Player One: What Is to Become of Us Read online

  Luke turns to Rachel and asks, “Have you ever had a vision?”

  “I don’t understand your question, Luke.”

  “A vision — a picture in your mind that’s not real life, but it’s not a dream, either — it’s something you see that you know is true and you know is going to happen.”

  “Have you?”

  “Once. Last summer. I was with my sister and her kids, at some lake. The kids were driving me nuts, so I went off on my own and got lost in the scrub — it’s easier to get lost than you think — and I ended up on a sandbar down the lake. I was thirsty, but I didn’t want to drink the water because it probably had bear shit and skunk shit in it, and who knows what else, so I was dehydrated, and I found this sandbar and then, wham! I had this vision. I fell to my knees and I saw a wash of light, and then I saw a fleet of dazzling metal spaceships, like bullets aimed at the sun, and I wanted to walk towards them and get inside one and leave everything behind. I’d had a vision, the only vision I’ve ever had, but it told me nothing and offered no comfort or guidance.”

  “Were the spaceships built by humans or by aliens?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Humans, I think.” He looks at the gorgeous but unreadable Rachel. “Do you believe in aliens?”

  “I think that all subatomic particles are designed specifically to generate life the first moment they possibly can. In our case, it happens to be based on DNA. On other planets, other designs will have occurred. Perhaps stacked rings or some other linear structure. Scientists now believe that life started on earth not just once, but many times, until it continued to become the forms we currently experience. Even if you took a planet full of nitrous sludge and did everything to hinder life’s development, it would still evolve.” Rachel pauses. “Actually, Luke, sometimes I do see pictures in my head — when I’m working in the garage and have been overconcentrating in bright light. They don’t make any sense, but I do see them . . . I once had this vision that a mountainside collapsed and buried me. While I watched it start to fall down, I wasn’t at all frightened. I knew that the weight of the soil and rocks would make me feel safe and protected.”

  Luke’s pupils dilated upon hearing of Rachel’s visions. Something she had said had emotionally affected him. “Does your vision mean anything, you think?”

  “No. Perhaps only that I had curry for dinner and its effect on my stomach is psychoactive. But the landslide dream did make me stop worrying about death.”

  Luke looked at her face closely. “Maybe someday you might become a poet.”

  “I don’t understand poetry.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me, but you probably have other things going for you. I can tell.” Luke polishes off what remains in his glass and sighs. “Rachel, I wish everything would just end. I think I’ve had just about as much of this world as I’m able to take. I’m pooped.”

  “Is that what people call ‘a cry for help’? Should I notify a local suicide hotline of your intentions?”

  “No! Jesus! Have another sip of your drink.”

  Rick passes by, and Rachel looks at Rick and says, “Did you know that every human being on earth is related to a single woman who existed 160,000 years ago in a place we now commonly call France?”

  “Seriously?” said Rick. “Related to every person on earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Man, she must have been one total slut.”

  Luke almost chokes on his Scotch, but then manages to swallow it and bursts out laughing. Rick heads off to the back of the bar.

  Rachel looks confused. She asks Luke, “What’s wrong with being a slut? I would think society would welcome fertile women fully enthusiastic about reproducing with a wide variety of genes so as to propagate the species in a genetically healthy and sensible manner.”

  Luke looks at Rachel. “That’s certainly one way of viewing things.”

  “Luke, are you single or married?”

  Luke says, “I’m single,” but doesn’t know if this is the right answer if he’s going to make it with Rachel. Being single is a self-fulfilling situation. Why are you single? Something must be wrong. I’ll pass, thank you. It’s slightly easier for single men than for single women, but it sends out an awkward signal nevertheless. Single means lonely, and lonely is scary, as Luke knows all too well from years of counselling his flock. Luke is lonely, too, but only when he thinks about time and growing old alone. Luke is afraid of getting hurt, but he also knows that if too much time passes you miss out on the opportunity to be hurt by other people. To a younger Luke this sounded like luck; to an older Luke this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

  The TV screen shows more of the trashed Florida zoo, waist-deep in water. Luke once thought time was like a river, and that it always flowed at the same speed, no matter what. But now he believes that time has floods, too — it simply isn’t a constant anymore. Twenty thousand dollars in his pockets, and Luke feels like he’s in the flood.

  Luke asks, “What about you? Single?”

  “Yes. Irregularities in the insula, cingulate, and inferior frontal parts of the brain make me unable to have what neurotypical people such as you call a ‘relationship.’ I enjoy situations that are familiar to me, and if that means having a person around me, then I suppose that’s fine. But it’s not something I crave or seek. I also have 630 people following my ongoing blog on the subject of mouse breeding. One might consider them, if not partners, then friends. They constitute my community.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “But this may change. The brain grows ten thousand new cells every day of its life — but unless you use them, they dissolve back into your brain.”

  “Serves them right,” says Luke. “Okay, Rachel, what do you crave or seek from life, then?”

  “I would like to become impregnated by an alpha male so that I can prove to my father that I am, in fact, a human being and not a monster or an alien.”

  Luke looks at Rachel. “Let me buy you another drink.”

  Rick returns from the bar’s rear area. Luke watches him mix a complicated cocktail and take a sip from it — are bartenders allowed to do that? — then inexplicably pour it out and flee into the back, returning a half-minute later looking like hell. Crystal meth? Crack? Luke thinks, Well, it’s an airport bar. Who wouldn’t? An airport isn’t even a real place. It’s a pit stop, an in-between area, a “nowhere,” a technicality — a grudging intrusion into the seamless dream of transcontinental jet flight. Airports are where you go right after you’ve died and before you get shipped off to wherever you’re going next. They’re the present tense crystallized into aluminum, concrete, and bad lighting.

  Luke watches as Rick mixes another drink and hands it to Karen — and then oil hits $250 a barrel. Even Rachel’s ears perk up at that news. She tells Luke, “That means a tank of gas for a typical North American–made sedan will cost roughly $300.”

  Luke remembers driving to the airport to catch his flight to freedom. The gas at the pumps back home was a buck and a half per litre. Would they even be open now? Just then, the power goes out. When it returns ten seconds later, the TV is white, fuzzy snow.

  ___

  Amidst all of the action and all the cocktails, what was troubling Luke most was the paradigm shift inside his head. Just yesterday he had believed that after he died he would go to a place called Eternity. Now all he had to look forward to was a paltry place called the future. The future is not the same thing as Eternity. Eternity is everything and nothing. In the future, things that were already happening keep going on, but without you.

  Because Luke no longer believed in Eternity, he had only the future. The day after he died there might be a really huge, terrific party and he wouldn’t be there to attend. A year or two later they might tear down his old neighbourhood and raise skyscrapers shaped like handguns. In two million years, squirrels might have developed frontal cortices and enslaved the world. Who was to say? Luke would never know, because he’d be dead and would have left all known
time streams.

  Of course, there was no guarantee that dwellers in Eternity would get peeks back into their pre-eternal world. Luke always did wonder what the point of that would be — so they could gloat? So they could settle bets? So they could see the latest Star Wars instalment? No matter how he looked at it, there remained something petty about Eternals looking backwards. No. Once you’re gone, you’ll never find out who won the World Series, who wore what to the Oscars, or whether your kids went on to cure cancer or murder Girl Guides. Luke is on the cusp of ordering another round of drinks for himself and Rachel when Leslie Freemont enters the building.

  Rachel turned to look at Leslie Freemont. “I’ve seen that man on TV.”

  “It’s that fraud — Freeman . . . Freemont — what the hell is he doing here?”

  “Being on television would make him a good genetic donor, would it not? And his skin is tanned. He must be a sportive outdoors type.”

  Luke was surprised by how angered he was that Leslie Freemont had become a threat to his potential hookup with Rachel. “Suntan? That’s fake-and-bake, trust me, and the TV thing? It’s infomercials for some quack self-help cult.”

  “He seems confident and virile.”

  “He’s a complete hoax.”

  Yet, of course, the two continued watching as Leslie seduced the western side of the bar. They even participated in a toast with the man. And after the briefest of visits, capped by a quickie snapshot, Leslie and his assistant were gone.

  Rachel

  Rachel is trying to establish whether Luke might be a suitable father for her child — a man with a wad of cash in his pocket who recently stopped believing in religion. Religion strikes Rachel as reproduction-neutral, but Luke says he once had a vision of a spaceship headed heavenward — perhaps he is a poet? Neurotypical people are an endless source of puzzles. Religion is one of the biggest.

  In any event, when oil hits $250 a barrel, Rachel’s brain senses a threat to her body, making her amygdala kick in to create a duplicate recording of her cocktail lounge experience, which, afterwards, she will be able to scan for data that she can learn from, to protect herself in a similar situation. Her brain’s double recording of the event will make it feel as if it happened in slow motion. The doubling of neural information simulates the lengthening of time, and because Rachel is different, she is able to keep dual recordings of intense events running far longer than neurotypicals. Thus, Rachel will be able to revisit the arrival and departure of Leslie Freemont and his assistant, Tara.

  Rachel is grateful for Leslie’s cocoa butter tan and white outfit and white hair, as it gives him distinctive non-facial characteristics that allow her to recognize him without having to resort to eyes, ears, and mouth. She has no idea how the rest of the world can tell each other apart. What would be wrong with everyone wearing name tags? It wouldn’t be difficult or expensive — and yet nobody is interested.

  Rachel is also relieved that nobody in the cocktail lounge makes laughing noises when she announces that she breeds white mice for a living. She received a lot of the laughing noises back in high school, when she first went into business. As she walked past other students, they’d say, “Squeak-squeak” — a bad imitation of the noise white mice make, which is, in fact, almost no noise at all. The laughing noise usually means her day is going to be just that much harder.

  Once Leslie leaves, the group of five clusters around the truly dreadful computer in search of news. Warren seizes control of the keyboard. Nobody else seems to care, but Rachel can tell that Warren isn’t actually that good with computers. “Fricking hell, it’s asking me to download some kind of patch.” Warren’s tone reminds Rachel of her father and thus her mating mission.

  Her current situation may be bewildering and slightly scary, but Rachel presses forward, saying, “Push CONTROL-4 to override that request.”

  It works.

  Karen says, “Go to CNN.com. Hurry! Hurry!” But Warren is klutzy and hits the wrong keys, triggering a cluster of frozen windows.

  Rick asks Rachel, “You — what’s your name?”

  “My name is . . . Rachel.”

  “Rachel, take over from this guy.”

  Warren rebels, saying, “Well, my name is Warren, and screw you. I’m almost in.”

  “Warren,” Rick says, “my grandmother’s more web-savvy than you.”

  Karen says, “Both you men, just shut up. Wait — CNN’s on the screen.”

  They look at the CNN page, which is shattering into digital fragments. During its two seconds onscreen, the group sees the words oil hits $350 and new info sheds light on anna nicole smith’s drug suicide.

  Then the connection dies and the server asks if they’d like to test a new Microsoft upgrade for their system.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” barks Warren. “This hunk of crap probably has a dot matrix printer, too.”

  “Actually,” Rick says, “it does, but I can’t find paper with tractor-tread holes on the sides anymore.”

  Rachel begins thinking about a world in which oil costs $350 a barrel, and it’s not a world the people she knows would want to live in — not exactly a world of empty roads and starving masses, but getting there. Fewer planes. Fewer vegetables and fruits. Anarchy. Crime. Maybe some suicides. There may no longer be a need for high-quality white mice in this world, and then what will she do? For a brief moment she thinks of the pizza-sized black circles cartoon characters throw onto the ground — portable holes — which they jump into to escape difficult situations. In her mind, that’s where people go when they die: down Daffy Duck’s cartoon hole. How comforting to have a wide array of cartoon friends to meet you on the other side! Cartoons were introduced to Rachel as a means of explaining the concept of humour, but she ended up preferring cartoons over real life because in cartoons she could at least tell whose face was saying what. She hasn’t watched a film in years. But there, in the stress of the bar, she wishes she had a cartoon hole she could escape into. But no — she’s on a mission, and this is no time to bail.

  ___

  Warren was yelling at the hard drive, and Karen was yelling at Warren for yelling at the machine. The two reminded Rachel of her parents, but she knew from Luke that they had met only an hour beforehand. Perhaps they were . . . What is the term? . . . a match made in heaven and ought to reproduce as quickly as possible.

  Warren clearly held Rick responsible for the lounge’s lame computer and for his inability to get a cellphone connection. “How hard can it be for a hotel lounge to have decent wireless? You’ve got nothing to do all day but make three margaritas and stick some bar mix in a bowl. You’d think you’d have time to find a computer that works.”

  “Right, Warren. I’ll put it on the agenda at the next board meeting, right after my PowerPoint presentation to implement a chain-wide series of planet-friendly green initiatives.”

  “There’s no other computer in this place?”

  “In the hotel’s main office. Be my guest and go use it.”

  “Smartass. Wait — I think I’ve got CNN again.” The screen’s address bar indicated a connection to the website, and the loading bar indicated it was about to appear. Then an ad for Tropicana orange juice popped up. Warren was incensed. “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Rick said, “Why don’t we let Rachel give this a try?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Warren said. “I get it. Out with the old, in with the young.”

  Karen said, “Warren, just move. Rachel, try and get us online here.”

  Rachel sat and executed some keystrokes that unclogged much of Warren’s mess. She considered rebooting but decided not to risk it. As she tried reaching various news websites, she reasoned that if oil was now $350 a barrel, most airline flights would soon be grounded. Gas stations would be emptied in minutes, and all grocery stores gutted. She asked Rick, “Do you have a radio?”

  “Just in my truck,” Rick said.

  “We should go out and listen to it,” Rachel said. “We’ll get the news faster that way.” />
  “No!” said Warren. “We are going to get the real facts online. Keep trying, Rachel.”

  Karen said, “I’d rather listen to the radio right now.”

  Rick said, “Me too.”

  Warren said, “Then go. I’m getting my information the modern way. Radio is for losers.”

  Rick said, “Right then, the truck’s out back.”

  Luke decided to join them. They walked out the lounge’s glass door, which was covered in blistering, peeling sun-screening material, and into the baking afternoon.

  The air outside seemed much quieter than it had when Rachel entered the cocktail lounge. Then she realized that the relative silence stemmed from the absence of air traffic into and out of the airport. Rick said, “This way,” and they walked to an aging black Dodge Ram pickup and opened the doors. The four of them got inside. Rick put the key in the ignition to activate the radio.

  Luke said, “At the moment it’ll probably cost you five bucks just to idle the car. God only knows what the pump price is right now. Airport’s pretty quiet, too.”

  Rachel said, “I doubt the airlines can afford to fly. People booked on flights today won’t be going anywhere. Probably not tomorrow, either. Maybe never.”

  Karen snapped, “Quiet, all of you. Rick, turn on the effing radio.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  They tuned in to the local AM news/traffic station. The normally cheery banter was gone, replaced by a very factual reading of incoming bulletins.

  . . . the Niagara Falls crossings have been closed until further notice, and authorities have requested that civilians not go near the half-kilometre buffer zone. In downtown Toronto, we have confirmation that the Gardiner Expressway has been closed after a series of noises we’re told sounded like explosions. Listener phone-ins report what seems to be a riot at the Eaton Centre, but 680 News has yet to confirm . . .