Pills and Starships

Table of Contents

___________________

Day One: The Bountiful Arriving

Day Two: Orientation & Relaxation

Day Three: Remembering & Appreciating

Day Four: Commitment & Communion

Day Five: Happiness

Day Six: Separation & Grief

Day Seven: Accepting & Gratitude

P.S.

Pills and Starships E-book Extras

About Lydia Millet

Copyright & Credits

Also Available from Black Sheep

About Akashic Books

Gray whale

Now that we are sinding you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

. . .

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your work to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

—W.S. Merwin, “For a Coming Extinction”

D
AY
O
NE

T
HE
B
OUNTIFUL
A
RRIVING

Theme of the Day: Listening

There was a time, not long ago, when it was illegal to kill people. I almost remember normal life back then.

Almost. But not really. I
tell
myself that I remember it, but to be honest it’s a mix of made-up and autolearned things.

I was a little kid when the last tipping point came, but part of me ignores that fact sometimes and wants to believe Back Then is my true home. So I invent the world I want to have lived in and curl up in that lost world like a mouse in a burrow. Soft edges and gentle lighting are all around me as I fall asleep, my legs and arms dropping into delicious numbness.

It’s safe in the lost world and always the same. Water flows right out of the taps—the kind you can drink, I mean. There are never new bugs, and the airtox alerts are a harmless yellow, never crimson or black. There are woods and a babbling stream on the edge of a peaceful, treelined neighborhood, and I can wander there with no one stopping me.

The vanished world settles inside eternal dusk: here it’s always the hour before sunset, my favorite time. On the quiet, dimming street the warmth of living rooms shines from ancient, separate houses—orangey table lamps glow from the windows with the comforting light of old-time incandescent bulbs, while outside the purple dusk deepens, insects called crickets make a chirping song, and dew springs up on velvety green lawns.

No barriers, no nets—you could just walk freely down the street, among the lovely gardens with flowers and bushes. You could step anywhere, practically. I’ve seen it in old movievids.

Sometimes I get to it by imagining: I set it up carefully, piece by piece, and then sail into it on a dream airship.

Or sometimes I just take the easy way to bliss, like everyone else, and get there with pharma.

Compared to that olden world, the new one’s like a vision brought by one of the flatter and speedier pharms. And going back to the vanished place relaxes me, usually, but every now and then it also gives me a strange feeling of homesickness.

Strange because, like I said, that world has never in fact been my home.

I never knew it at all.

If you’re reading this, I like to think, you got out a long time ago, while the going was good. You’re in the far future or in the starry reaches of space—maybe both—watching me from a safe distance. Circling the planet, say, watching over me, a living satellite.

That distance should be safe enough.

Out there the dark of airless space lies beyond the silver capsule you’re floating in. Through the thick glass of a round window—I get to design this spaceship so I’m going to make it cool—I can see your face, shining with honeyed light. Because I need the picture in my head to have details, I’ll throw in the fact that you’re young and attractive. (Like me, or at least I like to think so.) You might be a girl or you might be a boy, I change my mind on that between imaginings.

And with you in the capsule there’s even a pet. I always wanted a dog—I always
longed
to have a dog, ever since I saw vids of them from when they were legal—so I’m just going to give you one. Maybe it’s Laika, the famous dog from the 20th c. who was shot into space on a rocket called
Sputnik 2
. I browsed about her a lot in a history tutorial I’ve watched a bunch of times (“Carbon Excesses Vol. 244: The Era of the Pet”). Sometimes I think of her intelligent eyes, about how terribly confused she must have been. Because at first her life was thousands of hours of love and attention, but then it was a sudden blastoff into the freezing cold of space.

The cold that went on forever. Because they never planned to bring her back.

Her dog heart probably broke before she died.

So I bring Laika the Space Dog back to life. I put her in that warm, safe capsule with you—you and your nice family. She deserves it and so do you.

Because of
course
you have a family. I would never make you alone out there.

The capsule is a throwback to the world and style that used to be—like one of those curve-cornered, silver homes with wheels the blue-collars lived in, back in the days of the moon missions. I love the look from back then. These days a lot of kids go retro to the 20th c. stylewise, since that’s when most of the vids were made. Back then people could make a livelihood from stuff like that—their own creations. They got to make stuff that was unique, stuff people wanted but didn’t need at all.
Way
past what people needed to live.

Not food or energy but words and sounds, scenes and stories. Back then people could take their inner, personal desire and make it into something outside of them, something they loved and were proud of. It was art or music or movievids, it was anything they wanted.

Seeing the swirl of blue-green planet while cut off from all communication, you cosmonauts have a kind of innocence, I guess. You’re purified of the contamination of the rest of the human race, all our sadness and the chaos down here. When you read my words they fill your capsule like a song, a song surrounded by the stars and constellations, the streaming cosmic dust.

Maybe you’re on your way to colonize a new planet, even, like in the olden stories and vids where alien civilizations turned out to live close by, or we went out with kits and supplies and grew jungles on Mars—lived there in pretty domes, made an oasis on the red planet. In the meantime, hovering here before you say goodbye, you’re my beacon. You gaze down from a warm round of welcome in the blackness of space—the universe beyond our haze-gray sky, not cast beneath the pall of the future.

I hope that, from out there in the solar system, you’ll just ignore the cheesy names of the different sections in this journal. I know any reader of mine would need to have good taste and so, like me, you won’t be into them.

They’re in corpspeak, not my own words.

I couldn’t bring my face—that’s short for “interface,” in case you don’t know that word—because contracts forbid all personal devices. We’re just supposed to “focus on healing.” Without my face I have to go old-school and use a pen.

And all I have to write in is the journal they gave us, for writing our emotions in.

They
put those titles on the pages. The “Bountiful Arriving,” etc. Not me.

I wouldn’t be caught dead.

It’s not that olden people lived in the Garden of Eden, back in the golden times. That is, they didn’t
think
they lived in it. They acted like life was hard. Or on the other hand they acted like they had so little to do that they could talk about nothing forever.

I laugh when I watch old screenshows, because half the time you can’t tell which were meant to be serious and which were supposed to be funny.

To me the old world looks like paradise. My parents used to tell me stories of where they grew up, and no, it wasn’t perfect, bad things could happen if you had bad luck, but for a lot of people their problems were small in the background. Their problems weren’t chaos pouring down, just regular-size problems you could work around. Problems that were more or less the size of a person.

As far as I can tell from the tutorials—we have to log a
lot
of hours on faceschool till we turn eighteen and get our work matches—the human race has always been trouble. We’ve never been happy with what we had. I’ve done some browsing in Ancient Myths tutorials and it seems to me we’ve been like Icarus, that Greek dude with the glued-on wings who flew up toward the sun. The wax on his wings melted—wax acting like glue, I guess—so he plunged to his death.

Or maybe we’re more like his father, who made the wings for him in the first place. Who puts their kid in a set of waxed-on wings and sends them flying over the sea? That dad was practically a child molest.

Point is, the two of them had orchards to stroll around in—a blue ocean, green fields, and rolling farmlands. I saw a painting about it: a ship with white sails, a hillside overlooking a harbor, and in the background, so you could hardly notice him, Icarus plunging into the ocean. The wings were gone by then, completely melted off, vanished. All you could see were his legs, sticking out of the water foolishly.