Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet Page B

can still see the beginning of everything.
    Even when I was flat again, I still loved that rock.
    Mostly what Sam objects to is the controlling attitude that pharma has, their ads and slogans that make it seem like if you’re not on mood-management pills 24-7 then you’re callously “playing mood roulette.” They try to make it seem like you’re an irresponsible person if you’re not a max-dose regular. Selfish and flaky—even a little bit insane.
    It used to be they just hard-sold the pharma to grown-ups, but now they figure they have to capture the youth population too. We’re getting older and sooner or later, they figure, we’re going to get hella depressed.
    So they’re already grooming us to have an eventual death wish. I mean it’s obvious, we’re not stupid. And in a way I guess it’s creepy, yes, as Sam has said to me more than once. But then it’s also nature. Is it more creepy or more natural? I can’t decide. I mean, it’s always been natural to die. And wise to accept death since it’s the biggest fact of life. Blah blah.
    And yet.
    Sam says he has nothing against death, in and of itself. What he doesn’t like is management, which he refers to as “pharmacontrol.” He and his hackerfriends on face like to get mad and they have their own lexicon of angry words. Among the hackerkids there are a bunch of different factions; some say they don’t believe in pharms at all—though most of their parents make them stay on their daily doses anyway, of course—while other ones only believe in fastpharms because they don’t think being sped up is bad. They think it helps their rebel cause.
    Some of them wear their hair in old-time punk styles to show us all what big rebels they are. That always makes me laugh—the mohawks and silly drawings shaved into the stubble and all that—but not in front of Sam.
    “He’s fourteen,” is what my mother’s said to me about Sam and hacking. She smiles and sighs.
    Anyway, the session was carnage. The blinking didn’t contain my tears and soon I was pitiful, I had the runny nose going on, and I even started to hiccup at one point from the crying jag. So I promised myself I’d take a stronger cocktail as soon as we got back to the suite. There are different levels you can opt for at any point, if you’re not doing great at the so-called coping.
    I was thinking: I just want the sadness to go away. Or at least be a lot less so I can stay relatively calm and stop blubbering. I don’t want me falling apart to be my parents’ last sight; I want to get through this with a bit of grace.
    I decided to try to collect something really soon, because that always makes me feel better. Collecting focuses me.
    This isn’t exactly a feel-good diary, is it? But don’t worry, I promise it’ll get better. So if anyone’s out there, please keep reading: it’ll be roses soon because I’m dialing up my pharma.
    Before long it’ll be one big, long love-in.

    It’s morning now, the morning of Day Two, and this is our Personal Time. Mom and Dad are walking along the cliffs again and looking out at the ocean; they’re kind of obsessed with it. They keep thinking they’re going to see surprising life jump out and flash in exuberance—that suddenly some great ancient creature is going to surface from beneath the waves.
    They know, rationally, that it’s impossible. But there’s this part of them that doesn’t quite believe that, either. After all, the ocean is deep.
    But the ocean is also turning anoxic, the scientists say. It’s happened before. It happened, for instance, 250 million years ago in the Great Dying, otherwise known as the P-T extinction event—the biggest mass-death event in Earth’s history. Before this one, that is. So now it’s happening again. The seawater got more acid from all the carbon it was storing, which we pumped into the atmosphere and sank into the water. And so the ocean food web has mostly collapsed, from the bottom to the top in a