The Life Beyond: A Short Story

Evan and Sheena move toward the exit like a car going through an automated wash, brushing against the swaying torsos lining the entryway. Only when they finally escape do they relax. Sheena’s ankle stops trying to keep balance on her stilettos and she slides into Evan with a giggle. He recovers unevenly and they weave to the parking lot. She knows he is fumbling with his keys, but it doesn’t bother her. He’s okay. He’d say something if he wasn’t.

Evan gives her what help he can and she drops into the passenger seat. She’s waiting for him when he finally rounds the car and makes his way to the driver’s side. She kisses him deeply and makes lurid promises that she’ll probably be too sleepy to keep by the time they get back home. He does not need his advance to know this. Experience has taught him.

He wrestles with his pocket for the car keys. She asks if she can help and they giggle again. He gets them out and the giggling stops. Each of them has the same vision. The car staggers drunkenly from its parking spot, then regains its composure. It rolls casually onto the street, confident that it can hold its liquored passengers for the short drive to the house. It is steady around the turns. It brakes evenly at the lights. It cruises the suburban pathways at legal speed. It’s cool. Everything is normal.

The normalcy falls apart when another car with a flat hasn’t fully pulled onto the shoulder. Evan jerks the wheel a little too hard to the inside of the turn. The car flips. Evan and Sheena have forgotten to put on their seatbelts. The rescue crew opens the car to find their arms entwined in a final embrace and other pieces of them smeared all over the interior.

Sheena gasps. Evan pulls his hand back from the ignition as if burned. He pulls out his mobile and swipes for a ride.

They awake the next morning hung over and hollowed out. They stay in bed until their livers have processed so much alcohol that their bladders are uncomfortable. Then they shuffle about the house as their minds grow uncomfortable trying to process the rest. Evan breaks the silence.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about. You didn’t do anything.”

“I almost did.”

“And you didn’t. You saw what the advance told you and you made the right decision.” She kisses him on the forehead. “I’m thankful for you. I love you.”

He feels guilty for taking the compliment. It wasn’t much of a decision. The device literally spelled out the future for him in black and white. Neuroscience hasn’t figured out how to transmit the data in color yet, but no one disputes the device’s accuracy. The data is pulled from every sensor on the globe, the processing power crowd-sourced across every device with a microchip and Wi-Fi, and the connections managed by a smart nanonetwork just under his scalp. It has stabilized financial markets, stopped wars, reduced global poverty, and helped people evacuate ahead of natural disasters. Cloud computing has bottled is the butterfly effect. The expense to have them implanted—a wedding present to Sheena—seemed to vindicate itself in a blinding moment.

Sheena has repeated nightmares about. She goes to a therapist that tells her this is normal. Sometimes the advance enhances foresights with additional data, making them exceptionally realistic. Because it transmits to the consciousness through the dream centers of the brain, it can cause them to reactivate the most traumatic elements. She relates these facts to Evan after her weekly session, month after month.

Evan does not have nightmares, but he starts to think about life differently. He considers all the things he would never have done if not for the advance. For less than the price of the car that almost killed him, he purchased fifty years that he shouldn’t have. This is a second lease on life or life after death. Either way, it shouldn’t be the same as the life before.

Sheena is explaining how the hippocampus can become dependent on the advance’s inputs, dulling perception of environmental cues to danger. He puts his fork down and takes a deep breath. For some reason he is afraid to look up from his steak. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being a sucker.”

“What?” She looks up from her glass. She only drinks water now. 

“We got a second chance, and we’re still going around in the same routine.”

“What are you talking about?” She flattens her hands on the table and moves her fingers through a counting exercise her therapist gave her to keep calm.

“I mean, have you thought about what our lives would have amounted to if we had—I mean if I had—”

Her counting exercise breaks down. She covers her ears. “Stop. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about now. About what we do with the future.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She goes into an emotional palsy, sober and disconnected. Evan doesn’t pursue it further. Sheena has nothing interesting to say about her therapy session the next week.

Their relationship changes. They travel further away from home and spend weekends in those nearby places everyone else puts off. When they are home they spend more time apart. Evan stays up late long after Sheena goes to bed. He studies business ideas and real estate offerings. During breaks he looks up exotic places and expensive hobbies. He thinks he finds a good deal on a couple of condos. His advance sends him a warning that they will burn. He passes on the deal. Likewise with an IPO that his device says will tank and a friend’s startup that gets a foresight of failure. The IPO tanks. His friend launches the company after a redesign and the business booms. Evan is not given a second invitation to invest. The opportunities keep coming and going. The advance always offers a reason not to bite. The condos never catch on fire.

Evan becomes agitated. He goes through meetings at the office like a man stuck in traffic. He talks to Sheen as if he’s on the phone with someone. She asks what’s bothering him. He says nothing, but in a way that means something he won’t talk about. That night, was the disabled vehicle on the curve when the cab went by? He can’t remember. Was the advance wrong about that, too?

He goes to a church and watches the confessional to figure out which side is for the penitents. He understands the internal workings from television.

“I’m sorry, Father. I’m not here to confess. I’m not even Catholic. I need help.”

“I’ll do my best, son.”

“My denomination. It excommunicated everyone who got an advance implanted.”

“The Amish call it witchcraft, the Scientologists call it vindication. There are plenty of opinions in between. If you want to convert, the Pope hasn’t ruled on it yet. I can’t guarantee he’ll support it.”

“Why? I mean, this thing saved my life. I was drunk and… almost did something stupid. It stopped me. Shouldn’t we be happy that we’re saving lives?”

“You’ve heard the saying that God watches over fools and drunks?”

“Yeah.”

“The joke goes that the Vatican doesn’t like Silicon Valley moving in on its business. The theological arguments are a little drier, but it boils down to a debate over whether we’re subverting God’s will with gadgets.”

“I thought religion was on the side of people living good lives.”

“Is your gadget helping you live a good life, my son?”

The priest hears the familiar sigh of a soul at odds with itself. “I don’t know. It helped me do the right thing. Now life should feel like a gift, but it doesn’t. Like, everything is more frustrating for some reason and I don’t know why.”

“I see this problem all the time. A person puts their faith in God, and then God doesn’t tell them the things they want. They start to say God has abandoned them or that God is punishing them, but that’s not why they’re upset. They’re not dissatisfied with their lives. They’re upset in their own lack of faith.”

“You’re saying I’ve made the advance my own personal Jesus?”

“I’m saying it sounds like you’ve put your faith in it, and now you’re dissatisfied with your choice. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Only you can answer that question, my son. But when you do, I think you’ll have the solution to your problems.”

Evan goes in search of answers. His nights are spent reading about the advance, now. He starts with terms he remembers Sheena recounting from therapy. The mainstream websites just repeat the same soundbytes from manufacturers, corporate paeans taken at face value. Academia hints at things he suspects, but it’s difficult to understand. He reaches further, deeper. He finds sites people label as fringe. The last redoubts of information warriors seeking to expose the truth. The advance uses shared data to make predictions. The company can use that data to generate false foresights. It is controlling the government by doing exactly that. If you have a device, then they have you. The device didn’t save his life. It saved the life they have laid out for him to live.

He comes home late one afternoon. Sheena asks him where he’s been. He does not try to hide it. “I had my advance removed.”

She has been patient for several months, but now she is hysterical. “How could you? Get it back. Get it back!”

He tells her about the question the priest said he needed to answer and the answers he found and how he won’t put his faith in a corporate god. He tells her all this with the suave self-assurance of a TED speaker. It all makes sense to him. He is more relaxed than he has been since that night in the car. He is free from the global mind control conspiracy. She can remain part of it. He will not protest. All that matters is that he is free. Free to choose. Free to feel free in his choices.

Evan tells Sheena that there is a fishing boat for sale. He is going to get a loan and buy it. He will quit his job to catch tuna. Fish and most fishermen aren’t connected to the networks, so the endeavor is outside of control. Instead of getting rich to have adventures, he will have an adventure to work off the debt.

Sheena turns pale upon hearing all this. She begs him not to do this. She can’t see a future with him if he does this. He kisses her on the forehead and tells her if that’s how she feels, then so be it. Evan has to go to his appointment at the bank. They can talk about the rest later.

Sheena sits and waits. It is the only thing she can do. She is sure of this. The device is almost perfectly accurate. Her therapist suggested having it removed, but the idea of living without it was more frightening than keeping it. That night in the car, the foresight they had, the way they responded to it, all these things were inevitable. She resigns herself to his denial the same as her nightmares.

She goes to answer the door before the police officer knocks. Yes, she is Evan’s wife. A terrible accident, yes. She is told the person who killed him is suspected of drinking. She already knows the labs will confirm it. In time, she will stop going to therapy. The advance shows her that the experience of foreseeing death and actually experiencing it will put an end to the nightmares. She is already feeling better.