You Only Live Forever [WIP]

“Do you remember the first time you died?”

Jen woke, with a start, bathed in a chill sweat. The sodden sheets stuck to her back and thighs, her hair stuck to her lips as she gasped with the sudden return of consciousness. Running a hand across her face, she pushed her dark hair back from her forehead and wiped the sweat from her neck. How long had she made it this time? She rolled over to look at the clock. “Shit.” She groaned and threw the covers back. Only slightly more than an hour had passed. She stood, stretched, and padded into the bathroom. Standing in front of the sink, she ran cool water and considered giving up for the night. Again. She washed her face and looked into the mirror. Dark eyes with an Asian cast to them looked back at her. Framed in black hair, her skin looked more pale than usual, but that could have been either the pale blue high-K LED streetlight coming through the window or the receding dread of her dream. Come to think of it, she couldn’t recall the last time she had been in true sunlight, either. She prodded her face, examining the dark circles that seemed to have taken up permanent residence under her eyes and the geology of deepening lines in her face, carved by tectonic forces of stress, fatigue, and the erosion of time.

Cigarettes had been outlawed in the New West Coast States after the catastrophic fires of 2020, but she drew on a slim nicotine vape and exhaled vapor out into the night breeze, and it was almost the same. The wave of transient relaxation passed through her neck and shoulders and a little more of the dream tension evaporated. What had it been about? She had tried keeping a dream journal but the only habits she could seem to keep were self destructive. She took another drag.

It had been, of course, about her own death. But so were all her dreams lately. Mostly falling, but sometimes the current events made their way into them and added flavoring of riots or fire or plague. This one had felt different though, somehow abstracted. Fragments of it seemed to hang and spin like broken glass in her minds eye, shards of dream frozen in the moment of contact with consciousness’ thrown brick. Impressions of a question she’d been asked before, the sound of rustling paper, a bed not her own. The closer she tried to look, the further it all receded.

She gave up trying and got dressed, pulling on a pair of black jeans, a t-shirt she’d left at the foot of her bed that smelled passably clean, and a zip up hoodie. She stepped into a pair of elastic-upper sneakers and pulled her hair back into a short ponytail. She had to pull back the sheets on her bed before she found her mobile. She wrapped its flexible screen around her wrist before tapping at it to unlock her front door. Walking through the dim corridors of her building, it was clear the cleaning bots were out again. Small bits of trash had accumulated in the corners and edges of the halls and stairwells, the sedimentary strata of humanity. She stepped out into warm breeze of the Oakland early morning, its ever-present smell of piss making her wrinkle her nose. There was a 24-hour Starbucks down the block, one of the few companies that had survived the turmoil of the past decade largely unchanged. They had been turfed out of Deseret Territory, but Mormons didn’t drink much coffee to begin with. She walked past the omnipresent homeless, shrouded in blankets or faded camping tents that encrusted all the pedestrian areas of the city. You learned pretty early on the right way to walk around the city, eyes hard and forward, pretending not to hear or see the panhandlers. It was easy to spot new arrivals: people whose sympathy hadn’t been sufficiently calloused to ignore the background noise of sob stories painted in carboard signs and sunburned skin.

Maybe buying coffee wasn’t the best course of action for an insomniac, she thought. But the warm cup in her hands seemed to warm something immaterial as well, and the lingering horror of her dream faded further into the back of her mind. Still, something lingered there besides the fear, some more concrete sense of …something. Something present there that was absent here, but the more directly she looked, the fainter it got, like trying to see a faint star.

Jen’s lack of sleep over the past few days was only a symptom of a larger issue, however. While the dust around the US breakup had largely settled on the continental scale, at the personal level, families, careers, and finances had been smashed and smashed again in the shifting of borders, markets, and politics. She had been working in Oakland for a maglev train startup as a land acquisition consultant. Existing train lines wouldn’t willingly give up their older but still profitable rail lines for upgrades they wouldn’t be able to use, and the labyrinthine mess of municipal pipelines and power and data lines running parallel to the tracks meant that running parallel to existing routes was similarly out of the question. This type of project would have been impossible a decade ago, but now, under the new regime of the NWCS, collective value and economic benefit was prioritized over private interest, and the acquisition of the land for new, truly high-speed rail lines was proceeding at a breakneck pace.

Some people didn’t take so kindly to the march of progress through their holdings, however. Trained, equipped, and emboldened by the violence of the recent past, a group of these disenfranchised had firebombed the 3 floors of the high-rise that housed Jen’s company, resulting in the death of most of the employees and the destruction of most of the company’s physical assets.

Jen had been out getting coffee.

She could still see the series of explosions, gouts of fire erupting out of the glass-sided tower 200 feet overhead as the fuel-air mixture touched off inside the office. The way the sound of the explosions echoed, through the reflecting faces of the San Francisco skyscrapers. The screams, both hers and the onlookers. The insane windchime cacophony of 5000 square feet of shattered glass smashing into the street.

She tried not to think about it, and sipped at her coffee, the slight tremble of her hand making the lid jump out of her mouth on the first attempt. She drew on her vape again and the shakes subsided. As perverse as it felt, to her, the green glow and serene gaze of the Starbucks mermaid signified safety. She had watched the scene of awful chaos and slaughter on the street from behind the glass of the coffee shop windows, clutching a cup still too hot to drink.