Free Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

people. To a younger Luke this sounded like luck; to an older Luke this sounds like a quiet tragedy.
    The TV screen shows more of the trashed Florida zoo, waist-deep in water. Luke once thought time was like a river, and that it always flowed at the same speed, no matter what. But now he believes that time has floods, too — it simply isn’t a constant anymore. Twenty thousand dollars in his pockets, and Luke feels like he’s in the flood.
    Luke asks, “What about you? Single?”
    “Yes. Irregularities in the insula, cingulate, and inferior frontal parts of the brain make me unable to have what neurotypical people such as you call a ‘relationship.’ I enjoy situations that are familiar to me, and if that means having a person around me, then I suppose that’s fine. But it’s not something I crave or seek. I also have 630 people following my ongoing blog on the subject of mouse breeding. One might consider them, if not partners, then friends. They constitute my community.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “But this may change. The brain grows ten thousand new cells every day of its life — but unless you use them, they dissolve back into your brain.”
    “Serves them right,” says Luke. “Okay, Rachel, what do you crave or seek from life, then?”
    “I would like to become impregnated by an alpha male so that I can prove to my father that I am, in fact, a human being and not a monster or an alien.”
    Luke looks at Rachel. “Let me buy you another drink.”
    Rick returns from the bar’s rear area. Luke watches him mix a complicated cocktail and take a sip from it — are bartenders allowed to do that? — then inexplicably pour it out and flee into the back, returning a half-minute later looking like hell. Crystal meth? Crack? Luke thinks, Well, it’s an airport bar. Who wouldn’t? An airport isn’t even a real place. It’s a pit stop, an in-between area, a “nowhere,” a technicality — a grudging intrusion into the seamless dream of transcontinental jet flight. Airports are where you go right after you’ve died and before you get shipped off to wherever you’re going next. They’re the present tense crystallized into aluminum, concrete, and bad lighting.
    Luke watches as Rick mixes another drink and hands it to Karen — and then oil hits $250 a barrel. Even Rachel’s ears perk up at that news. She tells Luke, “That means a tank of gas for a typical North American–made sedan will cost roughly $300.”
    Luke remembers driving to the airport to catch his flight to freedom. The gas at the pumps back home was a buck and a half per litre. Would they even be open now? Just then, the power goes out. When it returns ten seconds later, the TV is white, fuzzy snow.
    ___
    Amidst all of the action and all the cocktails, what was troubling Luke most was the paradigm shift inside his head. Just yesterday he had believed that after he died he would go to a place called Eternity. Now all he had to look forward to was a paltry place called the future. The future is not the same thing as Eternity. Eternity is everything and nothing. In the future, things that were already happening keep going on, but without you.
    Because Luke no longer believed in Eternity, he had only the future. The day after he died there might be a really huge, terrific party and he wouldn’t be there to attend. A year or two later they might tear down his old neighbourhood and raise skyscrapers shaped like handguns. In two million years, squirrels might have developed frontal cortices and enslaved the world. Who was to say? Luke would never know, because he’d be dead and would have left all known time streams.
    Of course, there was no guarantee that dwellers in Eternity would get peeks back into their pre-eternal world. Luke always did wonder what the point of that would be — so they could gloat? So they could settle bets? So they could see the latest Star Wars instalment? No matter how he looked at it, there remained something petty