Pills and Starships (17 page)

And also, when we’ve been told those stories in the past—the stories of contracts who reneged at the eleventh hour—they’re always told in a way that makes the contracts seem insecure and selfish, like by paying double out of fear they’re making things poorer for their survivors, and so they’re the ones with the disgrace. Not the corporates.

Because contracts don’t come cheap.

I don’t fully get it.

We had to take Sam to the session like that, our private family session with LaT. He wasn’t drooling anymore, after we left the restaurant, but he was tripping over his feet as he walked, muttering under his breath. You couldn’t even understand what he was saying—a relief—but I was on high alert, because what if it was secrets he was telling? And what if he got louder and clearer? Pharma can come in waves sometimes, affecting the brain first one way, then another. He’d been quiet till then, but that didn’t make me confident.

To spill the secrets in front of LaTessa, I figured, that would be the worst possible situation.

So I kept close to him as we headed to the hearing room. I held one of his limp arms and walked beside him and I listened, through the hotel lobby, into the elevator, then down the twists and turns of lavender corridors, passing other contracts and family members as they navigated their own way through the maze.

All striking me, for the first time, as total sleepwalkers.

But what he was mumbling was all gibberish, as far as I could tell, and my parents, walking ahead of us with their arms around each other’s waists, didn’t seem to be paying any more attention to him now than they had when he was drooling over his lunchplate.

We got there and sat down in a circle around the water feature, as directed. Sam was like a crazy person or a booze migrant, not looking up, doing little hand gestures to himself, little laughs, shit like that.

LaT. came in, and her gown was even more arresting this time because it was whiter than white, like a bride—and it even had a very small train that wafted in the air behind her and didn’t seem to touch the floor. LaT., I have to say, could win an Aryan Princess Beauty Contest. She’s like that superthin olden doll with yellow hair, one of the famous toys they used to make from oil. When she sat down the dress settled around her in a filmy cloud.

She must have been briefed by Rory, most likely she was in on the whole thing, because she didn’t even blink at Sam’s condition.

“I want to wish you a happy, happy Goodbye Day,” she said first off. “Let us join hands and
be
.”

We held hands, with me grabbing Sam’s, which was sweaty and trembling, and my father on his other side taking his other one. This was when we were supposed to bow our heads and close our eyes and meditate, but I just watched the others do it. With LaT.’s eyes closed, I noticed on her lids the weenciest bit of silvery eyeshadow.

So LaT. was breaking the no-makeup-in-sessions rule. Huh.

And Sam was still babbling to himself, but mostly it was silent, his lips moving, his head shaking back and forth, like no, no, no, like he was denying something constantly. I think he was trying to hold himself in check. I wondered how I was supposed to dose him now, in the middle of the session, if he got louder. I started to feel even more anxious.

There was a waste room nearby, a couple of doors down the hall—could I get him there, if I had to? Would LaT. even let me?

I was getting pretty majorly anxious; I was on the edge of my seat, or would have been if I’d had one.

“And now, Robert and Sara,” she said to my parents, when the moment was apparently done, “I trust you’re feeling loving.”

“Very,” said my mother—or, rather, the pharmazone impostor who had taken her over.

“Express your perceiving,” said LaT. gently.

My parents just looked at her and smiled.

“I know,” said LaT. “Words escaping.”

“It’s just . . . nice,” said my mother.

“Nice,” echoed my dad.

She wasn’t getting much from them, obviously. Pharmadrones. She smiled and nodded sympathetically and then she turned to me.

“And you, Nat,” she serened. “Is there a beingness you feel like sharing?”

“I guess so.” It seemed to me I should fill as much space as I could right then, so that Sam couldn’t fill any. “I guess my problem is, you know, we’re supposed to say goodbye today. And we’ve had all the training. Which I appreciate. And so none of this is unexpected, and I realize that. But still, my problem is I feel like I
can’t
really say goodbye. Because I believe they’ve already left. Before, we didn’t say goodbye because there was going to be time later. Now it’s later but I’m not sure who’s here to say goodbye to.”

“You know, Nat,” said LaT., a little chiding, “your loving parents are being next to you,
so
closely. You can still be expressing to them.”

“But I’m not sure it
is
them. It’s more their pharma that’s here, their pharms speaking through them. Not them speaking through their pharms. That would be fine, or at least I could take it. I’m used to it. But this is like their pharms have taken over. Don’t you know what I mean?”

Of course, I didn’t really care if she knew what I meant, and I also already knew that she knew. I was talking emptily, just to hold onto the airwaves.

“The selves of your parents,” explained LaT., “are fully whole, only ensconced in Happiness-promoting. A self is not taken, a self is being augmented. Please, Nat, be with us fully in the triumph that is healing. Remember, only contentment is designed. The self is always still there, the self is a noble spark, bountifully persisting.”

And that was when Sam spoke up.

“No, no,” he said, urgently if still a bit slurry too. “That isn’t it at all.”

LaT. swiveled her head to look at him. Really swiveled—like a robot. For a second I thought she was one. But no. There aren’t robots that high-functioning.

“Sam,” she purred. “Wonderful. Sharing a feeling?”

“They’re gone. You took them. This isn’t them, it’s just a memory,” said Sam. “It’s like, the side that’s faceup, floating on the surface when the person has already been drowned.”

He was flushed and sweaty-faced and shaking his head.

And he hadn’t said anything yet but I knew then, I had to get to him before he did.

“You’re taking them for the quotas,” said Sam.

I had no clue what he was talking about. But I saw LaT.’s eyes widen in shock.

This was it.

“He’s going to throw up,” I interrupted, my voice panicked. “He’s gagging!”

Sam eyeballed me a little, fear in the whites of his eyes, and a split-second later he
was
gagging, he was hunching forward and making motions of being sick.

“I’ll get him to the toilet,” I rushed, and I got up, and I grabbed him by the hand and pulled. LaTessa stood up too, but I pushed him past her and out the door, we were basically running, and it was a blur after that. I got him to the door of the waste room, and then we were inside and I took the vial out of my robe pocket and shoved the pills into his mouth, with him half-helping and half-flailing, and then he was swallowing and it looked like he really was gagging, but I didn’t have time to watch. I threw the vial into a composting toilet and then even—this is a gross part—shoved it down under the top layer of straw, which thankfully wasn’t too shitty, and turned around just in time to see Sam leaning over the sink, where he must have washed down the pills with some Reclaimed Sewage Grade A.

And then the door was flung open. I mean this whole thing took under sixty seconds.

I couldn’t wash my hands because that would tip them off, so I stood there with the faint pungency of compost on my fingertips, hoping no one else could smell it coming from me. And Sam stood over the sink, face streaming with sweat and bright red, and it did look like he might have just thrown up.

But he had swallowed the pills.

And water was washing down the sink. So for all they knew, he
had
been sick.

I was afraid. Of the service employee standing in front of me—not Rory but his friend from before, another man-mountain with a name tag that read,
Olaf
.

“I’m sorry,” I said shakily. “I know it’s totally disruptive. But he just—he had to throw up. Maybe a reaction to his pharms?”

Olaf jerked his head at me, to say,
Get out
. (It was a men’s waste room, by the way.) He didn’t bother to make nice. “Wait in the hall,” he said. “Don’t leave.”

So he stayed in the waste room with Sam, and I went out. As I was standing in the hall, following orders and waiting for them, I noticed a door cracked open—it must have been the door to a room just off the healing room, I think, because the healing room door was only a few feet further along the hall. It was open a couple of inches, like it hadn’t quite connected and clicked closed when someone quickly went in. I don’t know whether it was just boredom and restlessness or whether I was purposeful, but something made me sneak closer until I was near enough to detect the voices leaking out of it.

And then I heard a man’s voice say, not loudly but forcefully all the same, with a threatening tone: “That shit can’t happen. That’s major demerits. I bet you forfeit the whole week’s bonus.”

And then a woman’s voice: “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. My whole bonus? It could be nothing. And it went down in two seconds flat. What the fuck was I supposed to do?
You
fucking tell
me
, Rory.”

I knew that voice even without the phony serene vibe and careful language technology. And it belonged to LaT.

Sam and Olaf came out after a minute and I led Sam up to the suite, with Olaf lumbering at our heels. When we got up there he was mumbling about how he was afraid he was going to be sick again. Actually he was just falling asleep, I could tell, and I was worried about all those pills and what they might do to him. I wasn’t quite as certain as he was that he wouldn’t OD.

But I was also relieved he wasn’t saying anything shocking. And that I’d been able to keep my promise. It had been a close call.

Olaf didn’t let me stay with Sam though, I had to go back to the session and he escorted me the whole way. When I went in, there was LaTessa, completely returned to her serene self. Like nothing had happened. My parents were holding hands with her, and all three of them had closed eyes and were trancelike.

I was feeling shaken because I guess in some way I’d trusted that LaTessa was who she pretended to be. In some way I wanted her to be a real VR; if she was going to say that jargon I’d wanted her to
mean
it. I didn’t want her to be someone who was flat-out pretending. And now I knew she was. She was just like the other thugs, nothing but a regular service employee, and all her language technology was a veneer. She wasn’t a shrink, she was a con man.

On one level I’d always thought she was fake, sure, partly because of Sam’s cynicism and partly because her way of talking had too many rules for me. But still I must have hoped she wasn’t. I must have hoped she did have secrets, somewhere inside those words ending with
-ing
. Good secrets, like a godbelief. And now that hope was dashed.

Who knew what else was fake? This whole thing could be a house of cards. Underneath all the pretty surfaces, it might all be people swearing like LaTessa, people trying to pull something.

In fact now it seemed to me like it almost had to be that way, and I’d always been a sheep, just like Sam said. A sheep and a brainwash.

I bit down so hard on my teeth that they hurt. I didn’t want to be a sheep.

I waited politely till LaT. and my parents opened their eyes again and sat down at my place.

“Illness is part of being,” said LaT. consolingly. “Sam will be being fine later. For now, Nat, let us continue the loving expressing.”

All I could think of was the tone of her normally silvery voice, saying,
My whole bonus? What the fuck was I supposed to do?

But I tried on a weak smile and pushed myself back into a therapy frame of mind.