Now

Polka Pouli had lost her patience with the day before it had even begun. Her labour app kept her at work for a whole three minutes extra, the hydrocab was late, and now the Reception Bot was struggling to connect.

She tapped her foot impatiently and stared at her left palm, hovering two inches from her face. Her internal visual display showed three screens overlaying her olive skin. In one screen she flung email replies out two at a time, in the next she watched her hourly college lectures at 2.5x speed. The third screen continuously played 10 second ads for 0.003 Debt-Bits a piece.

I’ve had the treatment, dipshit. She thought, after the algorithm showed an ad for an immortality procedure. A mild stress warning showed in her display until the commercial had finished.

The archaic Reception Bot whirred, howled and printed out an oddly shaped metal pendant on a chain. Polka held it up, and opened IntelAnalysis. IA claimed the metal was brass and was fashioned into a love symbol. It claimed the shape to be a heart but Polka could not discern why, nor did she have the desire to.

With the pendant around her neck, the building’s Navigation System guided her feet to the other end of the lobby, and through a door.

After sending her last few emails out for the hour, she looked up at the room she was walking through, unable to locate herself for a moment. Where am I?

“Dharmatix!” she yelped, glad no one was around to hear her first word in days. Her teeth rattled momentarily, uneasy with the feeling of settling back into place. A mild anxiety warning blinked on her display as she rolled her tongue to its resting position. She breathed once, blinked once and returned to her previous thought pattern.

She was at Dharmatix, a Higher Therapy Clinic. An expensive 30,000 Debt-Bit gift from her labour app. I would rather have had the Debt-Bits, honestly.

As she walked, her mind was elsewhere. Not with a screen, but jumping through mental hoops, attempting to decipher the convoluted plot of her favourite cross-platform megadrama, The Moneymaker’s Motherload.

Without thought, her hand opened a door and she stepped into a room with fifteen other people. She quickly scanned the room.

It was “subtly decorated to echo alternative styles of the 2080s-2100s” according to IntelAnalysis. In reality this meant a pentagonal room with red and pink latticed pillars in each corner and a stained glass ceiling with LED lights. The walls between were a creamy pink, and the floor bore a soft yellow carpet with fifteen colourful cushions laid out across it. It was a lot to process, and Polka dimmed both brightness and colour to 40%.

The instructor sat in front of a large brass disk, waiting for everyone to take their place. She looked out over them, wearing a strange expression - she was smiling. Polka took a distaste to this instructor instantly, but was sat on a cushion before she knew it.

Did I sit down, or did the building do it? Half her mind questioned this for half a second before turning back to her megadrama, comfortably seated amongst the crowd.

As the last people took their seats, the instructor turned her head to smile at each attendee. A slow, laborious task. Polka had never thought much of this category of person. When sorting through her social priorities, as recommended by her medical app, she never rated them more than a 0.8.

She looked around and many of the attendees were of this demographic. Yonderers - rich and obsessed with the past.

Polka rolled her eyes as the woman began to speak out loud - a lot.

She rattled in an obnoxiously slow drawl. Polka had the urge to set her speech to 2.5x speed, but found she couldn’t, so resigned to more mind distractions to pass the time between each word. The instructor, introducing herself as Cluro, welcomed everyone and began to speak of the human condition.

Polka checked in on the rolling speech here and there, doing her best to fill in the gaps. Cluro asked the class a question about presents. Polka felt a tug of attention, but stayed in her head, filing (from memory) her five hundred tax receipts from this morning, as she raised a hand in the affirmative.

Cluro repeated the question, but amplified her voice through each person’s audio feed. “Who is truly present with me now?” The booming words cut through Polka’s thoughts and knocked every receipt back down to her lower memory. She had gained Polka’s attention, and her anger. Perhaps this is what she wants?

Polka looked around, and found similar expressions on the others. A mix of frustration and shock. Gently, but consciously, each person in the room raised their hand.

“Good.” Cluro smiled, and although she still spoke slow, Polka was doing better at staying with her words. “I’m sure that was alarming, but see what a little shock can do? We’re here today to really get to grips with this feeling.” Polka was not particularly interested in feeling shocked. “Human lives are an endless stream of activity, and a shock like that interrupts those, and brings us back to Now - a place we have forgotten about.”

Yeah, sure. Polka thought, and opened up her ad screen again. If I have to sit through this, I might as well earn money while I do...

“Our ancestors spent a lot of their mental energy in the Now, but today we struggle. Dharmatix have found that this is in large part due to the advent of immortality treatments. Now that most humans will never have to experience death - an experience guaranteed for our ancestors - we very easily get lost in the stream.”

I bet she’s immortal, herself. Polka protested. Hypocrite. A mild stress warning flickered on and off for a second and disappeared. Polka played a simple video game to unwind, bouncing 9 balls among 4 paddles.

“Our Temporary Passing Therapy was developed as a way to experience death.” Polka’s mind drifted further, numb to the words being spoken. She skimmed Newsbites in a new screen as Cluro explained that it would not be true death, each person will return to life.

She muttered words about a pill developed by Dharmatix as Polka reached the next level of her paddle game - 14 balls, 5 paddles. Polka found this level far more intense than the last, and considered closing the Newsbite window, but instead turned her audio down a touch.

Cluro’s faint murmur instructed the class to open their “locket”. Polka paused her game, looked around, and saw others reaching for their pendant. She held it up for closer inspection and found a hinge on one side, and a clip on the other. She pulled it open, and inside was a red pill, the same “heart” shape as the locket.

She popped the pill in her mouth, flooded it with saliva and swallowed it.

Cluro began to speak of the chemical composition, and Polka reopened her game. Following distant instructions, she lay flat with her head on the pillow. This made her game disorienting so she closed it, instead opening a video app. But in the gap between each window being open, she heard something that alarmed her. What was it?

She replayed the last few seconds of her audio feed. Between the sound of bouncing balls and the beginning of an informational video, she found the sentence.

“...on the fourth strike, your heart will stop beating, and you will pass.”

What!?

Medium stress and anxiety warnings popped up as Polka returned to the room. She couldn’t move. The warnings switched to high and a window popped up dialling her doctor. She tried to close it but couldn’t. The dial tone was louder than Cluro.

“By now, the sedation-”

Ring-ring!

“-setting in. This may be uncom-”

Ring-ring!

“-but I promise you-”

Ring-ring!

“-safe.”

At that moment, the doctor picked up the call. “Polka, your stress is exceeding healthy levels for your body. I suggest you cease your current activity immediately.” Polka was unable to respond.

Cluro picked up a large wooden stick.

“Polka do you hear me?” The doctor asked, as Cluro walked to the brass disk, turning to the group.

The doctor shouted her name.

Cluro looked at each of them and whispered. “Enjoy the experience, and I’ll see you again in two hours.” She nodded and pulled the stick back into the air.

Polka’s warnings immediately flashed to extreme alert, and a screen prompted her to call emergency services. As Cluro brought the stick down on the disk a loud bell sound echoed around the room.

Windows, icons and buttons in Polka’s vision began to shut down, including her extreme alert warnings. She tried to process what was happening, but found strange, tiny cracks in her thoughts. Before she knew it, the sound rang out once more.

Her vision shook. Colour and brightness neutralised as her audio volume balanced out. The cracks worsened until there was a noticeable gap between each thought. It felt as though her mind was moving through thick tar, unable to keep up with the things happening around her. Bodies were going limp, eyes were closing, throats were growling.

Another strike rippled through her body, until she could feel every piece of fabric touching her skin. As the last of her artificial mind shut off, the gap between thoughts widened.

Her panic began to naturally subside. The colours of the room began to shift.

The gap kept growing, and the colours and sounds of the room gracefully weaved into one another. Glistening beads of harmony and light. They spun in every direction at once, until they shrunk into nothing.

Polka did not hear the fourth strike...

Her next moment of experience was the LED ceiling suddenly back in view. The room drifted back into her awareness. Two people were already up. One held herself in shock, the other massaged his neck.

Polka sat up, and looked around for Cluro. Others were slowly rising, each with an entirely different look on their face. She felt the soft pillow with her hand as she adjusted her position to regain her thoughts.

It had been as though she blinked. She felt that no time had passed between closing her eyes and opening them once more.

Polka stood and stretched her limbs. She placed her hands by her side. She breathed and she took in the room. As the other attendees began to settle, the door opened.

Cluro stepped out and beamed a welcome reassuring smile. She took her seat before the group once more.

“Two hours.” She said, sending shivers down Polka’s spine. “You just spent two hours without a heartbeat and lived to tell the tale.”

Polka recalled some of the details leading up to her death, but they were hazy, half-remembered.

“I’m willing to bet none of you have opened an app since you came-to.” She was right. “You’re here, with me. In the Now.”

It was a strange feeling. Like a moving stillness passing by the room.

“I cannot promise this feeling will remain. But I can promise you will feel it again should you so choose.”

Even as she said it, Polka started adjusting the brightness of her display.

“Dharmatix offer a wide range of courses…”

Oh great. A sales pitch. Polka’s inner voice returned.

“For as little as 75,000 Debt-Bits you can enroll…”

Polka turned away from Cluro, finding any semblance of “Now” was escaping her. She thought about the moments leading up to her death. She thought of her busy day before the session, and the busy day ahead of her. This reminded her to send out an urgent email.

She had tuned out of Cluro’s speech once more, and her thoughts were racing. Yet between each thought, she felt the same tiny cracks she felt before...

And they were growing.