I’m waiting for a letter. It exists in potentia every morning I approach the letterbox, a Schrödinger’s envelope that only resolves itself as my key turns in the lock.
The letter will contain an appointment date, one that I can hang on my empty reels of calendar. It will let me pretend to myself that things will one day revert, the threads will once more be woven into a tightly held pattern of predictability.
In the meantime, the future unspools wildly and puddles at my feet, shapeless and purposeless.
Of course, my former self resented those tight wefts of work and travel. The endless predictability of the future chafed and bit, and left no thread free for a spontaneous embroidered trill.
Yet despite the benefits to my current state of uncertainty, I remain blind.
Society isn’t all that keen on people having unplanned futures, or unpredictable and potentially unstable paths. It likes individuals to snap into acceptable roles, populate and pay up. Faltering in no man’s land is a sign of weakness, laziness, fecklessness, or failure, so people self-flagellate until they implode or fit back in.
I circle myself in my mind and snap at my heels whenever I start enjoying myself. I can’t relax into this state in case I start liking it.
Instead, I remain vigilant and wait for a letter, listening for the click-clack of a loom re-started.
I feel this need to gobble things up. Consume them before they disappear from existence, seize them in a spasmodic clutch that crushes as much as it holds.
Why the rush?
I suppose the future feels empty in its uncertainty. The potential it holds seems like so much Fool’s Gold when compared to the sure gleam in the seam of the present. I seize the day, uncaring that my clumsy grasp might cause a hundred futures to wink out, wriggling threads extinguished without a second’s thought.
I get told to relax a lot. Chill out. Go with the flow. See what happens. It turns out that this doesn’t really have any effect on a mind outraged by the paucity of knowledge available when told to make decisions.
And so I hold onto today like the Earth might turn its back on the Sun, refusing to bring it back around. I feel everything now, in case the future is a burnt out carcass hosting only maggots of misery.
Sometimes my grip releases. Hands go slack and shaky with the fear that those terrible futures might mean that there’s no point in consuming or clutching. There’s no point in holding on.
On those days, when my brain coils tightly around itself and digs its jaws in deep, I need someone to slip their hand in mine and clutch me as though the Earth might spin no more. As though those future threads mean nothing compared to the need for a clumsy grasp today.
And on those days I’ll realise I don’t have to rush alone.
I can’t get between my ribs to that stuttering heart.
(I think there might be something wrong with it, but the warranty ran out a while ago.)
My brain seems to have turned into one of those big glass bubbles with ping pong balls of thought flying in every direction.
New thought: utterly irrelevant.
New thought: completely nonsensical.
Lungs still seem to be working though, focus on that.
There’s familiarity, sure, but also a realisation that there’s so much unknown behind the line you toed. Familiar never felt so strange.
In air cooled by rain long due, risk marries possibility and spins excitement into anxiety’s arms in a nauseatingly glorious waltz.
I can’t find another footing, the next handhold is in the dark, and it’s a bit of a bloody nightmare for someone who likes to satellite view every journey before she takes it.
That’s life, apparently.
I’m not sure I’ve been designed to the necessary specification to cope with it.
*Just in case this comes across as a bit concerning, I’m okay! I wanted to explore the concepts below as speculative fiction, please note that there are potential triggers around suicide.
People come here to die.
When you’re unwanted, or too old, too helpless, too ill. When you feel like you’re a millstone around your family’s neck, when your mind begins to go and you don’t want your children to see your emptying shell, when you can’t bear to watch your parents try to smile as your body wastes, when you’ve bankrupted your family and can’t look in your wife’s eyes, when you’re too lonely and can’t stand the quiet for one more day. When you cannot try any longer.
This is where you come.
You press your hand to a digitised waiver. You walk down row upon row of brightly painted doors until you come to your assigned number.
The door opens at the touch of your palm to the plate, the lights flick on automatically. There’s a long chair in the middle, one that reclines all the way back with adjustable everything. There are monitor patches to stick on all over, so you have to strip off and slip one of their gowns over your head. There’s a box for your clothing and anything else you brought with you.
Most people have nothing else to put in it.
Next to the chair is a dark grey VR helmet, padded and ventilated through gills at the side. Cords run from the helmet to the wall, snaking away into the unknown. You sit and lean backward until you’re nearly horizontal. The helmet slips over your face and –
There are hundreds of these places all over the country. Whoever designs them always seems to choose primary colours for the doors. Maybe they think that’s more cheerful than beige.
Once a client has settled into their room and become fully immersed in their chosen virtual reality simulation, a team of begloved carers inserts catheters and feeding tubes and hooks up the monitors. That’s the way things stay until the client checks out. Terminally.
It’s meant to be a good way to go. You get to live in a virtual world that’s designed to avoid stressors and sources of misery, and they make it as gentle and pain-free as possible.
There have always been stories, of course. The one about the self-storage unit that got raided and they found nothing but empty beds and a whole lot of organ transport boxes.
Or the one where they didn’t bother with any of the body maintenance so emaciated people were dying in a lake of their own piss and faeces.
Or the one where they set up a side business and let people in to do whatever they wanted with the bodies while the minds were hooked up to the VR.
I guess there’s always some sicko looking to make an extra buck.
The thing is, even the units that operate under the law have a major snag. That waiver you sign says you’re not allowed to change your mind: you’re never allowed to check out or be checked out.
I wonder how many people this no takesie-backsies rule has left trapped inside.
The state likes self-storage though. Way cheaper to run than care homes or state facilities, easier to deliver medical assistance, and the state gets to claim any assets to pay for care. They’re trialling it ‘voluntarily’ in prisons, so offenders get to feel like they’re free, and prison staff no longer have to deal with violence or drug abuse.
There are more and more self-storage facilities springing up. Squat towers with corridors that wind around and around, each lined with an orderly array of doors.
Behind those primary coloured doors, a hundred minds spin away.
In which we journey to a future far, far (and hopefully further) away
They brought in S.H.A.M.E four years ago.
It stands for System for Health and Monitoring Efficiency, and it took the government years of bullying, bribes and blackmail to force companies into implementation. It was going to ‘transform productivity’, ‘improve stakeholder engagement’, and had to be ‘actioned immediately’.
Workers are pretty damn engaged. But mostly because they’re scared shitless.
It works like this: sickness and absence stats, start and finish times, and hours spent on productive tasks are all monitored by a national system that ties data to your National Insurance number and Health Service number. Everyone – from the CEO to the handyman – has to wear a digitised display badge with stats and rankings, and it emits an ear-piercing bleep every time your numbers slip. Teams get rewarded or punished based on collective performances. Productivity is the only thing that matters.
Once your stats drop too low, you can’t work for a company in the same tier any more – you have to move down to a lower tier company. Less pay, same badges. The sleep at the factory kind of deal with no-break shifts, no daylight, and no real money.
If your stats slip too far, there are no jobs. No one can take on a dud in case they have to fork out for rehabilitation training. S.H.A.M.E Central Services take the offender somewhere for a few weeks and drill into them that they need to be less shit. Then they get their badge numbers bumped up just enough so they can work in the lowest tier. “Rehabilitation” costs way more than most people can afford, and more than most companies want to pay.
No badge means no money and no health services.
The government says that measures are in place for S.H.A.M.E to work for everyone. It says that those with a confirmed diagnosis receive an allotment of extra points on their badge. It says that you can get a badge with larger font displays. Or with digi-braille. It says that anyone who’s fallen out the bottom has chosen to ‘not be part of a successful system’.
The government says a lot of things.
They’re launching S.H.A.M.E in America now, and half of Europe is a S.H.A.M.E zone. Apparently the UK’s been an astounding success case.
It’s like they can’t even see all those people sleeping on the streets.
Medically Unexplained 