Chapter 6: I Can’t Handle This

I force myself to stay up and actually get caught up to speed on what’s happened in the past half century. Last time was just a weak attempt at skimming at best, bogged down by flashbacks. I need to understand what’s happened to the world after Matt and before me.

The 60’s are hard to get through without dredging up memories. It’s the decade he died, after all. He was 24. It got swept under the rug pretty fast, and no one could actually prove it was the US government. Even though it was plain to see for anyone who knew him. There were ceremonies held, and even a protest or two. Digging deeper reveals that Mari was behind a lot of the latter, and Will a lot of the former. Social media spreads news fast, especially when you’re super influential young people. Never let Mari catch you calling them that, though. She insisted she was nobody.

The war ended in 2064, the year after Matt died. It didn’t save the coasts, of course. Hurricanes and rising ocean levels ruined most major coastal cities, which is what finally got all of the American asshole billionaires to start care — their second homes being underwater, and all that. It affected the entire world, of course, but the sheer control that America had over production in third world countries, especially China even midway through the war — though most of it was under the table — gave them massive control over the levels of pollution pouring into the atmosphere. It took fifteen years of intense corrective measures to get the world back to a place that was going to be habitable in the immediate future.

The 70’s were the start of the unsteady peace, and the majority of the decade was spent in climate regulation negotiations. And as the Earth slowly repaired itself, brought back from the brink of total apocalyptic, mass extinction-level catastrophe, work began to repair the cities broken by war. Cities like Seattle and New York in America, Beijing and Shenzhen in China, or London in the UK, began to be cleared of any nuclear waste in the case of nuclear devices, or simply rubble and debris. Many engineers saw it as an opportunity to totally optimize the cities that had existed in some form for hundreds or even thousands of years, since large-scale planning had rarely been the idea behind many of those cities.

I start to get into the 80’s but I get hit with a wave of helplessness. This all feels pointless, I should just let myself not care about any of this. Why should I lean into any scheme they have me involved in? My attention span is slipping away, and I can’t convince myself to continue. Maybe I should just call it a day.

I flop onto the bed face-down. The pillow is too feathery, my head always sinks straight through it. The mattress is fine, but it’s not the most comfortable. Not that they were expecting someone with opinions to be occupying this room. They were just expecting a zombie slave that they could push around.

It takes me a moment to convince my mind into falling asleep so early, it’s barely 8PM, but I can’t deal with being awake any longer. I just want to be unburdened for thought for a while, even if I won’t get the chance to fully revel in it. The sensations of the world around me slowly slip out of focus as my mind turns off, and I hope for a quiet, peaceful sleep like last night.

I’m sitting in the car. I recognize this memory, I had dug it up earlier today. Matt is on his way to his first and last gymnastics tournament, and his dad is driving them. His mom is in the passenger seat, busily doing something on her phone. He’s wearing the plainest black leotard he could find at the store, most of the other kids on the team have multicolored leotards covered in sequins, but the though of wearing one is nauseating. That much I still agree with him about.

He didn’t want to be here. It wasn’t that he wasn’t good, he was great. It was that he was on the girls’ team. He wasn’t a really angry kid, but doing this made him furious. He wanted to play on the boys’ team, but the coaches wouldn’t let him. It was just a phase, they said. Those words burned in his mind as they headed to the tournament.

He was trying his best not to cry while he sat on the bench, waiting to do his set. It was floor first, then beam, then bar. He watched as all of the girls before him executed their routines, only a few mistakes making themselves obvious to him. A misplaced foot here, an unclean landing there. He was always aware of errors, not to blame people for their inaccuracies but to make sure he could catch them in himself. He was never quite good enough.

His turn, finally. He winced when the announcer called his name, the name he wished he could change. He steps on the floor, just barely springy and soft under his feet, then starts running. He brings his hands to the floor, but instead of hitting the solid ground like they were supposed to, like I Know They Did, he falls straight through. The darkness engulfs hi- no, this is me now.

I can feel the air around me sinking into my skin and chilling my bones, even my blood feels cold. It feels like a mix between falling through the air and sinking through water, and I can’t make sense of which way is up. On top of the darkness and the confusion, my mind starts to fill with malicious voices. “You can’t keep your anger in check. You can’t accept your situation. You’re defective on every front. Why can’t you just be more like Him? Sit back and be a good little boy. Stop pretending you can be anything more than what you were made for.”

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I try to protest, but my voice refuses to work. I just clutch my head and grip it tightly, as if it will be able to stop the verbal assault. Finally, it feels like I’m out of the water, but now I’m just falling.

I wake up on the floor, and immediately bolt straight up to sitting. My legs are tangled in the blanket, and my shirt is somehow halfway off of my torso. I take a moment to catch my breath, taking large gulps of air into my lungs, before untangling myself from the blanket and taking my shirt off. Despite the cold I felt in the dream, I find myself overheating. I hope I’m not running a fever, I don’t want to know what they’d do to me if I got sick. And on the second night here.

I manage to unwrap myself from the blanket and pull the shirt off of my head, but I still feel too hot. I start to panic, then I remember that the bathroom is all tiled. It will be cooler in there.

I get up and stumble to the small bathroom that’s off of my room, and sit in the shower. It almost feels too cold now, the ceramic tiles pressing into my overheated skin and bringing my body temperature closer to what it should be right now. I start crying while I think back to the dream. Matt being forced to be someone he wasn’t, it was a sore spot for him later in life. He wasn’t ashamed to admit what he was, but he hated to think about the implications of that fact. The only reason he ever thought about the first ten years of his life was to think about his dad before he got sick. Why did I think I could pull those memories up without any consequence?

It takes a long time to stop crying and for my body temperature to start to drop, but even then it feels like the tiles aren’t even cooling me down anymore. God, they’re going to find me like this in the morning and they’re going to fucking get rid of me. I’m not useful to them like this, and it’s probably not going to be worth it to let me recover. How much does it cost to make a new clone? How much does my training cost? How much of a waste of money am I going to end up being?

I don’t have any idea of how much time has passed, or even what time it is. I don’t want to pull up anything up on my Cortex display, I just want to pretend that none of this is happening to me. I just want to disappear from the world for a little while and act like nothing is weird or wrong about me.

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