Pills and Starships (8 page)

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 the 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.

While they sang, the sun outside was sinking down over the sea. As the sky turned indigo, darkness descended on the dome over our heads and out of the darkness these flowing images appeared. There were these scenes, maybe from old movies—scenes of the ocean world that used to exist right around here, in Hawaii. Crossing the dome overhead were whales, big ones with their babies swimming right next to them, close to the mother whales’ bodies. When they appeared these haunting whale songs also began, mixing with the live voices of the mermaids and the seal robots.

And then the whales faded and schools of fish swam past us where the whales had been, moving and flashing with the light of their thousands of tiny bodies. And all in a row, like a parade, dozens of other creatures passed before our eyes—these lit-up creatures that looked like alien spaceships, things with tentacles, strangely shaped sharks, big rays and small rays, dolphins or porpoises, otters and these seals with tusks, and a bunch of other things I don’t know the names for. In one scene there was a boat and dolphins following behind it, leaping and playing alongside, jumping out of the water again and again, and this went on for a while until they went under again, and then the ship faded.

The whole time some sad music played; parts of it had no words and other parts did. One song the mermaids and seals sang went,
Heaven, heaven is a place—a place where nothing, nothing ever happens
.

After the ship was gone the dome became scenes of beaches—these pure, flat sand beaches they used to have with no seawalls at all. You could see waves crashing right on the gently sloping skirts of sand, and nothing but sand meeting water for miles and miles. They showed these natural pools between outcroppings of rock, and in them small creatures walked or swam—some that looked like insects, almost, with lots of legs, and tiny octopi and darting fish like minnows. There were some long-gone people on the beaches—whole families, happily playing together right in the open and wearing only small swimsuits.

They had no hats to shade against the sun, only those skimpy suits and bare heads. A family ran in the shallow waves, including a chubby midget kid with nothing on but puffy white underwear, smiling persistently. They showed two handsome men with their arms around each other, girls making a fort out of sand with spades and buckets.

And then we left the beach behind and were underwater again—an ancient reef, fish swimming everywhere and the dark silhouettes of people snorkeling above them with rays of sunlight beaming through. Spiky bright-colored anemone—I’ve seen them in the fake reefs—and red urchins and orange-and-white clown fish and even those things that look like insects again, big insects wearing body armor.

And then the last thing was the whales returning: a pod of them, you call it, swimming toward the underwater camera. A whole family of whales, singing their mournful songs. And then they swam away from us again, getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared into the dark.

The lights went up a little after the whales were gone, though it was still pretty dim, and the mermaids and seals silently sank back beneath the water of the pool. Sam and I saw that our mom was crying, and then we saw that this time our dad was too—not making any noise, just silent, big tears running down his cheeks and into his mouth. Of course, because of the pharma both of them were also still
beaming
. They smiled and smiled and tears ran down their cheeks and dripped right off their chins.

I was—well, I’d never felt that way before. Overwhelmed. I’d seen some of the old footage on face, but it’s so different on that scale—it’s personalized and miniature, it’s cutely enclosed in the colorful frames you’ve chosen for your browse experience—and somehow you feel superior to it, like it’s a snapshot or a fairy story.