The Final Countdown

By Hege Lepri

Eve wakes up around three and for more than an hour stays perfectly still while she tries to read the red numbers flickering across his face. The first number is still a nine, but she can’t make out the rest. By 4:30 she’s given up—her backward reading skills haven’t improved despite all the time she’s had to practice. And then she just waits for signs that he’s about to wake up so she can go and pee. When the well-known sequence of tossing and grunting starts, she tiptoes to the bathroom. The suction of the water recovery tank pulling her urine from the bowl is loud, and when she gets back in the room, he’s fully awake.

“Did I snore again?” he asks.

“No, I don’t know what woke me up,” she says.

“What’s today’s number?” Aidan says.

The preambles of dawn make the large pylon on the building across less bright than an hour ago, but she can read them now that they are turned the right way. Nine billion, seven hundred and ten million, eight hundred and five thousand, four hundred and three.

“Three,” he says. “Did you wait a little extra un purpose so it wouldn’t end with a zero?”

She laughs. “That stupid game still. We can have sex even if the morning number doesn’t end with a zero.”

“It’s not the same,” he says. He pulls her down to the futon anyway, and they’ve almost broken the rule when the alarm goes off.

She fixes breakfast while he showers. Half of yesterday’s coffee grounds, dried and rehydrated in the recycling station, mixed with freshly ground coffee. Sometimes she wonders if they, in the end, will be able to drink a morning brew from only regenerated grounds, and if they will notice when it no longer resembles the coffee they used to have. Since she keeps mixing in pre-used coffee, it is bound to be weaker and weaker as the old grounds go through the process more times. Is there a point when there is no taste left in the grounds, or does the aroma have an infinite limit where there is always some fraction left? That’s an area someone should research more.

She pinches some watercress and spinach from the hydroponic hanging garden in her window. They are lucky like that. The space is small, but they’ve got two large panels of glass that go almost from floor to ceiling. She’s fitted both windows with a contraption made of old plastic bottles that now hold their salad greens and occasional tomato. It’s worth it even if they have to do without blinds to make it happen. It’s a good thing Aidan can sleep through the light-pollution, since he’s the one who has to go to work in the morning. There’s been plenty of time to sleep during the day since her last gig ended.

As he leaves, he asks her what she’ll do today, but doesn’t wait around for her to say, “The usual.”

When she’s taken her shower and bright daylight starts flowing in through the glass panes, Eve notices how tired she is. She’s swept the floor and rolled up the futons into a kind of couch to keep the temptation to sleep at bay. Yesterday, she slept straight through the four hours of Interconnectivity, missing her chance to read through the job boards and discussion forums. Even though she voted for this change at the last Continental elections, the shift to restricting Interconnectivity hadn’t been easy. Still wasn’t easy, even though it seemed to be working the way they intended it to. They had curbed toxic debates and untrue news stories. There is less unrest, fewer reports of violence. But then again, fewer hours of access would give fewer reports of anything.

She positions her eyes in front of the far wall and looks straight at the iris camera. Three seconds—and the screen is turned on. She starts flipping through the usual sites, navigating idly from one end to the other using a tiny keyboard. Every few minutes she has to lock her gaze with the camera to keep the screen lit. This was once a special feature to prevent Interconnectivity burnout, but like many pilot projects, it’s become a mandatory security feature. Whenever she gets frustrated with the interruption, she reminds herself of her brain-breaking 48-hour stint in front of the screen during the long unrest, as she tried to find out what was happening elsewhere. Aidan had to pick her up in the end and carry her back to bed. She didn’t get up again for a week. It was after that she joined the campaign.

A couple of short-term copywriting contracts were the only relevant postings today. She throws in her resume and signs with her fingerprint reader. There isn’t much hope she’ll ever hear back from them. It’s hard to tweak her experience from marketing baby gear and soft drinks into something that sounds relevant here and now. Every day she goes without working, disqualifies her further as a worker in the New Economy. Things are changing so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up from home.

She’d never expected it to be him to stay relevant, with his dyslexia and mechanics hands. But frequent flooding made robots and automated processes vulnerable. Someone had to clean them with rags and q-tips and go in to add grease and oil much earlier than the maintenance handbooks claimed.

She takes a break to make herself a cup of secret, all-new coffee. Afterwards, she waters her garden, the only chore that makes her feel useful. By the window, her eyes are once again drawn to the pylon. The numbers change every half hour. Now the last two digits are zeros. Aidan would have liked that, the feeling of winning the lottery when the number you’ve been waiting for appears twice. 400? Is that higher or lower than the numbers she’d read in the morning? She’s never been good with math or figures and must write down anything exceeding two digits. The first few weeks after the pylons went up, she wrote down the sum every morning and evening to prepare herself for when they hit ten billion, but the numbers kept going up and down, without a clear pattern, and she’d thrown away the old scraps of paper after the first year. The government sends out quarterly reports on the Population Control Program and reminds them frequently what a success the program is. Without it, they would now be far beyond ten billion.

She has no way of knowing if that’s correct. When she goes out, the streets are still crowded. The part of the subway system that has been recovered after the floods, is still packed. And she has never understood how counting people in real-time worked. If someone dies or is born outside of a scanning area, one of those areas that hadn’t been cleared yet, wouldn’t that be left uncounted? Her parents—is there someone who knows and has counted them as either dead or alive? She tries to focus on the here and now, but sometimes dangerous thoughts creep in.

Eve sighs. She supported the policy when it was presented and still wants to give the program and the scientists behind it more time before she changes her mind. She shrugs and returns to the Interconnectivity screen.

This time she looks for free events, something to keep her awake and engaged until Aidan comes home from work. There are the usual invitations to help dig out more subway. These aren’t paid, but every volunteer gets a bag of produce. She’s done it a few times, but her hands got blisters and the produce was on its last leg, so she had to throw out most of it the next day. And she never met the same people twice, so there was no way to forge connections.

There are also foraging groups, but most parks and wooded areas are ribbed bare this time of the year, and the groups always seemed to be a place where people go to vent their discontent. Eve really doesn’t need that. Nobody wants to hire depressed people.

On the bottom of every list, there is a new advert. Cleverly placed, she has to admit that. In college, she’d learned that you should go for the top of the page or mid-page to be seen, but that was in another time, where you tried to attract the attention of busy consumers. Now, placing something at the bottom of a page would guarantee you a large audience of idle people who have found nothing to their liking or are fed up with everything they’d seen, so they keep anger-scrolling further and further down. These would be much easier to engage than just any random Interconnectivity user. If Eve ever gets a job again, she’ll use that trick herself.

Come Celebrate with Us! Join Us for Drinks, Talks and a Toast to Life!

The words in the ad feel strangely old-fashioned, but she doesn’t dislike that. Her marketer instincts tell her it may be the Next New Thing.

The event is scheduled for tomorrow, in Franklin Park. She’ll have to look that up. She has lived in the city for fifteen years, but only knows places that used to be famous, in addition to the ten-block radius around their housing complex. The years of unrest and then the last flood, and suddenly they’ve become homebodies. But she is almost hopeful as she imagines getting up and getting dressed because she’d be going somewhere the next day.

That night she makes chili for the first time in a long time. There is no beef in it, but the insect protein beef substitute is actually quite good. Better for every month since the last time they had real beef. Eve cracks jokes. Aidan laughs, then talks about these strange slugs that have been invading machinery. “Nasty bastards, but without them, I probably wouldn’t be able to find work, so let’s toast to the slugs,” he says. They lift their glasses, even though there is no wine in the house. They live too far away from the part of wine-country that survived the last 500-year flood, and until normal transportation has been restored and she’s found work, it’s too expensive. She wonders what will be in the glasses at the event the next day.

She wakes up to a zero the next morning. There is a slight murmur from the lower part of her tummy, it almost feels like when she used to get her period, but she doesn’t dwell on it. That’s a worry of the past, all taken care of by the Water for Life system they signed up for to get into this apartment complex.

The zero is unmistakable—she can decipher it by merely looking at the red reflected on his face. She watches him sleep for a while, then wakes him up right before the number is updated. They make love quickly the way they used to when both worked. She makes breakfast while he’s in the shower, splurging on all fresh grounds. He smiles knowingly at her while they drink it. They can still tell the difference.

She’s in the shower when he leaves, and his goodbye drowns in the sound from the drain suction. The pull is so strong she sometimes thinks something’s got connected wrong after the last reboot. If there wasn’t a grid to protect her, it would probably ingest her foot.

She puts on her black work pants and a green shirt she hasn’t worn in a long time. In front of the mirror, she realizes everything looks wrong on her. She’s put on a bit of weight on her tummy and the shirt does nothing to hide it. How does anyone put on weight in times like these? It’s not as if they’ve been having gourmet meals.

She leaves it on but adds a raincoat to hide it. You never know when it’s going to rain again, or when it will stop. There is an electric bus that goes almost all the way to Franklin Park, but clearly, she’s not the only one wanting to go in that direction, but she squeezes herself in headfirst, her right leg almost caught in the door. There’s a pushing and squishing from all sides, and after twenty minutes she can’t take it anymore and gets off eight stops before her destination.

There’s a gray mist in the air, but it’s a relief to not feel other people’s arms and heads and torsos touch her on all sides. Eve stands for a minute, then throws up on the torn-up sidewalk. The chili, she thinks. She keeps her head down until an army of insects she doesn’t know the name of, starts cleaning up her mess. She wipes her mouth with a cotton napkin and asks a passer-by the way to the park. The sidewalk gets worse as she walks. She has to e careful about where she puts her feet. But once in a while, she allows herself a sideways glance to the row of three-story houses lining the street. They are of the old kind, full of mold and mud now, and probably waiting to be torn down, but it reminds her of the house she grew up in, far outside the cleared zones. Who knows if she’ll ever be able to go back?

When she arrives, the event has already started. There’s a stage with speakers and a band. It looks professional but there’s too much of a crowd between her and the stage to see most of what’s going on.

“Who’s behind this?” Eve asks the woman next to her. The woman, who looks to be her age, replies, “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I guess the Clear communication slogan went out of style pretty quickly.”

Sarcasm. More addictive than wine, Eve thinks, and in even scarcer supply these days.

She looks around for clues. There are fresh, colourful billboards all around the area. Back when she was a professional, she’d have said the colours of this campaign, or whatever it was, were too bright. But maybe she is out of touch. To be honest, though, on such a dreary day, she finds them attractive. But the type is too small, so someone hasn’t been paying attention to the manual on effective text sizing in marketing.

The band plays another song, Eleanor Rigby, which even for a government who wants to return the state of things to the 1960s – or “the time before all the bad choices that brought us here,” isn’t much of a rally song. Yet, she hears people around her sing along to All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong. Back when she volunteered in the Movement, the songs had been more upbeat, lots of Gimme Shelter and Come Together, but maybe the people who had stayed on got tired of the same five songs used over and over.

Finally, the first speaker starts. She’s a tall woman with big black hair.

“We’re so happy you could make it here. We’ll try to make this into a bi-monthly event. Are you all enjoying yourselves?”

The response is a mixed murmur.

“Most people came here for the free drinks, and they haven’t been served yet,” the woman beside her says. “They should have started with that.”

Eve looks at her. She wouldn’t have guessed such wit from a homely woman in a grey raincoat.

The speaker goes on to introduce the two men who have joined her on stage: John from the Population Control Program and Carlos from the governing We Can Do It-coalition.“

Some of you may have asked yourselves what you could do to prevent further environmental disaster, and we’re here to give you some tips. But first, I hear that the drinks and nibbles have arrived, so we’ll take a short break while you all get your share, and then we’ll ask the band to play some songs in the meantime.

”While the rest of the crowd follows the lead of those who had spotted the food and drink stalls, she stays behind. Her mouth still tastes like vomit and the mere thought of eating something makes her stomach turn.

Instead, she walks over to the billboards.

BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD. White letters on a purply-pink background. Dots of stylized flowers here and there. Sentimental, but kind of nice.

9 BILLION IS STILL NOT SUSTAINABLE – LET’S DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. White block letters on a black background. Purple bubbles around the edges. The strident text and the colours don’t appeal to her at all.

The next ones are in tones of green and orange. From a distance, they look appealing, but the letters are so small she has to walk to the end of the field to read the messages.

IS LIFE MEANINGLESS? LET’S TALK ABOUT ALTRUISTIC SUICIDE

HONOURABLE PURPOSE IN DEATH AS IN LIFE

IS IT TIME FOR YOU TO DO THE RIGHT THING?

She realizes the small font is a marketing trick. They want whoever lacks the fighting spirit to stay in the crowd to walk all the way over and receive this message. Her face turns red with anger. Not even the band playing the old tune Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water can calm her down. She has voted for voluntary population control, but this is too much.

She walks away from the signs and when the crowd starts returning from the drink tables, she gets caught up in the movement of thousands of people pushing in the same direction. Suddenly she finds herself much closer to the stage. Eve can see the brown legs of this woman called Ruth and a pair of nice high-heeled shoes the kind she used to have before the second great flood.

Ruth goes on and on about how excited she is about this new phase, how this government has saved them all from the 10 billion-disaster, and how this new project is the natural next step to fulfil their mandate.

While Ruth leaves the lectern to Carlos, Eve starts feeling faint. She would probably fall to the ground if people weren’t pushing on her from all sides. She sways back and forth with each breath of this mass of people. It feels like being a foreign object stuck in a giant organism. Carlos clears his voice.

“How many of you felt uneasy about adding contraceptives to the drinking water in some of our buildings?” He pauses for effect, but when there is none, he continues. “And how many of you felt the pylons with the world population numbers were intrusive?” This time he doesn’t pause. “Quite a few, I guess. But most of you will agree that it was the right choice and the only way to go at the time. The campaign we’re about to start now, which will both tackle the population problem and give new employment opportunities—we’re rolling out an altruistic suicide consultation service with offices in every precinct—may feel the same way. But I’m sure you’ll get on board when we’ve shown you how this is both an ethical and practical solution.”

She watches him shift back and forth every few seconds, and she watches his dark green pant legs blur with the orange of the lectern. His words flow in all directions, breaking apart into syllables and recombining into senseless chatter. When he finally stops speaking, and the music starts, she bends forward and throws up all over her waterproof brown shoes.

The witty woman is suddenly there again. Maybe she’s been there the whole time. She hands Eve a handkerchief and the random kindness brings tears to Eve’s eyes. “Thank you,” she says, unsure about whether to hand back the puke-stained cloth or keep it. It’s good cotton, the kind she hasn’t seen in years.“

The rallies aren’t as hopeful as they used to be,” the woman says in her deep jazzy voice. “Especially in your condition.”

Eve blushes. “Condition? – I’m not...”

“Yeah, whatever...”

Eve feels a new wave of nausea. She has no comeback ready. The woman doesn’t look like someone who’d be easily persuaded by a slogan about the population control program. Anyway, she’d have to apply to go off the system and even if they wanted to, they don’t meet half the criteria. Eve blinks to get rid of that thought, but this time, the tears don’t stop at the rim of her eye.

“Well, you should look on the bright side,” the woman says, touching her shoulder, “sometimes life is so obstinate it even escapes water for life. It’s its own kind of protest movement.”

The nausea is subsiding, but Eve knows she must get away from this woman. She has no use for someone she doesn’t know injecting doubt into her life. It’s hard enough without feeding your demons; Eve knows that better than most. She worked on the campaign team that came up with the slogan, Deniers and doubters got us into this mess.

On stage, there has been a reshuffling. Ruth is gone and someone who looks like they should still be in school grabs the mic. There is real enthusiasm in her voice, not the practiced and focus-group-tested kind she’s seen thus far. Eve remembers a time when that kind of passion was a part of her—how she’s aged in five years.

They’re playing Stand by Me when Eve starts making her way through the crowd and out of the park. By the time she’s crossed the street they’re on to I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. Someone should really take a long hard look to align the music better with their branding. But she is not going to stick around for all that.

Eve walks down the road clutching the vomit-stained handkerchief in her pocket. She marches as fast as she can in what she believes to be the general direction of her apartment. Even if it isn’t, she is not ready for another bus ride. She keeps walking until she reaches a bridge she hasn’t seen before, and she knows she is lost. The rush of water mutes all other noise. She leans on the handrail and feels how slippery it is and how the swollen river pulls and pulls and pulls. The weight in her womb may be telling her something. Or maybe this is how effective marketing works.

She moves her left foot and feels something soft in her shoe. Balancing on one leg, she takes it off, then tries to shake whatever it is into the river. When nothing happens, she lets her finger slide along the worn insole. The damp, slimy sensation makes it clear it’s a slug. No shell to protect it, but able to insert itself anywhere. She prods it, but it won’t let go of her shoe. Eve pulls the cotton handkerchief out of her pocket and wraps it tightly around the mollusk. It finally gives in. Eve looks at it, a tiny bundle of invertebrate goo, enveloped in vomit, then she squeezes it as hard as she can. Only when she hears a pop of something bursting does she let go.

THE END

Author Bio: Hege A. Jakobsen Lepri is a Norwegian-Canadian translator and writer, currently dividing her time between Oslo, Florence and Toronto. Her most recent work is featured or forthcoming in Atticus Review, Held Magazine, This Magazine, Grist, Room Magazine, Washington Square Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. You find her at www.hegeajlepri.ca

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