Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  Dr. Rasmusen: Thank you, Doctor. I have a wish list ready, of course, but hear me out before you drag me away. What would the perfect human race be? What rules would we have to enforce? People with congenital heart defects may not reproduce. People with family history of severe mental illness may not reproduce. People with autism-spectrum disorders in their family, people with diabetes, blind people, deaf people, people whose families have a history of dying earlier than age seventy. Any condition we know to be genetically inherited can be weeded out in a single glorious generation.

  Would there be anyone left to reproduce at all?

  We can’t do it.

  In an ideal world, we’d leave the breeding up to the best and brightest of us. The paragon of human genetics, those with the smartest brains and fewest genetic defects, would sire the future of human kind.

  Some places, this is happening. Some places are perhaps a braver, newer world than the rest of us.

  But the plan the world over, to avoid too big a rights-shock, is the one Dr. Betrand just gave you.

  Babies for everyone. Anyone who wants them.

  Blanche: Thank you Dr. Rasmusen. Dr. Betrand, please continue.

  Dr. Betrand: Indeed, at first, babies for everyone. Anyone who wants them. And then by god we will curb our reproduction. We will not destroy ourselves this time. We will make this plan as a species and we will follow it, and we will grin and bear it.

  Every child born in the After will have it taught to them how it was in the Before. The problems of overpopulation. The way we wrecked the earth in ways that they will still be able to see and feel.

  Maybe they’ll have a restored version of earth to grow up in—all the wild stocks of fish that were going extinct because of us can bounce back. In twenty years, in forty years, maybe the animal systems we were collapsing will be able to recover.

  They might grow up and see that everything’s fine. Look at all the goddamn cod, there’s enough to support more.

  No. No there isn’t. We thought that before. Don’t be us, Generation One, and Generation Two, don’t you dare think that you’re better than your grandparents. The Survivor Generation has survived the insomnia, yes, but they are also the survivors of humanity’s previous life. You don’t know what it was like. Seeing species after species wink out of existence because we wanted to eat them. Because they lived in places where other things we wanted to eat could make themselves fat for us. Because we liked some part of their anatomy either to look at or to consume. Because we thought the ocean was an inexhaustible cornucopia of fish and shellfish and crustaceans. We wiped out whole systems without even batting an eye. This is simply what happened. Just, oh well, the white rhino went extinct today—if we even noticed at all. Did any of you even notice?

  Dr. Rasmusen: Do you know where our oxygen comes from, for fuck’s sake?!

  Dr. Betrand: The ocean is our life and we need to drill these facts into the heads of every child born in the After.

  The biologists need to get on it, get on documenting how things bounce back. Our food strategies need to be planned by scientists that know about interactions within food chains. We must not go back to the old food model either, but that’s not my area of expertise. Insects will be the new protein, and I don’t mind—I enjoy cricket tacos every now and then, and they’re quite tasty.

  And in that same time, the technology around reproduction will be a major focus; the reversible vasectomy and reversible tubal ligation are a top priority, and may very well be ready for when Generation One reaches the age of reproduction. Maybe by then, we can come to an agreement on if reversible sterilization should be mandatory.

  By the time you get The Act published, I may well be dead, killed in a better-executed car bomb (I had a scare with one last week), or lamely shot through the head by someone upset that I’m trying to tell them what to do in their bedroom.

  Dr. Rasmusen: This notion of privacy has got to go, too. On the plus side, now that it’s okay to let your opinions about having children out and made heard, people are doing so. Anyone that is on the side of The Act is loud about it, just as loud as the moronic idiots that think they should be allowed to have a dozen mewling larva to make them happy.

  Blanche: Please Doctor, let her finish.

  Dr. Rasmusen: We’re going to see war, the breeders and I.

  Nations’ armies will split in half, just as the public is doing. And the rest of the world will annihilate the breeders before they let you spread your idiot seed beyond what you’re allotted.

  Think of your children. Think of the future of the human race!

  Blanche: Doctor, that’s quite enough. Please be seated.

  Dr. Betrand: Because we’re set on this. Maybe it won’t be my plan that gets enacted, but one of them will be. One way or another, now is the time to take charge of our future, as a species, as a united human race.

  Dr. Rasmusen: If you want to live on this planet, you will get in line, and you will have your four babies, and then you will stop, or one day you will find yourself with a rope around your neck, a hood over your head, thrown in the back of a van. And when you wake up, you will not have ovaries any more. If you are very, very lucky, you will have a bottle of pain killers in your pocket to help you with the recovery.

  Blanche: Dr. Rasmusen, any further interruptions from you will result in your ejection from this conference.

  Dr. Betrand: We are all in this together. Look here, how fun it will be to have a defined generation. All the parents working with children who are all the same age. What a marvelous opportunity to study childhood development in such segmented generations. Will the oldest siblings become the leaders by default?

  The first children born in the After are going to be spoiled little brats, no doubt about it.

  As long as they get it into their head about just how many children they’re allowed to have. They are the lucky ones. The last generation of people born who will be allowed to increase the population. After them, with Generation Two, Maintenance Mode only. Two per.

  That’s all that matters now.

  It’s a numbers game, and we have numbers enough to destroy ourselves again. We can’t let it happen.

  We have to try.

  Blanche: The Rebuilding World Government Special Think Tank thanks Dr. Betrand for her reading of the vision statement of her proposal for the New World-Wide Population Control Act. Further proposals will follow a one-hour lunch. Meeting adjourned.

 

  Loners don’t have a chance! Party up, join a group, help your neighbors. Together, we can get through this!

  —Propaganda fliers plastered all over Seoul, South Korea

  Idon’t know why you asked for my story. We didn’t see any of the riots. We weren’t part of any of the brave things that happened during The Longest Day. We didn’t do anything special, except survive. If that’s why, as in, you need a tale of people simply surviving, then things are worse than I thought. Anyways, here we go.

  I know it’s a huge coincidence, but when you think of all the crazy shit that happens at university, and all the silly, insane things friends do together, it’s not actually that farfetched that my friends and I had made a bet to see who could stay awake the longest, beginning on the very night that the insomnia plague began.

  There were five of us, and we were the kind of friends that everyone in the world wishes they could have. When we showed up at parties, we had the attention of everyone there. Not because we looked (or were) cool, but because we had each other and loved each other so fiercely, that we were these lighthouses showing the way for anyone brave enough to stare at the beam and see the land.

  Haha, when they read this they’re going to laugh at me. But you know it guys, we were all that, and more. Everyone wanted us, wanted to be us or be near us. I’m glad we were able to keep it just us five though. Any more and it would have upset the balance.

  Alec, Taikla, Jim, Zoey, and I—going to con
certs, museums, camping, on all sorts of adventures together. The perfect team. Also the perfect survival group.

  So it was five of us.

  They all had their areas of interest which they shared with the group, and I was sort of the wild card. A jack-of-all-trades. I was the one phoning them up just as they were getting ready for bed, asking if they knew where we could find a shop that rented costumes at such an hour, and if they’d ever seen the movie Eyes Wide Shut. Sometimes they followed me on wild adventures, sometimes I was off on my own. Which was all right by me. I loved them, but I think I was keen to do way more than they were prepared to. Once you settle down, you’re not so quick to put yourself out there all the time. Jim and Taikla were together, and Alec and Zoey got together not long into starting school. I was still looking for the right person, so I kept on heading to strange social functions, meeting new people, searching out that one that would turn our group of five into an even half dozen.

  It was exhausting.

  After a few years and several failed relationships, it was getting me down.

  After a week containing not one but three dates that failed in spectacular fashion, Taikla saw me waning first. It was board games day, and she saw that I was one step behind in the build cue, my galactic domination strategy taking a severe hit due to my ineptitude. She noticed, yes, but took no mercy, sending a formidable fleet into my home sector and squashing my resource production.

  It was like she used it as a diagnostic. My reactions to her invasion told her my mood, and my retreat into a neighboring quadrant told her that things were perhaps more dire than she had guessed. As the glue that bound the group together, she dove headfirst into my mood and how to help me.

  “All right then,” she said out of nowhere, after the game, “I propose a group adventure. We’ve got reading break coming up, and I think we need to do something epic. Not epic like, climb a mountain,” she said, silencing Alec before he had a chance to suggest just such an adventure, “I mean epic like, like something cool, as a group.”

  “Crash the masquerade party in the English Properties,” suggested Zoey.

  “Sneak into the art gallery and tape googley eyes to every piece in that boring statue exhibit,” suggested Jim.

  “Stay awake as long as we can,” said Alec. We had no answer to that; no further suggestions were meted out, while we mulled it over.

  “The longest anyone’s ever gone is eleven days,” he continued, leaving a strategic length of silence before he spoke next. He’d thought about this before. “I bet we could do it.”

  “I’d miss the first class of my Paleobotany 304 class, but that’s the only one. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday,” said Taikla, counting on her fingers. When she got to the second Monday, she had ten fingers up, plus one, provided by Alec. “We could do it.”

  “Is everyone cool to take the Monday off?” I asked.

  “This is preposterous,” said Zoey. “There’s no way we can do it. Eleven days? You know how frickin’ long that is?”

  Oh Jesus, Zoey, we did not.

  But the idea had been planted, and the more we thought about it, the more we talked about it, the more insane it seemed, but also the more fun.

  “Even if we don’t manage to go all eleven days, let’s just see how far we get,” said Zoey, hoping to reign in our insane plan.

  “We could all put a twenty into a jar; last one awake gets it,” suggested Taikla.

  “Eleven days or bust,” countered Alec, defiance and determination writ large across his face.

  Hah! Can you imagine if we’d started earlier? What if we had been awake for eleven days and then finally gave in to go to sleep, and found that we couldn’t, that no one could. Maybe that happened to someone. But not us, thank gods not us.

  We added an extra layer to the challenge: Taik and Jim were going to make the apartment a cold spot, as in, disconnect us from the outside world. No internet. And their place was already shit for cell reception. We decided that we would withdraw from the world, and only reemerge when we had slept, like some sort of monkish retreat, a vow of internet silence. I was almost more impressed that we managed this portion of the plan as long as we did. We were all pretty connected, pretty used to being plugged in and having our feeds constantly updated with everything we put in them.

  So we had to become an island. Or maybe just shipwrecked on one. With a huge store of food and things to entertain us. Yeah right, a shipwreck, roughing it, sure.

  Taikla was in charge of movies. We gave her requests, and she mustered them for us. TV shows too. All on her laptop, rented from iTunes or borrowed from people’s Blu-ray collections, or downloaded, when neither of those options worked. We had two hundred and sixty-four hours to fill, and we wanted to have a library of viewing choices to keep us soothed while we embarked upon our insane idea. We decided collectively on a few series to burn through. Can eat up a lot of time with a back catalog of TV shows like we had.

  I was in charge of field trips. Outings at regular intervals, which I arranged in order of ones we’d need our wits about us for, to ones we could bumble through without a brain in our head. Each night there was something to go to. Of course after the plague hit, a wrench was thrown into many of my planned outings, but ah well.

  Alec was in charge of walks. We figured a great way to stay awake was going to be to walk. He planned tours all over the city for us. He also put them in order of most challenging to least, so when we were at our most enthusiastic at the beginning, we’d be able to tackle the harder ones, and as we waned, we’d have easier and easier routes.

  Zoey was in charge of food. She had meals all planned out for us, and snacks and drinks and everything. We figured we could be trusted to operate a stove for the first three or maybe four days, but then after that, we knew we’d be pretty poorly off, and so she planned cold meals. Thank Christ she was such a good cook; if it had been me, I’d’ve lobbied for more order-in stuff. But that would have got us nowhere fast, after it hit. As it stood, we had at least eleven days’ worth of meals, and when we figured out how dire everything was, we made it last.

  Jim was in charge of music. We were going to force ourselves to get up and move if we felt the sleep taking us, and dance music was key. He spent a while loading up an iPod with playlists that would keep us awake. Or, that was the plan anyway.

  So the day before it hit, our Day One, everyone else’s normal day, we mustered. Taikla and Jim were hosting us. They had a small apartment, but their couch was comfortable and their kitchen table was good for board games. I sat on the couch, Zoey and Alec on either side of me, and Jim lay on the floor on a throw pillow. Taikla’s laptop was hooked into their big TV, and she knelt in front of it like a holy relic, scrolling down an extensive list of scheduled movies and shows.

  I handed out the list of the field trips. Alec gave out eleven sheets of paper to each of us, each with a different route in red snaking through the city. Zoey handed us our meal schedule, with a list of “any time” snacks and beverages. And Jim waggled his iPod at us.

  Taikla made a blog post announcing our epic plan. We took a single group photo to kick it off, with a mountain of pop, juice, chips, and other such junk behind us, taking up the entire space in front of Jim and Taik’s wall of bookshelves. After she made the post, she disconnected the router and put it in the closet.

  Eleven days. Five best friends. Games, movies, music, activities, fun, and each other.

  Boy oh boy, were we in for it.

  That night, we didn’t sleep. We felt pretty energized, actually. We went out to a Bike Rave, sometimes standing on the sidelines and watching the colorful show, sometimes joining in when the music got just too good. We went on one of Alec’s walks, which took us through China Town, under that beautiful old-style dragon arch, and wove our way east, alongside the industrial corridor that led us back to Taikla and Jim’s. There, we put on the first episode of Deadwood. After it was through, we constructed the most epic personal pizzas that have ever been ma
de.

  Alec’s was a tower of meat.

  Mine had neat concentric rings of three kinds of mushrooms. (Zoey, you shut your face; mushrooms on pizza are the best) (that’s just how we roll; we picked up a lot of phrases from the cartoons we watched, the shows and comedians we all loved; if it seems mean, it isn’t. Like I said: it’s just how we roll. You know I love you, dollface.)

  Jim had pretty much a smattering of every single ingredient available.

  Taik had a pretty standard Hawaiian-Canadian (which, for those of you not in the know, is ham, pineapple, bacon, and mushrooms, with a drizzle of maple syrup).

  Zoey did a pretty mean Mediterranean.

  The pizzas were for that meal and the next, and we each swapped a few slices to try each other’s. Another episode of Deadwood, and another.

  We played some Battleblock Theatre, passing off the controller when it was time to switch players. Then we decided to get old school, and Taik set up Jim’s old Super Nintendo. Super Mario Kart lasted a couple of hours.

  More pizza. More Deadwood.

  We didn’t really start to feel tired until that evening.

  And because we were off in our own little world, we didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t realize that we weren’t the only ones that hadn’t slept last night. Haha, we felt so accomplished.

  It was the middle of the second night when we hit The Wall. Well, not all of us, and not all at once. I hit it first. My energy plummeted. The world seemed dull and stupid. I wanted nothing to do with it. I dragged my feet as we walked home along a route that Alec had planned for us, away from an admittedly fun free concert in the city’s largest park.

  “Come on Rug-Doug, let’s get the lead out here. No moping. Night number two is no time to let your head hang down.” Ah, Zoey. She didn’t hit her wall until the third night, also on the walk home. But by then I had picked back up, and managed to retort with “Slowy-Zoey, what’s the down low-ey. Come on come on, no time to be dragging your heels here.”