Dramamine: A Short Story [other worlds]
Basically, Marriage Story but with cryogenic freezing
Author’s Note (Rexy Dorado): As we wait for John Ray to finish track 8, I wanted to share some stories with you all from outside the Maharlika world! This one is a bit more of a small-scale personal journey compared to Maharlika, but across an impossibly vast period of time. I hope you enjoy it.
Per tradition, I like to link my stories to music, so for this one, take a listen to Dramamine by one of my favorite bands, Modest Mouse.
[TW/CW: suicidal ideation and intent, toxic relationships]
I
As Luca prepares to take his last breath, his mind drifts—against the force of his will, he lies to himself—to the first time he met her.
It’s funny how certain details stick to memory better than others. The palette of the scene in his memory’s eye is fuzzy, and he can’t tell you whether she wore a T-shirt or a sundress when she introduced herself, much less what color. But the feeling in his gut, he remembers as clear and real now as it was on that day: he wants to throw up.
Maybe it’s the waves beneath him tonight, still visible even in the cloak of midnight, that triggered the sensation of nausea. Maybe it’s the height that he made extra sure would summon the requisite G-force to kill him upon landing. But he never feared heights, nor thought much about the sea. No, this is a specific kind of drowsiness, the contours of which fit unmistakably with his memory of that day nine years ago, when he sat aboard a bus next to a ponytailed stranger, ready to hurl his breakfast out the window and over the Cordilleran mountainside.
“Motion sickness?” the then-stranger asked, though his present mind can no longer see what she looked like through fresh eyes.
“Is it obvious?” he replied, a weak smile on his face that would fail to convince anyone that he was feeling anything other than miserable.
She took off her headphones, swept some loose hair to the side of her face, and reached for her backpack under the seat in front of her. Her hand rummaged inside, then emerged holding a strip of pills that looked worn and well-traveled. She held it towards him, above the empty seat that separated them. “Here, take this. It’s Dramamine.”
His eyes widened as he grasped for it, ripped open the foil, and placed the pill on his dry tongue. “Water,” she interrupted, holding out a plastic bottle. He muttered his thanks and drank the pill down, tasting a hint of her banana lip balm on the sip.
“Boats and planes kill me,” she said as he returned the Dramamine strip. “I can’t count how many times I’ve thrown up in an airplane bathroom. I’ve never had a problem on the road, though. I don’t know how the science of it works.”
“It’s the opposite for me,” Luca said. With one eye still closed, he peered at the scenery outside the window, forest and concrete flowing out into the sun-painted horizon—a beautiful sight, if his insides would let him appreciate it.
“I think you got the better deal,” he said. “Road trips give more interesting views than endless clouds and endless sea.”
“No way,” she said. “Have you ever been on the Pasig ferry? The moment when it makes the final turn into Escolta station—even drunk on nausea and the stink of the river, I get goosebumps.”
Maybe it was his mood, but he couldn’t grasp what she meant—what kind of glory she could see in the weary visages of Old Manila set against polluted waters. “I think we have different tastes,” he remembers saying, long before that phrase would come to take on a different meaning for them.
“I’m Luna, by the way,” she said, extending her hand.
“Hey, Luna. I’m Luca.”
To Luca in the present, viewing through the lens of memory, it feels strange to hear himself call her Luna. This was before she became Moonbug, and eventually just Bug when no one else was around.
“Luca,” she repeated, a faint smile creeping up the corner of her lip, that smile that over the years would enchant and enrage him in turn. “Hey, maybe we’re not so different after all.”
“The Dramamine won’t kick in for another thirty minutes,” she said. “You want me to keep you distracted?”
They continued talking in hushed tones—about what, he can no longer remember. But thirty minutes became four hours, and by the time the bus made its final stop at their destination, they had both inched from the opposite sides of their three-seat row towards the center, where she napped with her head on her neck pillow on his shoulder.
That night, they met again on the beach of the resort where he stayed, and under the glow of stars they laid and rambled about the things they wanted to bring into this world: her through her music, him in the halls of industry. She had a light that pierced holes through the fog around him—a fog that had built up from the past year’s burnout mixed with that day’s alcohol and nausea and pills.
In the years that followed, at dinner parties, they would talk about the day they met as though it was something out of a romcom. They would laugh, as if on cue, between each story beat. But on good days, they felt it without irony: that they were enchanted somehow, that it was too good to be true.
And of course it was. Long before they betrayed each other, the magic had given way to arguments and angry silence and the boredom of people who had come to know each other all too well, and somehow didn’t know each other at all. By the time he found her in bed with another man, the love between them was long dead. Luca remembers wanting to feel heartbroken about her infidelity—but the anger he felt was something else. It was the desperate fear of a man who had suddenly lost the ability to lie to himself about being unhappy.
Luca catches his thoughts wandering. This was not what brought him here on this night. He would swear it on his life, if his life still meant something to him. Standing at the edge of a quiet bridge and ready to jump, Luca reminds himself that Luna was in the distant past, and is neither to blame for bringing him here nor a reason to stay alive. He reminds himself that years have passed and he has moved on.
He is here because tomorrow, what is left of his world will fall apart, and he doesn’t have the strength to face it. The bank accounts are empty now, and his business partners have gone silent, leaving him to deal with the fallout: staff finding out they no longer have jobs, investors rushing to chase their money, his face on the news as the SEC opens its investigation of fraudulent practices under his watch. A more shameless person could recover from it with a bit of time; then again, a better man wouldn’t be in this situation at all. Luca would be ashamed to take a coward’s way out if the alternative wasn’t so unbearable.
And yet—with all the noise of the past few weeks, his mind keeps returning to Luna and that day nine years ago. And beneath the layers of desperation and fear that brought him here, Luca hears an inner voice that tells him to do it—to jump—not so he can escape, but so he can show her, after all these years, the consequences of her betrayal.
A final fuck you.
He’s disgusted at himself for even thinking it. “That’s enough,” he says to himself out loud, as if it makes a difference. “That’s enough.”
Luca jumps. He closes his eyes and readies himself for his last few seconds on Earth, the last bit of discomfort as gravity pulls him down to meet the stiff water.
Instead, he feels a tug at his collar, an arm grabbing him around his chest, the light of the city flashing in when his eyes open in surprise—right before everything goes back to black.
Luca wakes up with a numbness in his head. He looks around: To his right and below him, a black leather couch over which his body is sprawled. To his left, a young, brown haired, freckled white woman dressed in a dark blue button-down shirt sits, hands held together on a wooden desk, eyes locked on to his as he regains consciousness.
“You’re awake,” says the woman. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Luca,” he says almost automatically. His mind, still floating between conscious and empty, hasn’t awakened enough to actively question where he is. “Luca Isidro.”
“Good morning, Mr. Isidro,” says the woman. “You can call me Anna. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Luca pushes himself upright. He notices that his jacket is gone and his pockets emptied. “Um… can I ask some questions?”
“Of course,” says Anna. “I’m sure you’re wondering why you’re here.”
There’s a knock on the door. Anna stands up, walks over, and opens it. An older man, Filipino, enters wearing a green polo shirt, holding a glass of water. “For you,” says Anna.
Luca accepts the glass. He looks at the man, who walks over to another chair placed next to Anna’s desk, and Luca remembers seeing a flash of his face from earlier that night as he lost consciousness on the bridge. The man’s arm grabbing him right at the moment he jumped.
“Evening, Mr. Isidro,” the man says with a smile. “You know, we almost lost you there on the bridge!”
The man’s aloofness pierces through Luca like a break in a dam, and questions flood into his mind. He can barely put words to them, save for a few that are screaming out: Where is he? Who are these people? What do they want? Why did they stop him from jumping? Is this real? Is he alive?
Luca stammers, then decides to take it a step at a time. He looks at Anna and asks: “You were going to tell me why I’m here?”
Anna nods. “That’s right. Pardon my associate—Elmer is just passionate about his work and doesn’t like to lose people to their own demons. You’re here, Mr. Isidro, because you’ve been chosen—chosen to play a part in what may be the most important project in humanity’s history.”
More questions flood through Luca’s head, but he remains silent. As his eyes grow less foggy, he realizes just how young Anna looks, like you could believe she was an awkward college intern if she didn’t speak with such uncanny self-assurance.
“Before we can go into specifics, however,” says Anna, “I’d like to ask you a few things. Is that alright?”
Luca struggles to make sense of the situation. What could these people want from him? Is it about the money, the business? Anyone paying enough attention that they are following him this closely would know there’s nothing there. An absurd train of thought runs through him: Is this organ trafficking? No, they wouldn’t waste time asking questions; anything they need to know about his body, they can figure out without keeping him conscious and unbound. A cult? The way Anna spoke felt religious, almost—even cult-like.
Anna interrupts. “Mr. Isidro, why did you attempt to take your life last night?”
Luca thinks. If he were to tell them the real answer, how could they use it against him? If they were a rival corporation, perhaps, sniffing out their weakness? It’s a stretch for a company to go this far. Government investigators? Too unconventional, inadmissible in court—right?
He keeps it open-ended: “I… couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“Can you?”
Anna and Elmer glance at each other.
“I’m sorry, I just… I don’t know who I’m talking to,” says Luca. “Whatever it is you’re after… if it was enough for me to want to end things, why would I share it with some strangers?”
Anna nods.
“I understand,” she says, “and I apologize for being reticent. What I should have shared is this: Mr. Isidro, if you want to take your life, we can release you right now and leave you to it. If you’ve changed your mind and want to live, you can walk out of here—no questions asked—and continue living as though last night never happened. It’s said that for most people, just the attempt to take one’s life is enough to remind them that they want to continue living. If that’s the case for you, then we’re happy to live with the knowledge that Elmer’s intervention saved one life last night.”
“... But?”
“... But. What we want to offer you, Mr. Isidro, if you’ll take it, is a second chance. A real second chance. A blank slate, except better: a new start but with enough resources to live any life you want to live.”
Luca tries to anticipate where she’s going, but he hits dead end after dead end. Whatever it is these people are doing, it’s beyond what he can piece together by himself. He relents. “What’s the catch?”
“A chance that you might die instead,” says Anna. “But my guess is that won’t be a problem for you—will it?”
Luca takes a second to think. But he knows the answer.
“Mr. Isidro, can you elaborate on what made you choose to take your life?”
Luca takes a deep breath. A part of him feels something that resembles gratitude for the opportunity to say this to someone before he goes. He was never the type to open up about his struggles, never had the courage for it—but the absurdity of the situation gives him some sense of comfort, real or otherwise, that he can be honest here.
“I failed everyone,” he says. “I lost everything. Or I will, anyway. The world doesn’t know yet. No one knows. I made choices and took shortcuts to keep my business alive… and tomorrow—I mean, today—it all unravels.”
“Many people fail,” Anna says in a tone that sounds matter-of-fact, but betrays a genuine need to understand. “Why is it—for you—worth ending your life?”
“Because I’m a coward. Because I can’t bear the thought of facing everyone and telling each of them how I failed them. Because I know I don’t have what it takes to start over again with that baggage tied to me—to build back up when I know they all believe I’m a fraud.”
Elmer interjects. “Too much of a coward to face consequences, too much of a conscience to live with your sins.”
Anna gives Elmer a sharp look. “What Elmer means to say is… this sounds like just the kind of unique situation we can help with. But I have a few more questions.”
“Ask away,” says Luca. “I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“Is that everything? Is there any other reason you wanted to… exit?”
Luna’s face flashes through Luca’s mind. They’re on the beach, that day nine years ago. She’s glowing. He touches his forehead. “No.”
“And have you changed your mind about taking your own life?”
“I haven’t,” Luca says without hesitation.
Anna nods, then stands. She’s taller than Luca realized at first, and her height gives her a sense of elegance and power that contrasts with her mousy hair and youthfulness. If this is a cult, she’s not just another disciple—she’s a magnet of her own.
“Mr. Isidro,” Anna says, “we are members of an organization that seeks to prolong human life. We can’t divulge specifics, but we are working on a form of life extension that we hope to extend to humanity writ large. Naturally, and regrettably, this is something that is only available at the moment to people of means. And those patrons have allocated a generous sum for us to not only perfect the technology, but to ensure that the technology is perfected through the willful participation of human subjects.”
“What she’s saying,” says Elmer, “is that we’re looking for test subjects for cryogenic life extension. Do you know what cryogenics is?”
“Like Futurama,” says Luca, remembering it as one of Luna’s favorites. “I mean… freezing dead people?”
“Quite like that,” says Anna. “But dead is a word whose meaning has evolved over time as the capabilities of human medicine have evolved. Did you know, Mr. Isidro, that not too long ago, if you stopped breathing you would be considered dead? Today’s medicine has evolved enough to know that you can perform several exercises, such as CPR, to keep someone alive after they’ve stopped breathing. And today, death is defined as some variation of the heart not beating long enough that brain death occurs.”
Anna continues: “But one day, you can imagine that just as you are able to save someone with CPR, you may be able to survive a state of what we now consider irreversible brain death. By freezing the human body, we maximize the odds that someone who is considered dead today may be brought back to life—for lack of a better phrase—by the technologies of tomorrow.”
Luca takes a minute to process. “And… you need test subjects.”
Anna nods again. “Imagine that ten years from now, or twenty, or a hundred, or ten thousand, medicine has evolved to a point where bringing people back from brain death is possible. It may take many experiments to make the possible probable, and even more to move from probable to likely and safe. The patrons who are able to afford life extension today aren’t the kind to leave their life to a roll of the dice.”
Luca is beginning to understand.
“What she means,” says Elmer, “is that our rich clients don’t want to be guinea pigs. They want the sure thing. And they’re willing to pay for the guinea pigs to make sure that they have a second chance at life.”
Luca wants to laugh. All of this pageantry for what—a blind bet that one day in the future, people can be defrosted and revived? He wants to cut through the bullshit: “How much does it pay?”
Elmer chuckles. “There we go. Proper businessman. One hundred thousand U.S. dollars a year, compounding interest,” he says. “Worst case, you die. Best case, you wake up rich in a crazy future.”
Luca considers his options. Tomorrow—no, today—he will wake up to a world in which he must live as a failure, a fraud, for what will feel like eternity. Or he takes a gamble: a good chance he dies as planned, and an off chance that he wakes up in a few decades, maybe more, with enough money in the bank to start anew with his mistakes and sins forgotten by time. It’s one of the easiest decisions he’s ever had to make.
In his mind’s eye, he sees another flash of Luna, her face nestled in his shoulder in their bed. Their engagement ring on her finger—just months before everything fell apart. He shakes his head as if running an eraser across a chalkboard. He prepares for a long trip.
“What do I need to sign?” Luca asks.
Luca sits in the dull fluorescent of the operating room, wearing nothing but a loosely fitting hospital gown. If he had the choice, this wouldn’t be the outfit he exits the era in, but the deal is done and the contract is signed.
The contract was as standard as you could get for something as fantastical as a moonshot to prolong humanity. A non-disclosure, of course, in case he changes his mind before getting frozen. A hundred thousand US a year in a money market account, and depending on how long it takes society to crack resurrection that could mean a lot more or a lot less than it sounds like: more if the economy proceeds uneventfully or splendidly, less if the centuries ahead hold economic crises that bring inflation beyond the interest rate. There was a clause that allows a supermajority of the Board of Directors to move his balance to another bank or another currency if deemed necessary, so long as it keeps his estate whole. Luca deduced that this was in the event that the bank becomes insolvent or the US dollar becomes unreliable.
Another clause stated that, in the event that his revival fails and there are no descendants to inherit his wealth, the money is surrendered back to the company for the purpose of further research. Fair enough—but he can’t help but imagine some financial bean counter in a distant office calculating the likely failure rate and how much they might save in the process of testing. A less than ethical company might use that clause to terminate all unused specimen when future corpos decide that the treatment has been proven safe enough—and save a fortune in the process.
Either way, Luca isn’t in the mood to negotiate paperwork. His mind wanders and plays through the economics moreso as a way to keep himself busy, entertained, and perhaps to distract himself from any impulse to run away. A kind of chew toy exercise. He feels the urge to grab his phone as he sits alone and hears the minutes tick on the clock on the wall, to check just one more thing: How did that one show end, the one he never finished? What’s the name of that song again, the one that goes oh oh oh oh ohhh? What does Reddit think of his favorite instant noodle flavor? But there was no way they were going to let him keep his phone and browse the internet here of all places, in this secretive, shadowy, self-serious Illuminati project hall.
The door to the operating room opens, and in come Anna and Elmer, their blue and green clothes breaking the white-on-white monotone of the hospital palette.
“I signed it,” Luca says and gestures at the folder on his bedside table.
Elmer picks it up, scans through the pages, then turns to Anna and gives her a nod.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. Isidro,” Anna says. She smiles for the first time since their introduction. It’s a gentle, almost sweet smile, one that gives Luca a tinge of comfort despite himself. “Do you have any final questions for us?” she asks him.
“Do you really believe in this?” Luca asks. “Do you really think there’s a good chance… you know, that we’ll be able to bring people back from the dead?”
Anna doesn’t even need a minute to think. There’s a different smile on her now, the kind that reminds him that he might be caught in the middle of some weird cult project with this woman as its zealot.
“Humanity has taken leaps much more daunting,” she says. “The universe is four billion years old and in the last blink of an eye we’ve invented language, society, electricity, the internet. I think it’s more unlikely that this is the one thing we can’t solve.”
Luca shifts his gaze to Elmer, who shrugs seemingly in agreement.
“Alright,” Luca says. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Anna doesn’t look quite satisfied with his response. She stands still, eyes still locked on his, as though waiting for his next question.
“You can go now, right?” Luca says.
“Do you have any other questions?” Anna asks.
Luca thinks, but he doesn’t want to go too deep into any rabbit holes. Instead, he asks: “Why are you still here, entertaining me? I signed the docs. I’m not one of your clients. I’m a test subject. You got what you need from me regardless of how I’m feeling.”
For a split second, Anna seems puzzled by the inquiry, but in the next moment she accepts it with a sideways nod to herself.
She takes a breath, then answers: “At the risk of sounding vain, Mr. Isidro, I’m young and I’m smart. I could be making a mark in another company, one I could talk about openly and without any secrecy to the people in my life. But I’m here. And it pays well, but so do many other things. So I’m in this work because I believe in it. And the work in question isn’t just about unlocking scientific achievement—it’s about making people’s lives better. Those people include you.”
Luca can’t help but respect her response. Elmer chimes in.
“You can probably tell I’m not as noble as… Miss Anna,” Elmer says. “I don’t spend as much time thinking about humanity’s glorious purpose or whatever the fuck. As long as I’m bringing home a good paycheck and I can sleep at night.”
He continues: “All I know is that, no bullshit, there’s a good chance I’m one of the last people you see before you die. Forever, not just for a bit. And if I’m the last face you see before you go, I’d rather not be a total asshole.”
“Fair enough,” says Luca.
“You fucking asshole.”
It’s Luna’s voice, ringing out from a distant memory as Luca waits for the anesthesia to funnel into his silicone face mask. He tries to will it into kicking in and taking him away before he gets pulled into the memory. No such luck.
It was three years into their relationship, and Luca had just arrived at her apartment after a night out celebrating and drinking with his business partners. They had just landed their first big client: so small now in retrospect but at the time it felt life-changing. When Luca pulled his phone out to call a Grab, he saw six missed calls from her, tried to call back, but got no response. He arrived at her place to find her lying on the couch, facing the direction of the wall, refusing to acknowledge him.
“What is it now?” he asked in a tone that he immediately regretted.
“What is it now?” she echoed back in a half-scream as she turned upright on the couch, her fingers digging into her face as though to attempt to constrain her emotions. A guttural noise, almost a growl, and then in soft exhaustion: “I didn’t know this was such a fucking chore for you.”
“No, I—sorry,” Luca mumbled. “I didn’t see your call. I came here as soon as I saw it. Did something happen?”
“Did something have to happen?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Luca said, and the alcohol removed any inhibitions that would have kept him from saying what came next. “You don’t have to take everything as an attack, you know. You’d probably have more friends if you didn’t make people walk on eggshells around you—”
“Fuck you,” she said. “I called you because I was feeling alone and I missed you and now you’re here and I’m even lonelier and I miss you more when you’re around. I shouldn’t have called.”
Luca didn’t know how to respond. “Listen, I’m trying, but… you know it’s been hard. And now things are finally turning around, so we were celebrating. I’m trying to make everything work for both of us, and now we’re finally getting there—”
“You’re getting there,” she said. “What about me? You act like I’m forcing you to be our breadwinner, but I never asked for that—”
Luca interrupted: “You didn’t ask for it, sure. But shit, you really hated living the way we lived before. You even said it yourself: you like nice things. So what, I’m a dick for putting the extra work in to make sure we make money while you’re here—”
“While I’m here doing what? Wasting my time?”
“I… no,” Luca said.
“Don’t lie to me, you fucking asshole. You never respected me. Some little girl who wants to make music and thinks she can be a star. Say it. You just like the idea of Luca the brilliant fucking businessman who pays for his muse’s cute little fantasy of being the next big thing. You’re happy as long as I don’t think too hard about how I want more than this.”
“I’m not stopping you!” Luca snapped. “Did I try to stop you? I told you that you could move to LA and do your thing and we could make it work—”
“And I told you, it wouldn’t work. I don’t want to be in a long distance relationship. So what, was I going to make you give up your business so that I could roll the dice on a chance at being something?”
“I never said it like that,” Luca said.
“But that’s what you thought, right? Obviously. And I couldn’t do that to you because I love you. So here I am, some awkward extra appendage, waiting at home while you do your big shit out there. Trying not to let my emotions spill or else I distract my man with my childish tantrums. Why can’t she just be happy playing her little games, right?—”
“You know that’s not what I think about you. I fell in love with you because I believe in you. And I’ve been there—I mean, not exactly, but I know what it’s like when you’re just starting and things are hard and you just have to keep bashing your head against the wall…”
“You don’t have to give me the fucking startup guru spiel, Luca. I get it. I know that this is part of the process. But it doesn’t help when the only person I’m close to is you and I see you in your element but you don’t even respect what I do.”
“Where are you getting that idea from? That I don’t respect you?” he asked.
“You don’t even like music,” she said. “I know you. There are things that you care about and the world revolves around those things and anything outside of that, for you, is pointless and stupid. You don’t have to say it.”
Luca was still and silent for a moment. “Do you want me to change?”
“It’s not about changing or not changing. It’s just… I just really don’t know if this can work. Us.”
Luca sat on the floor, feeling much more sober than when the conversation started. Luna leaned forward from the couch, her arm moving past him as she grabbed a pack of cigarettes she had lying on the living room table. She lit it, took a puff, and continued.
“I don’t want to break up,” she said. “I really don’t. But I don’t know if we can keep doing this thing.”
But they kept doing this thing—for another four years until they finally decided they couldn’t do it anymore, which was long after they knew they couldn’t do it anymore. Back in the operating room, as the anesthesia finally begins to kick in, Luca’s mind lingers on the frame of Luna’s face that night, her cheeks wet with tears and eyes swollen and face lit by the city lights on one side, the flame of her cigarette on the other. How beautiful she looked, how much he loved her at that moment and how scared he was to lose her.
And how suddenly scared he is now to lose this memory, despite the pain it carries. His heart pounds as he realizes that this might be it, and his hands tense as though trying to clutch onto this feeling of bitterness that might be the last thing he experiences of being alive and human. And then—
II
Luca wakes up.
Not all at once—it’s like his brain is reactivating one section at a time, a feeling not dissimilar to that time he had his wisdom teeth removed. He recognizes slivers of moments: the faces of doctors hovering above him, then an orderly holding him upright in the shower. And before he knows it he is back in his old clothes, seated on one side of a desk in what reminds him of a crowded government office, except sheen-polished and glittering with holographic screens.
“Mr. Isidro?” asks the man sitting across from him. “You might still experience some lapses here and there, but trust that it’s just a natural side-effect. You should be fully back to normal in no time.”
Luca looks down at the desk in front of him and sees some text and numbers hovering in front of his fingers, like a billing invoice but without the paper, just the ink, floating above the desk’s surface.
“Our doctors found a few congenital diseases and genetic defects that we were able to repair during your awakening procedure. We also administered the latest set of required vaccinations. This has been deducted from your balance, but I trust that won’t be a problem.”
“Uh-huh.” Luca presses the green button underneath the invoice before he can fully process the details.
The man stands up and offers a handshake with a smile. Luca accepts. “Welcome to Elrae,” the man says, then points somewhere behind Luca’s shoulder. “Just follow the sign to Immigration, and right after that, Newcomer Services.”
Luca follows the signs and finds himself in a line of people who look patched together from different eras: some wearing fashion from Luca’s own time, others more visibly advanced or eccentric, from a time he didn’t live to see. Luca checks his pockets reflexively. He finds his phone in his left pants pocket, his wallet on his right, both of which he knows will likely be useless where he is now. He checks his inner jacket pocket next and finds three things: a strip of Dramamine pills he had left behind from his last road trip, a pack of cigarettes, and something new, a metallic card with an engraving of what appears to be a globe on it. He realizes that this must be his new passport.
Now at the front of the line, Luca is getting his passport verified by the immigration officer when he sees something. It’s an older man, Filipino, standing a medium distance ahead, and it’s not the man’s mechanized arm and legs that catch Luca’s attention. His mind buffers for a moment before he recognizes the man as none other than Elmer.
Luca walks past immigration, trailing Elmer but hesitant to approach. Elmer is scanning the room for someone. When he finds the person, Elmer waves, and Luca follows to see who it is. Luca’s eyes land on a tall, brown haired white woman who gives Elmer a warm hug, says a few words of welcome, then catches Luca’s gaze over Elmer’s shoulder.
She stops, looks at him, and smiles in recognition.
“I know you,” Anna says.
Elmer is puzzled at first. Anna whispers something to him, and he mouths a not too convincing “Ah” as he tries to recall Luca.
“Look where we’ve found each other after all this time,” Anna says, taking a step towards Luca. She doesn’t look too different from when they last met, but Luca can tell that she’s aged a bit—if he were to guess, in the range of ten years or so. Her hair is the same, and her freckles, but there’s a change in her energy, a certain lightness on one hand that’s paired paradoxically with the weight of however much time it took to break through her once perfect-poised presence.
“Elmer, this is Luca. Don’t you remember? One of our earliest prospects.”
Elmer clearly doesn’t recall, but places his hand on Luca’s shoulder with familiarity regardless. “It’s been a long time, I guess,” Elmer says to Luca, then to Anna: “You get to see a lot of our people here?”
“Not very often,” Anna says with a glint in her eyes. “It’s just our luck. Luca, if you’re not busy, will you come with us? Newcomer Services is overpriced, anyhow. You can both stay with me and my wife. Take your time before you start looking for a new place. I never liked the idea of people milking Newcomers for everything they have before they even know where they are.”
Elmer lets out a chuckle. “Your wife,” he says. “I noticed the ring. How long has it been?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Anna says. “For the world—practically an eternity. For the two of you, a couple of hours. For me… next month marks three years in.”
“No fucking way,” Elmer says with a smile. “A hundred years I’ve known Anna and she was never the kind to commit. That must be one hell of a woman to turn you in three years.”
“Time changed me,” Anna says.
“And yes,” she continues. “Yes she is.”
The sky looks funny, a uniform Pantone slab of purple so perfect it looks motionless outside the window. Luca stares at it, his consciousness still fading lightly as Anna and Elmer catch up in front of him. They’re in some kind of driverless car that looks more like a ferris wheel carriage, two benches facing each other: Luca on one, Anna and Elmer on the other, all three of them flying thousands of feet above the city of Adz, Elrae underneath.
“You defrosted yet, bud?” Elmer asks. Luca realizes it’s directed at him.
“Me?” he asks. “Um. Yeah, I’m fine. I think.”
“Luca went to sleep a hundred years before us,” Anna says to Elmer. “They’ve mostly fine tuned the awakening process to repair all the neural connections good as new, but still—a century makes for night-and-day preservation techniques. So Luca, if it takes you a while to feel like yourself, don’t think too much of it. It will get better.”
Luca seems to lag for an infuriating second, taking an extra bit of time to process what he’s experiencing. He finally picks up on what they’re saying. “A hundred years?” he asks.
“I went under cryogenic freezing in the year 2137,” Anna says. “Elmer here a few years before that. Now I know what you’re thinking, so I’ll go ahead and answer it for you. It was sometime in the 2030s when humans solved how to halt aging. So we’re older than we look. I suppose we’re all older than we look, though, aren’t we?”
“Don’t make the kid feel like he missed the boat,” Elmer jokes.
Anna shrugs and responds dryly. “I wouldn’t quite put it that way. When we met him, Luca didn’t have the strength to face his life. I doubt the prospect of living longer at that point would have made a difference.”
She looks at Luca, reaches over, and squeezes his hand. “And that’s OK. We’re here now.”
They arrive at Anna’s place, a house in the middle of a vast green property backlit by a pastel-orange sky. At the front of the house they are greeted by Mimi, Anna’s wife, who invites them in for dinner: a serving of chicken adobo on rice.
“It’s all grown here,” Anna says with a bit of pride. “We planted the rice and started growing the chicken cells when we found out Elmer’s date was coming up. But of course—”
Anna pulls out a gift slightly smaller than a shoebox and gives it to Elmer. She continues: “—of course we didn’t forget the main attraction.”
Elmer opens the present and lets out a joyful roar. “Jameson! My fucking poison. Just in time to christen my new liver!”
“I was wondering,” Luca says as Elmer pours glasses of whiskey for the table. “Elmer, you went to sleep a hundred years after me. I’m guessing they defrost the later ones first since they’re better preserved. But they took us both off the ice today. Does that have something to do with…?”
Elmer nods and lifts his right arm, which has been replaced by a mechanized prosthetic. “You’re smart, kid. I didn’t leave the world in great shape. When you solve aging, then the things that take you out aren’t as kind to your uh… preservation. For me, it was a car crash and a bad liver I couldn’t afford to replace. After a hundred years, it felt like the right time to cash in my pension plan.”
Anna takes a sip from her glass. “As for me, it was a hereditary disease that destroyed my nervous system. A rare one, which meant that it was one of the few things they didn’t have a ready cure for. I decided I had lived a full enough life and didn’t have much interest in torturing myself and becoming a cripple. So I retired. And I was lucky that by the time the reawakening procedure was ready, my condition came with an easy fix. The oldest specimen like you, Luca, and the more damaged ones like Elmer took a bit longer to do safely.”
“Did you guys get a good deal?” Luca asks. “With a century-long tenure, I can imagine—”
“Same deal as you,” Elmer says. “The guinea pig package. Could say you did even better. A hundred year head start on your savings account and interest ain’t nothing.”
“Well shit,” Luca says. “Cheers to that.”
He turns to Anna with a look of respect that he had held back since they first met. “It wasn’t about the benefits for you, huh?” he says. “I didn’t know what to make of you at first. But it really seems like you loved your job.”
Anna turns to Mimi, who raises her eyebrows and smirks. “Loved,” Anna says, turning back to Luca. “After enough time, you see the cracks in everything, I suppose. But there was a part of it that I never got tired of, and that was… you, you could say. The subjects. Asking the right questions to understand whether these were people we could truly help.”
Mimi giggles and runs her hand through Anna’s hair. “You know,” she says to Luca, “she remembers everyone, and I mean everyone. I used to walk in on her trying to stalk her old subjects on the console. She never had much luck finding anyone. You’re the first one we’ve met in person.”
Anna gives Mimi a playful slap on the knee. “Let’s not tell him that now, that’s embarrassing!”
Anna laughs, takes another sip of her whiskey, then gives Luca that piercing look he remembers as what could have been one of the last things he saw before dying. “You though, Luca Isidro… I couldn’t quite figure you out. Maybe because you were one of the first. But I couldn’t be sure whether you meant it, whether you had truly given up on the life you had.”
Luca isn’t sure how to respond. “What do you do in those situations?” he asks, eventually.
“Remind myself that I’m not a god,” Anna replies, “as much as I may have wanted to be when I was young. And at the end of the day, when it seems they’ve made up their mind, all I can do is let them make their own choice and live with it.”
Before the night ends, Mimi invites them to the field behind their house, where they set up a blanket underneath the sky. Though hours have passed, the sky looks unchanged from when they arrived—until Anna brings out a small rectangular device and swipes her finger along it as though to turn a dial. The sky’s color follows the motion of her finger in a quick gradient from orange to dark blue, while the moon springs up from behind the horizon.
“It’s time we talked about where we are,” Anna says.
Anna gives Luca and Elmer a quick history of Elrae. As Luca already guessed, their new home was not a place on Earth. Neither was it any kind of natural planet, but a manmade habitat built in the orbit of a Dyson Sphere long after humanity had left Earth. The sphere blocks out much of the visible from its central star, so the sky above them is an artificial projection to give inhabitants a sense of familiarity.
“It feels empty here,” Luca says. “Not in a bad way. It’s peaceful. Is it like this everywhere?”
“We faced a few population crunches,” Anna says.
“You can blame the dogs,” says Mimi. “Along the way, we just realized we liked our furry friends better than those spoiled hairless balls of flesh anyway. And you don’t have to deal with incubating them for nine months.”
“Reasonable,” Luca says.
“Well… you’re not wrong, love,” Anna interjects, “but of course there was more to it than that. Once virtual reality became good enough, many decided it was better to migrate to the cloud than run the risk of getting our hardware fried in the harsh world of atoms. And there were wars, genocides… humanity does what humanity does. But we woke up in a lucky era where, at least for now, we live in peace. And we can reap the rewards of the generations before us.”
“What’s the catch?” Elmer asks.
Anna chuckles. “I’ve been asking myself the same question. As far as I can tell, I don’t think there is one, at least for someone like me. I’m tired, and we’re well taken care of here. A.I. does most of the real work. Everyone gets a healthy basic income. The only thing I can think of is… I suppose it can get boring. You can plug into your console and experience anything you can imagine and more. If you’re a creative type, you have the best canvas and paint you could ask for. But after a while, maybe you’ll feel like you’ve seen everything.”
“I can be happy with boring,” says Elmer. “It’s been a long life already.”
Anna glances over to Luca. “You’re still young,” she says. “I’m sure you’ll find something to get excited about here. What did you do back in the day, Luca?”
“I had a personal finance app,” Luca says. “And before that, I owned a process optimization consultancy. For me, it was always about how to make people’s lives easier, more efficient. That’s the thing that really makes me feel alive, I guess—solving real problems for people, in a new way.”
“Hm.” Anna hunches over and seems to ponder over what Luca just said. There’s a shade of worry that flashes on her face, then hides itself. “Then perhaps there is a catch after all.”
His brain might still be rebooting, or it might be the immensity of the projected skyview or the alcohol in his system that distracts Luca at this moment, but he doesn’t quite pick up what Anna is trying to tell him. Instead, he chuckles to himself, takes another drink, gazes forward, and tries to take in this dazzling new era and its possibilities.
On Luca’s first full day in Elrae, Anna takes him and Elmer to get their neural interfaces installed and their consoles set up. Luca spends the rest of day poking around online, trying to familiarize himself with the new society he lives in, and getting utterly lost and overwhelmed.
He hesitates at first, but gives in to the urge to search up his past life and the people that he knew, only to find—practically nothing on the open internet. He learns through forums that the internet has gone through multiple historical epochs, the data on which has expanded and consolidated through the millennia. A world war in the 2050s involved the destruction of many of Amazon and Google’s servers, wiping out certain corners of the cloud-hosted internet. Several thousand years later, as humanity embarked en masse to find new homes in outer space, human vessels contained data centers that tried to carry onboard as much information on humanity’s past—but realistically could only bring along so much. Future expeditions led by nonprofit groups have since secured copies of large volumes of once-lost Earth data. But their libraries are scattered across the skies, not all of them accessible to Elrae, save for data that was found to be essential or commercially relevant enough that a large corporation would pay to store and distribute it in their intergalactic networks.
Traces of Luca’s life and legacy might be out there in some distant data center. Or if he’s lucky and wants to dig enough, he might be able to find a broken link to or a footnote that references an article that he was once mentioned in. But the details of his existence have likely been lost to time, stranded in carcasses of some old Amazon servers now swallowed up by the ocean.
Among many other things, Luca feels relief. It’s a coward’s relief at best, but perhaps the best he can realistically hope for. He could have found articles about his disappearance and the fallout of his business, seen the mess he left behind for his employees and his grieving family. Found some closure, eventually, in seeing many of them recover with time, find their new footing and realize that it was all just a speed bump. But not everyone would have been so lucky, and Luca would have emerged from the exercise with at least a few grim ghosts haunting him. At least this way, he can imagine a happy ending for everyone involved, or at the very least try to forget it all. It hurts his pride to start from zero, but he never feared losing the fire in him to do something. It was the anticipation of pain and shame that ate away at him—and now he is free to take on his ambitions for his own life without that baggage.
A part of him is disgusted with himself: You say you want to help people, but here you are, happy to ignore your impact on their lives as long as you can sleep at night. But Luca tells himself that there was nothing he could do. He left at a point where things had become irreversible, and his only choice was whether to sink with wreckage or find himself a life raft. He resolves with himself to make it all worth it—this time, in this new era, he can, and must, achieve what he set out to do for the world. A lasting legacy and a positive mark.
In practice, though, starting over proves to be difficult. He tries to familiarize himself with the current economy but is inundated with names, jargon, and concepts that have evolved over the millennia to be unrecognizable to him. None of the companies from his era, those he idolized, survived to the current time; the present landscape of players are far-flung descendents of the corporate bloodlines which he now recognizes were still in their infancy when he was first alive. It feels a bit like trying to link a twenty-first century politician’s lineage to Genghis Khan. After a day, Luca decides to set down his console and let his mind rest.
Luca was never the outdoorsy type; there was always something more pressing, more existentially urgent that would pull him back inside, except in brief moments where he hit a limit and couldn’t ignore the need to step away. This—finding himself lost in a distant future—warranted being considered one of those exceptional situations. And this is what brings him to Adz Peak, the mountain at the heart of his new home city.
It’s a chilly day, so he wears his native-era jacket over his new wardrobe as he walks up to the final summit. The trail was, as is the nature of this world, beautiful but devoid of people. But as he reaches the top of the mountain, he sees the outline of a woman with her arms crossed, head tilted, facing him with a camera hovering in front of her.
“Newcomer?” the woman asks. “Newcomer or aficionado—must be one of those two. Which are you?”
Luca catches his breath, places his hand on a railing to steady himself. “The first one, I think?”
“Nice!” the woman says, almost jumping in excitement. “That’s Earth 2000s, right? What you’re wearing. You got frozen early, man. I never get to see anyone from your vintage.”
He walks up closer to her. The painted sun is to her left and behind, which leaves half of her face shaded and a left crescent glowing with a youthful grin on oak-tanned skin. He notices that the clothes she’s wearing resemble his own era. “What does that make you? Cosplaying my vintage? Isn’t that, like, cultural appropriation?” he jokes.
“I don’t know what that means, but sure,” she says. She takes a seat on a bench and invites him to sit across from him. “It’s my culture too, though, I’ll have you know. I’m second gen. My mom’s a Newcomer. Two centuries after you, so you wouldn’t know her. But maybe she knows you? If you could afford to freeze yourself back then, you might be a big shot.”
“Nope,” Luca says as he sits down. “Test subject.” The woman curls her mouth as though to apologize, but Luca interrupts her by pulling out the pack of cigarettes from his jacket and offering one to her. “You want some twenty-first century smokes?”
“Hell yeah I do,” she says and accepts it. She pauses. “I mean—you sure you want to waste that on me, though?”
Luca lights it for her. “Take it. I’m… happy to leave the past behind.”
The flame lingers on the end of her cigarette for a few seconds, before her eyes flash with realization that she needs to inhale to light the tip. “I forgot that’s how it works—” she says, her voice sounding funny from the inhale before she starts coughing into her sleeve. Smoke spreads out in wild directions.
“That tastes nothing like I imagined,” she says after recovering. “That’s awful,” she says, then without skipping a beat: “Can I have the rest if you don’t want it?”
Luca snorts. “Yeah sure—”
“I’m joking, I’m joking!” She laughs while at the same time trying to put on a horrified face. “No, keep it, please. What are you, crazy? You can’t find that stuff just anywhere. You’re gonna crave it one day and you’ll regret ever giving it to some random mountain girl with a nostalgia problem.”
Luca watches her take another puff from the cigarette, open her mouth and move her tongue as if to taste it, then shake her head as she blows it out. “Is it nostalgia if you weren’t there?” he asks.
“Well… for me, it’s different. My mom brought a bunch of her old movies with her, even the TV and DVD player and everything. It took her a while to get it to work with the power supply here, but she figured it out eventually. So I grew up watching a lot of the stuff you guys made back in the day. I think that counts as nostalgia.”
“Hm.” Luca thinks for a second. “Do you know a lot about my time?”
“Just a bit. My mom wasn’t a high-brow film buff or anything, so it wasn’t like… zeitgeist, if that’s what you’re wondering. And not my kind of movies, but I do have some favorites from your era. Let’s see… when was your exact vintage?”
“When was I frozen? 2024.”
“OK, so… Timothee Chalamet. But that’s kind of cheating, he’s still around these days and making girls squeal. Tarantino was your era, for sure. Are you Filipino?”
Luca is surprised. “How’d you guess?”
“A lot of the older batch are. My mom was too. She wasn’t a test subject but… I think a lot of test subjects came from places like the Philippines, India, Brazil. We don’t even remember that many countries from Mother Earth these days but we get a lot of people from those. Big countries with low GDP per capita where they got a lot more mileage from their budget.”
“That’s interesting,” says Luca. “Anyway, why’d you ask?”
“If you were Filipino? Oh yeah. I was gonna say, some of my favorites… you know Dilaw, right? Everyone knows Dilaw.”
“Dilaw?”
“You know the song, at least. Bakit uhaw, sa ‘yong sayaw, bakit ikaw…”
It clicks. Luca didn’t recognize the name, but he’s definitely heard this one. “The one with um… oh oh oh oh ohhh…”
“That’s the one. You know, I got my middle name from one of their songs. Janice.”
“Janice. Here I was thinking no one remembered anything from my time…”
“Eek,” she says. “Don’t call me Janice, though. I’m Tara, by the way.”
“OK. Tara Janice,” he teases her.
“Just Tara, please.”
“Fine. Hey Tara, I’m Luca.”
Tara finishes her cigarette. By the time it burns out, she’s become a natural with it. “What did you do back in the day, Luca? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Business,” Luca says. “I was good at it, for a while, until I wasn’t. Really thought I was going to make the Apple or Stripe of the Philippines…”
“You… sold apples? Stripes, what?”
“No, Apple. The company.”
Not even a shade of recognition in her eyes. “I don’t know that one. But it’s not my field. Sounds big, though. Is that still what you’re trying to do? Business, I mean.”
“Yeah,” Luca says without hesitation. “I’m still figuring it out, but… there’s a lot I wanted to do back then. Now it’s time to finally do it right.”
“Hm.” Tara gives him a look that Luca can’t quite place—like either she’s recognized something familiar in him or finds him so different that he’s intriguing, or both. “You know, I used to think a lot about doing things right when I was younger. Sometime around fifty years old, I started being happy just doing things that worked for me.”
Her age takes him by surprise but he reminds himself that these things work differently now. He asks instead: “And what is it you do?”
“Movies,” she says, and gestures at the camera which he forgot had been hovering around them throughout their conversation. “Back in the day, I used to base my entire life around each year’s festival schedule and the award shows at the end. I even won a few Killingers. But now I’m just making shit that I can show in a small sensorium to whoever shows up.”
“Killingers,” Luca says. “I don’t know that one. Sounds big though.”
“Stupid,” Tara laughs.
Luca can’t help himself. “Killinger? I ‘ardly know ‘er…”
“Ha-ha. Is that a 2000s joke?”
“Older than that, if you can believe it.”
Luca and Tara walk down the mountain together and part ways. It was fun, she says. They should keep in touch. Luca agrees coolly but looks forward to the next time more than he would like to admit.
He heads home to the new house that he had chosen not too far from Anna’s. As he tries to go to sleep, a thought intrudes upon him: one he had tried to lock down when he felt it surface earlier on the mountaintop. There was no version of him that would have been content learning that he had been all but forgotten by history—but he consoled himself with the fact that nothing, really, persisted through the long thousands of years between his time and now. His conversation with Tara made it clear that this was not quite true, that some ghosts of his era still survive in people’s minds here and now, still burn vividly in the shared consciousness of humanity. And he hates that he hates knowing this.
This time, he doesn’t even try to resist diving into as much information he can find about his time in history. But what he finds are still largely footnotes, save for the names and brief biographies of major historical figures and cultural juggernauts of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It doesn’t take long for him to get tired and disheartened. Before logging off, he tries to search again for his own name, finds nothing, and with a bit of embarrassment despite no one around to see it, he sets an alert for anything that surfaces about his life.
He and Tara continue seeing each other, and on their third meetup she invites Luca to a sensorium near Adz Central. A sensorium, he learns, is a kind of 3D movie theater but, instead of surround sound, you’re surrounded by everything in its most immersive form. Every sound, every smell, every feeling and vibration and texture like you’re there—living, not watching the story.
“What makes it different from being in VR?” Luca asks.
“What makes being with me different from being with a virtual girlfriend?” Tara asks back. Before he can reply, she continues: “The answer is probably not much, honestly, for a lot of people—but those people have mostly gone and uploaded themselves on the cloud by now. For the rest of us, I think we’re here because we still find something valuable in being able to experience something with our own bodies.”
Tara booked a private theater. The two of them sit in the middle of a pitch-black room, with some invisible light source that somehow illuminates only them and nothing else, not even an inch of the ground they sit on. Then Luca hears a distant click, and the scenery emerges around them: the sights and sounds and scents of Metro Manila in his time. If it’s not 2024, it’s close enough. Something picks him and Tara up from the ground by their waist, so that they’re no longer sitting on the ground with their legs crossed but rather with their butts on an elevated seat and their feet remaining on the floor. In a second it becomes clear that they’re sitting inside a car, stuck in EDSA rush hour traffic.
“This one was made using the director’s memory data,” Tara whispers. “He used to be from your year. I thought you might like it.”
Luca is very literally speechless through the entire film. When the credits roll, Tara gives him a worried glance, touches his arm, and asks: “What did you think?”
He doesn’t reply, but instead wraps his arm around her waist and kisses her as the sensorium lowers their bodies back to the ground. In a minute, a sensorium staff member walks into the room, sees them kissing with their arms all over each other on the floor, and as politely as he can, tells them it’s time to leave.
Later that night, Luca lies in his bed with Tara asleep and naked next to him. His mind flashes back to the scenes of his previous home world. His mind wanders to his brother, his mother, his friends who not only did he never say goodbye to—but he left with the weight of an unexplained disappearance. He swears to himself that he will make it up to them by building a legacy for them here and now.
Before he can fall asleep, though, an alert comes in through his neural interface. He’s convinced he’s imagining it: somewhere in this strange universe, someone just mentioned his name.
He sits up and opens the notification, and in his mind’s eye he sees a message that he doesn’t parse right away:
Doing my residency at Buckminster Archive and found an interesting one for you all! It looks like our moon queen was engaged for a couple of years to marry someone named Luca Isidro. If you don’t know Earth cinema pre-2k there’s a classic film called Godfather where there’s a quote about a character named Luca who “sleeps with the fishes.” So I think Sleeps With Fishes might be a reference to him.
It’s a post on a forum called Moonbugs, and seeing the name jolts Luca awake. He puts it together: this is an online community for fans of Luna’s musical work. Curiosity takes over. He avoided searching her name all this time, and he didn’t have much interest in researching entertainers. But now he finds her biography across several platforms, her music on streaming services and film soundtracks and in the background of user posts on social networks. Articles covered her death and how her music influenced the industry, and her obituary says that she left behind two children, Kari and Cory, and a loving husband, Marcus.
Luca checks to make sure that his console’s audio is linked only to his neural interface and not his home speakers, then listens to some of Luna’s music. He recognizes some of the songs, but even the ones that are new to him feel similar to those he remembers her playing in their apartment. He doesn’t have the musical vocabulary to describe it, but at the very least they have the same soul and vision behind them, except fully realized with the production quality and budget that she once dreamed of having.
Luca laughs to himself. He feels like he won an argument that they always had, about how she would get there and needed to just push through and she would make it. But he also feels like he lost a competition that he always denied existed—between two people trying to leave their mark on the world.
Luca tries to go to sleep. But he can’t get that one song out of his head, Sleeps With Fishes, the one referenced on the post mentioning him. With the one line that goes:
We were motion-sick but happy / Sometimes I wish that I could travel with you…
III
“How are you, Luca? Really?”
Anna sits across from Luca at a cafe playing a lofi reverie playlist from the 7200s. Luca leans back on his chair, his head tilted back toward his left arm, which hangs off the side of the chair extended. He looks like he’s playing dead, shot in the chest and slumped over. After a second, he turns his head slightly toward Anna and shrugs.
“What do I have to complain about, right?” he says. “We’re living in the bright new future we could have only dreamed of when we were kids.”
“You sure look like you’re living the dream. What’s going on?”
“Listen, Anna,” Luca says. “I appreciate you checking in. But I think there’s a reason they don’t make a habit of introducing sponsors to their subjects. I’m not your responsibility, and I don’t want to be.”
“Maybe so, but I feel responsible for you and you’re responsible for how that makes me feel,” she says without blinking.
“That’s unfair,” Luca says. “Do you really feel that way?”
“Which part?” she asks. “The first part, yes. I do feel responsible for you. The second part—if it makes you feel obligated to tell me, then yes to that as well.”
“You’re terrible.”
“I may be. But… how do I say this tactfully? One thing I’ve learned is that the subjects of your type, if I may put it that way, often underestimate how their own well-being weighs on the people in their life.”
Luca grunts. That hit a sore spot. “I don’t think I care for you very much,” he says with a resentful smile.
“And I’m trying to tell you I care for you very much. So out with it.”
Luca picks up his glass and takes a drink. “It’s nothing. It’s just… I don’t know. It’s been a year for me in the here-and-now. And I’ve never been patient, but I’m coming to a point where I don’t think that’s the problem.”
“I’ve been trying to find my place here,” he continues. “I’ve started a few businesses, and none of them have been a trainwreck, but that’s only because I have fuck-you money and I can keep them all on life support if I have to. And making money isn’t the point, anyway.”
“So what’s the problem?” Anna asks. It’s not a rhetorical question.
“I’ve done this before,” Luca says. “I know what it feels like when things are working, and more importantly when things are worth doing until they work. I don’t feel that—with anything. It feels like everything has been solved for, every need served, every process optimized. And I hate that I resent it. I want to be happy about living in a perfect world. If I was a creative type and it was about self-expression, I might feel superhuman. But I’m not. Instead, I’m a problem solver in a world without problems.”
“That does sound like a problem,” Anna says. She’s hearing him but doesn’t seem surprised. Luca remembers what she told him a year ago and just now realizes what she meant: Then perhaps there is a catch after all.
“I suppose the only thing that hasn’t been solved for may be the pain of just existing,” Anna says.
Luca nods. “And that’s not me. That’s never been me. I’m the process, the plan, the machinery. The philosophy and beauty of it all—that’s someone else.”
Anna sits in silence for a while. Then: “I can’t give you the answers, Luca. And I know you never asked me to. But I’m not convinced it’s quite as black-and-white as you believe it is on this point.”
“You’re right,” says Luca. “Who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and we’ll get an intergalactic war or cosmic crisis to shake things up and open some spaces to innovate, right?”
“Anyway,” Luca says as he gets the bill, “I’m going to be late for Tara’s 83rd. I’ll see you, Anna.” He gets up from their table and gives her a brisk hug.
“Luca,” Anna says before he goes. “Let’s talk again soon, OK? I’m thinking about what you said. I want to help.”
“You don’t have to,” he replies.
Directed by Altara J. Heller.
Credits roll at the end of Tara’s private screening of her latest sensorium film. It’s a documentary on long-distance interstellar relationships across habitats with vastly different gravity profiles, and thus different rates at which each person experiences time. The crowd loves it. Tears are shed, and even the toughest critics in the audience call it her best work. Friends surprise her with a birthday synth platter, a kind of dessert consisting pleasurable tastes, sounds, and sensations that are non-native to Elrae. It’s a bit of a game: the more beloved the person, the more alien and far flung the sensations you bring them, so long as all stays pleasant and wholesome.
Tara is enjoying herself until she sees Luca sitting by himself in the corner. They leave early.
“We didn’t have to leave early for my sake, you know,” Luca says. “It’s your day.”
Tara sits next to him on one side of the car. She holds his arm and squeezes her face into his shoulder. “They’re great but I know they’re not your crowd,” she says. “It’s my 83rd. How many birthdays have I spent with them? They’re probably sick of me and me of them, we’re just in denial.”
Luca can tell she’s joking to lighten the mood. He kisses her on the forehead.
“Anyway,” she says, “I want to spend this one with you, OK? I’m the birthday girl and that’s my wish, so fuck ‘em.”
They sit quietly for a while before she asks: “What did you think of the movie?”
“It was good,” Luca says. “I mean, it was great. I don’t have as many big words I can use for it, but you know you’re the shit.”
Tara can tell he’s uncomfortable. She recalls a fight they had a few months ago where he felt her friends thought he was dumb for not being able to talk about art with the same vocabulary and conviction. She changes the subject: “The shit. That’s such a funny phrasing. Hey, by the way, did you have that meeting today?”
Tara takes one look at Luca’s face and regrets the question immediately.
“It was bullshit,” Luca says. “I mean, they tried to be nice about it, but they didn’t think they needed my help. I told you I’m not the kind of guy they’re looking for. It was always going to be a waste of time for both of us.” He pauses for a second, sees the guilt on her face, and tries to course correct: “But thank you. I know you meant well.”
“No, tell me about it,” she says. “I don’t want you to hide how you’re feeling.”
“It’s just… I guess it hurt,” says Luca. “It’s the first time I’ve ever put myself out there to work for someone else—because it was something I didn’t feel I was naturally good at. Film. I wanted to learn. So it stung harder than I expected it to.”
“Well, you have to understand from their point of view it was never going to be an easy sell,” she says. “I mean… no, that’s not what you want to hear, is it? Sorry, what I’m trying to say is that just because this one didn’t work out—and even if the next one isn’t likely to work out—that doesn’t mean stop trying.”
“You don’t have to tell me about the importance of persevering,” he says, containing his frustration.
“I know. What I meant to say was… nevermind. Let’s drop it.”
Tara feels him pulling away and lets him have his space. They’re on opposite ends of the seat now, looking at each other from a distance.
“Why do you keep me around?” Luca asks.
Tara chuckles. “That’s a stupid question.”
“There it is. Stupid. And you don’t care, do you? You’re happy to keep me along as a stupid pet. You’re retired, or at least you pretend to be, so you want a dog to snuggle with when you’re home and that’s all I am.”
“I have never said that,” Tara says. She lets out a noise like she’s exerting strength to hold herself back. But she can’t do it for much longer. “The only one that thinks you’re a stupid idiot and that you’re failing is yourself, Luca. There’s no timer. I give you unconditional love and you treat it as an insult—how is that fair? I know it’s torture for you to not feel like you’re doing what you’re meant to do but…”
She hesitates before continuing. “But Luca,” she says, “I just wish you could be happy living for yourself and for us instead of this… imaginary competition you have in your head with your dead ex.”
“Fuck you,” Luca says.
Tara can no longer stop the tears from breaking through. She lets out a wail and lowers her head into her arms. “No, fuck you,” she screams, “fuck! I’m too old for this shit. I’ve been with enough broken boys that I should know this is not going to work but… ugh!”
Luca stares up at the ceiling. He can’t look at her, at what he’s done to this woman. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I think I’m fucked up.”
“I know,” Tara says between sobs. Eventually, she wipes her tears and tries to sniffle back all the mucus flowing out of her nose. “It’s not your fault. I knew what I was getting into when you told me how you ended up here. It’s just…”
Luca nods. “I think we both know what needs to happen.”
After a beat, Tara looks at him. “I just have a favor to ask,” she says, “if that’s OK.”
“It’s your birthday,” he says.
“Can I have one last twenty-first century smoke?”
Luca laughs. Over the past year, he’s brought the cigarette pack with him but has kept it mostly untouched, saving it for big moments and when the stakes get high. He realizes he hasn’t had much of that. He takes it out of his jacket now, puts a cigarette in his mouth, and gives the rest of the pack to Tara. “Keep it,” he says.
He lights both of their cigarettes, and the two of them sit back to back, taking deep drags as they look out of opposite windows.
“Ruined my fucking birthday,” she says. “Asshole.”
“That’s all? Forgot you were still a baby,” Elmer says as Luca finishes his drink. Luca raises his eyebrows and tilts his head toward the glass to tell him: keep it coming.
The rest of the night plays out in blurs. They’re singing karaoke one second, and in the next blink, Luca is dancing in some zero gravity nebula club, bodies floating around him, each in a trance. With each beat drop, the universe gets more crowded, and more crowded still, until he feels like bursting. He takes another shot, then another, then drops some psych tonic into his pupils, spilling a few errantly on his face and then catching the droplets with his tongue. He’s in a desert feeling ticklish and cold. He’s in an ocean surrounded by rose petals spelling out T.S. Eliot’s Love Song. He is alone in an overwhelming blackness. He blinks and rubs his head and looks down to see the most beautiful view he’s ever seen from the top of Adz’s entertainment district, and he hears the call of some bird from above which circles him playfully, then invites him to plunge down.
He closes his eyes, takes the leap, then feels a familiar arm wrap around him.
“Not today, kid.”
Elmer’s voice comes in as though from a distance, but Luca is surrounded by darkness again. Another voice comes in, louder and closer—it’s his own. “It’s always me or something else that’s the problem, right? You think money will change things, and then moving to somewhere new—but you need to look in the mirror and take responsibility for the things you can control in yourself, Luna.”
Luca feels the bitterness come out of his mouth. From the other side of the abyss, he hears Luna, her voice filled with anguish. “I know I can’t blame you. You think I don’t know I’m the problem? You think I don’t fucking hate myself enough?”
Their fight continues, screaming followed by tortured silence and then raised tones and back again like the ebb and flow of water. But slowly and surely, it seems to pull farther into distance. Light inches into the dark, and Luca’s senses return.
When he wakes up, he’s in Anna’s guest room. Anna and Elmer are seated in front of him: Anna smiling solemnly, Elmer stoic as ever. “What happened?” he asks.
“You’re good,” Elmer says. “Nothing too crazy in my book. But I think a second ago, you were mistaking us for your parents.”
“Huh?”
Elmer laughs. “I’m kidding. Imagine? Anyway, your mom yelled at me to bring you home. So here we are.”
“Tara called me,” Anna said. “She’s worried about you. She told me what happened and to make sure you’re OK. Then Elmer told me you were out and I had a bad feeling.”
Luca sits up on the bed. “You don’t have to—”
“Save it,” Anna says. “Not the right time to tell us we don’t have to worry about you.”
Luca pauses, and they sit in silence for a while. Then he speaks: “Sometimes… sometimes I find myself wishing that you never stopped me on the bridge. I know that’s shitty of me to say—to you guys. It’s the coward in me trying to look for something to blame for where I found myself.”
“Do you still feel that way right now?” Anna asks.
“No.” Luca surprises himself with how quickly the answer came. “And even when I do, when I feel it and start wishing for an exit… I think something changed when you stopped me the first time. And the second time, when I went under, when I knew in all likelihood there wasn’t going to be a second chance.”
“You were scared to die,” Elmer says. Luca nods.
“I want to keep living in this world,” Luca says. “I do. I just don’t know how.”
Anna takes a second to think through her words before she speaks. “I’m… going to say something and it’s possible that it’s not what you want to hear,” she says. “But I think that… perhaps you have an unhealthy sense of pride and ego that keeps you from realizing that living your purpose doesn’t have to look like a big legacy and an achievement you can boast about.”
Luca’s instinct wants to fight it, and the only thing that stops it is just how tired he feels. He lets the words sink in instead. “Yeah, I’m an arrogant shit, huh?”
Anna tilts her head and raises a corner of her lips as if to say, hey, it wasn’t me that said it.
“If you truly want to help people and solve problems, Luca… well, Elmer and I are volunteering at this support center for Newcomers. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be a counselor in your state, but you can help in other ways. Tend to the garden, clean around the house. It’s small, but it’s something.”
“If you’re not too good for it,” Elmer teases. Luca probably needed that jab.
“OK,” he says, again faster than he had the chance to consciously decide. “Alright.”
Anna nods. She looks about as satisfied as she can be, and possibly a bit proud. But she knows that nothing has been solved yet, and that nothing will be solved on this particular early morning. Instead, she steps out, calls for Mimi, and makes sure that breakfast is ready.
IV
Today marks two years since Luca started volunteering at the Adz Newcomer Center. He’s sure that no one kept track, and he doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it. Still, he feels that it’s worth some celebration.
He found the cigarette about a month and a half ago, in between his living room couch cushions. It must have fallen out from the pack in his jacket at some point. He’s been saving it for something and this little secret anniversary was as good an occasion as any other. So after dismissing his Business Fundamentals class, he takes a step outside, finds a quiet corner, and lights up.
That’s when Luca sees her.
Her hair is longer now, and tied up in a different ponytail than he was used to. She seems older, but it’s impossible to guess anyone’s age these days from looks alone. Her age shows in the way he sees her sitting from across the window in one of the offices, the way her shoulders seem heavy and her eyes have just one or two extra lines on each corner.
But there’s no mistaking it: that’s Luna.
For the next few weeks, Luca puts equal attention into avoiding Luna’s direct line of sight and finding angles to sneak glances at her. Not out of anything more than innocent curiosity—but he soon realizes he’s not being as subtle as he thinks.
“That’s a sad one,” Elmer says from behind him. Luca jumps a bit, then fails to play it off.
Elmer continues: “I wouldn’t fuck around with her if I were you. Vulnerable type. Tried to kill herself a few times in the past year. Came into good money, enough to afford the afterlife package for her whole family in the early days. Then a few years after she went under, her husband and kids died in a freak accident. Heard she makes good music, though.”
Elmer sees Luca’s reaction and reads it instantly. “You know her,” Elmer realizes out loud.
Luca sighs, then nods.
“Well in that case,” Elmer says, “can’t tell you what to do. Just… be nice, alright? But not too nice.”
Luca succeeds in avoiding her for another week. But as he walks to his car one afternoon, he hears her voice over his shoulder, saying: “Shit. My ride isn’t responding. Do you mind—”
He turns around just as she looks up, and for a second she doesn’t realize who she’s looking at. But in the next second, it clicks. “Oh.”
“Hey,” Luca says.
He can see in her face that she didn’t expect this, obviously, and knows she isn’t ready to talk. He stammers, then digs his hand into his pocket: “Um… you can take my car. I don’t have to go with you. I’ll just have it drop you off and come back for me. It’s OK, I’m not really going anywhere, anyway.”
She tries to decline, but he insists, and she’s in too much shock to push back. Luca watches her go and then finds the nearest bathroom to throw up.
Two days later, he’s sitting in his empty classroom when he sees her enter from the door on the far side. She stands there for a second, looks at him as though asking for permission to enter. He gives her a look that tells her it’s OK to come in. She takes a seat at the front row of student desks.
“It’s been a while,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Do you want anything to drink?”
“No. Thanks, though.”
Silence for a moment. Then Luna says, with a quiet laugh to herself: “I thought I killed you.”
Luca would be lying if he said the thought never crossed his mind. In fact, a part of him in the past wanted exactly that—for his death to gnaw at her, to fill her heart with guilt. He wants to apologize to her, as Luna but also as a representation of all the people he left with the burden of his disappearance.
Instead, he jokes: “Well, I have some bad news for you.”
Luna laughs again and shakes her head. It’s not a happy laugh. “Don’t say that,” she says. “You don’t owe me your self-deprecation, Luca. I was shitty to you and you don’t owe me anything. I must have fucked you up harder than I feared if you think that’s what I want to hear.”
Luca is quiet for a moment as he searches for something trivial to fill the air. “You know,” he says, “you’re looking at one of the earliest test subjects for cryogenic freezing and revival. I finally became a pioneer.”
Luna giggles. For every word she speaks, her mind seems to be buzzing with a hundred more. “So you’re to blame for getting me into this mess, is what you’re saying,” she says. “In that case, maybe you do owe me a little bit.”
They sit in silence for most of the time they spend together in the classroom. It’s not an awkward silence, not at all; Luca appreciates it as the kind of silence you can only share with someone you’ve known and loved for a long time. He missed it. He had feared that they’d lost the ability to do this and is happy to see it return so naturally.
“I really am sorry, Luca,” Luna says after a time. “You didn’t deserve what I did to you. No one does. And I hope you know that I really did love you.”
“You already apologized,” Luca says. “I said I forgave you but we both know that was a lie. But I’ve had a lot of time. And I do forgive you. And I was shitty to you too and I never apologized for that.”
Luna tears up. “God, I’m still such a crybaby,” she says. She always was, and he loved her for it, when he didn’t hate her for it.
“You loved him, right?”
“I really did,” she says.
“More than me?”
“I’m sorry,” Luna says, trying to wipe away her tears. “Yes. That’s the answer. He was everything.”
“Then you did what you had to do,” Luca says. “You didn’t do it in a kind way. But we were never kind to each other. It was fitting.”
“I love your music, by the way,” Luca says after a quiet minute. “Like, really. You always said I didn’t appreciate or get it, and maybe I didn’t, or at least not as much as you wanted me to. Maybe I thought I was above it. But hey—you won. You made a fucking dent in the universe. I was proud to hear about everything you left behind.”
Time catches up with them and Luna has to excuse herself and leave. Before they part, she hugs him, and it’s stiff and awkward but Luca finds it… nice. They have more to catch up on, so Luca invites her to dinner that weekend at a Japanese place—the closest thing he could find to one of her favorites.
“How are you doing, Luca?” Luna asks him at dinner. “With everything? It’s so different here. I still can’t get used to it.”
“I… wasn’t doing well for a while,” Luca says. “I think I’m only doing OK now. But I really didn’t know how I was going to survive here, as stupid as that sounds. There’s not a lot of places for people like me anymore. I always thought that for you it would be paradise. Everything at your fingertips—and nothing to stop you from expressing yourself. Sure, there’s A.I. so it’s hard to make money from it, but you don’t need money to live comfortably here anyway.”
“You would think,” Luna says. “But I had a good run with self-expression. I still have art in me, of course, and I think I always will. But when the cancer got me and I chose to go under, I learned to value my family above everything. And as luck would have it…”
She’s said enough. She stuffs a nigiri in her mouth, then swallows it down with sake.
“I don’t know how to say this,” Luna says, “and I know it will come off as… a bit presumptuous. But it’s better to say it than not. It’s nice to see you, Luca, but I hope you don’t think that this means anything more than it does.”
Luca places his hand on hers. “Of course,” he says, “I know.”
“It was real, right?” he asks her a bit later. “Us.”
“Of course it was real,” Luna replies. “I wondered too, myself. I always had a thing for twin names. I named my kids Kari and Cory. So I asked myself if it all started with that—Luca and Luna, and I imagined some kind of destiny around it. But no, it was real. I really did love you. And I love you still, as a person—probably more than any other person alive, for what little that’s worth.”
“Do you have someone?” Luna asks him. “I never got to ask.”
“There might be someone,” Luca says. “We used to date. We just started getting in touch again, and… we’ll see where it goes. You would like her, I think.”
“Good,” says Luna. “That makes me happy.”
Luca has one last thing planned on their agenda for the night. He takes Luna to a new sensorium near the restaurant, where he booked a private room to screen a new film. When they enter the dark theater, she makes a joke about that time they both got stranded in a mall during a power outage.
They hear a click, and the scenery unfolds around them. They’re on the Pasig River ferry in 2022, riding through the clotted artery of Manila City, with all the heat and humidity and awful smells as real as they were during their long-ago era, in that faraway place.
“This one’s from my memory file, actually,” Luca says. “I thought a lot about our first conversation. On the bus. How you loved the Pasig River ferry. I didn’t get it. I went on the ride myself after we broke up, I think just to remind myself how stupid you were.”
“You never thought much about water views,” Luna says. Her eyes are wide and bright, and she almost forgets: “Oh god, I’m gonna get seasick.”
Luca puts his hand in his pocket and takes out the strip of Dramamine, the one he brought with him through an uncountable number of years. “It’s been a bit, but it should still be good,” he says. “I kept it in the preserver.”
Luna laughs, then swallows down the pills with a bottle of water. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she says. “You loved the city and the road but it made you sick. For me, it was the same but with water and sky. Like we shared some ancient curse.”
“We still do,” Luca says. Tears begin to claw through Luna’s eyes again, and she puts her hands to her face to hide them. But she doesn’t want to waste the view, so she wipes them off and sniffles.
“Sorry,” she says. “I think I’ve just been so lonely.”
The ferry passes the mouth of the Pasig River and enters Manila Bay. It makes its final turn to Escolta station, and the visages of Old Manila and all its history pan towards them, so large as they get close that the city threatens to swallow them whole. They hold each other there, and sit quietly even as the lights go out: two remnants of a forgotten world who traveled so far just to end up back here. If only for a moment.
Found this on r/ModestMouse :) not what I was expecting but this is really good. a fun journey & with some ideas that I can personally relate to. and idk if it was intentional but it fits so well with the song for me. its like I'm in a tcxic relationship and on a road trip but thru time