Generation A by Douglas Coupland

with a human voice I actually recognized—if you’ve ever phoned a large corporation and been stuck in voice-mail hell, you know the sensation. And so they piped in Louise. “Samantha, this isn’t good science.”
    “Louise, I’m going crazy.”
    “Don’t go crazy. It’ll last a bit longer, and then you’re free.”
    “How much longer?”
    “I can’t say.”
    “You’re no better than Lisa.”
    “Samantha, the point is that we really have to be as neutral as possible.”
    “Why?”
    “Because science is about being neutral, and our results are too valuable to screw up.”
    “Then give me something to make time go more quickly. That new stuff, Solon. My mother takes it.”
    There was a pause. “Solon? Sorry, Sam, I can’t give you Solon.”
    “Why can’t I see you, at least? I haven’t seen a human being in a week. How come?” (I don’t know if anyone mentioned it, but staff never used the corridors outside the rooms. This added a stagy apocalyptic feel to the experience, as though everyone but me had been taken away by a Stephen King plague.)
    “Samantha, just take my word for it that what we’re doing is based on sound science and your time here is finite.”
    “Right. As opposed to infinite? Lisa tells me my family is fine and all.”
    “No need for a tone, Samantha. Just hang in there, okay?”
    “Fat lot of good you are.”
    “Goodbye, Samantha.”
    I tried to calm myself by playing Earth sandwich in my head. The opposite of Atlanta would be about a thousand miles west of Perth, in the Indian Ocean. It wasn’t a fun month. But it passed. I did calisthenics, yoga, weight training (with light fixtures) and was systematically sprayed with a narcotizing mist every time they needed my body for whatever scary shit they were doing with me. I lost the five final remaining pounds of flab left on my frame and at least had that as a plus.
    I thought about my beliefless parents floating about the Southeast Asian archipelago, eating chocolate brioches while discussing the absence of God as though he were a lost hiker found dead at the bottom of a cliff.
    And I did more sit-ups.
    And I did more crunches.
    And I did more . . . you get the point.
    They dropped me off in Los Angeles in time to catch the once-a-week L.A.–Auckland commercial flight. Seeing as the security budget for me was zilch, the combined U.S. and New Zealand governments found me a wig and a slutty dress to conceal my identity for the flight. My discharging officer termed the costume “lifestyle-inappropriate,” asked me for my autograph and then dropped me off curbside at the LAX decontamination shuttle.
    After the weeks of boredom in my cell, I felt like I’d trashed my school uniform and was now ditching school. The fun thing about dressing like a slut is that people treat you like a slut. Feminism be damned; a man came up to me at LAX and gave me an unsolicited shoulder massage. And from my brief experience at the Terminal 6 bar, I learned that a woman need never pay for her own drinks if she plays her cards right. Cripes, listen to me—but I was so effing tired of being the goody two-shoes! My two brothers spent their lives getting away with blue murder, but if I got caught with something as minor as the smell of cigarette smoke on my sweater, I was grounded and had to hear my parents’ heavily freighted, judgmental sighs for at least a week.
    I was given an A seat and thus had a Pacific panorama for the entire flight. At one point the captain asked everybody to pull down their shades so that people could see their video screens properly. “In any event, there’s nothing out there to see.” I glanced out and saw the ocean forever, some wispy clouds and a sun too bright to focus on—like a snapshot of life after death—a very boring life after death.
    Remember, I’d had a month to mull over my mother’s phone call, and hadn’t yet drawn a final conclusion. It was hard not to stop overthinking the matter of my own