Inearthia

by Lily Markova

  Evan’s attention returned to the woman before him, and he squinted again.

  “Hey, did you—did you do something to your eyes?”

  Something apart from making the irises so unnaturally turquoise, Evan meant, because that he was more or less used to by now. She glanced around, too, as if to check that nobody was close enough to have overheard him, then leaned her face in, peering at Evan pointedly, and said, her voice merely a hissing undertone. “No, I didn’t. They’ve always been like that.”

  Of course they hadn’t always been like that. No one’s eyes had ever been like that. Evan felt as if his sweater were suddenly full of crawling insects.

  “Evan, don’t. Please.”

  But Evan was too appalled to heed her urging and give it a rest.

  “Where are those pink things in the corners of your eyes?” he demanded. “There’re supposed to be these little pink things! What have you removed them for? Jesus!”

  The small triangular prominences at the inner corners of the woman’s eyes were still there, but they were white, as if just a continuation of the sclerae, which made her eyes appear even larger and brighter, her gaze even more otherworldly. Evan tried to imagine what shape or size the eyeballs would need to be for someone’s eyes to really be like this, and the inside of his sweater started crawling on his skin once more.

  The young woman shushed him. “They’re called caruncles, you high-school dropout,” she said, sounding resigned.

  “Oh, great, now how about you go get yourself some of those carun—”

  She didn’t bother shushing anymore and just pressed her hand firmly to his mouth.

  “That’s enough, Evan. There’s no need to publicly humiliate me for wanting to keep up, to fit in.” She removed her hand, but Evan knew better than to keep arguing with her when she was this upset. “You don’t understand what it’s like, being a woman in this place. You always have to meet expectations—now that you have all the means to. If you don’t, in their eyes you’re just lazy. It’s unacceptable. Anyone can hide their external defects, so the scrutiny is on your character now. You can’t mask being apathetic. You don’t want to be deemed too old, too provincial, or too stupid to be perceptive when it comes to the right trends. You don’t want people to think you consider yourself better than this, better than them. Play at being a rebel all you want, but you’re going to play alone.”

  “You’re right,” said Evan quietly. It was better if he just agreed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to find anything to say that could change her mind or help her not care so much whether these strangers liked her or not. She had a point, too. People did have much less patience for those who weren’t perfect these days, and loneliness did suck, and loneliness in a place where you might never die sucked forever. “You’re right, I just don’t get this whole thing.”

  He added that by way of final capitulation and admission of his cluelessness, but she must have interpreted it as a stubborn unwillingness to understand.

  “Oh, I can see that you don’t.” She looked him up and down. “Everyone can see that. You know, you could really make a little more effort yourself. You’re not getting any younger, and it’s beginning to show.”

  Evan instantly regretted whatever tinge of pity he had been feeling toward this woman the moment before. He made a mental note to mention this to his psychotherapist, who had suggested Evan blame her for everything that went wrong in his life, anyway—mostly because that was, Evan had assured him, what shrinks were for.

  “I’m twenty-seven, Mom.”

  She gave him a smile again, another one of those on the warmer, sincerer side.

  “I know. Happy Birthday.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek, too.

  So she remembered. Evan had never been big on his own birthdays, but for the past ten years, he outright hated them. For the past ten years, the grandiose parties his mother hosted on this day every summer had not been to celebrate him (not that he’d like that); they were to glorify the rise of Inearthia, which to Evan (and seemingly Evan alone) meant gloat over the fall of the earth.

  “Evan!”

  Another stunning young woman separated from the dancers and stopped at Evan’s mother’s side. Evan felt his lower jaw suddenly become aware of the law of universal gravitation, or at least of its simulation maintained (more often than not) purely out of habit rather than necessity.

  “You, uh. . .” He swallowed. He knew most of these people weren’t really this gorgeous but still had to remind himself about that every time they caught him off guard. “Hi? Do I know—wait, Mia?”

  He couldn’t move as Mia kissed him on the gaping mouth.

  “You like it?” she asked.

  By it, she must mean her, her foreign, brand-new face and hair and—

  Evan wished this whole place would explode for the good old times’ sake. “What is this? You’re barely recognizable. I could’ve walked right past you on the street! You’re like a totally different person. Hang on. What have you—Jesus, Mia!”

  His girlfriend drew back, clearly at a loss as to why he wasn’t happier to see her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Where are your caruncles?”

  “My what?”

  “THE PINK THINGIES that you’re supposed to have at the corners of your—”

  There was a hand clasped over his mouth again.

  “Stop yelling, will you?” hissed Mia, with an embarrassed glance around the hall, much like his mother’s not five minutes ago.

  As both women were telling him off, Evan looked slowly from one to another, from his mother’s eyes to Mia’s, noting, with a chilly, hollow feeling in his real ribcage that was drifting in space so, so far away, that their eyes were now almost identical. He didn’t think he’d ever been so weirded out in his life before, and he had seen enough stuff in the past ten years to weird anyone out, a lot. Evan watched them grimace and wave their hands, wondering if his sister had done this thing to her eyes, too. He also wondered if he would ever be able to bring himself to touch Mia again. Her eyes looked just like his mother’s, Jesus Christ. No, they needed to break up. Right now, on his birthday, on the tenth anniversary of the end of the world.

  He couldn’t blame his mother for wanting to have things, this house, these cars and pools and even the goddamn macaques, after so many years of having nothing but debts and dead-end jobs. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to be as young as anyone else here, after spending her real youth fussing about her children’s needs. And yet, at times she felt like a complete stranger, a stranger who looked younger than he did, while Mia—well, Mia was a stranger. He had no way of knowing if what she’d told him about her pre-Inearthia life was even remotely true. . . .

  “Don’t you dare space out on me again, young man!” he could read his mother’s freakishly full lips say, but it was too late.

  Evan didn’t have to witness it to know that above the villa, two giant, long, wispy dark arms had pierced down through the sky and were now stretching earthward, twining in and out of each other, until they arrived at the house, burst through the front doors’ stained glass without breaking it, and avoiding anyone else present, found Evan. They seized him, and pulled him out and up, farther and farther away from his mother’s and girlfriend’s—ex-girlfriend’s—displeased faces. When Evan reached the stratosphere, he remembered he still had his blanket and helmet on him, so he put the latter on properly and wrapped himself in the former, and in that attire, he let himself be towed higher and higher by the two hands, now invisible against the blackness of space, all the way to the Moon.

  Once there, he planted his feet in the dust, then planted his backside in the dust, too, facing the bright, blue-and-white globe above. For a few minutes, he just Earth-gazed in silence. The sight of it almost didn’t hurt anymore.

  “Hey, RoboShrink?” he said at last.

  “Yes?”

  Evan had tried out many safe places since the school counselor’s office and eventually settled on the imita
tion of the Moon. It was nice here, quiet. He could miss Earth here without distractions. He could miss all the people up there on its imitation. It was hard to stay too annoyed with them from such a long distance.

  “Can I have a cup of hot chocolate?”

  “You know you can.”

  “Well, can you get me one?”

  Andreas shuffled over and placed a cup of hot chocolate into Evan’s expecting hand.

  “Thanks.” Evan lifted his helmet’s visor, took a gulp, and licked his lips. “You’re actually a pretty decent shrink, you know that?”

  “Thanks,” said the robot.

  Evan savored his imitation of hot chocolate, which was as perfectly calculated, constructed, and calibrated as the synthetic music but which Evan did not despise at all, probably because he’d never seriously dreamed of becoming a hot chocolate master. He eyed Earth some more.

  “Have you read The Little Prince?” he asked Andreas, who was still towering over him. The number of books Evan had finished hadn’t changed since his first post-apocalypse conversation with the robot, and The Little Prince remained the third and last one of them.

  “As part of Inearthia, I have, stored in my memory, all the human-made books that were available at the time of the last Google World View snapshot.”

  “Can you just make conversation?”

  “I have read The Little Prince, three hundred and eighty-five times.”

  “You know, I feel that way sometimes. You’d think I’d feel like Alice, right? I mean, this place is one weird-ass rabbit hole, but I feel more like the little prince. I wander from one messed-up guy to another, they tell me ridiculous stuff, and all I can do is observe, think ‘what the hell?’, and miss my planet.”

  “Do you want me to draw you a sheep?” said Andreas, the simulated sarcasm in his boomy voice unmistakable.

  “I want you to draw me my rose. Draw me Emily.”

  The robot nodded, and there she was, Emily, sitting next to Evan, moonstone skin, one hand reaching out to catch a falling raindrop, lips parted. Evan winced and turned away, locking his eyes on Earth again.

  “That’s not Emily.”

  That was only an imitation of Emily—not even of Emily herself, but of what was left of her physical shell.

  “She’s in a box,” said Andreas, who seemed to be on a roll. “She’s asleep. Can’t you see that, mon petit prince?”

  “Ping off,” said Evan, who wasn’t on a roll at all.

  “As you command.” And Andreas was gone, along with the imitation of Emily’s hibernating body.

  The memory of her was the only untarnished link Evan still had to his old life, to home, and so he held on to her. Of course, he hadn’t been thinking about Emily all the time, not lately, but today was his birthday, today was ten years since he’d last seen her, so he allowed himself to be a bit sentimental and just sat there, wrapped in his cozy blanket and yet another existential crisis, replaying in his mind little snippets of their life back on Earth.

  #

  He was fifteen, he was on a cable car, aimlessly riding around town and listening to one of his favorite indie bands for inspiration, when this nice-smelling girl plopped into the seat next to him and tapped him on the arm so he had to pull off his headphones. He hated it when people did that, of course, especially when they were strangers and so had no business invading his mental personal space like that. The girl leaned sideways toward him, her exaggeratedly distressed eyes darting around the car, and whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “Do you have any idea what all these folks are doing in our house?”

  Evan simply stared askance at her. He recognized her from somewhere—oh, that was right, she went to the same school as he did, except she hung out with the cooler crowds, the kids with the jutting cheekbones who never did homework but probably did cocaine.

  The car pulled to a stop and the doors folded open.

  “Are you expecting someone?” said the girl, narrowing her eyes at him.

  She was so convincing Evan wondered if she was actually mad. A stream of tourists’ flashy shirts and hats filed out; another stream filed in. The doors unfolded, and the car pulled off.

  Apart from the oblique staring, Evan still hadn’t done or said anything to acknowledge the strange girl’s presence. She sighed, turned away, and studied the newcomers. Evan could tell she was about to leave him for the guy two seats ahead, who was wearing the least flashy hat on the car and easily the flashiest smile on the whole West Coast. Evan coughed to regain her attention and pointed furtively at a passenger in a gray business suit, who had just settled into a single seat and was scowling at the window, unaware he was clutching his briefcase too obviously to his chest.

  “All I know is I didn’t invite that guy, and he just sat on our cat,” said Evan.

  Emily grinned at him.

  “I can work with this,” she murmured, and before Evan knew it, he was dating the hottest girl he’d ever met.

  He had many more chances to question Emily’s sanity. There was definitely something completely askew with her brain. She was never sad, for one thing. Exasperated, yes, exhausted, yes, but sad, never. Whatever happened, she was fine, not like some coffee-powered droids who always seemed to be infuriatingly cheerful, but happy in a relaxed way that made you want to be around her, be more content for no reason, despite all reasons not to be, just be a little bit more fine with life, too.

  “How come you never have breakdowns?” Evan asked her one day. “I mean, your life’s a mess. Your family sucks. Your boyfriend sucks. You’re not going to be able to afford college.”

  She thought about it, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it’s because I think about death first thing in the morning, every day without fail.”

  “How does that work? Like memento mori or something? Like you appreciate what you have while you have it and all that non-Zen-se?”

  “Oh, no, it’s just nice to have something to look forward to. Entropy.” He could tell from the way she pronounced that word that she loved both the sound of it and its meaning.

  Evan had no idea if she was joking, and honestly, he had no idea what she meant and if she knew that herself. He just hugged her. He could swear on anything that Emily was the comfiest, nicest person to hug, as if hugging people were the very mission she was sent to Earth with.

  He wished he could hug her now. He wished he knew where she was, at least. She wasn’t the only one to have vanished. People lost their relatives and friends every day. Some hoped they’d been “rescued,” bodies extracted from their cocoons, minds back to the real world, however empty and strange. But secretly, most thought they knew where the missing went—those were the people who’d had it with their old circles, who seized the opportunity to change their faces and names and disappear into the crowd, start anew.

  But Emily? She wouldn’t have. She’d disappeared too soon. Had something gone wrong with her hibernation? What were the chances that someone had indeed found her and awakened her just moments after the explosion? She couldn’t have died, not here. It was impossible to die here. The RoboShrink or what-have-you would just pause the game, return you to your safe place, and if your near-death experience wasn’t entirely accidental, he would give you a lecture about hope before dropping you back into a pool bar or something. There was no reasoning with the dumb system.

  “God, I miss entropy,” Evan said out loud.

  He finished his hot chocolate, lowered the visor of his helmet, and pushed off the moon into the star-spattered void.

  AND ANOTHER ONE BITES

  Not bothering with standard gatecrashing etiquette, Evan barreled straight through the roof of his mother’s villa, proceeded through the second storey’s floor, and flopped down onto a long-legged stool at one of the bars in the hall.

  “Type two diabetes, please,” he said, removing the helmet.

  The bartender, who, like everyone in the slightest employed, wasn’t a digitized human mind but a character designed by Inearthia, conju
red a cup of steaming hot chocolate from under the counter. Evan hadn’t been abusing any substances stronger than added sugar since he turned seventeen because getting wasted in a virtual reality seemed to him like an overkill. His whole short life on Earth, he had sought to escape from reality in every way he could. People drank to escape reality, people lost themselves in VR worlds to the same end. These days, however, Evan would do anything to get away from the non-reality of it all.

  Talking about this, saying anything along the lines of “it’s not real” was as serious a faux pas as bringing up the matter of human mortality and lack of intrinsic meaning to life had been back in the day. “We’re so lucky we were alive when it happened. Just think of all those poor stiffs who missed out on all this. We don’t get to complain.” Which is why when someone showed you pictures of their five-year-old daughter, you smiled and, at best, mentioned it looked like a potato, but you never pointed out that it wasn’t a real child and so why would you care if it just sprouted its first permanent tooth or whatever artificial kids were up to nowadays. People found that hella upsetting. As Evan’s sister had once told him, “You gotta stop calling a baby ‘it’ at some point.” Her own son was three at the time. (“You dipstick,” she added when the boy was out of earshot.)

  So Evan appreciated it when yet another stunning lady sauntered over and said “Scoot,” giving him an excuse to move his stool to make room for her, thus increasing the distance between him and the loud young couple with their imitations of pictures of the imitation of their baby.

  Once an extra barstool summoned itself up out of nothingness for her to sit next to Evan, the woman ordered a Euphosphoria, one of the thousands of cocktails concocted by Inearthia’s inexhaustible imagination. It was fizzy, mint-green, and luminescent, and was likely to taste a zillion times better than any of the alcoholic beverages Evan had tried (which were mostly limited to beer and cheap wine).