It was only afterwards that the man noticed how ordinary the room was. It looked just like how hotel rooms used to, with the only notable feature being the luxurious silk sheets draped over himself and the girl. They were a boring off-white colour, not a seductive deep red, nor an overly feminine neon pink, just boring off-white. He liked that a whole lot.
“Would you like to have a drink?” the girl asked.
“No, don’t trouble yourself,” the man said.
“It’s no trouble. I’m getting myself one.”
“Can we talk?”
“That’s what the drink is for.”
“Okay then.”
“Whiskey?”
“Okay.”
She gave him a brief smile as she got up from the bed, then she walked only a few steps away to the small table that held the alcohol. The man began to speak as soon as the liquid began splashing into the glasses.
“I’ve been spending a lot more time looking over my balcony.”
The girl turned her head briefly to signal that she was paying attention, before returning her focus on pouring the right amounts. Then she walked over with the drinks and handed the man his.
“To be, or not to be, that seems to be the question nowadays,” the girl replied nonchalantly.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
They each took a sip, and then the girl rejoined the man in sitting against the headrest.
“Do you have a wife?” the girl asked.
“I did.”
“Did she look over the balcony a lot too?”
“No, natural causes.”
“Really?” the girl asked with seemingly exaggerated, yet authentic, surprise.
“Yeah.”
“That doesn’t happen anymore, well, unless she was 150. You don’t look that old.”
“No, no, she wasn’t old,” the man laughed.
“Well, what then?”
“Stubbornness.”
The girl waited for the man to continue.
“We joined a group of pioneers. Then she got sick and didn’t want to come back.”
“What a world we live in.”
“Yeah.”
The man felt cheated. They promised him the world would be perfect, but not like he imagined, nor anyone else for that matter. Nothing made sense to him anymore. He remembered all those fairy tales from his childhood with a genie in them, getting everything you’d want in a way you didn’t. “Always beware the genie,” he thought.
“Tell me about her,” the girl asked.
“Well, she was stubborn.” The man paused and took another sip. “But she was also adventurous, that’s what drew me to her. At first she was thrilled about not having a job anymore. She always said ‘more time for adventures’ but I guess that got old quickly. She wanted more.”
“And so you became pioneers?”
“Yeah.”
“How was that? Most people think you guys are crazy.”
“On paper, I’d think so too.”
A brief memory flashed in the man’s head of his first night at the camp. All his doubts were eliminated as the night sky came, with a million twinkling stars laying out above him, something that he never saw before. He knew what the pioneers were doing didn’t really make any sense, but it felt like it did, and maybe even more than before. He smiled at the memory.
“Maybe I should get out there.” The girl suggested in a serious tone, indicating that she had given it thought before.
“I don’t think it makes a difference anymore.”
“Well, I already turned my life upside once.”
“What do you mean?”
“I used to be a doctor,” she said, not quite looking at the man.
“Really?” Now it was the man’s turn to be surprised.
“How long does it take to get there?”
“You were a doctor?”
“Yeah. How long does it take to get to the pioneers?”
“Umm, about 2 days of driving with stops for rest and food.”
“Will you show me where they are?”
“Okay.”
“You mean it?”
“Yeah.”
“I was upset when doctors weren’t needed anymore. That’s pretty selfish, I know. The miracle drugs they invented saved so many lives, most of them with no side effects, but it felt like my whole life was taken from me.”
“And so you became a-”
“Yeah. Yeah, I saw what was happening. Disease isn’t killing people anymore, but many are dying all the same. No one is hiding the numbers, but it’s scary how many people don’t seem to care! I thought I could help this way. I need to help. I don’t know what else to do.”
“Wow, the things we do in this brave new world.”
“Amen.”
“So, why not become a therapist?”
“It’s funny these are the only two jobs now,” the girl laughed.
“Says a lot.”
“Yeah, it definitely does. I didn’t think the therapists were doing any good.”
The man nodded his head in agreement. He had been to the therapists just the week before. The demand for them was so high that they made fake ones, synths. People still preferred a human of course, even if you couldn’t tell the difference. Either way, you did some talking then got some soma. Sometimes you didn’t even really need to talk.
Upon leaving the therapist’s office, the man had been greeted by a long line of people waiting for their appointment. They waited in an orderly row, stretching far down and then around the block, all of them patiently wearing blank expressions, as if there wasn’t anything possibly more necessary. The man had thought there was something sickening in having been part of that line.
In the end, he didn’t take the soma, not out of principle, but out of indifference. He saw it as no different than jumping off of a balcony or letting a disease consume him. It was all the same in his mind.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said.
“What for?”
“I’m supposed to let you do most of the talking.”
“It’s fine, I like it when you talk.”
“You said it didn’t make a difference.”
“What?”
“The pioneers, that’s what you said.”
“Yeah, it didn’t.”
“Why?”
“I’m beginning to believe that nothing we do really matters.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“Not just now, maybe nothing ever really mattered. Maybe all the genies did was make that obvious.”
“The genies?”
“The Advanced Artificial Intelligence, I call them genies in my mind.”
“That’s still nonsense. You have to care about something.”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“It’s caring about something that makes things matter.”
“I don’t know anymore.”
They both took a long sip to finish off their drinks, and let the silence linger for a few moments afterward. The girl had a lot on her mind. She always thought if there was something she could just say in moments like these, then she could help. But recently, she wasn’t so sure.
“Even if what you’re saying is true, I don’t think I could believe it,” the girl finally said.
“And that’s why you are thinking of joining the pioneers?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if I should be doing this much longer.”
“Wow, was I so terrible?” the man joked.
“The absolute worst,” the girl replied with a laugh. “But in all seriousness, I think I could do a lot more good by joining the pioneers.”
“That makes sense. If we had a doctor in our group...”
It was raining the night that the man and his wife had their fight. Their newly built hut kept the water out, but the sound of rain was deafening. The man was worried, he urged his wife to get treatment, to go back to the city “just for the week.” But his wife kept on refusing as “that would defeat the purpose.”
The camp itself was divided over this. Exactly half agreed with the man, and the other half with his wife. They had all come out here to escape what the world had become. Some saw no harm in using the medicinal breakthroughs of the new world, while others viewed it as symbolic of everything that had gone wrong.
Within two weeks, the man’s wife had died of some infection. In her final days, he tried to be understanding of her decision, but he could never figure out how she could just choose to leave him alone in this world. Maybe she thought that if life no longer has any meaning, then death may still have some. Maybe the infection just made her delirious. The man would never know.
“So it’s settled. I don’t have many belongings. I’ll head out tomorrow,” the girl declared.
“I’ll drive you.”
“Will you? That’s an awfully long drive.”
“I have too much time. And who knows, maybe it’ll be fun getting back out there.”
“Maybe,” the girl said with a hopeful smile.