Free Where the Lost Things Are by Rudy Rucker

 
    I first met Jack when were vegetating in the Journey’s End senior facility in Harrods Creek, Kentucky. One day some scientists discovered something they trademarked as bluegene, and everyone’s meds got better. Journey’s End went out of business. Thanks to bluegene, society could dose us geezers and set us free. Bony cattle in patchy pastures.
    We still needed housing, so they opened up some abandoned exurban condos. Plenty of those around, what with the population drop, and the reborn fad for urban living. Jack and I ended up in a master bedroom with beige drywall and twin beds. Our wives were dead, you understand.
    Nobody but freeloading geezers in the decrepit London Earl development we inhabited, way out Route 42 near Goshen, amid fields and spindly trees. On our own. We had big-screen TVs, cheap as piss, made of squidskin.
    A fellow named Hector came by the London Earl condos with his crew once a week. They’d bag and haul any of the clients who’d “passed,” and hand out food packs and bluegene pills to the rest of us. The pills were in short supply; you didn’t get but seven at a time.
    My kids said they were glad about my new meds, but I worried maybe they weren’t. I remembered how I’d felt about my own parents. They’d hung on for longer than I’d bargained for.
    With bluegene, I myself might be around till I was a hundred. Lucid till the end, still talking, still giving advice. Ugh. I told the kids not to feel like they had to keep in close touch. Enough was enough.
    Meanwhile I had my friend Jack, and the other coots and biddies living in the London Earl condos with us. Kind of a scene. The bluegene meds had kicked up the flirtations a notch. I had a lady friend called Darly— a generous beauty in her way: plump around the middle but even plumper top and bottom. She’d sold cosmetics over the social nets for Karing Kate for twenty, thirty years. She’d even earned the legendary pink leather Karing Kate sample case, which she carried with her at all times.
    Skinny Jack was seeing a skinny Allen County hillbilly called Amara. She’d been a backup singer for most of her life, even toured with Waddy Peytona and his Jumper Cables. Still looked sorta cute in her google glasses, even though they were Dollar Store knockoffs. Thanks to the glasses, Amara was recording nearly everything she saw. But never mind—you don’t want to hear about Darly’s figure or Amara’s google glasses. Geezers are nauseating. We know our place. The London Earl subdivision.
    The thing I do want to tell you about is our journey into the alsoverse with Jack—and how we escaped.
    It started one evening when Jack and I were in our two-sink bathroom, taking our nightly bluegene pills. Chalky little pastel blue footballs. We liked to dose together so as to increase our odds of remembering to do it. For the third or fourth evening in a row, Jack fumbled the job. His bluegene pill fell to the floor. It made a tiny tic and rolled out of sight.
    â€œOh well,” said Jack, turning to leave the bathroom. “Another one gone.”
    â€œGet down on the floor and look for it!” I yelled. “You knows what happens if you miss too many doses.”
    â€œI turn into roadkill,” said Jack. “Or so Hector says. But it’s a slow process.”
    â€œNot that slow.” With a theatrical sigh, I bent over to peer at the base of the sink cabinet. The things I do for my friends.
    â€œWhen something small drops onto the floor it disappears,” said Jack. “Surely you’ve noticed that, Bart.”
    â€œIt’s Bert,” I muttered. He was always forgetting my name.
    â€œLooking for it makes things worse,” said Jack. “Elementary quantum mechanics. The observer effect. An electron doesn’t have a position until it’s observed. A dropped pill isn’t fully lost until you look for it. And then its wave