Pills and Starships (9 page)

But this was huge and real.

And then, of course, it’s not real after all, being just ancient history, with nothing left. Ghosts filling the room, a world of amazing and mysterious ghosts.

So Sam and I were blown away, just sitting there blasted and in a daze. At the same time I was thinking—for Mom and Dad, and the pain of their memories—what are these corps doing? Are they, like,
torturing
them?

Because it was bittersweet and shit, I got that, no kidding. But it also seemed like a knife twist in a wound.

We have a family field trip in the afternoon. Before that, a few minutes from now, Sam and I have our Survivor Orient, where we go to a special session with some other future survivors of this week’s contracts.

I’ve got my beige robe on already and am just waiting to go. Like with the family therapy, they make us all dress the same; no makeup or other decorations.
We are survivors and loved ones, joined in togetherness of being
, says the handbook in my Coping Kit.
Dressing for impressing is not how we are striving, in this together-time. We are simply being, deeply authentic and without appearance divisions
.

Sam just went back into his room to dress in his own robe, but before that he was in the living room for a while, talking to me. He decided not to take any moodpharms this morning. He says he wants to be “perfectly lucid,” is how he put it.

“But you’re supposed to take the minimum
dose
, at least,” I protested. “You know you are. Mom and Dad need you to.”

“Nat. It’s
my
decision. I’m not gonna be spaced out while this is happening,” he said, standing in my doorway.

Our parents had finished their daily cliffwalk by this time and were in a couples prep session titled “Bountiful Passing.”

“Okay,” I said. “So yeah, it’s up to you. But I have a right to say what I think about it. Are you going to give Mom and Dad a harder time, if you don’t take a basic dose? Because this is, like,
their
time. It’s
their
last week, not ours. It has to be about
them
.”

“I have to be honest, Nat. I can’t make any promises.”

“But Sam,” I replied, more and more annoyed, “they’re
already
doing something so hard! And you’re going to make it even harder on them?”

“Don’t be a brainwash, Nat. They’re taking the easy way out.
Something so hard?
Bullshit. They’re doing exactly what the corps want them to do.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard for them.”

“It
should
be hard. Because it’s wrong, and it’s cowardly, and it’s completely fucked.”

We were looking at each other right in the eye, which we don’t do that much since, I don’t know—maybe since Sam hit puberty. He started getting all shifty around when he turned twelve. But now he’s direct again, suddenly.

It kind of made me nervous, in fact, because he can be intense.

“Well,” I said, “that may be true or it may not be. But even if it is, we can’t
stop
them! They’re 100 percent certain. And we don’t know how it is, Sam—we don’t know what it’s like to be them!”

“Sure we do. They’re human. And so are we.”

I was looking at him, shaking my head.

Everyone old buys a contract, sooner or later. It’s their choice when. It has to be.

“They’re sure what they want,” I argued. “The contract is already in. So why not give them some peace of mind now that they’re definitely going? Why not let them have their last days the way they want them?”

I was thinking of my collection, and how my parents must want their last days to be like one of my items—perfect despite its tragic imperfections.

Beautiful even when broken.

Sam stared at me for a second, blinking. Then he ran a hand through his nappy brown hair. “Because it’s not right, Nat,” he said slowly. “None of it is.”

But he’s still going to the survivor session. For one thing, he has to. And for another, he says he wants to keep alert and pay attention to everything.

Here’s how it was at Survivor Orient: they put us in a different hearing room this time, a larger one with a kind of open space in the middle that had a cactus garden and quasi-artificial breezes and little hanging bells. There were twelve of us there, they keep the sessions small, and most of the survivors were in their twenties; Sam and I were the two youngest.

And Xing was there! Xing from the ship. She smiled at me although she didn’t wave or say anything—we’re not supposed to talk before the session gets started. I was so happy to see her, though.

The VR was LaTessa again. I guess we’re just assigned to her, and so are those other families. For this whole week she’s going to be our designated headshrinker.

We started with five minutes of silent meditation, during which the fake breezes breezed and the real bells swung on their threads and rang tinnily. But then nearing the end of it some of the future survivors started to sniffle and cry, already.

Strangers crying is embarrassing in a way I’m not quite used to yet. I mean, it’s embarrassing to cry in general, who wouldn’t feel that way? Even if you don’t get self-conscious easily it’s raw to be seen like that. But crying in public yourself is a different kind of embarrassment from watching other people do it. I have to admit I felt a bit stronger than them, since I wasn’t—right off the bat before anyone even said anything—showing my sniveling side.

So then these masseurs and masseuses filed in. I don’t know if they’re corp or hotel employees, they all wore robes a lot like ours and they looked Hawaiian—a little dark-skinned, about like me, and fit and robust, like they don’t do much traveling but spend their time in one place in the sun. They went behind us and started to give us these massages.

I don’t really like that. It’s too groovy.

Sam shrugged his masseur off right away and said, “No thanks, man. Nothing personal but it’s not for me.”

This was disruptive so I looked at the masseur guy Sam was blowing off. He was young too, maybe around my age, I thought, and I saw humor in his eyes, which, at this place, seems to be rare. There’s not that many people here who are big on laughing, they’re trained to focus on serenity and the solemn vibe of parting.

“If you be gratefully welcoming,” said LaTessa gently to Sam, “you’ll find a forgiving space opening.”

“That’s really rad,” said Sam. “Still, though. I’ll go ahead and pass.”

This time LaTessa gave up easily—maybe because the other survivors were staring at Sam and getting distracted. My own masseuse was really digging into the shoulder area so I had to stop looking at Sam’s guy, who stood back patiently with this funny kind of sympathy in his brown eyes, and keep my gaze straight ahead.

He must have had to wait for permission to leave from LaTessa, because he just stood there patiently without moving, until all the masseurs finished their work and withdrew from the people they were massaging. He didn’t seem offended or awkward but just graceful and sort of self-contained.

Eventually they all filed out again quietly.

By this time the snifflers had stopped sniffling and LaTessa made us hold hands and name the emotions that we felt. As we went around the circle saying our feelings, it struck me that everyone was zomboid. I wondered if the others were taking more pharms than us; but then, a second ago they’d been crying. So they weren’t mood-leveled. Who knows.

They mostly said variations of the same thing—they felt abandoned, they loved their parents and/or they were pissed off at them, the dying was selfish; one with a hardcore godbelief said contracts were against God’s plan.

It was all about them, was what I noticed—survivors, not the people who had to die in three days. But I guess that’s the point of therapy.

Then Xing spoke up. She asked how she was supposed to go on with her life, knowing the last generation had already been born, which meant that she would never be a parent herself and neither would anyone she knew.

Not that she wanted to; she didn’t, not at all.

“But,” she said, “these are the last parents, you know? The parents that are choosing to go now, they’re some of the last parents around. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, in the First, there won’t be any parents left. Not only no babies and no little kids, but no parents. Doesn’t that seem kind of
weird
?”

“Hella weird,” said Sam abruptly. He really looked at her. “And hella dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” asked someone else.

“Dangerous,” said Sam firmly. “A world full of people who don’t have kids and never will. It’s kind of a huge psychotic experiment, isn’t it? I mean it’s never happened in the history of the world. Even the corporates talk about it. Not loudly but they do. A world of people who may be the last generation. No consequences to what they do. A massive social experiment.”

I glanced quickly at LaTessa then to see if that had pissed her off. But she had her usual serene smile on, smooth and unwavering.

“So now we’ve got, in the First World and corporate leadership, this old population that’s getting more and more decrepit,” Sam went on. “And then we’ve got the poor parts where they’re still having kids, which is making them even poorer plus emitting huge amounts of carbon we’re totally unable to put a lid on. We’ve got actual armies guarding our farms and water. If it weren’t bad enough that the global biome’s collapsing, now it’s two kinds of people against each other too? Ancient and rich against young and scrabbling to survive?”

“But it’s already divided like that, isn’t it?” said Xing. “It’s
already
the First against the rest . . .”

“Why don’t we just, like, kidnap the poor kids if we need them so badly,” suggested a meathead-type guy.

Xing and Sam both shot him a look of disgust. Even LaTessa cleared her throat.

“We’re headed for the next tipping point,” said Sam, looking around. “We’ve had the planetary one. Pretty soon now we’re going to have the human one.”

“A social tipping point?” asked Xing.

“The corps have already launched it,” said Sam, peering at the meathead. “
Total war
.”

There was a shocked silence. Xing looked a bit alarmed. It didn’t seem like anyone knew what Sam was talking about.

I didn’t, anyway.

“I am feeling,” said LaTessa after a few seconds, with a little head incline, a clos
ing
of the eyes and a reach
ing
out of her slim, graceful arms to the future survivors sitting on either side of her, “a gently bountiful healing is calling to us all. A lovely call for
inward
focusing. This is a
personal
listening. Let us
be
in the
gathering
.”

My parents are out of it today—no doubt the sunset pharms are kicking in more. Not that they’re actually forgetting stuff yet, but they do have a kind of blissed-out quality.

I suppose maybe it’s okay, if it’s what they have to do. But it’s also a bit alien.

After we got back from our separate sessions, ate lunch, and took a little relaxation time, we had a field trip on the schedule. We get two field trips total, one on Day Two and another on Day Three. My parents picked them out beforehand from a menu of options.