going.

He said it was a crock, the whole thing. I never let him get very far with his argument because I didn’t want to think about what it meant for Ben, but James believed the system was a completely flawed corporate-government program designed to prevent even worse food and water shortages. He believed that those who uploaded their consciousness in exchange for life as avatars in utopia had essentially agreed to commit suicide.

“But he’s not dead!” I yelled. “His body is just fine. It’s, you know, in storage.”

“He might as well be, Casey.
Storage?
In a climate-controlled warehouse with no windows? He’s on a feeding tube slowly wasting away.”

“No he’s not! He’s getting the ideal mixture of protein and vitamins to sustain life indefinitely. He’s
fine!”

“What if he wanted to come back out? He can’t. He’s signed his life away, and everyone’s perfectly happy because he’s using fewer resources. It’s messed up. We’re not lab rats.”

“He’s happy.”

“What’s he going to say? It’s too late now to tell the truth.”

“He would warn me if it was a bad idea. My birthday is only ten days from now.”

“He’d only warn you if he still had the power to think for himself. Which he doesn’t. Who knows what kind of narcotics they’re putting in with that ‘ideal mixture of protein and vitamins.’”

“It’s nobody’s fault, you know,” I said quietly. “It’s nobody’s fault it’s gotten so bad. We live in the worst drought in modern history and we’re lucky someone’s given us this option. Given us
something.
”

“It’s everybody’s fault!” James shot back. “Everybody’s. We all stopped paying attention when things started getting worse. We all buried our faces in our screens and stopped dealing with reality. We stopped trying to fix it. And now reality has completely fallen apart and we want to just leave it behind forever.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Listen, let’s talk about something else.” James had this vein on his neck that started sticking out whenever we discussed the Forever system. His gray eyes looked fierce against his golden tanned skin when he got upset. He kept his dark blonde hair a little longer than the other guys I knew, and I thought he looked like an angel, even when he got angry. James was very practical—a problem solver-type, but he had a passionate streak. We’d been together over a year and I wanted us to be together forever.

“But I want to go in. And I want you to come with me.”

“Not going to happen, Case. I’ll take my chances out here. I’d rather dig holes and move bricks all day long than float around in there like some goldfish on happy pills. At least pain and thirst are real.”

“You’re crazy.”

We both gave up. We’d been having this fight for months, and the last time we’d had it, I’d gotten pretty hysterical and we hadn’t spoken for days. Neither one of us wanted to fight like that again. We didn’t want to lose each other for any reason. If only he’d see it my way. We could be so happy in there together—forever. James folded me into his strong arms and I kissed his collarbone, but I couldn’t stop feeling constant dread.