Pills and Starships Read Online Free

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