The Forever Contract (A Dystopian YA Novella)



  The Forever Contract

  A Novella

  By Avery Sawyer

  Copyright 2012 Laura Schaefer

  CASEY

  All anyone ever talked about these days was going into the system. Most of us turned seventeen this year, and you couldn’t go in until your seventeenth birthday.

  “But what will it feel like?” we asked each other in class, when we were supposed to be writing lab reports or graphing equations. “What if it hurts?”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” the decided ones said. “My best friend Shana went in last month and I chat with her every night. She says it’s amazing—you get to do whatever you want.”

  “That does sound pretty decent,” the doubtful replied, throwing back a gel pack. We all had gel packs for lunch; water was scarce and the gel was supposed to rehydrate you even though it never felt like it did.

  There had been a drought and record high temperatures all over the country as long as anyone could remember. We lived with the constant whirr of weak air-conditioners and uncertainty in our small prairie town. A long time ago, the town boomed thanks to large deposits of natural gas, but that was all over now. Most people had left, but a few thousand hunkered down and built concrete block houses. It wasn’t quite as hot in the summer here as it was farther south, so we figured it could be worse. No one had seen green grass in years; everything was dirt and dust and dead trees. It was actually illegal to plant your own garden because everyone knew you’d try to water it in the middle of the night when no one was looking. I kept planning to cut my longish brown hair into a pixie to make one-minute showers easier to manage, but I just couldn’t do it.

  My brother Benjamin had gone in a year ago. Our parents were upset—they didn’t believe it was a good idea, because once you went in, you couldn’t come back out. “But I’ll never be able to give you a hug again,” my mother had wailed. “It’s not normal.”

  “We’ll talk every day on screen,” Ben had replied. “And you can join me any time and give me a hug inside.”

  “I doubt two avatars hugging really feel anything,” Mom had said ruefully. “It’s all made up. A fake world, a theme park, a game.”

  “No, it’s not, Mom,” Ben had insisted. “It’s whatever you want it to be. Don’t you ever get tired of being thirsty? Of feeling pain?” He knew she’d suffered from arthritis for years. He wanted to sell us all on the idea, on the plan, but I knew my parents would never go in without me, and I wasn’t old enough then.

  “Please don’t do it. I don’t trust it,” she’d begged.

  “The system isn’t some monolithic thing, you know,” he’d tried to explain. “It’s the first true democracy. You upload your consciousness to the forever system and you’re free to live as long as you want, however you want. No more pain, no more heat, no more awful dust, no more work. Just pure thought. It’s what our species has always been meant for. Suffering is for philosophers. Not for me.”

  “You’re free to live and play as long as the system has power,” our father corrected him. “What happens if the grid goes down?”

  “Won’t happen, Dad. Why are you so negative?”

  Our parents were still part of the faction who believed it would get better in the nuts-and-bolts world. That the rain would come back, that the changes we were seeing around the globe were temporary. They were different than most parents in our town. Most parents felt that anything was better than life as we all knew it. As a result, there were almost no young adults around anymore. It seemed like everyone seventeen or older had gone in. You almost never saw a twenty-something at the supply store or the school. Older people could go in if they wanted to, but they were more reluctant. They weren’t completely comfortable with the technology—they wanted to give it a few more years.

  Things had gotten worse gradually. My mom talked about citrus all the time. That’s the thing she missed, she said. Grapefruit. A slice of lime in soda water. We couldn’t get citrus fruit anymore, and I couldn’t even remember what it had tasted like. She said I’d loved oranges as a toddler. We were the lucky ones, though. A lot of families didn’t have enough to eat. Food was very expensive, so meals were skipped. People ate rice and beans. It was awful. We at least had meat once or twice a week.

  In any case, Ben had signed the Forever Contract and went in, and like my mom said, we couldn’t hug him anymore. His avatar looked like him, only better somehow. His hair seemed thicker onscreen; his arms and body leaner and more muscular. I wanted to ask him if he’d done it with anyone in there, but I couldn’t. I was his sister, and little sisters didn’t ask big brothers that sort of thing. Besides, I could read about it anywhere. Every report coming out of the system said sex inside was amazing. Indescribable. Much better than it could ever be in real life—with no worries about pregnancy or diseases. The system didn’t have babies, which sounded perfectly fine to me.

  Still, I wasn’t sure. My boyfriend James was a really good kisser and I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would prevent me from being in his arms. When his lips touched that spot on my neck, right below my ear, I felt more alive than I ever had. How could immortality and nice muscles compete with that?

  Besides, James wasn’t going.

  He said it was a crock, the whole thing. I never let him get very far with his argument because I didn’t want to think about what it meant for Ben, but James believed the system was a completely flawed corporate-government program designed to prevent even worse food and water shortages. He believed that those who uploaded their consciousness in exchange for life as avatars in utopia had essentially agreed to commit suicide.

  “But he’s not dead!” I yelled. “His body is just fine. It’s, you know, in storage.”

  “He might as well be, Casey. Storage? In a climate-controlled warehouse with no windows? He’s on a feeding tube slowly wasting away.”

  “No he’s not! He’s getting the ideal mixture of protein and vitamins to sustain life indefinitely. He’s fine!”

  “What if he wanted to come back out? He can’t. He’s signed his life away, and everyone’s perfectly happy because he’s using fewer resources. It’s messed up. We’re not lab rats.”

  “He’s happy.”

  “What’s he going to say? It’s too late now to tell the truth.”

  “He would warn me if it was a bad idea. My birthday is only ten days from now.”

  “He’d only warn you if he still had the power to think for himself. Which he doesn’t. Who knows what kind of narcotics they’re putting in with that ‘ideal mixture of protein and vitamins.’”

  “It’s nobody’s fault, you know,” I said quietly. “It’s nobody’s fault it’s gotten so bad. We live in the worst drought in modern history and we’re lucky someone’s given us this option. Given us something.”

  “It’s everybody’s fault!” James shot back. “Everybody’s. We all stopped paying attention when things started getting worse. We all buried our faces in our screens and stopped dealing with reality. We stopped trying to fix it. And now reality has completely fallen apart and we want to just leave it behind forever.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Listen, let’s talk about something else.” James had this vein on his neck that started sticking out whenever we discussed the Forever system. His gray eyes looked fierce against his golden tanned skin when he got upset. He kept his dark blonde hair a little longer than the other guys I knew, and I thought he looked like an angel, even when he got angry. James was very practical—a problem solver-type, but he had a passionate streak. We’d been together over a year and I wanted us to be together forever.

  “But I want to go i
n. And I want you to come with me.”

  “Not going to happen, Case. I’ll take my chances out here. I’d rather dig holes and move bricks all day long than float around in there like some goldfish on happy pills. At least pain and thirst are real.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  We both gave up. We’d been having this fight for months, and the last time we’d had it, I’d gotten pretty hysterical and we hadn’t spoken for days. Neither one of us wanted to fight like that again. We didn’t want to lose each other for any reason. If only he’d see it my way. We could be so happy in there together—forever. James folded me into his strong arms and I kissed his collarbone, but I couldn’t stop feeling constant dread.

  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.

  JAMES

  There’s a lot Casey doesn’t know about the system. I can’t tell her everything I want to tell her because then she’ll have to face the fact that Ben is gone. “Gone” as in not alive, not “gone” as in hanging out in super-fun rainforest paradise. I don’t want to be the one to make her see it—I remember how it felt when I lost my mom. I almost thought I wasn’t going to survive it. After she died, the only thing that kept me going was meeting Casey and finding the Greys.

  My mom had been working for a company in California, a vendor for the gaming conglomerate that had invented the system prototype. I missed having her at home, but she was one of the lucky ones who had made it out of Dakota and I planned to follow in her footsteps as soon as I possibly could. She was genius tester and had been one of the first players of the MMOG that grew to become the system. I was so proud of her—excited to hear each night about how they were changing the world out there.

  But something had gone very wrong. When she returned to us after her work contract had expired, she was different. Vacant. She did things no regular person would ever, ever do—she blinded herself by looking right at the sun and she purposely stayed outside at high noon with uncovered skin and no water or gel. She succumbed to a heat stroke on a day that neither I nor my stepdad had been home to keep an eye on her. The official explanation for her death hadn’t come close to telling the real story. They had done something to her out there—something to her mind. Something terrible.

  Casey had come to the funeral even though we only sort of knew each other from
school, and she led me away from all of the people whispering about how sorry they were. She took me into some cool, dark tunnels she knew about from her dad’s job as a mining engineer. She gave me a flask filled with vodka and she let me cry. I’d never cried in front of a girl before, but with Casey it didn’t feel weird. She just kept kissing my tears away. She climbed right onto my lap, straddling me, and even though I was completely distracted with wanting her, I knew she was just trying to heal me. I don’t know what instinct was guiding her or how she had known what to do. All I knew was she made me feel like trying again, like not giving up, like living. Casey was like that, I learned. She just loved things in an uncomplicated and total way. I saw it when she took care of her straggly mutt of a dog and when she talked about her older brother, who was kind of a screw-up but whom she adored anyway.

  Anyway, after that day in the tunnels, we were together. We didn’t even talk about it, we just were. I’d do anything for Casey. It kills me that she’s even considering signing the contract, but I know she’s scared. We’re all scared of what our lives will be like if we don’t sign. I can’t go to California, not after what they did to my mom out there. And I can’t stay here.

  Everything is uncertain, unstable, awful.

  I liked to go out in the middle of the night, even though there wasn’t much to see in our desolate prairie town. People didn’t like to turn lights on after dark because all the power we had was used for refrigeration, the occasional air conditioner, and powering our screens. All you could do was look up. The stars didn’t seem thirsty or worn-out or hopeless. The heavens whispered about a future I could believe in, one I actually wanted to meet.

  It was in the middle of the night that I met my first Grey. I’d stayed late at work because they had more powerful screens there than I did at home. My supervisor trusted me to lock up at night, mostly because I paid him off by giving him my extra gel packs. I stayed after dark to do what I always did: find the data that would prove the system was corrupt, dangerous and illegal. If I could just prove it with the right information, I could shut them down. And more importantly, I could stop having idiotic fights with Casey about the whole thing and make her see that the system was evil and our future together had to be out here.