Pills and Starships

by Lydia Millet

  Anyway, the service corps’ products get fancier all the time. There are whole catalogs of options you can order in face shops now: personal or couple contracts, home or away, urban or country, private or open, basic or luxury. Each of those categories has hundreds, maybe thousands of different opportunities.

  This might sound pretty weird to you, floating above the stratosphere. Like, number one, why do so many people pay serious money to have themselves made dead? And number two, even if beaucoups of them want to die, why don’t they just go DIY?

  Re: number one, I don’t totally get it either. But then I’m young. No one who’s sixteen wants to buy a contract or is allowed to—not where I live, anyway. We still have our emo types and cutters and all that, but they do most of it on face. It’s style gestures, not actual flesh-injuring. Poses are serious but they’re still poses. Young people don’t have as many mood problems as older people do, is how the corporates explain the deal to us. I don’t know why, exactly, except this is the world we were born into so it’s what we’ve always known. I mean, we’re not completely overjoyed or anything, you won’t see us leaping up in jubilation constantly at the chaos reports we see on face or even the quieter scene through our windows. I’d say we go from glum to bitchy to outright hostile, on the whole attitude spectrum.

  But still, compared to the older ones we’re cheerful, so in some ways we must be used to it.

  The old people get sad because the world’s falling apart, the world they used to know, and it turns out they loved that world, they loved it more than they ever knew until it was way too late. So now they miss all the parts of it that are going or gone; they miss those parts of the world the way you’d miss a limb or a major organ. Like me they have their soft green lawns and treelined neighborhoods to think of when they want to escape and dream, but for them those neighbor­hoods were real when they were young.

  And now they’re only memories.

  I should mention, I learned from 20th c. stories and vids that “old” used to mean in your sixties or seventies, for humans. Well, that’s like middle-aged now. Due to the GE that boosted immune systems against cancer and heart trouble in the mid 21st c., people who live in the comfort zones make it to a hundred and ten easily. If they choose to.

  I hope that answers number one. Re: number two, I hear it’s not that simple to off yourself if you’re not naturally gifted in that department. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never tried, but I know a kid on face whose parents did. It didn’t work out that well. Most older folks who go the DIY route are singles, not people with families, because it’s harder on survivors with no official support. People like to be able to depend on a system that’s there outside of them, with set rules and schedules and convenience.

  Back in the days when death was unmanaged, before the sunset pharms, people already had plenty of death businesses, from what I’ve read on corp facesites. Even Sam says it’s true. It’s not like people keeled over and just lay there where they fell.

  People need organized ways of dealing with hard things. Therefore, service contracts.

  Of course, you can’t take out a contract on someone else. That’d be murder. You can only buy a contract on yourself. It made me feel queasy when I found out how death works. Even though I wasn’t born in free death times—free death is what Sam and the other hackerkids call it, instead of “unmanaged”—I think about it now and almost feel like making it part of my old-world dreams. I mean as soon as I was old enough to understand that people die, I knew it was managed by the corps. It wasn’t surprising, but I did enough browsing to know it wasn’t the way things had been down through human history.

  That made me feel a little off-kilter, when I didn’t push away the thought of it.

  Though newsflash, legal killing isn’t exactly a recent invention. In old-time wars millions of people were killed and plenty of them never picked up a weapon in their whole life or wanted to hurt anyone.

  Sam claims the corporates are still out there making war. He says they just don’t tell us anymore, since they bought all the news outlets, and that you have to hack around to find out about it. Maybe he’s right, or maybe he’s paranoid. With Sam it’s hard to tell sometimes.

  My point is, though: as far as I can tell, the corps are nothing new under the sun. They’re just a more obvious form of an old machine, bigger and shinier and with tons of information. They don’t have to hide; they run their business in plain sight.

  Once we saw a car accident that was apparently a contract—or Sam said it was, at least. We were walking along the street to the vaccine update clinic, we hadn’t been out of the complex for nine weeks so we felt like even going two blocks outside the complex gate was an expedition to the Gobi Desert. We were laughing and goofing off and not paying enough attention and then the crash happened, from one second to the next, making us scream and jump back against a building in a rush of fear and adrenalin.

  It looked like an accident, but really it was a contract. You could tell, Sam said, because one vehicle was a car, a heavy vintage polluting thing that only the megarich and corps could ever hope to afford, with gigantic carbon fines. And the service guy driving the ancient car—which sped up out of nowhere and rammed a bamboo e-buggy into a concrete wall so that it instantly splintered into a pile of sticks—was wearing bulky protective headgear.

  Sam and I wrote about in on face for months, because you hardly ever see that stuff. We got thousands of hits from other kids when we reported the crash. Because a scene like that is super rare.

  So when I say the corps operate in plain sight I mean it’s the same as with most other businesses—you see the results more often than what went into them. With electricity you see the light come on, not the brooding nuclear plant that squats outside the city in some no-man’s-land. If you’re rich, and get to eat animal protein, you see thin cold cuts on your plate, not the tubes full of bloody in vitro meat masses at the tissue farms.

  So my family has come to Hawaii.

  Hawaii, like an aging fashionista, is almost as gorgeous as in the olden pics—just in a more fragile, wasted way.

  My parents had been here long ago; they came here on their honeymoon more than fifty years back. They bought a hotel and airplane package to Oahu and they loved it. They went scuba diving in the coral reefs and touched real rays and even one dolphin, they said. They took surfing lessons and my father broke his wrist. (But, he told me, it was worth it.)

  Of course scuba and surfing aren’t options anymore, but we’re going to snorkel in polymer reefs stocked with colorful farmed parrot fish and now and then a robot shark. I’ve seen the vids. I love the parrotfish’s bulgy, fat lips.

  Back on their honeymoon they ate at restaurants with views of sparkling turquoise bays, they went to luaus and drank fancy drinks with tiny umbrellas made of pulped-up trees. (We still have two of the umbrellas; they’re a faded pink and a faded green and have my parents’ names printed on them, from a honeymoon party that was held for them. Robert & Sara, says the ancient writing, Hawaii.) They took small trips to the other islands, even the one that used to be a leper colony.

  These days Honolulu and most of Oahu is seawall and salty aquifers and long blocks of abandoned buildings, so the overall feel isn’t too festive.

  But even so, they still wanted Hawaii. They were both nostalgic. So we came to the Big Island, where we’re staying in a hotel with a view of Mauna Kea. I’ve seen pictures of it from way back when, white at the top and majestic. Well, there’s never snow anymore, even at 14,000 feet; snow’s legendary now. (I collect pictures of it and even have a 20th c. snow globe I shake sometimes to fall asleep. I brought it with me, along with my other most precious collected items. It’s from Japan, snow falling on pink-blooming cherry trees.)

  Even without snow, though, the volcano’s pretty cool.

  It’s just the four of us, my mother and my father, Sam and me, the four of us here for our last week.

  A week is the period the corps outline, once yo
u pick your dates. I tried to browse on why it’s a week, but I couldn’t find much; Sam says it’s just about control. He claims that when it’s longer than a week contract buyers get morbid or even, if they decide to refuse their pharms, hysterical, and then the whole thing collapses.

  If it’s shorter than a week there’s not enough time for goodbyes—at least that’s the official line, he says.

  My parents aren’t that old. My mother’s only in her eighties—she had me around the average time back then, in her sixties, and two years later she had Sam—and my father’s in his nineties. And though they’re pretty healthy physically, they’re tired of being sad and they’ve decided that they’re done.

  So it’s our last week with the four of us together.

  It would be way harder without the training we did at home, without the pharma regimen they have us on. Even with those tools it’s still intense and everything seems to vibrate with meaning. Be cursed with meaning, almost. Meaning’s attached to everyday objects—combs, swim­suits, dangling earrings. I’ll find my mother’s earrings, say, lying on the counter, and I’ll pick them up and stare at them—small crescent moons—and that’ll make me think how my mother will never see a crescent moon again, because right now the moon is almost full.

  I’ll stand there looking at jewelry, thinking, Never again a crescent moon. She’ll never look up at that again.

  It’s not exactly meaning, I guess, since I don’t know what the meaning would be. It’s more like associations—small things pointing to bigger ones.

  Or, uh, one bigger one. That being death.

  A/k/a Happiness.

  Here in the hotel suite, I see these normal items and they’re not trivial anymore. A toothbrush looks like it portends the end.

  This is only the first day and already we’re on the brink of tears sometimes, or at least I am and my father is. My mother and Sam are generally acting stoic, though now and then I catch one of their hands or bottom lips trembling. Meanwhile the edges of objects glow, blur, and fade as I look at them. I don’t know if that’s a pharma effect. Sam and I aren’t even on a solid diet of moodpharms yet.

  Day Four, I see when I consult the schedule, we have the option of a powerful tranquilizing blend because that’s our Goodbye Day.

  Day Five is Happiness, but you always do goodbyes the day before, while memory’s still intact. The pharma that makes you so happy to go—the diet my parents have already started on, which doesn’t build up to a critical mass in your system till Day Five—causes forgetfulness, a particular kind of long-term memory loss that wipes the memories associated with trauma.

  Which these days, for old people, is most of them.

  So goodbyes are slated for Day Four, the day before the major memory loss happens.

  Now I look around my bedroom, in the suite, and I see fresh flowers in too many colors. Cut flowers are almost never real because the crop’s so water-intensive, the carbon footprint’s through the roof, but these ones are actual plants with cut-off stems and that’s such a crazy luxury it seems wrong. Plus the fact that the stems have been cut off means they’ve only got a few days. The metaphor’s creepily perfect. The flowers are in a brief limbo, already doomed but having the appearance of life. Like olden-time dead people, made up like dolls and then displayed in long boxes.

  I see chocolates on end tables and when I slide open the thick panel door of the food unit there’s pharmawine chilling. All primo luxury items, most of which I’ve browsed about but never seen before.

  And of course there are these flowery bamboo write-fiber journals they gave us, one in each of our Coping Kits, where we’re supposed to jot down emotions.

  They want us to unload, download, offload, we’re supposed to use these notebooks like garbage cans for our feelings, suddenly drop the feelings like they’re a pair of dirty pants.

  Leaving ourselves looking like naked idiots.

  I found it hard to write longhand just a couple of hours ago, since most of my life I’ve typed. But I’m getting used to it: I even kind of like it, because the feeling of forming words with a pen is cool and weird.

  Each day has a preprinted title and a cute little theme that follows the schedule. It’s manipulative and pathetic, as though we’re not so smart. But they’re going to make us take Personal Time every day—alone time without media or face, of course, because they’re verboten—so I figure I might as well use it.

  The flowers are dazzling my eyes as I write this—they’re deep throats, they’re wounds, they’re pan­demonium. The purple and red and orange hues of their petals are jangly and overwhelming. I wonder if maybe they don’t tell us all the pharms we’re taking. It could be that our vitamins are loaded; maybe there are moodpharms in our drinks or food. Sam says the “potential delivery vehicles are multifold.” The same corporates own food and pharmafranchises, of course.

  Whether I’m seeing with my own mind or through the drugs, either way, the tropical flowers are too much and I wish for the simplicity of fake daisies.

  They warned us to prepare for heightening effects—for the “charged, hypersensitive nature of the parting experience,” as the brochure reads—but still.

  Right now it’s early afternoon. My parents and Sam have gone out for a walk and from the balcony of our suite I can see them strolling, their light clothes flapping in the breeze off the ocean, along a trail above the high, jagged bluffs.

  They carry parasols, which protect them from the sun but also hide their heads from me.

  So I guess they could be anyone.

  The bluffs were well engineered and have been planted to look like nature, in a fake garden way. There are scrubby bushes from the desert, “Peruvian paperthorn cactus” and “Chinese beach roses” (according to the brochure) and even, now and then, dune grasses and crests of sand. They hide the concrete seawall beneath the artificial bluffs so that you don’t have to remember where you are or when—so that you can almost forget you’re not in Old Hawaii.

  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 t
o 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.