Pills and Starships (4 page)

Forget, in other words, that you’re living at the very tip of the tail end of the fire-breathing dragon of human history.

Some people forget that all the time, I guess, and some people say they welcome it. They’re called Hot Earthers—officially called the Hot Earth Society—a group of strict godbelievers who claim it’s all fine, it’s how things were always supposed to end, and chaos is a God message. (I guess the message is,
I told you so
.) They don’t believe in using face and aren’t allowed to read anything but the end of the Christian holy book.

Other people try to act matter-of-fact and scientific about it all—like my parents—and so, to help control the chaos, we have models.

People choose what model to believe in and they move according to what, at any given time, the model’s trajectories are predicting.

In media the models are sold to the public by nonscientists, as the scientists call them. To scientists that’s the worst thing you can be. To a scientist, “nonscientist” is like a swear word.

Scientists stream live on face and say the nonscientists are irresponsible, they’re murderers and demagogues. But that doesn’t stop the nonscientists from saying what they say, from signing contracts with location corporates and flogging whatever model they want to. Model ad placement is all over the place. The nonscientists are usually actors or musicians, politicians or motivational speakers or godbelief figureheads—celebrities who hawk a model either for money or, every now and then, because they truly believe in it.

“Move to the Poconos! Rolling green hills of the future,” one of the famous Wiithletes will say, with an autumn landscape behind him. Maybe he’ll smile, swing his remote. “I’m making my whole-life home in wholesome Wisconsin,” an actress will croon, all got up in some weird ancient costume with braids in her hair and nonexistent, fully illegal white-and-black cows munching dumbly on flowers in the background.

It’s confusing because not all the scientists are honest. A lot of them work for corporates and are only pretending to be unbiased; the best ones work for universities, but those can be bought and paid for too sometimes, so that their scientists pimp a certain model. The average person doesn’t know the difference between the independent scientists and this other kind. Montana is the number-one location right now, one university might say, following the money: Montana is where the data shows “optimal livability.” But then another university might say to avoid Montana at all costs, head up to Michigan. Go live with the Finns and Swedes on Michigan’s Upper P.

Models, like service corps, are everywhere.

I get so sick of the barrage of models. For that one part of our Final Week—getting away from them—I’m actually grateful.

So technically it’s a week, not counting the long boat trip here and back of course, but for my parents it’s only five days. My brother and I, as survivors, have two days for recovery.

No one pretends that that’s enough. The service corp language isn’t crude, they’re far too slick for that. But Jean said it’s the policy: those two days are the minimum needed before reentry. You grieve in your own way after that, she said,
at your own pace of sadness-expressing
.

There’s grief guidance at home if you buy a luxury package, but we have a midprice, not a luxury. My parents spent the money that would have gone to service for the luxury deal on practical benefits. They bought vaccine packages for us that stretch out five more years, medic coupons, water prepaids, that kind of lifesaving tech and supplies. My parents’ contract has Hawaii and this fancy hotel and one or two daytrips, but all the rest of the money they had budgeted went to cover the travel permit and the ship we took from Seattle.

Our contract’s not lux, but it’s a few steps up from Vacation Basic.

The corp that my parents chose likes to boast how it hires locals, down to the complex where the contractor lives. Of course its parent corp is huge; it’s more a style choice than a structural difference. I mean, no corporates are exactly mom-’n’-pop boutiques.

So our rep, when it came down to it, was a lady my mother had once played smallgolf with.

My mother isn’t the sporty type, by the way. Just this one time she did a game for charity—smallgolf’s a game they used to play on grass, on huge hills that went on forever, so big they had to ride around them in buggies. Now the courses are set up in rec rooms of complexes with green carpets.

Anyway, because my mother had a good sense of humor, at least till recently, she was basically the comic relief, I think. And that one day of smallgolfing was where she first met Jean, the service rep.

Jean had a low-key way about her. She showed up at our condo a couple of months ago, in the comfortable hour before dinnertime when we usually hang out together and talk about our day, what feeds we’ve seen and friends we’ve made on face. The four of us were drinking cocktails in the living room. Being fourteen Sam wasn’t drinking intoxicants much yet, but my mother, in a celebratory gesture we didn’t understand then, had offered him a mini pharmabeer.

And there was Jean at the door—a compact, middle-aged woman from the tenth floor, frosted hair, braided wedge heels. I’d seen her in the elevator once or twice but I never knew she was a family acquaintance.

“This is Jean,” said my mother softly. “Jean, these are our children, Nat and Sam.”

Oh yeah, spacefriend: my name is Natalie, but I go by Nat. I should have introduced myself before.

The woman smiled and sat down and looked at us with a friendly but businesslike expression. “Your parents thought it might be good to have me here,” is how she started in.

Sam glanced up. He had been reading off his handface. He looked stricken, I noticed immediately. “You’re service,” he said flatly.

“I
do
work with a service company,” said Jean, smiling again. (They call themselves “companies,” not “corps,” because it’s more positive sounding.) Jean didn’t miss a beat and didn’t seem awkward; she had a forthright attitude, without being domineering.

“You’re the counselor, or whatever they call them,” said Sam.

“I’m coordinating the personal aspect of outreach,” conceded Jean.

“On the contract we purchased recently,” added my mother, softer-voiced than usual. “Mine and your father’s.”

Sam picked up his beer and drank the rest of it down quickly, a flush rising on his skin.

I had been sitting at the bay window, looking out over the garden. Our complex was nice, with trees and water features and squirrels in the courtyard—no, wait, they’re not squirrels but rather little striped chipmunks, because chipmunks always poll higher.

Squirrels = vermin. Chipmunks = cute.

I liked to drink and take in the view. It was usually just as relaxing as it was meant to be.

But now, without really noticing my own movement, I had turned so I was facing into the room, my back against the view of the trees. Even the next instant I didn’t remember swiveling. In the pit of my stomach was a heavy new stone. And at the same time my arms and legs felt light and liquid, like the bones in them had weakened.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” was the thing I said, obviously stupid.

“We’re telling you now, sweetheart,” replied my mother, and came to sit beside me on the ledge. She put one arm around my shoulder—her left arm with the two-finger hand. She calls it her claw sometimes.

I’ve never been grossed out by it, but on the couple of occasions when I’ve introduced other kids to her in flesh, I’ve seen them do a double-take and try to hide their pukiness. After the second time that happened I made sure I warned them so they could plan their smooth reaction. Their being disgusted made me feel bad for my mom—though she
herself
always seems pretty cool about people’s reactions.

My father says it’s a badge of honor to her, “and so it should be,” he adds.

“I know it’s difficult to hear,” my mother said. “But it’s all according to schedule. The timing is what they recommend.”

They don’t encourage the parents to get emotive when they’re disclosing. (Sam and I had heard about the protocols on listserves and from facefriends as well—facefriends whose parents have been contracts in the past. It makes things worse for the kids, the corps say, if parents get feely at that moment.) And sure enough I noticed she wasn’t applying a squeeze of consoling pressure with her arm; she wasn’t looking deep into my eyes. She was being careful, walking a tightrope of proper behavior.

Corps always stress to contract buyers that following the rules is what allows survivors to emerge with psych intact. They even have ads like that:
Let your survivors thrive
. . . I can’t recall the rest of it, but basically the message is,
Do what the service tells you to, or we’ll make you feel hella guilty
.

My mother was just sitting there next to me, her arm lightly applied, keeping a quasi-professional attitude that seemed to mirror Jean’s. After a moment she shook the cooling cubes in her cup with her other hand and raised the cup to drink.

I looked at her then and I couldn’t help thinking she was only half there.

My father, standing gazing at us with his pharmawine in hand, had a kind, bemused expression that reminded me of how he’d looked when we were younger, when Sam or I would cry and he had no idea how to stop it.

“You can still take it back,” said Sam, with a kind of hurt urgency. “Please, Mom—Dad! Take it back!”

“Honey,” said my mother, “we don’t
want
to. Or maybe a better way to say it is that we . . . we can’t. We’ve lived for you two ever since the tipping point, sweetheart. You’ve been everything that kept us going. We try to hide the side of us that feels so desp . . . that feels it’s time to go. But we can’t live with it forever.”

The tipping point was when it got out that the globe was in this runaway warming cycle with these feedback loops of heat and there was nothing we could do to stop the sea from rising or get back the melted ice that used to cover the top and the bottom of the world.

So anyhow.

“Now both of you are practically grown up,” said my mother. “Nat’s so mature for her age. Sam, you are too. You’re both very intelligent, you’re both
so
much more capable than we are
already!”

Under normal conditions we would have snarked at that, but it wasn’t normal conditions.

“We know that when it comes right down to it you don’t really need us—not in the day-to-day sense. You
think
you do right now. But we know deep down that you can take care of yourselves. We trust you. At first you’ll miss us and that’s perfectly natural. It’ll be tough. We understand. But then you’ll pull yourselves out of that mourning process and be stronger than ever. We know you will.”

“You can’t say what we’re feeling,” said Sam, shaking his head. “Or
will
feel when you’re dead. Sorry.”

“It helps, for peace of mind,” said Jean to Sam, “if you keep any argumentation for later. During this encounter, this time of disclosure, we’ve found that what allows for peacefulness is a
listening
.”

“Fuck listening!” said Sam. He was bright red by then—like someone had dealt him two slaps, one on each cheek.

“And really,” went on Jean calmly, as though he hadn’t said anything, “there’s no rush here. There’s plenty of time. Remember, all contracts are voidable right up until the end. So there’s absolutely nothing to make you nervous.”

She didn’t mention what we all knew: that there’s a stiff financial penalty for last-minute cancellations. She didn’t
need
to mention it. My parents had a friend who canceled just five hours before, paid through the nose because at that point it was like 90 percent of the full price, then ended up buying a new contract a couple of months later. Meaning less money for the survivors—a tainted legacy.

Also, embarrassing.

It happens.

“But you’re doing so
well
,” begged Sam, turning to my mother.

Myself, I felt frozen.

“You’re doing really well, you’ve got your moods well stabilized, lately,” he argued, in a firmer tone.

“No, yeah, son,” said my father. “Well . . . we’re not too badly off. We’re not complaining about our, you know, our
personal
situation. Relative to . . . we feel so lucky. Look, in terms of our particular, individual lives, we
are
lucky. No question there, no question there at all. And you know—there’s no specific event catalyst here. But we agreed . . .”

“We made an agreement that we would go when you two were ready,” put in my mother. “And we feel that time has come.”

“We made an agreement,” my father echoed.

Sam was staring at him stonily and my father looked like that stare was making him nervous—and I guess it was.

“We need to quit while we’re still ahead—leave while you can remember us the way we
want
to be remembered. With our real personalities. You saw how Mamie got after she passed a hundred. We need to leave when we can do it right.”

There was a minute of silence, because although we’d seen my grandmother stop making sense we knew it wasn’t about her. For starters, they were both more than twenty years younger than Mamie had been and nowhere near the demented zone.