One Billion Drops of Happiness (2 page)

Now focused in the right direction, the government scientists soon found a way to cleanly inject the same Vapour as a liquid, yielding exactly the same effects. Humans could now disappear forever. It was as simple as that. The responsibility of informing the inventor was passed slapdash onto a gawky young citizen who worked in the laboratory as a cleaner. His protestations unheard, he was instructed to write a cursory note to Alfred detailing the latest developments of the Vapour. How his blood had frozen upon reading that it had been secretly and successfully tested on a willing volunteer. How he had stayed awake for weeks, his innards a landslide of rubble, furious at himself, furious at the government. His brainchild being used for this? He simmered alternately with contempt, with horror, with despair. He felt that he could never forgive himself; he had unknowingly abetted the rise of dehumanisation. There was nothing he could do to stop it, and it would only spiral from here. Death had been turned into a simple, clinical process. No trace, no sentiment.

The government was aware that such a Vapour had the potential to be abused by unauthorised hands. Extremely tight security measures were put in place so that only a few people could have access to it to use in a controlled, authorised environment. Everybody knew it existed, but only a very small number could say they had ever seen the elusive Vapour in action. And the government liked to keep it that way. Their inventions belonged to New America only. Countries from the Old World had petitioned for innumerable nifty inventions, primarily the Vaccinations, to be available to them, but had quickly backtracked in revulsion when they were informed they could only do so under the condition that their country became an addition to New America. Almost like a satellite state. Thank you but no thank you, came the huffy responses. Unexpected death is the fabric of what it is to be human.

Following the distressing abuse of his creative mind, Alfred gradually became a recluse, spending more and more time tucked away in his study. He had not realised society could change so much in one lifetime. Consequently, he spent the last thirty five years of his life desperately seeking meaning to his existence; real meaning. Not the kind of meaning you could manufacture and wear on your neck, the government’s latest hare-brained scheme soon to be unveiled. He slowly rebuilt his ailing library on the sly, finding old works of the great philosophers often shipped in from Europe disguised as other items. Books were not banned per se in the new civilisation, but greatly frowned upon as they took up space and it was outdated to fill one’s head with frivolous ideas from the stagnant days of the past.

In the months of 2114, before his Sign Off, Alfred had adopted a sense of intangible urgency to whatever he was working on behind closed doors. Xandria had noticed that when he emerged in the evenings he seemed more peaceful than he had ever been before; it was as if he had resolved something deep in the depths of his conscience.

Her mother and Doric, too, seemed slightly changed. Her mother Amethyst had always been on the bohemian spectrum, but more recently had been showering unnerving amounts of affection on the whole family. It didn’t make Xandria comfortable at all; that sort of behaviour was not conducive to anything. Her generation was the first not to have lived through a previous era without all the adjuncts she was accustomed to. Outpouring of emotion was something she was unfamiliar with and something she had never herself felt. She didn’t trust her mother at all when she was acting so strangely. Xandria was on the cusp of promotion in her job at the government and any smear on her good name would ensure she came plummeting right down the career ladder, (but thanks to modern medicine only minor trauma would ensue).

‘Zebediah gone?’

‘Gone!’

‘He can’t be gone!’

‘Zebediah Voss?’

‘…to where?’

‘Did he get Signed Off?’

‘He was only a hundred…’

‘Did he have a life partner?’

‘How should we know?’

‘But why?’

‘Did he forget to click?’

‘You can’t forget to click, immigrant!’

* * *

It was not the first time that Bathsheba Ermez had been called an immigrant. Since her arrival in New America six months ago she had been trying fervently to get to grips with her new culture. Her mother had warned her she was making the biggest mistake of her life; her father had wept into his ghormeh sabzi. She would rather be Signed Off than reveal to her fellow citizens that she had been born quite naturally. The old way. It had taken months of acclimatisation in a special centre for her to learn the nuances of this modern society; that death was a scheduled event and children were born from a special serum implanted into women. They were already dabbling with embryos that needed neither man nor woman to flourish.

When she was finally given her Suppressitor, she wore it proudly and prominently, as if it was a secret uniform others would see and accept her for. She found herself using it only a little at first, when she missed home or wondered about her lost family, but the acclimatisation had almost re-conditioned her psyche to depend on it to balance her emotions. Nowadays she was just about using it as an instinct when she could feel a warm surge of old emotions, but still found herself clicking more in the presence of others. They became suspicious if immigrants were not using them enough. The new civilisation was hyper vigilant of people from the old lands coming in. Raw with their inflammatory emotions, they could easily unsettle the finely tuned equilibrium of artificial serenity.

* * *

The fourth President of New America, Olivier Okadigbo, had just been hastily informed by his subordinate that Zebediah Voss, introvert inventor of the Suppressitor, had quite disappeared.

‘What do you mean disappeared?’ spluttered Okadigbo, highly miffed and a little embarrassed that he had by no means been the first to know.

‘His apartment was found empty, completely stripped. All that was left was his Suppressitor on the dining table,’ the subordinate replied sluggishly. He had been through this charade with many other people already.

‘This is the 22
^nd
century, you can’t just lose someone! I don’t understand! What does this mean? Will someone tell me what this means?’ Okadigbo leapt to his feet, furiously jabbing at his 24-carat-diamond Suppressitor. This seemed to have the desired effect for he immediately shrunk into his chair again resignedly. ‘Did he have a life partner? Damn it, I only saw him three weeks ago. We dined at The Claude and he said he thought it remarkable that leopard goulash could still be served so sang-froid.’

The subordinate looked vaguely amused. He was used to the pint-sized Okadigbo and his fluctuant moods. Only yesterday in sheer aggravation had he spat reams of water at him mid-sip upon discovering that there had been yet another meeting scheduled without his knowledge. Okadigbo struggled for power; he sometimes felt that he would be more important if he were not President, like the runners-up of major competitions who in the long-run always seemed to have more success than the over-hyped winner.

Okadigbo, too, had been an immigrant when the new society was officially inaugurated. He had been particularly zealous with his proclamations of ‘this wonderful new civilisation, so very forward, so very modern,’ that thanks to his remarkable gift of sycophancy he had rather quickly worked his way up to become President. Even today he still tingled with pride upon reading his name in official government documents; he had made it.

The plain and ordinary citizens gave him much unquestioned support, but if he was very honest, he felt more decorative than functional. In the flushes of emotion before his Suppressitor kicked in he sometimes registered pangs of insufficiency, of frustration. But what were those words in this modern age? The Suppressitor had all but made them redundant! Long live the Suppressitor, long live New America - but where had Zebediah gone?

* * *

Building 2506, Floor 41 – erstwhile home of Zebediah Voss - had indeed been left in a threadbare state, as discovered by Ernesta Wan, chief executive of the largest Suppressitor factory midtown. Upon arrival at the residence, she had called his name numerous times and then some more just in case he was hiding from her, before she realised that she was not five anymore, and that this was a serious situation.

For a man of such advanced intellect, one who could feasibly fathom and manufacture such an invention as the Suppressitor, Zebediah Voss despised virtual communication. He had grumbled that his ideas could not translate over a telephone line, despite being able to see and hear the other person as a perfect three dimensional ethereal miniature. Therefore every week Ernesta Wan would zip over to his building, and with much help from her own Suppressitor, simpered and pandered to the inventor and his infuriating manner until he finally revealed precious nuggets of expertise. It was worth it if she could keep the company merrily afloat.

Wan was a ruthless woman. Ninety years old and top of her game, she wore her hair parted severely down the midline as if her brain had been prised apart meticulously and sewn back together with a resultant scar. But the flaw with her company was that it was only Zebediah Voss who truly knew what he was talking about. Yes, they had employed scientists with the highest accolades, but practically speaking it was Zebediah who ran the show and she knew he probably suspected so.

The factory computers powering the machines to produce Suppressitors were all fed by a complex program written by Voss. Some of the most lauded minds in the country had worked together to try to decipher this program but all had been left scratching their heads in bewilderment. Zebediah’s mind was truly a labyrinth in a field of its own.

Hence a delicate balance had been struck. The company depended on Zebediah’s cooperation, and in turn he seemed to amuse himself tinkering with the devices. Suppressitors were by no means perfect yet; often the devices would adopt glitches, malfunction at any crucial moment or simply throw a wobbly that only Zebediah knew how to fix. He would receive news of any problems with a wry smile as if the granite slabs were small errant children.

Voss was paid an extortionately large sum of money for his ideas, but curiously his living abode did not seem to contain a great deal. Wan’s intuition had suspected his enthusiasm had been waning in recent months and she had been tiptoeing extra gently around his every whim.

But if he were truly gone, what would happen to the company, and more importantly, what would happen to the country when all the Suppressitors stopped working?

* * *

Henry Excelsior stood engrossed, quite literally with the world at his fingertips. Amongst the lavish interior of his 143
^rd
floor office, the bespoke Hercules Rodolfo soft furnishings slung insouciantly on chairs and sofas in fashionable shades of quartz, the centre-piece of the office was an enormous astral sphere.

Made of the purest slabs of gold, this dome-like object hosted a live representation of the universe. Left to right, top to bottom as far as the eye could see, illusory planets suspended themselves in colours of brilliance. Stars swirled and glittered, and sometimes, if the right moment was caught, a death could be witnessed albeit in wispy slow motion.

‘Not today,’ barked Reginald Excelsior striding briskly into the office. ‘Zebediah is gone and we need to get ourselves in gear!’

Henry calmly turned to face his father as if he had been expecting him. ‘Father, relax, have a click.’

A cloud of distilled irritability crossed Reginald’s face as he fumbled around on his clavicle for the plain granite device. Click, click. The job was done. Reginald sighed.

Biological fathers were unheard of these days seeing as life-synthesising serum could be concocted in a laboratory. Therefore it made sense that Reginald Excelsior was not actually Henry’s father. He had been his mother’s life partner until the love draught they shared needed a booster and she had suddenly acquired cold feet. He had not seen her since and for split seconds had felt distraught until the urgent batterings of his Suppressitor took effect. However, as he had grown a business affiliation with Henry over the years, setting up the multi-billion enterprise firm Excelsior Incorporated, it made sense for the two to stick together. And for many years, they had done just that.

‘I tell you, son. Call it my hundred-year-old paranoia, but ever since the fool took off I swear these things have lost their pizzazz.’ Reginald inspected his Suppressitor with great suspicion as though it had been swiped in the night and replaced with a shoddy placebo. ‘How’s yours working?’

‘Fine,’ said Henry shortly. He had been born into the world after the dawn of these devices and had consequently never suffered the same pangs of withdrawal as his elders. He shared the same innate calmness as the rest of his generation. Nursed by a Suppressitor since being a newborn, it had almost injected a pandemic aloofness across the country.

Reginald was one hundred and three years old, so had been born during the first flushes of the former century. He had experienced decades of life hindered by his own primitive emotions. They had made him lose control; they had dominated him, taunted him. Activating his Suppressitor was less of a habit but more as an act of insecurity. He could remember the surges of excess emotion from the Old World and hid from their ominous shadow in fear of their return. He had wholeheartedly embraced the Inauguration of New America in 2080 with its modern new gadgets and ideals. Too right, emotions got in the way of life. They impeded the progress of civilisation. They had caused wars, hysteria and general disarray. If you had feelings you’d certainly fritter your potential to feeding them, as in an old leaky engine or a parasite and its encumbered host.

Cool logic was the modern objective in life. Factory machines churned out a phenomenal output every day. These magnificent objects had never been burdened by emotion, they were never distracted. Think of everything humans could achieve if they were the same! And then there would never be hurt, or sadness, or masses of people taking umbrage at the world. Equally there would never be ebullient joy, but everybody knew that whatever goes up must come down, and with a tremendous fall-out to boot.