Scientific discovery was the dominant social motivator, since even the most arcane theories could be enacted by vast resources. Religion had little place in the public sphere. Hundreds of millions of people were still religious, but as more of a cultural affectation. Like folk dancing and pierogies.
Morality did not collapse into nihilism. People were kind, people were rude, people were generous, people were greedy, people were courageous and cowardly, insightful and dull-witted, self-sacrificing and self-destructive, willful and easygoing, happy and sad. You could still get into a fistfight if you said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong bar. Damaged people sometimes made bad decisions. Smart people sometimes did stupid things. But everyone who wanted it had a place in the world.
What is religion? What is philosophy? What is art? It’s a question—why?
When you live in a miserable world of systemic inequity and toxic want, the answer is elusive and dissatisfying. And there’s always a blameworthy because. Because of human nature. Because of money. Because of the government. Because of magical puppet masters manipulating us from their celestial lair. The because can never really answer the why.
The existential difference between my world and this world is that where I come from the because is self-evident—just look around. No one needed to ask why. The answer was obvious. We were happy. Our purpose was to keep it going and, if we had some way to contribute, make it incrementally better for those who would follow us, just as those who preceded us had.
Yes, I understand that’s a pretty good working definition of ideology—a belief system so immersive that it renders questions unquestionable.
It wasn’t perfect. Mistakes got made. Accidents happened. Ambitions were thwarted. People got hurt. Mothers died. Sons couldn’t figure out why their fathers didn’t love them. Women got pregnant and didn’t want the babies. Suicides were committed.
But it was a good world, a sane world, billions of people with worthwhile lives, some selfish, some selfless, most a bit of both. None of them deserved what I did to them.
35
I woke up in a hospital, my thoughts sludgy and scattered. At first I thought I’d gone deaf, but it was just the sound dampeners in the sterile recovery cube. My eyes took a long time to focus, like the light waves undulating up my optic nerves were getting frayed in transit. I must have freaked the hell out for them to dope me up so heavily. Maybe everything that happened afterward was because the doctors got the dosage wrong. Maybe the neural scanners misgauged my endocrine levels. Maybe none of my subsequent choices were choices at all.
Then again, are any of our choices actual choices? The brain is a soupy lightning storm swirling and crackling in three pounds of wet meat. Do conscious decisions even exist, or is everything an instinctual response gussied up with malformed logic?
These are the kinds of questions I assuredly was not asking as the chemical haze dissipated and the leaden truth returned. Penelope gone. Our cell gone. My father’s genius in ruins. His lab abandoned. The mission indefinitely postponed. The entire team, chrononauts, technicians, advisers, my father, all sequestered in communication-proof suites as the lawyers massed for the required inquiry, auguring a swarm of legal sanctions, blackened reputations, government crackdowns, corporate audits, the entire field of time travel set back a generation.
It’s amazing how much damage one penis can do.
36
Where I come from, people have a different relationship with the authorities. Food synthesizers, clothing recyclers, and vast interlocked housing towers meant no one lacked for food or cover or shelter. Property crime wasn’t really a thing because everything was encoded and tracked, so even if you stole something you couldn’t use it or take it anywhere. Mental illness and substance abuse existed, but they were managed as health care issues. Drugs were self-synthesizable in a local treatment facility, so you could develop a foaming-amp or binary-sweet or morphocaine addiction and go sleep under a bridge if you really wanted to, but no one ever did it.
It just wasn’t a rebellious world. Maybe that sounds lame and not, like, punk rock enough, except punk rock never happened in my world. Punk rock wasn’t required.
That isn’t to say entropy never warped the system into disarray, just that when it did most people patiently waited for the authorities to get their shit back under control so we could all return to security and comfort and plenty. All of our material needs were managed by attentive corporations with excellent customer service, so elected governments were mostly there for legal oversight, public safety, international trade agreements, and disaster preparedness. People trusted the system.
Which is why it was easy to just walk out of the hospital even though I was technically supposed to remand myself into police custody on release. No one stopped me because it wasn’t the kind of society where people deliberately violate protocol.
Lying in the soundproof recovery cube was supposed to feel velvety and tranquil. Except, alone with my own thoughts, it was more like being buried alive inside a coffin. My brain was rejecting any orderly assessment of my situation, like the organ itself had seized shut to prevent contamination. Can your brain scab over a memory like your flesh does a wound? My brain was sure as hell going to try.
I opened the cube and looked around the narrow, windowless room where it was stationed. There was no guard. Nobody would think that I’d need to be guarded. I reconstituted my clothing and strolled down the hallway. The medical technicians were all busy with patients, and those who did see me assumed if I was leaving the hospital I was allowed to do so. My nonchalance wasn’t cool under pressure. It was acute shock. My blood was lava. My heart poured flame. But whatever pain ignited my nerves couldn’t quite find its way to my numbed mind.
In front of the hospital was a wide plaza with hover-car landing slots, transit-capsule docks, and teleportation platforms. Hundreds of people moved this way and that, going to work, visiting patients, getting tests, dropping off spouses, picking up family, gossiping with colleagues, chatting with friends, flirting with strangers, a fractal knot of daily life. In the afternoon sunshine, nobody knew my annihilation.
I watched the mesh of hover cars swoop by overhead. Because they’re seen just as often from below as from above, the undersides of hover cars are designed to be as pleasing as their hulls, sleek ribs of iridescent piping and the round shells of the antigravity engines shimmering with languid force. I realized I couldn’t remember what happened to the driver of the hover car that killed my mother. I couldn’t picture their face or recall their name. Were they injured too? Admitted to the same hospital I just left? Did they come to the funeral, awkwardly hanging at the back of the crowd, unsure if they should express condolences in person or remain mute and abashed in the periphery? How do they feel about what they did to my family? Their presence was like a shadow cast from a trick of light, this person who changed everything about my life but whom I’d utterly forgotten.
I smiled amiably at everyone I passed as I crossed the plaza and stepped into a transit capsule.
I couldn’t explain what I was doing. I had no plan. I was twelve years old again and I was going to run away. Someplace no one could ever find me.
37
I went back to my condo. I wasn’t worried about the police coming after me, so I kept to the surveilled public grid and walked through the front door in broad daylight. I wasn’t hiding. I was running away. There’s a difference.