Pills and Starships

by Lydia Millet

  While they sang, the sun outside was sinking down over the sea. As the sky turned indigo, darkness descended on the dome over our heads and out of the darkness these flowing images appeared. There were these scenes, maybe from old movies—scenes of the ocean world that used to exist right around here, in Hawaii. Crossing the dome overhead were whales, big ones with their babies swimming right next to them, close to the mother whales’ bodies. When they appeared these haunting whale songs also began, mixing with the live voices of the mermaids and the seal robots.

  And then the whales faded and schools of fish swam past us where the whales had been, moving and flashing with the light of their thousands of tiny bodies. And all in a row, like a parade, dozens of other creatures passed before our eyes—these lit-up creatures that looked like alien spaceships, things with tentacles, strangely shaped sharks, big rays and small rays, dolphins or porpoises, otters and these seals with tusks, and a bunch of other things I don’t know the names for. In one scene there was a boat and dolphins following behind it, leaping and playing alongside, jumping out of the water again and again, and this went on for a while until they went under again, and then the ship faded.

  The whole time some sad music played; parts of it had no words and other parts did. One song the mermaids and seals sang went, Heaven, heaven is a place—a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

  After the ship was gone the dome became scenes of beaches—these pure, flat sand beaches they used to have with no seawalls at all. You could see waves crashing right on the gently sloping skirts of sand, and nothing but sand meeting water for miles and miles. They showed these natural pools between outcroppings of rock, and in them small creatures walked or swam—some that looked like insects, almost, with lots of legs, and tiny octopi and darting fish like minnows. There were some long-gone people on the beaches—whole families, happily playing together right in the open and wearing only small swimsuits.

  They had no hats to shade against the sun, only those skimpy suits and bare heads. A family ran in the shallow waves, including a chubby midget kid with nothing on but puffy white underwear, smiling persistently. They showed two handsome men with their arms around each other, girls making a fort out of sand with spades and buckets.

  And then we left the beach behind and were underwater again—an ancient reef, fish swimming everywhere and the dark silhouettes of people snorkeling above them with rays of sunlight beaming through. Spiky bright-colored anemone—I’ve seen them in the fake reefs—and red urchins and orange-and-white clown fish and even those things that look like insects again, big insects wearing body armor.

  And then the last thing was the whales returning: a pod of them, you call it, swimming toward the underwater camera. A whole family of whales, singing their mournful songs. And then they swam away from us again, getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared into the dark.

  The lights went up a little after the whales were gone, though it was still pretty dim, and the mermaids and seals silently sank back beneath the water of the pool. Sam and I saw that our mom was crying, and then we saw that this time our dad was too—not making any noise, just silent, big tears running down his cheeks and into his mouth. Of course, because of the pharma both of them were also still beaming. They smiled and smiled and tears ran down their cheeks and dripped right off their chins.

  I was—well, I’d never felt that way before. Overwhelmed. I’d seen some of the old footage on face, but it’s so different on that scale—it’s personalized and miniature, it’s cutely enclosed in the colorful frames you’ve chosen for your browse experience—and somehow you feel superior to it, like it’s a snapshot or a fairy story.

  But this was huge and real.

  And then, of course, it’s not real after all, being just ancient history, with nothing left. Ghosts filling the room, a world of amazing and mysterious ghosts.

  So Sam and I were blown away, just sitting there blasted and in a daze. At the same time I was thinking—for Mom and Dad, and the pain of their memories—what are these corps doing? Are they, like, torturing them?

  Because it was bittersweet and shit, I got that, no kidding. But it also seemed like a knife twist in a wound.

  We have a family field trip in the afternoon. Before that, a few minutes from now, Sam and I have our Survivor Orient, where we go to a special session with some other future survivors of this week’s contracts.

  I’ve got my beige robe on already and am just waiting to go. Like with the family therapy, they make us all dress the same; no makeup or other decorations. We are survivors and loved ones, joined in togetherness of being, says the handbook in my Coping Kit. Dressing for impressing is not how we are striving, in this together-time. We are simply being, deeply authentic and without appearance divisions.

  Sam just went back into his room to dress in his own robe, but before that he was in the living room for a while, talking to me. He decided not to take any moodpharms this morning. He says he wants to be “perfectly lucid,” is how he put it.

  “But you’re supposed to take the minimum dose, at least,” I protested. “You know you are. Mom and Dad need you to.”

  “Nat. It’s my decision. I’m not gonna be spaced out while this is happening,” he said, standing in my doorway.

  Our parents had finished their daily cliffwalk by this time and were in a couples prep session titled “Bountiful Passing.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So yeah, it’s up to you. But I have a right to say what I think about it. Are you going to give Mom and Dad a harder time, if you don’t take a basic dose? Because this is, like, their time. It’s their last week, not ours. It has to be about them.”

  “I have to be honest, Nat. I can’t make any promises.”

  “But Sam,” I replied, more and more annoyed, “they’re already doing something so hard! And you’re going to make it even harder on them?”

  “Don’t be a brainwash, Nat. They’re taking the easy way out. Something so hard? Bullshit. They’re doing exactly what the corps want them to do.”

  “That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard for them.”

  “It should be hard. Because it’s wrong, and it’s cowardly, and it’s completely fucked.”

  We were looking at each other right in the eye, which we don’t do that much since, I don’t know—maybe since Sam hit puberty. He started getting all shifty around when he turned twelve. But now he’s direct again, suddenly.

  It kind of made me nervous, in fact, because he can be intense.

  “Well,” I said, “that may be true or it may not be. But even if it is, we can’t stop them! They’re 100 percent certain. And we don’t know how it is, Sam—we don’t know what it’s like to be them!”

  “Sure we do. They’re human. And so are we.”

  I was looking at him, shaking my head.

  Everyone old buys a contract, sooner or later. It’s their choice when. It has to be.

  “They’re sure what they want,” I argued. “The contract is already in. So why not give them some peace of mind now that they’re definitely going? Why not let them have their last days the way they want them?”

  I was thinking of my collection, and how my parents must want their last days to be like one of my items—perfect despite its tragic imperfections.

  Beautiful even when broken.

  Sam stared at me for a second, blinking. Then he ran a hand through his nappy brown hair. “Because it’s not right, Nat,” he said slowly. “None of it is.”

  But he’s still going to the survivor session. For one thing, he has to. And for another, he says he wants to keep alert and pay attention to everything.

  Here’s how it was at Survivor Orient: they put us in a different hearing room this time, a larger one with a kind of open space in the middle that had a cactus garden and quasi-artificial breezes and little hanging bells. There were twelve of us there, they keep the sessions small, and most of the survivors were in their twenties; Sam and I were the two youngest.

 
And Xing was there! Xing from the ship. She smiled at me although she didn’t wave or say anything—we’re not supposed to talk before the session gets started. I was so happy to see her, though.

  The VR was LaTessa again. I guess we’re just assigned to her, and so are those other families. For this whole week she’s going to be our designated headshrinker.

  We started with five minutes of silent meditation, during which the fake breezes breezed and the real bells swung on their threads and rang tinnily. But then nearing the end of it some of the future survivors started to sniffle and cry, already.

  Strangers crying is embarrassing in a way I’m not quite used to yet. I mean, it’s embarrassing to cry in general, who wouldn’t feel that way? Even if you don’t get self-conscious easily it’s raw to be seen like that. But crying in public yourself is a different kind of embarrassment from watching other people do it. I have to admit I felt a bit stronger than them, since I wasn’t—right off the bat before anyone even said anything—showing my sniveling side.

  So then these masseurs and masseuses filed in. I don’t know if they’re corp or hotel employees, they all wore robes a lot like ours and they looked Hawaiian—a little dark-skinned, about like me, and fit and robust, like they don’t do much traveling but spend their time in one place in the sun. They went behind us and started to give us these massages.

  I don’t really like that. It’s too groovy.

  Sam shrugged his masseur off right away and said, “No thanks, man. Nothing personal but it’s not for me.”

  This was disruptive so I looked at the masseur guy Sam was blowing off. He was young too, maybe around my age, I thought, and I saw humor in his eyes, which, at this place, seems to be rare. There’s not that many people here who are big on laughing, they’re trained to focus on serenity and the solemn vibe of parting.

  “If you be gratefully welcoming,” said LaTessa gently to Sam, “you’ll find a forgiving space opening.”

  “That’s really rad,” said Sam. “Still, though. I’ll go ahead and pass.”

  This time LaTessa gave up easily—maybe because the other survivors were staring at Sam and getting distracted. My own masseuse was really digging into the shoulder area so I had to stop looking at Sam’s guy, who stood back patiently with this funny kind of sympathy in his brown eyes, and keep my gaze straight ahead.

  He must have had to wait for permission to leave from LaTessa, because he just stood there patiently without moving, until all the masseurs finished their work and withdrew from the people they were massaging. He didn’t seem offended or awkward but just graceful and sort of self-contained.

  Eventually they all filed out again quietly.

  By this time the snifflers had stopped sniffling and LaTessa made us hold hands and name the emotions that we felt. As we went around the circle saying our feelings, it struck me that everyone was zomboid. I wondered if the others were taking more pharms than us; but then, a second ago they’d been crying. So they weren’t mood-leveled. Who knows.

  They mostly said variations of the same thing—they felt abandoned, they loved their parents and/or they were pissed off at them, the dying was selfish; one with a hardcore godbelief said contracts were against God’s plan.

  It was all about them, was what I noticed—survivors, not the people who had to die in three days. But I guess that’s the point of therapy.

  Then Xing spoke up. She asked how she was supposed to go on with her life, knowing the last generation had already been born, which meant that she would never be a parent herself and neither would anyone she knew.

  Not that she wanted to; she didn’t, not at all.

  “But,” she said, “these are the last parents, you know? The parents that are choosing to go now, they’re some of the last parents around. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, in the First, there won’t be any parents left. Not only no babies and no little kids, but no parents. Doesn’t that seem kind of weird?”

  “Hella weird,” said Sam abruptly. He really looked at her. “And hella dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” asked someone else.

  “Dangerous,” said Sam firmly. “A world full of people who don’t have kids and never will. It’s kind of a huge psychotic experiment, isn’t it? I mean it’s never happened in the history of the world. Even the corporates talk about it. Not loudly but they do. A world of people who may be the last generation. No consequences to what they do. A massive social experiment.”

  I glanced quickly at LaTessa then to see if that had pissed her off. But she had her usual serene smile on, smooth and unwavering.

  “So now we’ve got, in the First World and corporate leadership, this old population that’s getting more and more decrepit,” Sam went on. “And then we’ve got the poor parts where they’re still having kids, which is making them even poorer plus emitting huge amounts of carbon we’re totally unable to put a lid on. We’ve got actual armies guarding our farms and water. If it weren’t bad enough that the global biome’s collapsing, now it’s two kinds of people against each other too? Ancient and rich against young and scrabbling to survive?”

  “But it’s already divided like that, isn’t it?” said Xing. “It’s already the First against the rest …”

  “Why don’t we just, like, kidnap the poor kids if we need them so badly,” suggested a meathead-type guy.

  Xing and Sam both shot him a look of disgust. Even LaTessa cleared her throat.

  “We’re headed for the next tipping point,” said Sam, looking around. “We’ve had the planetary one. Pretty soon now we’re going to have the human one.”

  “A social tipping point?” asked Xing.

  “The corps have already launched it,” said Sam, peering at the meathead. “Total war.”

  There was a shocked silence. Xing looked a bit alarmed. It didn’t seem like anyone knew what Sam was talking about.

  I didn’t, anyway.

  “I am feeling,” said LaTessa after a few seconds, with a little head incline, a closing of the eyes and a reaching out of her slim, graceful arms to the future survivors sitting on either side of her, “a gently bountiful healing is calling to us all. A lovely call for inward focusing. This is a personal listening. Let us be in the gathering.”

  My parents are out of it today—no doubt the sunset pharms are kicking in more. Not that they’re actually forget­ting stuff yet, but they do have a kind of blissed-out quality.

  I suppose maybe it’s okay, if it’s what they have to do. But it’s also a bit alien.

  After we got back from our separate sessions, ate lunch, and took a little relaxation time, we had a field trip on the schedule. We get two field trips total, one on Day Two and another on Day Three. My parents picked them out beforehand from a menu of options.

  This one was to a snorkeltank.

  It was like a guided tour, and other people went with us—other people in what I gather is LaTessa’s official group, because a bunch of survivors were there, including Xing. Luckily, LaTessa herself didn’t come with us. A little LaTessa goes a long way.

  She may even know this.

  When early afternoon rolled around we put on our swimsuits under­neath our clothes and trooped out to the front of the hotel, where they loaded us into an all-terrain e-buggy—this open-air, mostly bamboo bus contraption that runs off a solar battery. It’s got a really wide roof that hangs pretty far off the sides to give a lot of shade and has solar collectors on top. And it goes really slow.

  We went uphill then, away from the ocean and toward the volcano. We passed some lava, all black and curved and crinkly. The guide announced that the volcano still erupts now and then so there are cracks and holes, some places with hot, orange-red magma showing through, and if you’re on foot you have to be careful where you step.

  Sam was beside me on the seat. He leaned over and whispered in my ear that he wished LaTessa were with us after all, so he could push her in.

  “That’s not very forgiving, Sam,” I whispered back after a minu
te. “How can she hold your abundant angri­ness if she’s being all shrieking and screaming in a limb-removing burning?”

  Sam guffawed.

  I was glad, maybe a little proud of myself, because he hardly ever laughs. Or even smiles. He’s Mister Serious.

  Mostly though we were quiet and watched the scenery, keeping our childish venting to ourselves. Sam pointed out that his masseur was along for the ride, still wearing his same beige robe. He and two others sat next to the tour guide, up at the front with the bus driver.

  “They don’t wear name tags, did you notice?” Sam whispered to me. “That’s because they’re local support staff. Like, contractors, not corp employees. So the corps don’t like to individuate them. That’s what they call it. They’re supposed to remain anonymous. Basically so the corps can easily change them out and no one will notice.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” I asked.

  “I did my homework. Before we left. I needed to know the details.”

  A bit paranoid, maybe, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I’m leery of Sam’s conclusions sometimes but I trust him for the raw data. He knows things, and I for one am glad he does. Even if my browsing mostly goes in different ways from his.

  After the best part of an hour we got to the tank location. It’s sunk into the ground, so when you come up to it—after you get off the bus and walk through some jungly vegetation—it just looks like a big natural pond, except there are a few small decks built into the sides and stairs made out of rock. They handed out snorkel masks and tubes and fins and we messed around for a while making sure we had the right sizes of everything. You didn’t need a wet suit, they keep the water a nice warm temperature, so we just slipped our regular clothes off and our gear on and we were ready. My parents and Sam and I lined up along the deck for our turn.

  Xing was standing right behind us, looking like some kind of elegant little duck with those big black flippers on her feet. Two cute old people, who I assumed were her parents, waited quietly at her side; the mother was tiny, the father was very tall. I noticed they were way older than my own parents, probably past the century mark.