My Sunset Starburst Girl and the Plague of Endless Tomorrows

After the third day of nobody dying, the world started to panic. Babies kept being born, people kept getting injured, but nobody died.

As mathematicians rushed to calculate the exact day that the earth could no longer sustain us, people leapt off of buildings and jumped from boats with anchors tied around their waists. Bones shattered and lungs exploded but hearts continued beating and neural synapses went on firing.

Big pharma couldn’t produce pain medication fast enough to treat the agony caused by injuries and illnesses that should have killed those they afflicted. For the wounded and the ailing, time stretched impotently on in a parade of pain with no finish line.

Eventually, a neuroscientist named Eduardo Fontanelli would patent a “life cure” made from (among other rare and difficult to source ingredients) tupelo honey and King cobra venom. Needless to say, this antidote to immortality was in high demand. Even people who had no intention of dying soon yearned for the security of knowing that they could.

Enditol, that’s what Fontanelli called his wonder drug, because what world full of human suffering doesn’t love a good sick joke. Hospitals couldn’t be built fast enough yet Emergency Rooms were rendered obsolete. Doctors had no sense of urgency, without the life or death of it all. Each hospital room was packed with rows of bunk beds.

Death row was evacuated and filled instead with the world’s wealthiest elderly who needed a secure location to enjoy the luxury of their medically induced comas. Within two months, society was on the verge of collapse.

But let me start at the beginning (if there can even be a beginning without an end).

I fell in love three months before life stopped ending. Her hair was the color of a Hollywood sunset: Red-orange-pink, electric, celestial. It made me think of toxic waste and pollution. It made me think of heaven.

She passed me on the mirrored runway between the Bridal Expo dressing pods, so close that the air her body displaced lapped against my cheek, and I froze for a fraction of a moment, not knowing whether to hold my breath or breathe her in. A honeysuckle Starburst, that’s what she smelled like (I breathed).

I was trying on bridesmaid dresses for my sister’s wedding. She was half a mile away at the other end of the Expo Emporium compound herself, helping my dad with his Survivalist Expo booth, selling water purification straws and infrared sensor blocking cream.

The digital sales assistant led me to a changing pod. “First, let’s start with a simple question,” she said. “What makes you feel beautiful?”

“Covering all the mirrors in my home,” I said.

A confetti burst of laughter from a neighboring pod both startled and gratified me as the salesbot cocked her head to the side, loading. The lower-end bots had trouble with sarcasm.

It wasn’t until I was leaving that Starburst approached me. I’ll call her that, if you don’t mind, as I’m sure now the name she gave me wasn’t real.

“I’m sorry for laughing back there,” she said. She was holding a handful of rainbow-gemmed tiaras.

I looked up from the wristband unit I was messaging my sister on, embarrassed. But Starburst voiced no judgment on the fact that I still chose to use an external device. The elite and the majority of the middle class have chosen to fully integrate with their technology. Some people literally recoil when they see you interacting with communication hardware, like they’ve caught you picking your nose or adjusting your underwear. As any etiquette book will tell you: the most polished and proficient members of this society can conduct one in-person and at least two virtual conversations simultaneously without lifting a finger.

“That was you laughing?” Have you ever noticed that sometimes when someone unexpectedly answers a secret hope you were protecting yourself from acknowledging, it startles you into asking for immediate confirmation?

As she nodded, my eyes fell on the tiny heart-shaped locket seemingly suspended at the hollow of her throat.

“It’s a wish necklace,” she said, slipping one finger beneath a silver thread, finer than a strand of hair. “When it breaks, it means my wish is coming true.”

“I knew about wish bracelets,” my voice said, and I saw my hand had caught her wrist, as if to demonstrate the difference between a necklace and a bracelet. Why did I do that? Her pulse fluttered hotly beneath the pad of my thumb.

“Oh?” she said, and stepped closer. “Not many people do.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“What’s your wish?” I countered. I was mesmerized by the locket, the way it caught the light, the warmth I imagined the underside of it held, from resting on her skin.

“I wished the cute, funny girl from the bridal expo would let me buy her a drink.” She laughed as she started walking away. I laughed as I followed her. But the locket didn’t break that day.

It didn’t break on our first full night together, either. Not when we held a contest in the shower to see who could stand under the hottest water for a count of three, our shoulders blooming red as the steam billowed around us. Not when we lay side by side on the living room floor with all the windows open and our eyes closed, tracing the raised bumps on each other’s skin, pretending there were love letters there in biological braille. “Our bodies, our minds, they’re just the middlemen,” she said, “for the messages of our souls.”

On our fifth date I asked what was in the locket. “Pixie dust,” she said to me.

“The ashes of my pet hummingbird,” she told my colleague Duncan, at my company gala.

“A cyanide tablet,” she told my cousin Mica after the champagne toast at my sister’s wedding.

“A piece of freeze-dried placenta.” My personal favorite, as said to our neighbor, when he lurked around the front stoop, watching us move her stuff in to my apartment, asking questions but not offering to help.

I was chewing a teeth cleaning tablet and looking out the bathroom window one morning, three months after we’d met. I was thinking that I loved her. I was weighing the pros and cons of being the first to say I love you. Was it weird that we were living together and hadn’t said it yet? Was it weird that I wanted her to leave for work already so I could climb back into bed for a few minutes, press my face to the pillow she slept on while cataloguing all my favorite parts about what we’d done together the night before?

When I turned back to the sink to spit, she was there behind me in the mirror.

“The news,” she said. Her face was oddly blank.

I looked to my wristband and realized it was missing. Another odd thing.

On the large monitor in the living room, the apocalypse was beginning to unfold. I didn’t drink the tea Starburst set in front of me. Starburst moved from room to room gathering things. I watched doctors, the president, scientists, the head of the WHO deliver conflicting pleas: Don’t panic. Lock your doors.

“People can’t die anymore?” I said. I hadn’t realized how long I’d been sitting there hypnotized, not speaking. My mouth was dry and my lips were stuck together. Opening them to speak was like peeling two segments of orange apart. Hearing my own voice out loud broke the spell. Reality came spinning in, loud and bright, reconfiguring itself in unfamiliar shapes.

Starburst was sitting cross-legged in the kitchen chair now. Her eyes looked bigger than usual. She was wearing make-up, I realized. I’d never seen her in make-up.

Do you know what it feels like to be betrayed by someone you love? It feels like you’ve been force-fed something heavy, what it does to your stomach as it sinks in, dark and unfurling. It feels like taking a sip of your cold tea and then waking up on the floor of your father’s bunker, only it’s been lined with sound-proof panels and is alive with the blue glow of hundreds of monitors, shuffling through news broadcasts, security camera and other surveillance footage of people who clearly think they are unobserved.

“I’m sorry. I thought we had more time,” Starburst said. She brushed some hair out of my face.

I couldn’t speak. I could barely form thoughts. Consciousness was heavy, it kept trying to fall away.

“I wanted more time to prepare you for this stage, to explain. Don’t worry, by the way. Your family is safe. They’re asleep. They’ll stay asleep until the next phase that’s coming, whatever that may be. We haven’t decided yet.”

We? I felt my lips shape the word but no sound came out.

Her face broke into a beatific smile that sliced through my heart like a scythe.

“We are the New Colonials. We’re a small group of humans chosen to help colonize Mars and a planet-like moon of Saturn. Mars is my first choice. I find out soon if I got in…” she seemed to catch herself, stuff her giddiness back down.

“This bunker by the way is amazing!” she did a chef’s kiss thing. “I could not have asked for a better base. Applying for the New Colonial relocation opportunity isn’t cheap. You have to offer substantial resources—a base to assist with gathering intel, for example.”

A memory flashed in my mind: Dad’s holographic model of his bunker displayed to draw customers to his booth.

She said now, “To be honest, some of the other civilizations were really skeptical about letting earthlings join. They say we’re limited by our singular consciousness. They’re worried we’ll plunder the new planets like we’re ruining Earth. They say we have no concept of consequences because our own life spans are too short to see the damage we’re doing. The not dying thing, they came up with that as this idea of the universe shoving our faces in our own mess. If we’re going to build a new inter-galactic society, we have to make sure that we’re getting the cream of the crop. That’s what all this surveillance is for. And as we know, catastrophe is a catalyst for people showing their true colors.”

I’ll say.

“Look, I’m sorry I had to take your wrist device,” she said. “But people can’t know what’s going on. It’s like with the Titanic. There aren’t enough life boats. Also, I needed your credentials to access the bunker.”

“But you are one lucky girl,” she said, vanishing for a moment and returning with an enormous IV. “For your generous donation, you get the good stuff. How does a nice long nap sound?”

Days pass, weeks, months. I’m only awake for a few minutes a day, enough to see the news. The fires, the looting, the formation of factions, the beginnings of a new World War.

Starburst comes and goes. She hums as she takes notes. Once or twice she cries, standing over me. Or maybe that’s just a dream.

Until one day I wake up and all the monitors are broadcasting static. Starburst is gone.

What will happen to all of us who are left? Left to live endlessly on Earth? What will happen to us still, when the sun absorbs the earth? Will we all be centuries, millennia old? Will we be reduced to animate ashes, swirling around the cosmos, whispering to one another about what our bodies did, once upon an Earth?

Sensation is returning to my body. My fingers wiggle. Something cold is coiled in my palm. I can’t lift my head, but my fingers trace the outline of a tiny heart locket. I pass the strand of the necklace between my thumb and forefinger, feeding it through over and over until I can confirm for sure that the necklace is broken.