All Our Wrong Todays(22)
Penelope didn’t seem any different. She had that weird shimmer you get when you’re immaterial, like the intangible molecules on your outermost layer of skin can’t properly interact with the coherent molecules of the air around you. But other than that, she looked like she always did.
Except that nobody could touch her or grab her or pull her back into the defusion sphere. It didn’t matter how much anybody screamed or cried or begged her not to do this. It didn’t matter how much, in that moment, somebody might realize that everything he never knew he wanted was coming apart at the seams. It didn’t matter that at least one of the cells in the ghost that used to be her body was half someone else.
It didn’t matter because what I wanted was immaterial.
We could’ve done so many things. We could’ve brought a life into this world of wonders and that life could’ve changed us both, made us better, fixed the broken clocks inside our brains that wouldn’t let us be happy when happiness was within reach. It wasn’t just a who inside her. It was a where, a place both of us could’ve finally been free of the people we never meant to become because that’s the magic trick of creating life—it takes every bad decision you ever made and makes them necessary footsteps on the treacherous path that brought you home. For just a moment I had a home. It was the size of one cell but that was enough to fit in all I ever wanted.
I slumped to the floor and just stared at her. Penelope stared back.
She touched her stomach. I like to think that’s the moment she changed her mind and decided to have our baby and become a family.
But of course it was too late. Even if she wanted to run back into the defusion sphere and reverse the process, she couldn’t move anymore. She’d come unglued. Her neurons no longer able to fire to her muscles, her muscles no longer able to wrench her bones, her bones no longer bones at all, her heart, its heart, our baby’s heart, will never beat in what was no longer her womb.
She floated apart in front of me. They. They floated apart in front of me. Her hand on her stomach. Her eyes frozen in terror, regret, grief. Mine too.
I wanted to memorize every contour of her while she still held her form, but it was impossible to look away from her eyes. Her molecules drifted away, carried off in all directions, through the walls, the ceiling, the floor, until there was nothing left.
34
It’s not like everything in my world was perfect. People still got screwed up by anxiety and stress and off-kilter neural chemistry. Pharmaceutical use was rampant. So was status panic. Power still corrupted, infidelity still hurt, marriages still collapsed. Love went unrequited. Childhood could be a playground or a dungeon. Some people are just constitutionally bad in bed and no amount of interactive pornography can fix that.
But in the world built on the limitless energy of the Goettreider Engine, oil was irrelevant, basic resources were plentiful, and everyone had access to all manner of technological enhancements, major and minor. Not everyone chose to live in our global techno-utopia, and it wasn’t like countries never had tense disagreements and diplomatic posturing, but weaponry was so sophisticated and life so comfortable that there hadn’t been a real geopolitical conflict in three decades. What was there to fight about?
I’m sorry if that sounds wide-eyed or heavy-handed, but it is what it is.
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.