Pills and Starships Read Online Free Page A

“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 to 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