Notes to Self (24 page)

Why was he being so impossible? Most kids were going in. Most were excited for their birthdays—why did
I
have to be in love with the one person who wouldn’t get with the program?

My best friend Alexis was going in. She’d just signed on for a weekend during spring break. There was a policy that we could visit the system as much as we wanted, but it was very expensive until you signed the papers, so I’d never been.

“It’s amazing,” Alexis said. Her eyes looked bigger than normal behind her red-rimmed glasses. “You can live in any kind of habitat you want—city, country, beach, rainforest. That was my favorite. It was so amazing to be around all those plants, to feel the moist air and breathe in all that oxygen. Everything tasted better,
sounded
better. My mind was so clear. I bawled my eyes out when it was time to come back out. You don’t even know it, but compared to that,
this
is an armpit.” She gestured around at our neighborhood, at the half-empty supply store, the sandstorm shelter, the old hospital and our school, which was in a sprawling and decrepit strip mall.

“Well, not really, though.” I couldn’t get James’s nagging out of my head. Every time someone described the wonders of the system to me, I heard him say it.
Not really.
“I mean, you weren’t really breathing in more oxygen than normal.”

“You’re such a bummer, Casey. You have to stop listening to James all the time. He doesn’t have all the answers just because he’s a brainiac who looks like a freaking movie star. I’m going in.”

When the system was fully functional a few years ago, after the first wave of testers had completed quality control, they started with the prisoners. Those on death row were given the choice to go in and they all took it. Once they were in the system, their avatars were violent for a long time, but then calmed down when they got used to the fact that they could manifest anything—even their mothers. Commercials showed serial killers whose avatars spent all their time gardening or surfing. Apparently that happened in the system—everything that made you anxious and afraid and desperate and angry just sort of melted away. There was no money in there, no weekends or weekdays, just endless time to do whatever you wanted or could conjure up. The commercials said the system healed people, that it fixed broken spirits and made our souls whole. Better living through fantasy, they said. Paradise for everyone.

The next people who went in were the terminally ill. Some chose not to; some were ready to die. But most—the ones whose bodies were at least stable enough to support brain functioning—went in.

After that, it became kind of a free-for-all. The government could hardly keep up with demand. The storage warehouses they’d built were soon at capacity, and those who’d chosen to stay outside were often employed building new ones. They popped up on the outskirts of every town, huge metal buildings ten stories high and several football fields long. Filled with people. Filled with life support systems. We had turned Earth into a giant spaceship, with passengers who’d never reanimate.

It did drive some nuts. If you purposely killed your own avatar five times, you were done, poof, game over, unplugged from life support. No one talked about those people. (Except for James, of course.) They told us it only happened in very rare cases, to people who’d been mentally ill before they went in.

“They’re the
sane
ones,” James said, when the rare case of an avatar suicide appeared in the news. “Clearly. Who wants to live in a perfect world? There have been oceans of ink spilled about why it’s a bad idea to even try. Jesus, why am I the only one who sees this?”

But the thing was, I kind of did want to live in utopia. Or at least somewhere better than this. James was smart, but he was a bit of a conspiracy theorist and he liked to get a little carried away with nerd talk once in a while and I sometimes tuned him out, especially when he started ranting about the system.

When I was a little girl and my parents still had some money, we went to this exhibition, this City of the Future thing. Its presentation of hope and harmony and
green
was ludicrous, because by that time the water wars had already started and people hadn’t really tasted easy living in decades. Anyway, this one exhibit was called The House of the Future, and I loved it. Everything about the house was self-sufficient; it had its own solar panels and rain collection system. All the appliances were connected and could communicate with each other. The fridge could order food to be delivered and the soothing lights could be raised or dimmed at your quiet command. But the thing that really got me was the bathtub. It was enormous and full of clean, clear water. One side rose up higher than the others, and imbedded right in it was a screen showing dolphins splashing in the surf. I could see myself sitting in that bathtub for hours, watching those dolphins, enjoying all that water.

Mine.

I wanted it.

The only hope I had now of experiencing something as luxurious as that was to go into the Forever system. In the system, all I would have to do is describe what I wanted and it would be there.

Kids gearing up to sign the contract knew this, so they spent a ton of time looking at books and magazines and cached web pages from the early 2000’s, when luxury wasn’t common, but did exist. They wanted to fill up their minds with visions of beauty to take into the system. They wanted to be able to be as creative as possible with their demands, young architects who knew what infinity edge swimming pools looked like and could picture waterfalls that cascaded right into living rooms. They drank up photos of foods we’d never tried and read descriptions of flavors we’d never experience, so that when their avatars had the chance to order them, they’d get it right.
Saffron, chevre, heirloom tomatoes, Kobe beef, lobster, water, water, water
was on the lips of everyone about to go in.

Water.
Please.

I’m so thirsty.

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