Inearthia

by Lily Markova

  “Hot chocolate?” she said. “You’ve a girlfriend?”

  She seemed slightly older than the majority of the partiers, twenty-two or so, maybe, which was refreshing. Her real age must not be much more than that, Evan guessed. The older they were, the younger they wanted to come off as, but at twenty-five, erasing a few years’ worth of wear from their façade still felt like enough to most.

  “No, haven’t had one for an hour or so.”

  Evan was used to women showing interest in him in Inearthia and believed he owed the pleasure exclusively to the fact that he hadn’t changed anything about his looks since day one here. The default settings allowed his avatar to age exactly the way his body would have if it hadn’t been frozen at seventeen, and he didn’t frequent Inearthia’s barbershops, either. (There were all sorts of automated beauty salons for those who weren’t confident in their own taste and trusted the system to golden-ratio-optimize their appearance so that the length of their new nose was ideal for the distance between their new ears and the new haircut wasn’t wrong for the new shape of their chin). In the world where even the former hardcore body-positivity adepts photoshopped the living hell out of themselves, this made people like Evan somewhat of a filthy punk anarchist equivalent, which apparently appealed to a certain type of woman.

  At least he hoped his modest popularity with the opposite gender wasn’t because they thought he was an actor. Granted, local celebrities were highly respected, being the only real people who had something resembling a job to do. Landing a role when your rivals were specifically designed to act like the portrayed character and had instant access to zettabytes of data on human behavior was insanely difficult. Human actors got to play monsters in movies written and directed by Inearthia’s algorithms and had to make themselves unthinkably hideous in order to stand out and acquire a massive fan base to vote for them to be cast. Some said it took balls to be ugly when you could be irresistible, but Evan, being Evan, was of the opinion that there wasn’t anything brave about disfiguring yourself to snatch a few crumbs of attention.

  “You’re Evan, right? This your place? I live, like, three blocks away. I’m Rachel.”

  A little hesitant, Evan shook her proffered hand. “Rachel? You wouldn’t happen to be Rick Downe-Hill’s mother, would you?”

  The question caused Rachel to snort into her Euphosphoria, and the green liquid splattered all over her dress, eating away at the fabric. Evan looked around for some napkins, but Rachel drew a hand down her chest, a routine, unthinking gesture, so the brilliant stains evaporated and the holes sealed themselves as if they had never been there.

  “No, I’m not anyone’s mother,” she said, with a crooked smile that had some disturbing mysterious meaning behind it, which to Evan’s disappointment, he wasn’t insightful enough to decrypt. “You feel like going someplace quieter, then?” she asked simply, even though everyone knew that no matter how loud Inearthia’s music was blasting, you never had to yell over it—the words would reach the one they were intended for (and, unless you put up a shield, anyone else who cared to tune in).

  After another quick scan of her face, Evan shook his head. “You’re really pretty. But not my type, sorry.”

  “Who’s your type?” Rachel sounded curious rather than upset.

  “You know, I think I have this anti-fetish—this thing that everybody’s done to their eyes?” It reminded him of that time in 2015 or so when the fashion gods suddenly decided it was okay to have eyebrows, and the more eyebrows, the okayer—but at least eyebrows didn’t make you look like an alien.

  “Oh, that’s no problem.” She rubbed her eyes as if she were tired, and her caruncles became normal. “I think it’s lame, too. I only did it five minutes ago because I didn’t want to seem. . .square? You know?”

  From the way Rachel said it—as if it were some scientific term she wasn’t sure she was using correctly—Evan gathered she’d chosen to go for that word only because it was one of the old ones and he must look to her like the kind of guy who still clung to all things Old World. It was awkward because it was too old, but Evan immediately warmed up to her. She didn’t know the perfect thing to say, but it was perfect things that he was thoroughly sick of.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’d never think you were square.”

  She nodded and smiled, relaxing her shoulders. “Yeah, you just don’t care about all this, do you? I really like that. I think it’s rad.”

  “O-okay.” Evan stifled a laugh. “Well, that’s great, thank you. That’s just dope, actually.” He took another sip of his (still just the right degree of hot) chocolate, grinning, too. He could envision already how hilarious this first encounter was going to seem to them if things worked out, and how describing any situation with the lamest old slang word they could come up with might become both an inside joke and a competition he was determined to win every time. “So tell me about yourself. Who are you, Rachel? What do you do?”

  She bit her lower lip and rolled her eyes up, thinking hard. “Well, I—like I said, I live nearby. So I swim. I surf. I ski. I go to restaurants and bars, you know, I do what everyone does, just giggin’. . . .”

  “No, no. I mean, what did you do before the—?”

  “Oh, you mean before the—?”

  “Yeah, before the thing.”

  “Oh.” Rachel giggled, her lips stretching in another mischievous smile. “Well, I ate, slept, cried, you know. Regular baby activities.”

  Evan missed his own train of thought and choked on his drink. “Sorry?” he said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his sweater, forgoing the magic clean-up cheat.

  “Well, I was three, you see,” she said somewhat proudly. “I don’t even remember life before Inearthia. But I’d really like you to tell me all about it.”

  As she was mockingly fluttering her eyelashes, Evan’s brain was processing the information and trying to arrive at some horrible logical conclusion he knew there should be. Finally, it computed.

  “So that makes you. . .what, thirteen?” He tried not to sound horrified. So that’s why she didn’t look like a teenager. She was one. She was a teenager who wanted to sit at the grown-ups’ table and sleep in the grown-ups’ bed, so she was overcompensating.

  Rachel herself seemed to be taken aback by that news. She looked her own grown-up form up and down, too comfortable in it. How long had she been wearing it? Since eleven? Since eight? Perhaps she hadn’t been thinking about her actual, three-year-old body trapped in some distant planet’s orbit for years. Was she thinking about it now? Evan knew he was.

  “Well. . . . I guess so. I never learned math or anything, but—”

  “What the hell?” Evan was too freaked out to try to spare the child’s feelings, edging in the opposite direction on his barstool. “Hey, look, I’m not trying to be mea—it’s—you’re—nope, nope, nope, gotta go, I have some—”

  He backed away, nearly tripping, and ignoring the miserable look on Rachel’s face, caught the whirlwind that his confused thoughts had created nearby and let it catapult him past the crowd and upstairs.

  There, the whirlwind flung him through the shabbiest door on the floor and dissipated. Evan fumbled to his feet, darted back to the door, and locked it from the inside.

  “Note to self, never date anyone, ever,” he panted. Just in case Rachel had a make-over and went after him again, taking care to be smart about it this time.

  It could have been worse, he thought, sliding down the door with his face in his hands. She could have been seventy. Would that be worse? Oh, for Christ’s sake.

  TAMAGOTCHI AND IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

  An insistent knocking shook the flimsy door. Evan, who still sat leaning against it, groaned and pulled his helmet back on, both to protect his head from the shuddering and to create another physical (ha, ha) barrier between his screaming brains and Rachel. It was going to be harder than he’d hoped to throw her off. Oh, clingy teenagers and their inability to get over rejection.

&nbs
p; “Go away, I’M NOT HOOKING UP WITH A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD!”

  “Well, that’s good to know.”

  That voice. Evan started, hit the back of his head on the door, scrambled away from it—he was still cowering deeper into the room in a pathetic pose when the door opened and revealed Emily.

  Heat, so much heat, in the cheeks, in the chest, in the stomach—Evan’s back was on fire, literally on fire, so it was fortunate that a second later, a room-sized tsunami wave buried him underneath itself, squashing him flat against the floor and, on the plus side, extinguishing his sweater. When that was out of the way, Evan got up, part of him dripping water, part smoldering.

  Emily stood in the doorway, perfectly dry and only politely surprised.

  She stepped in, closing the door. “What was that about?”

  “I, uh, I have this setting that whenever I experience something resembling a human emotion, a thing that it feels like actually happens—my RoboShrink’s idea.” Stress babbling. Great. Breathe. You don’t need to breathe, it’s not real. Evan counted to three, tried to get his act together. “Anyway, I’d better tone it down, hang on.” He fiddled with his mental settings, couldn’t get it right for lack of focus, and abandoned the attempts. “Oh, screw it. Is that really you? Emily. You look. . .really old.”

  “You sound like a real douchebag.” She studied the room, looking at anything but him.

  Idiot. “No, I mean, it’s great, you don’t look old, you look different, you’re not, like, still seventeen or anything. Your eyes are fine.” God, he was sounding like a douchebag.

  “Yeah, that eyes thing?” Emily hooked a thumb over her shoulder, her own eyes rounding in amusement. “So freaking weird. It’ll pass, give it a week.”

  “It’s really you. Oh my God!”

  Evan staggered over and tried to hug her but bounced off an unseen wall.

  “Oh, sorry. Wait, I’ll grant you Access Rights. Got my physical firewalls up, you never know with these weirdos—”

  “Yeah, right. . . .”

  He waited for her to finish configuring her settings, which on the outside translated into a concentrated expression, no impressive hand waving or hologram organizers some people had.

  Then he could finally hold her close. He didn’t want to let go. “You know you’re the comfiest person to hug,” he said into her shoulder.

  “Happy Birthday, Evan. I’d bring you a present, but it’s kind of pointless when you can have anything you want just like that.” In contradiction to that last bit, Emily released herself from his arms.

  “You’re here,” he said dumbly, examining her face. No signs of any virtual plastic surgery. She even had tiny wrinkles at the outer corners of her eyes. She must have smiled a lot over these past ten years. She’d smiled. She’d laughed. All this time, all the dreadful things he’d imagined. . . . “I mean, Jesus, what happened? Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I mean. . .it’s been ten years?”

  “I know.” Emily smiled, not at him, at all the memories she’d made somewhere without him. “We must be so different from who we were then, right? It’s really strange seeing you.”

  “So, you were—?”

  She nodded. “Traveling. Trying stuff, you know. Stuff I could never have back home.”

  The ceiling disgorged a bunch of bricks onto the top of his head.

  “So that’s why the helmet,” she said. “I see.”

  “Yeah, sorry. I really need to disable this visualization thing. I feel like I’m going to experience a lot of. . .pain.”

  “So your mom renovated, huh? Mine did, too. Your room’s the same.”

  Emily paced his cramped room, running her fingers over the old indie band posters, old dusty shelves with old stuff she had borrowed, old stuff he’d borrowed from her and never returned. Was she wondering why he was still living at his mother’s place, at twenty-seven, when money wasn’t a problem? But how could he move out and leave all this behind, let his mother and Katie get rid of every memory—fine, every copy of memory—of their old squalid home he’d preserved?

  “What about you?” he asked. “You got a permanent-like place?”

  “Not really.”

  Evan swallowed. “Kids?”

  “Not here.”

  “What do you mea—? Oh. You took the blue pill?”

  “Yeah, Evan, I took the blue pill. Three times, so far. Haven’t you?”

  “No. It’s—to forget who you are, all that happened, live your life among imitations—”

  The mere thought of it made Evan want to throw up. It was one of Inearthia’s “pretty-much-whatever” options, just a mental click away. A whole world where you could be born again, go to school, get a job, start a family, never suspecting it wasn’t real, never realizing your neighbors and friends and even your cat were just artificial actors specifically designed to behave like the characters they portrayed. A whole world where you were the only living soul and you’d never find out until you died.

  “You get to retain your memories afterward, though. I’ve lived three different lives in addition to this one. It’s pretty cool. Wanna go to the roof?”

  Evan was thankful he had managed to turn off the special effects and dramatics, as the idea of Emily having husbands and children would have probably prompted a bus to run him over.

  “Yeah, the roof, it’s renovated, too, but—okay.”

  “The blue pill,” repeated Emily, shaking her head, as she walked down the hallway with Evan trailing behind. “Please tell me you’re not one of those nerds who call their dog WALLE, thinking they’re so funny?”

  “No. Why would I want a—?”

  “EMILY?”

  Oh, fantastic, thought Evan, wheeling around at the sound of the exclamation.

  “Katie!” Emily darted past Evan to hug his sister—no firewall tweaking required, he noticed with a sting of jealousy.

  “When did you get back? How are you?”

  His older sister looked younger than Evan, but at least she hadn’t removed her caruncles. Well, of course—Katie’s efforts were channeled somewhere else.

  “I’m good, really good. . . .” Emily’s gaze shifted down. “Wow, hello there—”

  She squatted in front of the child, smiling at him. Katie gave Evan a dirty look and tilted her head toward the kid. “Evan!”

  “Fine, fine,” said Evan, traipsing closer. “Hey, Tamagotchi.”

  “Deepusheetu,” said the child, glowering at Evan over Emily’s shoulder.

  “Timothy, language!” Katie’s dirty look was sent her son’s way this time.

  “I’m Emily. I’m your mom’s and uncle’s old friend. What are you two up to?”

  Evan cringed at the suggestion he was its uncle, but made sure to use the socially acceptable pronoun as he chimed in. “He’s Japanese. Doesn’t speak English, or pretends not to.”

  To Evan’s utter dismay, Emily turned back to the kid and said something to it—in Japanese. He had to interfere before they—before they influenced her, rubbed off on her, somehow.

  “Okay, we were actually headed somewhere. If you excuse us, sis.”

  He had to drag Emily away from the pair of them.

  “Wow,” said Emily, rubbing the arm he’d squeezed too hard, when they were on their way again and Katie with her little toy had disappeared in their room. “You really are a douchebag.”

  “Yeah,” admitted Evan. “Sorry I grabbed you.”

  “Oh my God.” Emily stopped in her tracks and stared at him in shock. “Your sister,” she whispered, looking back at the door of Katie’s bedroom. “She was pregnant when it happened, wasn’t she?”

  “Seven months. She was hysterical. Wouldn’t get rid of her virtual belly. Wore it for, like, five years. Apparently, unborn babies didn’t get an invite to Inearthia. She was pretty depressed.”

  “That’s terrible. But it’s good she’s doing better now.”

  “Is she? When they decided to have a v
irtual child, she said it would be immoral to choose its parameters, so they just hit ‘Random’ and got themselves a Japanese baby. It’s madness.”

  “He seems like a great kid. Don’t call him Tamagotchi.”

  “Come on, he’s—”

  Evan almost said “just an imitation,” then remembered it was Emily he was talking to, for the first time in so long. Why did he care about something that wasn’t even there, when she was?

  “Sorry. Just pisses me off. The whole thing.”

  “So nothing’s changed much, huh?” She smiled, and they set off down the hallway again.

  “No, now I miss the old thing. You know.”

  “Death, disabilities, diseases, poverty, hunger—all that?”

  “Yeah,” said Evan earnestly. “That, too. I miss entropy.”

  He waited, but Emily said nothing.

  “How come you speak Japanese?”

  “The blue pill. I was a Japanese man once.”

  “Oh God. I don’t want to know.”

  “Typical.” She climbed up the ladder first.

  “No, you’re right, I’m sorry.” Evan followed her out on the roof, mumbling at her back. “I do want to know. I want to know everything. Everything you’ve been up to these years. Places you’ve been. People you’ve been. People you’ve loved. I want to be your audience. I want to know all of it, even though—”

  “Even though what? Oh, this is. . .renovated.”

  The rooftop was almost entirely occupied by an infinity pool. Emily stood at its only visible edge, eyeing the spot where they’d almost met the last sunrise.

  “You are one of those people, aren’t you?” She pulled off her T-shirt and slipped out of her skirt. “Come on, I know you want to say it. Even though none of it was real, right?”

  He watched her get onto one of the floating mattresses and push herself off the edge.

  “Well, yeah. You know, I never really had the patience to listen to people’s dreams. Like, I get it, a giant hurricane filled with watermelons uprooted your house and took you away, but it’s probably ‘cause you’ve seen that bubble gum commercial one too many times. I really couldn’t care less about characters’ dreams in movies, ‘cause, I mean, the characters’ lives aren’t real is one thing, but their dreams are even less real. It just doesn’t make any sense to care about what happens in dreams, because it. . .doesn’t. Doesn’t really happen.”