One Billion Drops of Happiness (4 page)

Reginald brightened. ‘Luckily for you, Mr. Okadigbo my dear friend, Excelsior Incorporated can offer you a solution. A sound solution.’

‘Go on…’ Okadigbo kneeled to pick up a stray piece of fluff from the carpet. As a boy he had often been ticked off by his now deceased parents for his distractibility in important situations.

‘Well as we all know, these pesky emotions cloud our good judgment. We don’t have a place for them anymore in modern society.’ Okadigbo nodded approvingly, absently rolling the fluff between his fingertips. ‘They need to be suppressed. Before, all we knew was the Suppressitor. Let’s be fair, it’s been a good instrument for nearly forty years. But yes, they do have their limitations. We can’t keep clicking whenever we suffer excessive emotion; we need something that can be relied upon intrinsically. Something we don’t need to constantly be on edge about. How about something that we can breathe..?’

‘You mean to say…you have it?’ Okadigbo’s eyes glistened in wonderment. His nervous fingernail squashed the now neatly rounded fluff-ball into a flat wafer. If it had been alive it surely would have emitted a squeak.

‘Well you can’t say we don’t spoil you. What we have is essentially a Suppressitor in liquid form. We call it Ophelium. It’s liquid serenity, liquid happiness, call it what you will.’

‘Ophelium,’ the President breathed, liking the concept already, approving the way it felt on his tongue.

‘- But we need your permission to go ahead and test it. We believe that if we had the means to heat enough of it, thereby transforming it into a gas, we could pump it out across the whole country. There’d be no need for Suppressitors; we’d all be innately serene. And it’d never run out, the ingredients are fairly accessible…’

‘Wonderful, wonderful!’ Okadigbo exclaimed, ‘let’s do it, I’ll sign!’

Along with his distractibility, he was also renowned for his impatience. He loved quick solutions; in the olden days he would have been the man who built his house upon the sand.

‘Not yet,’ Reginald explained patiently, ‘we’re still working out the fine details. But don’t let anybody else pitch to you; you have to trust us with this.’

‘Absolutely, sir. Absolutely.’ Okadigbo breathed slowly; relieved he had found a way out of this sticky situation. ‘I can tell the people not to worry now. Thank you, thank you…’ He hung up, his mind awhirl.

Gaseous serenity? The world would never be the same again! He had no idea at the moment how it would work or what exactly it would entail, but brilliant idea, what a wonderfully modern society we live in!

Bathsheba Ermez had just been given her first job at the prison. She was spilling with pride at having finally been accepted to a role that would help her new society. When she spoke to her parents over the phone, she gushed about how wonderful and to the fore her new life was, how she wished they could see what she got up to. If they could, maybe they too would migrate away from the suffering of the Old World. There was really no need for hardship these days, the rest of the planet was kidding themselves by holding onto the problems that they believed made them human.

It was frustrating that during their short chats, she could see their world bustling about in the background of the mirage, but in return they could see only her face thanks to censorship. The government of New America did not want people outside glimpsing all their gadgets and contraptions. It was part of what made the country so special, and as a result, paranoia of intellectual theft and sabotage was rife.

And rightly so, Bathsheba thought. The world could not pick and choose what they approved of when it came to her new country. She was fiercely protective of the civilisation. Several times she had called her parents terrible names and refused to ever speak to them again after they had raised doubts about the way she lived. Her parents had wept down the phone and spoken of love and other abstract sentiments, but Bathsheba, recalling her acclimatisation lessons, retaliated that there was no such thing as love. It was a meaningless word; a chemical reaction that could be mimicked by potions acting on the sensory pathways of the brain. Sure, the people in her society took the Love Injection to ensure companionship – after all, ingenious ideas of progress could not be thought out alone - but it was overall an elitist sensation. They were going to phase out emotion with new inventions anyway.

The government was trying to construct a means by which people could evolve without harbouring an inner craving for this love word. The scientists were bamboozled; they found that it lay inherently dormant in everybody. Some fortunate people never unearthed it; other wise people discovered they possessed this feeling but managed to remove themselves from the situation rapidly by requesting transfers within their employment. They had been schooled all too well that it would always end badly.

But there remained a minority for whom love wreaked havoc. These people were looked upon as beings with weak minds, weak resolves. The head must always defeat the heart. Whether they stumbled across the flurry of emotions while supposedly injected with the potion for another, or whether it was entirely unto two free agents, this quandary had niggled the best brains in the country for years.

The best they had managed to come up with, for now, was a unique potion they could inject into two willing people. It could be any male or female combination; it didn’t matter. All that mattered was this potion mimicking the sensations of the mythical emotion. It was the lesser of the two evils; having the potion meant the feelings could be controlled, milder and altogether more manageable. The raw, wilder form of the emotion – the version that existed in the Old World, the version that scientists were working hard to prove did not exist – only caused confusion and conflict. Only kinship borne of mutual respect between citizens could propel the world to greatness.

While scientists could not yet categorically deny the feeling’s existence, that it was purely imaginary, it was thought better to deliver the potion as protection against the stronger, more unpredictable form of the feeling. Some citizens were so distressed by the turbulence the injection created that they could hardly wait for the six month installment to end so the feelings could fade. Antidotes were not given. It was advised that the feeling subsided gradually else the upset in equilibrium would be too traumatic. Often people never came back for a booster and never saw their partners ever again after the first hit.

Bathsheba hoped that she was one of those people who had fortunately never experienced the stirrings of weakness. She had no doubt that the scientists would soon get to the bottom of this problem once and for all, but she worried about what these dormant predispositions could do to society in the meantime. This was the last terror, the one thing that humans were still not immune to.

She had been given her job as a stroke of luck, since the woman in the role before her had been severely reprimanded for falling in love with somebody else, despite the fact that she was supposed to chemically love a man who worked in the Suppressitor plant. When he found out, he was said to have gone berserk. His Suppressitor had not been able to handle the burning emotions thrown up and he had been forced to go to the hospital to recover with a higher power Suppressitor. The stronger device had taken a few days to become in tune with his body, meaning he was off work for two weeks. In this time period, the output of the plant suffered and the case was used as a prime example as to why emotions hindered the output of society.

Nobody knew what had become of the woman herself. While having intense feelings for someone else, exquisite feelings that pierced her viscerally, the tepid effects of the potion were still active. The result being that she loved two different beings in two different ways, with two different strengths. The bewilderment the woman felt must have driven her to madness, sympathised the citizens. It was no wonder the government was toiling to eradicate such a recipe for disaster. Nonetheless they stressed heavily at the time that the risk of falling prey to the ‘real thing’ whilst having the milder, prophylactic potion was an extremely rare occurrence.

In the meantime, Bathsheba’s prison job was soulless to say the least. The hours were long and the pay meagre, but that was not the reason even the most unfeeling individual would label it harrowing. Seeing as the prisons housed all offenders in a semi- comatose, metabolism-numbing state, it was decided that the man power required to oversee the operation could be restricted to one person. This meant that every day, seven days a week, Bathsheba would descend into the depths of the earth, the bowels of New America’s society, and sit at her desk keeping a close eye on the mirages of each section of the prison as they flashed up in her office.

It had been frightening at first to see so many glazy eyed, gaunt-faced wrongdoers floating motionlessly only a few feet away from her. Every few seconds, like clockwork, the mirage would shift to the next section of the prison which would show virtually the same scene again; human bodies in purgatory waiting for their one hundred and fifty year release. The government was reluctant to dispose of prisoners with the Vapour just yet, they were still thinking of something useful to put them to. There had to be some means by which maximal use could be extracted from these individuals before their existence came to an end.

Bathsheba was no longer affected by the sights of the prison. They had told her it would pass, and as usual, they had been right. Loneliness had not occurred to her during the long empty hours. Her Suppressitor, still fairly new, was working like a dream to settle her conscience and lull her into a state of cool indifference. As long as she was doing her bit for society, it would thank her later, she was sure.

* * *

Amethyst stared at the mirage hanging in her bedroom in disbelief. It was strange enough to receive a personal government message let alone one which was delivered so promptly, so precisely to her whereabouts. They were getting cleverer each day, she cursed inwardly.

‘Dear Ms Reinhardt,’ it started, ‘please be advised that you are scheduled to attend a Suppressitor refresher course on Wednesday 18
^th
July, 2114. It has been noted at recent events that you have failed to maintain a satisfactory standard in emotional control. Your employment has been informed of this appointment and thus there is no feasible reason why you should be unable to attend. The government of New America would like to remind you that the welfare of every citizen is important to them, and by attending this course, you shall be better equipped to serve the progress of your country. Kind regards.’

‘Bullcrap.’ Amethyst muttered darkly as she continued to dress around the flickering mirage. She tossed her shoe at it but predictably, it sailed straight through without the spiteful crash that she so desperately desired to hear. She couldn’t minimise the window either as with other messages. If it came from the government it hung around like a bad smell for at least half an hour.

‘Who reads that slowly anyway…’ she grumbled. Since her father’s death – she had started referring to it as that now, for Signing Off was just a sugar coating of the reality – she had been permanently disgruntled at the state of affairs. Doric had not been enormously helpful, all he wanted to do was make sure she was content. Sometimes her daughter, Xandria, wondered whether his devotion to her was purely a product of the Love Injection they had both taken, or whether it was something more intangible.

She had stopped wearing her Suppressitor, and in its place on her neck sported an inert square of granite which perfectly resembled its former occupant. A cunning placebo; nobody would be able to tell the difference unless they seized it and took it away for testing. Although they might take a closer look at it during this refresher course, she suddenly realised in panic.

Little had Xandria known that in the last days of Alfred’s life, he had reached a shared epiphany with his wayward only daughter. The fruit of his thirty five years’ confinement was the flooding realisation that society was upside down, all wrong and that his family had to leave it behind before it was too late. He and his daughter had spoken at length, late into many starry nights about how the government was dehumanising the entire country, little by little. He had recounted his idyllic youth growing up in Norway, the craggy coastlines, the fjords and the islands upon which he would picnic. It was in the lowlands that he had met his future wife Kristina. He was sixty three, she was twenty five.

He was enamoured right from the very beginning. At that age he had never imagined it possible to find such congenial companionship, not the sort that lasted very long anyway. As a biological researcher he kept an avid interest in the local wildlife, often spending hours after work by the waters edge in the sole company of the salmon, trout and abundant sea char. She had appeared one day, as often occurs in these love stories, lithe limbed and idealistic with all the gifts of youth. She was as fresh as a mountain peak, his Kristina; a local photographer who had stumbled upon his corner of the world in the quest for the perfect panoramic arrangement of flora and fauna.

They were bound to each other from the beginning. Alfred experienced his own renaissance in what he imagined was the twilight of his remaining years. Kristina clung to and admired Alfred’s every thought and notion, for such depth and lucidity was sadly no longer a common quality in the world.

Almost a century later, whenever Alfred mentioned these happy years in Norway, his face would still adopt a distinct new quality of powdered delight, almost as if a source of light came from within his thorax. Those glorious days when he could live freely and simply, able to feel pain and cause pain to others, experience and revel in every hue of emotion on life’s palette. Feeling tremendous joy at fleeting wonders and being capable of thinking so abstractly that his brain’s pathways became full of knots. This was surely the beauty of life as was intended by whatever mastermind begot us, he acquiesced.