Pills and Starships (2 page)

Those farms and fields seem like a vast landscape to me, next to, for instance, the complex where my family lived. But those two guys probably didn’t think so. They wanted to conquer the heavens.

That’s how it was back then—once, in the past, we thought bigger was better. As far as I can tell, that was our main idea. More, bigger, higher. Of course the tutorials don’t put it that way. They’re mostly corpspeak about “our human achievements” in “America the Beautiful” over grainy old vids of national parks with pine trees and large brown animals, all furry. Every kid has to take that class. It’s called “One Great Nation.”

There are vids of herds moving across tall-grass prairies and tree branches with birds flitting about in them; cities of sparkling glass, white buildings with columns. Those sites tell all about how big we were, how high we flew, but not so much what it did to us. (Wax melting. Body plunging. Legs kicking in the air during a drowning activity.) In fact they talk like the system collapse was kind of a tragic accident, like a random asteroid strike.

To see anything but corpspeak veneer you have to look past the pop-up ads and chirpy theme songs; you have to fish around on rogue sites. It’s not hard, really, because even though the corps shut them down as fast as they can, new rogue sites keep popping up, and there’s lots of juicy stuff on them.

I browse the rogues now and then, but my little brother Sam does it constantly. He knows the hidden places to get to, how to find out corp secrets, even. He’s a hackerkid. And while I fish around too from time to time—in the traces of the world’s
true
history, where I can see pieces of beauty and sadness in old pictures like Icarus and spectacular olden music—I’m not into codes and puzzles like Sam is. I’m more into beautiful stuff, the history of what we’ve made, how we wanted to think of ourselves and of the world.

And when I fish around in that history—the shredded patchwork I can make of it, with holes big enough to see through—I find out things. It’s started to seem to me like there were moments and places—sometimes in little villages in the mountains with snow on their peaks or sunlit river valleys; sometimes in those clumps of skyscrapers that held ten million people at a time—when some of our ancestors had peace and were happy.

There were moments.

We still have laws. It’s not chaos in the parts Sam and I know. You get a glimpse of the disorder sometimes, even of a kind of split-second panic, but it’s almost like a technical glitch—like a video feed that freezes for just a moment and then moves normally again.

Where my family has lived there’s still the rule of law, we have our regular routines. Not far away the cliffs are falling into the sea and the last carbon-sequest forests are turning brown because some beetles from another continent are eating them. Closer to home people are lining up for medicines to cure bugs brought by the new mosquitoes.

All types of mosquitoes and flies have recently moved in from Africa and other continents, following the warmer air and changing conditions. They brought some gifts with them: malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile. The flies brought a human strain of parvo, sleeping sickness, the filoviruses they never used to be vectors for. There are vaccines for some of it, but plenty of days, if you’re going outside the complex, you have to wear netsuits.

Anyway, in our building there were still burn-free barbeques once a month—the neighbors were up to date on their vaccines and had the codes to prove it. So we would meet new people every now and then, meet them in flesh, not over the bands. We’d meet them on the roof garden or ground-level terraces, or sometimes, when air or bug warnings rolled in on the same day a realmeet was happening, in one of the lobbies, with wallscreen scenes pretending we were all outside. They’d throw up views of the cityscape that tried to replicate the vistas from the roof garden.

That always had a pathetic feel to it and Sam and I always wished they’d just do something else with the screens—we’d rather have had fairylands, animé. Even still photos or old-fashioned movievids. Hell, we’d rather have had just actual, you know,
walls
. It’s better to either (1) do nothing, or (2) full-on pretend, than try to imitate something that’s already halfway lame in the first place.

Frankly the real views aren’t that great.

Sam’s a sleuth and a sneak. He likes to look through spyholes; he has a thirst for knowledge and the patience to slake that thirst. Sam looks through spyholes on the face and he sees pieces of the hidden rest of the world. Sometimes it’s numbers he’s downloading, sometimes it’s vids, sometimes it’s GIS data.

Once I came up behind him when he was watching a live feed of a complex not far from ours where someone had come up contagious. Sam knew another kid there and the kid had some kind of spycam set up; we watched a scene where corporates came teeming into a condo, zipped up the kid’s father, and hustled him away.

I see pieces too, but like I said before, I don’t have Sam’s craving for facts. What I crave, after a long day, what I look for when I’m browsing, is one beautiful thing. I’m like the small gray fish we used to have, the last legal pet in our building. I bury my nose in gravel, hoping to find a nugget to sustain me. It can be a minuscule nugget, as long as it’s pleasing. A flash, a spark. Something to fix on and admire.

When I find one of these things, I add it to my collection.

But Sam reminds me more of that little gray fish during the times when it
wasn’t
looking for food. The rest of the time it was just desperate to escape the tank, swimming at the corner edge of the aquarium, its tail and fins constantly fluttering quickly like it was trying to get out. Back and forth, back and forth, corner to corner, from the filter to the air pump, from the fake plant to the fake rock, then up the corner seam and down again.

It’s Sam, in our family, who’s the rebel. My parents were also rebels once, back in the day—treehugs, at least. They got thrown in jail for saying their opinions about keeping nature around. Not crimes, exactly, but free speech shit—protests about loving animals, chaining themselves to oil derricks to stop drilling, that kind of stuff. My mother lost three fingers that way. On one of her hands she only has a thumb and forefinger, but she can get along fine with them, hold stuff and type, most things she needs to do. The other fingers got in the way of a saw, when she and my dad were treehugging.

She doesn’t like to go into detail. My father was with her, and other people too, and she was lucky in the end—they got to a clinic before she lost too much blood.

But they had to leave the fingers behind, Dad says.

That was before I was born. For the past sixteen years, they’ve been regular parents making a living and taking care of us. My mother’s the practical one, my dad’s dreamy and has a head full of facts and old memorized quotations. Of the four of us, it’s Sam who gets mad at the world these days. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I think things are golden. It’s just that, if there’s an angry gene, I don’t think I inherited it.

I don’t know how much of a history lesson to give; it depends on when your spaceship blasted off, right?

Sam’s hacked some corporate sites and he says it went down like so: The service corporations started as spinoffs from even bigger corps. They got their services made legal bit by bit, because those parent corps were megapowerful. Like there would be a major law passed to help farmers grow food, say, and then a government guy who was paid by a service corp would tack on some fine print saying that some action the corps wanted to do would just be legal from then on.

And when it got more out in the open, they started running ads saying how we needed the service because life spans are so long and old people suffer from terrible sadness. Those ads had powerful music written by famous musicians and were what my mom calls tearjerkers. Eventually it seemed most people figured the service must be a medical mercy. I guess it gradually turned normal.

Nowadays service corps, along with the energy and food and water corps, are either instead of government or just run it themselves. We still have democracy, I mean we pick from corporate leaders whose pics and styles and soundbites post on face. It’s voting made easy because you choose the brand that fits you best. You can see vids of the different choices playing with their virtual pets, talking to friends and family. And you can link to a list of leaders’ general opinions at the end—stuff like what models they prefer, whether they have a godbelief and if so what it is.

If you look really hard you find the boring stuff, like whether Plan A or Plan B is a better way to spend the corps’ money, or whether X or Y should be allowed. Most people are more interested in the homepages though, the look of their wives or hubbies, the musicvids that go with them.

Anyway, the service corps’ products get fancier all the time. There are whole catalogs of options you can order in face shops now: personal or couple contracts, home or away, urban or country, private or open, basic or luxury. Each of those categories has hundreds, maybe thousands of different opportunities.

This might sound pretty weird to you, floating above the stratosphere. Like, number one, why do so many people pay serious money to have themselves made dead? And number two, even if beaucoups of them want to die, why don’t they just go DIY?

Re: number one, I don’t totally get it either. But then I’m young. No one who’s sixteen wants to buy a contract or is allowed to—not where I live, anyway. We still have our emo types and cutters and all that, but they do most of it on face. It’s style gestures, not actual flesh-injuring. Poses are serious but they’re still poses. Young people don’t have as many mood problems as older people do, is how the corporates explain the deal to us. I don’t know why, exactly, except this is the world we were born into so it’s what we’ve always known. I mean, we’re not completely overjoyed or anything, you won’t see us leaping up in jubilation constantly at the chaos reports we see on face or even the quieter scene through our windows. I’d say we go from glum to bitchy to outright hostile, on the whole attitude spectrum.

But still, compared to the older ones we’re cheerful, so in some ways we must be used to it.

The old people get sad because the world’s falling apart, the world they used to know, and it turns out they loved that world, they loved it more than they ever knew until it was way too late. So now they miss all the parts of it that are going or gone; they miss those parts of the world the way you’d miss a limb or a major organ. Like me they have their soft green lawns and treelined neighborhoods to think of when they want to escape and dream, but for them those neighborhoods were real when they were young.

And now they’re only memories.

I should mention, I learned from 20th c. stories and vids that “old” used to mean in your sixties or seventies, for humans. Well, that’s like middle-aged now. Due to the GE that boosted immune systems against cancer and heart trouble in the mid 21st c., people who live in the comfort zones make it to a hundred and ten easily. If they choose to.

I hope that answers number one. Re: number two, I hear it’s not that simple to off yourself if you’re not naturally gifted in that department. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never tried, but I know a kid on face whose parents did. It didn’t work out that well. Most older folks who go the DIY route are singles, not people with families, because it’s harder on survivors with no official support. People like to be able to depend on a system that’s there outside of them, with set rules and schedules and convenience.

Back in the days when death was unmanaged, before the sunset pharms, people already had plenty of death businesses, from what I’ve read on corp facesites. Even Sam says it’s true. It’s not like people keeled over and just lay there where they fell.

People need organized ways of dealing with hard things. Therefore, service contracts.

Of course, you can’t take out a contract on someone else. That’d be murder. You can only buy a contract on yourself. It made me feel queasy when I found out how death works. Even though I wasn’t born in free death times—free death is what Sam and the other hackerkids call it, instead of “unmanaged”—I think about it now and almost feel like making it part of my old-world dreams. I mean as soon as I was old enough to understand that people die, I knew it was managed by the corps. It wasn’t surprising, but I did enough browsing to know it wasn’t the way things had been down through human history.