Stupid Perfect World
Scott Westerfeld
In this future-set novella by bestselling author Scott Westerfeld, Kieran Black lives in a “perfect” world. Disease and starvation have been eradicated, sleep is unnecessary, and it takes no time at all to go from the Bahamas to the moon. But now Kieran has to take Scarcity, a class about how people lived in the bad old days. And as if sitting through an hour of Scarcity every day wasn’t depressing enough, it’s final projects time. Each student must choose some form of ancient hardship to experience for two whole weeks. Kieran chooses having to sleep eight hours a night, which doesn’t seem too annoying.
Maria Borsotti has never thought much of Kieran, but she decides to take pity on him and help him out with his project. Soon, Kieran is sleeping and having vivid dreams, while Maria, whose Scarcity project is to give up all teenage hormone regulation, is experiencing emotions she never knew she had. As their assignments draw them closer together, they begin to wonder if the olden days weren't so bad. Maybe something has been missing from their perfect lives after all?
Scott Westerfeld
STUPID PERFECT WORLD
One
LIKE MOST DAYS, I was barely on time for Scarcity class.
It wasn’t a real course with grades and everything, so only the most pathetic meekers worked hard at it. The rest of us just showed up and tried not to fall asleep. Nobody wanted to fail, of course, because that meant repeating: another long semester of watching all those olden-day people starving and being diseased. At least regular History has battles; Scarcity was just depressing.
So when I walked in and saw what Mr. Solomon had written on the antique chalkboard, I groaned out loud.
FINAL PROJECT PROPOSALS DUE TODAY.
“Forget something, Kieran?” That was Maria Borsotti from the desk next to mine, her old-timey paper notebook out and ready to be scribbled in.
“This is not fair,” I said, dropping into my seat. Assignments were supposed to appear in headspace automatically. But one of the rules of the Scarcity classroom was that all the decent tech was switched off. Just like our miserable, diseased ancestors, we had to rely on our own brains, or, like Maria Borsotti, scratch glyphs on to dead wood pulp.
Learn to write by hand? For a pass/fail class? What a meeker.
I’d meant to put a reminder up for myself. The projects were first-come, first-scourge (Scarcity humor = hilarious), so most people had shot right into headspace the moment class had ended on Friday, racing to look up the easiest diseases before anyone else claimed them.
We were supposed to “embody” some form of ancient lameness, spending the next two weeks being blind or whatever. This was supposed to teach us what things were really like in the old days, as if sitting through an hour of Scarcity every day wasn’t depressing enough.
But I’d been distracted by Barefoot Tillman, who’d come up after class wanting help on an Antarctic camping trip. It’s hard to say no to Barefoot—who’s about two meters tall and the most beautiful girl in school. After talking tempsuits and penguins with her, I’d teleported straight to my climbing elective in the Alps. That started a busy weekend without pestilence or war or want: shopping with Mom on the moon, buckling down in headspace to work on my old-speak (my acting class was doing Hamlet), and spending all Sunday building my South Pole habitat for Advanced Engineering. The only time Scarcity had reared its diseased head was when my buddy Sho and I were simming some battle and I was like, “Whoa, people died a lot back then!” But then this airplane was bombing me, so I forgot again.
So here it was Monday, too late to do any research. As class officially began, headspace faded—my schedule, zero-g league scores, even the time of day, all gone. The world took on that weird, flat Scarcity look: one layer of vision, nothing to see but Maria Borsotti’s self-satisfied smile.
“Poor Kieran,” she said.
“Help me,” I whispered.
She looked away. “Well, I might have had a couple of leftover ideas…”
Mr. Solomon started by clearing his throat. He said that was how people got your attention in the old days, because they were always ill.
“Well, people, I hope you’re ready for a life-changing experience.”
Low-level groans rumbled through the classroom.
Solomon raised his hands to silence us. “Perspective is the key to the next two weeks. This project shouldn’t dismay you. In fact, the better you understand how things used to be, the happier you’ll be about your lives now.”
And that was the real point of Scarcity class: making us all into appreciative little meekers who never complained—even about really annoying things like, say, Scarcity class.
Maria shifted closer and murmured, “Oh, too bad. I can’t seem to find my notes. But Mr. Solomon said he had a few extra ideas.”
I swallowed. Our teacher had threatened a serious nightmare project for anyone who didn’t come up with their own. Bubonic plague, maybe. Or athlete’s foot, which sounded like a good thing to have, but wasn’t. I felt like one of those nerdy kids who can’t find a buddy in gym class and has to run laps instead of playing zero-g.
“Who wants to go first?” Mr. Solomon asked.
Hands shot up, everyone eager to lock in their projects. I sat there frozen, my unassisted brain spinning hopelessly. Solomon called on Barefoot Tillman first.
“Can I do the common cold?” she asked.
I glared at her. It was Barefoot’s fault I’d forgotten this assignment, and she was picking cold? After all the famines and pandemics we’d watched this semester? Even nowadays people got cold sometimes. Like down at the Pole, my tempsuit was always icy when I first put it on in the morning. Distinctly unpleasant. And “common cold” sounded a lot lamer than South Pole cold.
A smile was spreading across Mr. Solomon’s face. “Are you sure you want to attempt something so…disagreeable?”
That seemed to take Barefoot by surprise, and I saw from Maria’s grin that she’d already investigated this “common cold,” and if a meeker like Maria wanted no part of it, Barefoot was in big trouble.
“I can handle it,” she said, bluffing. Her thumbs were twitching with unconscious headspace gestures, trying to check closer. Knowing Barefoot, she hadn’t gotten past the name. It’s that kind of lazy work that Scarcity is supposed to teach you not to rely on, because people used to die from being lazy.
Of course, Barefoot was still way ahead of me.
“Well then,” Mr. Solomon said, “the common cold is all yours, Miss Tillman. Enjoy.”
More hands shot up.
Solomon’s gaze took a random walk around the classroom. This whole raising-your-hand thing was another of the tech-stepdowns that made Scarcity so frustrating. You had to wait your turn instead of arguing on multiple audio levels or texting on to one big thread. No wonder they were always fighting back then—discussing anything complicated with a single audio level was like trying to suck tar through a straw.
Lao Wrigley had her hand up higher than anyone.
“I’d like to do physical transport. No teleporting at all.” She flicked her hair. “My dad flies me to school anyway.”
“What an ambitious bunch you are,” Solomon said, the sadistic glee on his face making my stomach flip. “But what about your classes on other continents?”
Lao smugly shuffled the paper in her hands. She wasn’t a Maria Borsotti–level meeker, but she always squirted her notes from headspace on to wood-pulp before class.
“Well, my courses in Asia are all in headspace this semester, so I don’t have to teleport. My skin-diving elective is down in the Bahamas, but there’s this cargo ferry that runs twice a day, and it has some old passenger seats.”
Mr. Sol
omon nodded. “Excellent research, Lao, but I think you’ll find that boats are surprisingly slow. Did you know how long it takes?”
Lao nodded solemnly. “Two whole hours, Mr. S. But I can manage it if our ancestors could.”
“And what about your social life, Miss Wrigley? This means no parties on Luna for two weeks.”
Still wearing her serious face, Lao folded her hands. “Well, Scarcity doesn’t mean much unless you have to give something up.”
I rolled my eyes—as if Lao Wrigley had a planet-hopping social life. Even Maria raised an eyebrow, like she’d just sent me a headspace message. (That was the one cool thing about Scarcity: it made you realize how much you could communicate using just your face.) We managed not to giggle out loud.
Mr. Solomon nodded and started looking for his next victim.
Now my brain was really racing. It hadn’t occurred to me that you could give up teleporting. I’d been focused on the classics: diseases or starvation or having a limb paralyzed. Maybe a tech-stepdown was safer than some bacteria running rampant in my body.
I tried to remember all the olden-day hassles. No teleporting (taken). No headspace (yeah, right). No tempsuits (so I’d freeze to death down at the Pole?). No guaranteed credit level (and what would that mean—getting a job?). Every idea sounded nightmarish.
I guess that was the point of Scarcity: it sucked inescapably.
“How are those ideas coming, Kieran?” Maria whispered.
I gritted my teeth, having the sulky realization that my ancestors had expended lots of effort figuring out how not to suffer from hunger and lion attacks and random germs growing inside them. Much appreciated, ancient forebears, but why should I have to run that gauntlet again?
Though the thought of lions was kind of cool. I wondered if I could do predation, and have a fabricator build some big beast to chase me every now and then. But it would probably annoy my acting teacher, getting jumped by cave bears while rehearsing Shakespeare.
Solomon went through my classmates one by one, the noose tightening as hands went down.
My buddy Sho took hunger, saying he thought it would be funny to get skinny. His bioframe wouldn’t let him die, after all, and people used to fast for two weeks all the time. Solomon said okay, but made him promise to drink lots of water.
Judy Watson chose illiteracy, which meant she could only use icons and verbal commands in headspace. This was an excellent dodge, given how many people didn’t bother reading anymore. I tried to think of some variation on the idea, but nothing worked—and I needed to be literate to learn my lines for Hamlet.
Most people took diseases: cancers or infections, even a few parasites. Dan Stratovaria took river blindness, so his eyes would get eaten away over the next two weeks. Solomon let him keep visuals in headspace to do homework with, and Dan had been planning on getting new eyes anyway, so score another one for easy.
The only diseases I could remember were the ones with funny names, like whooping cough. But two weeks of whooping didn’t sound like fun.
“You’re cute when you’re nervous,” Maria whispered.
Mr. Solomon’s gaze shifted our way. “Maria and Kieran, what have you two been discussing so furiously since class began?”
“Well, Kieran has an outstanding idea, Mr. Solomon,” Maria said, and I suppressed the urge to kick her.
“No doubt, Maria,” he said. “But let’s hear yours first.”
Maria just smiled. “I’d like to suspend my hormonal balancers.”
Solomon nodded slowly—apparently these words made sense to him. “A little risky at sixteen years of age, don’t you think?”
“It’ll be fun, finding out how it was to be a teenager back then.” She shrugged. “It always sounds really intense when you read about it.”
“Indeed it does. Let the hormones run free, then. And what about your outstanding idea, Kieran?”
I ignored Maria’s amused expression. “Well, I was thinking about trying something…different.”
“Wonderful. And what would that be?”
What indeed? What? I tried to think of something that would help me with mountain climbing, like a fear of heights. Or motivate my Antarctic skills, like the possibility of frostbite. Or help me understand Hamlet better, because those Elizabethan times had been all about the heavy-duty scarcity…
And with that thought, William Shakespeare came to my rescue.
“Sleep,” I said.
“Ah.” Mr. Solomon steepled his fingers, looking pleased. “Very original.”
“Of course, I don’t mean tons of sleep,” I added quickly. “But some every single night, like they used to. Um, right?”
“Well, I don’t suppose I’ll make you put in eight hours,” he said. “As long as you get down to REM.”
I nodded, pretending I had some idea what “REM” was, while I was thinking, Eight hours a night? How did olden-day people get anything done? Most months I skipped my one hour of brainsmoothing.
A hint of panic must have crept onto my face, because Solomon said, “I believe that some ancients slept as little as three or four hours a night. Perhaps you can do some research on the matter.”
I smiled sheepishly, just thankful that I’d escaped bubonic plague.
Two
IT’S NOT LIKE KIERAN Black was cute or anything.
His outdoorsy mania had a certain charm, the way he teleported to classes straight from Antarctica, icicles clinging to his hair, lips freshly chapped by freezing winds. And he’d been attractively clueless that day, not realizing that hanging out at the South Pole was pretty much a Scarcity project already. I mean, who went outside in the cold these days?
So when class ended, I decided to take pity on him.
“Need some help?” I offered. “In my Bio unit, we have this hamster who sleeps.”
Kieran looked at me like he thought I was teasing him again, but then gave a tiny nod. Our projects were supposed to start right away, and he probably didn’t know the first thing about getting to sleep.
Sho Walters strolled past us and whacked Kieran’s shoulder. “Sweet project, bud. Lying there doing nothing.”
“Pretty good one, huh?” Kieran said, punching back. “But it isn’t like forgetting to eat is so hard.”
“Hey, I enjoy eating!” Sho called, then gave me a funny look as he slipped out into the hall.
I rolled my eyes, wondering if this outreach program was pointless. Sho lived by the rules that schoolwork was stupid, understanding was overrated, and effort was for meekers. If Kieran was the same way, I didn’t have time for posturing.
But then he muttered, “And I enjoy not lying around. I’ve got a snow habitat to build.”
I smiled. A snow habitat? Maybe this boy was worth my effort.
As the last few students slipped out of the classroom, a bemused look settled on Kieran’s face. “So is that all you do when you sleep? Lie there doing nothing?”
“That’s what Mikey the hamster does,” I said. “He breathes, but that’s about it.”
“Yeah, but he’s a hamster. Didn’t people back then get really bored?”
“You can’t be bored when you’re unconscious, silly.”
“Oh, right, unconscious. So like when you get major surgery.”
“No, it’s like…” I shook my head. “Kieran, you didn’t do any research on this, did you?”
“Not really. I was busy all weekend.”
“How did you even manage to come up with sleep?”
“Well, it’s in this play we’re doing. This psycho prince guy is thinking about suicide, and saying how death might not be so bad, because he figures it’s like sleep.” He shrugged. “So I figured it couldn’t totally suck.”
“You’ve read Hamlet?” I said, perplexed. Could Kieran Black possess hidden depths? Sure, he’d just called the greatest character in literature “this psycho prince guy,” but still.
“Yeah, I can read,” he said. “Didn’t mean to shock you. Maybe you thought I ra
n around in a little wheel all day?”
“Oh, that would be so cute.”
He rolled his eyes at me, then glanced into headspace and sighed. “We should get going. For the next two weeks, I’m wasting three hours a day.”
I took Kieran straight to my Bio classroom, which had both a hamster and a customizing engine for bioframes. I already had the program that would shut down my hormone balancers—those little widgets that keep us calm and collected and boring all the time.
Teen angst, here I come.
A few other people from Scarcity were already there, needing the engine to switch off immune defenses and organ repair. The machine’s AI was taking forever, checking permission slips and running simulations to make sure no one altered their bioframe in a lethal or illegal way. And, of course, Barefoot Tillman had managed to be first in line.
Kieran wandered over to Mikey’s habitat and looked down at his little quivering form. “Is he asleep right now?”
I stuck a finger through the confining field, and Mikey sniffed it.
“Nope. Just resting. See how his little eyes are open?”
Kieran reached through gingerly and stroked the hamster’s fur. Mikey stirred, then settled back down.
“Hey, his eyes just closed! So he’s asleep now?”
I sighed. “I think it takes longer than two seconds, Kieran. In old stories, sometimes people can’t get to sleep at all, like if they’re worked up about emotional stuff. It’s called ‘tossing and turning.’”
He looked up at me. “How do you know all this stuff, anyway?”
“Just from reading historicals, I guess. It’s awesome how their emotions worked back then. They’d have these little bouts of temporary insanity all the time.” I watched his finger run down Mikey’s back. “Just meeting a cute guy or girl could make them go crazy.”
“That still happens,” he said. “I forgot about this project just because Barefoot Tillman talked to me.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” I snapped. “Barefoot’s just distracting, not epic at all. Back then, it was screaming fights and weeping for hours. Pulling your hair out. Tossing and turning all night.”
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