A Dangerous Drug
There were modern ways to do everything quickly and efficiently, but Arnold preferred the older ways, the ways of his childhood. It was slower, but that gave it the weight of meaning. He'd turned his T-Link off days ago, and for the first time in decades he was feeling like a real person again. They had some fancy technobabble name, something with words like psychokinetic and electroneural interface and whatnot, but everyone just called them the telepathic links, or T-Links for short. They'd revolutionized everything, starting around when he was just getting out of college, and he'd been linked up ever since he'd first gotten his hands on one of the early versions. Not anymore, though.
So, rather than just thinking about what music he wanted to play, Arnold set down the box he'd been staring at and walked over to select a track and press the play button with his own hands. His bulky stereo was itself a relic of the forgotten past: a rare household appliance that was not connected to the internet at all. It could only hold a few terabytes of music rather than being connected to the various web databases that held every song known to man, and it had to be loaded onto a practically ancient storage chip about half the size of his thumbnail, but that was just fine. Going through the extra effort to listen to music made it feel more meaningful, less transitory, and all the more pleasant for it.
The mournful notes of a lone violin rolled forth from the speakers, followed shortly by the full orchestra joining in. It brought a fond smile to Arnold's face as he walked back to his favorite chair, an overstuffed thing that made him feel like he was being half hugged, half smothered by a particularly aggressive cloud. It was the sound of
real instruments being played by
actual human hands, which made it yet another ancient relic. This particular recording was from 2208, the last performance of the London Symphony after years of advancements in robotics and changing tastes of those wealthy enough to pay for such shows finally spelled the doom of classical music played by human hands. This was yet another oddity that had always made Arnold feel a man apart from his peers: he preferred this older music, the kind that had a human touch, because it felt like it had an actual soul rather than being a carefully calibrated set of perfect notes. The imperfections and creative flourishes of a human musician were, in his opinion, a part of what made music worth listening to. The people at large preferred the technically perfect, electronically produced music of the modern age, of course.
The last century had been full of those anachronistic feelings, moreso even than the many prior decades. Arnold was pushing into the middle of his third century of life, just shy of six months until his two hundred forty-second birthday. He never thought that he'd live this long back in 2213, when he'd just gotten out of college and saw the world as his playground. Reaching one hundred had been more or less a given at that point, but medical advancements had progressed fast enough that Arnold and others of his generation seemed to have barely aged past early adulthood at all. Just days ago he'd seen the bit of news that set everyone else buzzing with excitement: researchers thought they'd finally cracked the last barriers of longevity and found out how to stave off aging permanently. While the prospect of true immortality excited others, that news was what had sent Arnold to retreat into the past as literally as he could manage it. He kept his eyes off of the wooden box and sleek metal syringe syringe sitting on the table beside his chair, but he could almost
feel them sitting there as he closed his eyes and let the music carry his thoughts back to 2200, when life had been simpler.
It was all so... fuzzy. He could remember being awed by some of the first flying cars that were more than just a prohibitively expensive gimmick. Hell, he could remember the transition when the word 'flying' no longer needed to be said, thanks to the old breed dying out. It was hard to remember what the ancient vehicles sounded like though, the ones that still clonked along with their internal combustion engines. The modern thorium batteries made cars run almost silently, but Arnold could remember that, once upon a time, the noise of an engine was part of the experience. There was some time he'd rode in one of those old cars, something from back in the very early 2100s that his grandfather maintained with pride, but the memory was all soft around the edges. It seemed time had taken as much a toll on his mind as it had his spirit.
Arnold sighed and opened his eyes as he reached for the syringe. Getting his hands on the illegal substance had been tricky indeed, but he'd managed it. NOS, they called it. Like the T-Links, it too had some kind of scientific name, but only police and chemists bothered to use it. NOS was short for 'nostalgia' and also, in a fittingly nostalgic twist, for an old chemical injection system used in car engines to make them go faster. Apparently the idea was that the old NOS made cars go fast, and the new NOS would make your brain go fast. Arnold didn't bother pretending to be hesitant or afraid: he stuck the applicator end to his forearm and pressed the button on the other side. He didn't feel a thing as the nanotubes pierced his flesh and delivered the chemicals right into his bloodstream, and for a few minutes he thought perhaps he'd been duped.
But then it hit him: that same memory he'd been grasping for, now bright and vivid like it'd happened yesterday. He could hear the roar of the engine, like some massive beast was trapped under the hood of the car and purring and growling as they went. There was even more to it than that: even as he knew he was sitting in his overstuffed chair, Arnold could
feel the movement of his grandfather's prized car. There was a constant but faint vibration from the engine itself, but there were also larger jolts as the wheels rolled along the uneven dirt road. He could also feel the sensation of the chill wind from the open window stinging his face. Arnold remembered it all so clearly now, including his own laughter being nearly drowned out by the wind and his grandfather grinning at him through a bushy beard. They weren't going anywhere, they'd just been driving around for the fun of it. It was about spending time together and just doing something exciting.
That was when the truth finally surfaced in Arnold's mind: this was exactly what was missing, the root of the problem with the modern world. Nobody took such joys in life anymore. There were no more drives just for fun down a bumpy dirt road, everyone just used their T-Link to think where they wanted to go and their car got busy flying. People lived in a sanitized and anesthetized world where the thrill of risk was minimal at best, with everything controlled by AI and risk-averse algorithms. He'd spent his entire life working on some of those very bits of code, slaving away to help keep the world carefully controlled in every possible aspect in order to make sure everyone was safe and healthy. It was all meant to help people, but now he could see just how much of their collective humanity had been stripped away by all of this technology.
With this horrible juxtaposition filling his mind, the dull horror of modernity versus the comforting warmth of nostalgia, Arnold reached out blindly for the wooden box sitting on the table. The clatter of metal on tile told him that he'd knocked the lamp over, but that was fine. He wouldn't need the light any longer anyway. He pulled the box closer, fighting a strange numbness in his fingers, and eventually got it onto his lap. It was a plain thing, dark and battered with age. It was yet another relic of the distant past; supposedly one of his great great great grandfathers had built it with his own hands, just for the purpose of holding the family heirloom inside.
Arnold flipped the lid of the box open and stared down at the gleaming silver metal that took up the majority of the leather-lined interior. Weaponry had advanced to the point that the six-shot revolver seemed just about as barbaric is a simple club. Laser weapons were the preferred armament of police and military personnel, but it wasn't uncommon to see them using guns that fired metal slugs with an array of electromagnets. Arnold had tried out some of those guns at a firing range before, just to sate his curiosity, but they had been far too smooth and steady. They'd barely felt
real compared to his memory of firing the family revolver. His father had taken him out into the countryside shortly after his 16th birthday to introduce him to the heirloom and show him how it worked and how to keep it clean and in working order. The weight of it, and the kickback when it fired, had set his heart racing. Even the memory of it, fueled by the NOS coursing through his veins, made Arnold feel short of breath. His hands went through the practiced motions of cleaning the gun, making sure to put everything back into its designated place when he was done with it.
For a moment he felt a stabbing sadness at the knowledge that the gun would not be handed down to anyone else, that he'd put off having children for so long that he was now certain to be the end of his family line. Perhaps that was for the best. A couple years back, Arnold had written a will saying to donate all his belongings and wealth to the local museum. That was really the only place left for relics of the past in this modern age where barely anyone cared to look to the past. There was a carefully written out history of the ownership of the revolver set into the lid of the case, and that might be of some interest to a museum. Hopefully the gun would be displayed there, after it was cleaned.
Arnold carefully closed the box and set it aside, then loaded the revolver with a single round. He felt no hesitation or fear, only relief at the prospect of no longer feeling like a man born into the wrong time. With the warm haze of nostalgia coursing through him, Arnold thought of happier times as he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
~~~
An almost unnoticed item trickled across the bottoms of thousands of holographic projection screens while an immaculately beautiful and entirely artificial image of a woman above spoke of the booming growth of the economy. Between blurbs written on subjects like
Ten dead in Cairo explosion and
Med-tech stocks soar on promise of immortality, there was one that ticked by that seemed not to truly fit among such important stories.
Another NOS-related suicide in New York City, police and medical experts advise staying away from this dangerous drug. Such stories were an almost daily occurrence, and thus far too common for anyone to care about. There was work to be done, progress to be made, and of course that meant there was no time to waste caring about fools who couldn't let go of the past.