The Easiest Choice

“Bonobos, like all apes, do not practice permanent monogamous relationships with their partners. With the exception of mothers and their sons, no sexual activity is off-”

I turned this strange artifact off. Seriously, 25 etherium for this - what did they call it again - television? Sensatory-philes are so weird: streaming pods through the neurochip is obviously superior. How were people ever entertained by an object that only appealed to two of the seven senses?

Besides, it was time for work. Maybe afterwards I could go down to the thrift shop and look for a different CD at the bottom of a pile of cell phones and printers.

As I powered up my teleportation chamber, I couldn’t help but wonder what people of the television-age would think of this device. I vaguely remember hearing that people considered it to be a suicide device, that by dismantling and reassembling your body cell by cell you are simple killing yourself and making a clone to take your place.

Those poor fools, would it even be possible to explain the emergent theory of consciousness to them? It’s said even the educated ones believed in ridiculous myths: that their cell phones would make them infertile, that “natural” food was healthier than GMOs, that we only use 20% of our brain.

But maybe those simpletons had it right, I thought, as the teleporter spat me out at work. Before we were able to make transistors just five atoms wide, jobs were a source of fulfillment. There were professors, architects, engineers, doctors, lawyers, even artists and athletes - although you usually had to have rich parents.

Now - unless you were super smart or super rich - you spent your days powering the Source, which makes the world go round. Nobody really knows what this all-powerful, renewable energy source is, or why 95% of Earth has to run around on treadmills to harness the Source. Although with the money they paid us and the lifestyles we led, why question it? It was the Source that allowed society to reach the point where everyone's needs and most of their wants could be fulfilled: of course most of us didn’t question it. I think the Chancellor knows, and maybe some of his advisors, but that’s it.

The work wasn’t even that bad. Unless you were particularly greedy, you could get away with a light jog, the sort of light jog where you could stream pods on your neurochip without it affecting your performance. Choosing which pod to stream could be overwhelming, with the billions of options I had. So, every now and then, I preferred to just let my thoughts wander.

My brain couldn’t help but go back to these early humans and how my life was better than theirs in every way but one. Back then, it was expected to settle down and have a family, you even got tax breaks for it. Now, not only was it not the norm, it was a taboo. People would look at you like you were some bumbling idiot stuck in the past, and you would get taxed more too. I can’t even remember the last time I’d seen a family. Almost all of us were test tube babies, raised by the state until we were eighteen.

Most people seemed to prefer this. You could get high, fuck the town, get drunk, go rock climbing, eat delicious food, go on day trips, attend holographic concerts with Elvis Presly and Juice Wrld, and never have to worry about aging parents or gold-digging cousins. I used to think you had to be crazy to give all that up to scrape shit off a diaper at 3 AM and pour all your hard earned etherium into a college fund. I’m still not sure how I feel now but—

Pink. Bright pink hair with a lip piercing and amber eyes. I’d seen her before. You think I’d remember someone that looks like that. What was she doing here? All the treadmills in the room were taken?

“Hi! Um, I don’t usually do this, but would you like to grab some coffee when you get off? I get off at five.”

I usually don’t have the energy to hook up right after work, but she was really pretty.

“Five works for me,” I said, containing my excitement. “I’m Winston by the way.”

I wished you had warned me before you smiled. You should have told me that I’d never be able to forget that smile, that it would make feel like I was 12 and you were the first girl I’d talked to, that I would turn into a scientist and an entertainer to figure out how to make you smile on days that nothing seemed to go right, that a year from now I would walk through a thunderstorm to buy you flowers so that you’d smile.

But without warning me you smiled and said, “I’m Octavia.”

#

Octavia sat across from me, coffee in hand, with her left ankle neatly crossed on top of her right thigh. Her stubborn eyes refused to stop looking directly at me, into me. I was being sized up, here we go again. She’ll be back at my place within the hour.

“Do you recognize me from somewhere?”

“I do, but I can’t place my finger on it. Help me out?”

“I saw you buying a television in the thrift shop,” she admitted. “Most people don’t even give them a second look. They aren’t curious about the past like you. When I realized we worked in the same building, I had to ask you out.”

It has been a while since someone has been into me and not just my body. Could this be more than just a hookup?

“So you’re curious about what people used to do for entertainment. What else are you curious about?”

“I wonder what having a family would be like, but I don’t think I’d ever go through with it. I don’t want to be a social pariah, you know?”

“Do you ever wonder what the Source is?”

“From time to time. But I don’t put too much thought into it. There’s so many pods to stream, so many friends to see, so many places to go while I’m still young. Although it’s weird that the Source needs so many people to power it, right? We’ve automated most jobs away, so why not this?”

“What would you do to find out what the Source is?”

“Not much. Like I said, I’m busy and my life is damn-near perfect. I think all of us can say that. I’m happy like 95% of the time and get to do whatever the hell I want. Still, it would be interesting to know.”

Her face dropped a little, and I felt like I was flunking a job interview. Octavia must have been around 5’3” and no more than 100 pounds, but I couldn’t help feeling slightly scared of her. She was making me feel things I hadn’t felt, think things I rarely did, and totally controlling the conversation too. It was my turn now.

“So, why are you curious about the past?”

“He who controls the past controls the future. Do you know where that’s from Winston?”

“No I don’t.” I steered the conversation into more mundane, comfortable territory. I found out where Octavia grew up, that she liked to paint, that her favorite color was orange, and her favorite flavor of ice cream was coffee. I found out that she had three boyfriends but none of them lasted longer than three months and that she was named after a Roman emperor. I found out that she really was looking for more than just sex because when I invited her to my place, she said that I’d have to take her on a proper date first.

I thought about her smile for the rest of the day, but I also thought about the things she forced me to think about. I’ve thought about the past and the Source before, but it had always been a fleeting moment, a flash in the pan. These must be the longest, deepest thoughts I’ve had that weren’t about food, vacations, gossip about a five percent-er, the latest pod, or whatever fad that people would talk about for ten minutes before moving on to the next. This blend of confusion, fear, and excitement, was this what it felt like to be in love?

On each of our “proper dates,” Octavia drew me deeper and deeper down this hole. And at some point, I don’t know when, it was me asking her the questions. Why do we learn Math, Science, and English in school but only learn history through the internet and old people and thrift shops? Why do the news pods only talk about five percent-er celebrities and not the Chancellor? Why do we feel the constant need for stimulation, for pods? Has anyone ever seen this Chancellor in person? If the Source really powers everything, why haven’t they found a more efficient way to harness it? Who even are “they?” How did they convince everyone to stop having families?

I reasoned it must not be that nefarious of a plot. Every now and then, people do talk about these things openly, in person and online, and no harm seems to come of it. Still, I didn’t even know who I would ask to find the answers we wanted.

I’ll admit, I asked these questions at first because I know my curiosity made you smile. But now I asked myself these questions even when you weren’t around. I rarely streamed pods or saw friends after a while, it was all starting to seem pointless; I must have been the only person on Earth who took time to do nothing. My life before Octavia was a shade of vibrant gray: shiny and exciting, but undeniably gray.

#

My life changed forever the day I got her those flowers. Octavia had finally moved into my apartment by then, and when I came in dripping wet, bouquet in hand, she still didn’t smile. I could tell she was a bit off, but Octavia only ever let me know what she wanted to let me know.

“Winston, I think I trust you now.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. It’s time that I tell you the truth about me, the Source, everything.”

“Oh, you have a new theory! Do tell.” She sat perfectly straight, hair neatly parted to the side instead of her usual bed-head look. I braced myself for another one of her lectures.

“It’s not a theory, love, I know the truth. You’ve questioned everything in your life except how you met me. I said we work in the same building, but have you ever seen me before all this?”

“Well, it's a huge building and—”

“I have pink hair and you’ve worked there for five years: you would have noticed. We’ve been watching you for a while now and think you can be of use to our movement, the movement to free your people.”

I avoided eye contact and did my best poker face. I hated that Octavia could always tell what I’m thinking. But it didn’t work.

“I’m not crazy Winston, please just hear me out. You’ve clearly picked up by now that something isn’t right with your world, with your life. Only the Chancellor can view the data on your neurochips, but our movement was able to hack in. And we are able to find you because you were one of maybe a million who could work an entire day without streaming pods. Even if it was only one day every month, you spent more time thinking than all of them, and that makes you dangerous to them and useful to us.”

I paused, unsure whether to indulge her further or ask her what drugs she had taken recently. “Okay I’ll bite, who is us and them?”

“There’s no easy way to say this: you’re a clone. That’s why they don’t want you to try and have kids because most of you can’t. What you would call the 5% are the real humans, and there are a lot more of them then you think. The Source isn’t even real: you’re part of an early experiment. They want to test the minimum quality of life they’d need to provide clones to get them to do menial labor without question. So, they give you enough money to fulfill most of your wants, but once they perfect this system they will make enough money to fulfill desires someone like you would never even dream of: owning countries, colonizing planets, making trillions of people know their name long after they have died. I suppose it’s more about power than money actually but-”

“Colonizing planets?”

Octavia waved her hand dismissively. “We made contact with other planets decades ago, I’ll get into that later. But when you’re not eating at what you think is a five-star restaurant or travelling to the parts of the world they’ll let you travel to, you’re streaming pods. They make the pods addictive on purpose, by activating almost all of your senses and usually only lasting five minutes. So you have no real down-time, no time when you’d sit and let your mind wander and think about all the things in your life that make no damn sense. Well no, not you. Because like I said our movement-

“You still haven’t told me who your movement is.”

“Well, we are part of the 5%, we are real humans. The humans, they’re trying to create ‘ethical slavery,’: that’s what you are now, an ethical slave, since you do your work willingly, and like you told me you don’t even bother to question it since you’re happy 95% of the time. But not all of us believe in this, some of us think that hiding the truth from you clones is wrong, that you can’t consent to something if you aren’t fully informed. We want to help free you. So we infiltrated the enforcers: humans who pose as clones to observe them for the experiment. They also get rid of any clones who start to think too hard. If I weren’t a double agent, that’s what I’d be doing right now.”

Octavia’s whole body was shaking.

“This … you can’t just expect me to believe all that, you know that right? Without any proof either?”

“Okay Winston” she said, slowly regaining her composure. “I’ll give you a choice. Your work supervisor is part of the movement too, and we have a secret code to distinguish ourselves from the real enforcers. Tomorrow at work, go and tell him that there is a dead rat stuck underneath your treadmill, and you’ll see that I am telling the truth. He’ll initiate you as a member of the movement, and you’ll have to give up your luxurious lifestyle and live under the radar. You’ll be a fugitive, who has to sleep in sewer tunnels and get by on crumbs. You can’t have any contact with people from your old life either. If the enforcers find you, they will shoot to kill. But, as long as we don’t die, we can still be together. Or, if you really are happy with your life, with being a slave, you can keep living as you were. If you choose the second option, well, this will have to be goodbye.”

Without warning I curled over and vomited my lunch all over the carpet. I sat up, chunks still coming out my nose, focusing all my brainpower on getting these words out.

“You don’t mean to say you’ve never loved me, that this was all part of your mission?”

Octavia stood up and walked towards the door without saying anything. Before leaving, she turned to face me but ended up looking down at the floor.

“I was never supposed to love you, but I do now. Still, I’ve committed myself to the movement, and if you choose the second option, I’ll have to keep doing my job. I’m sorry Winston. I never wanted to hurt you, but this was the only way. I’m sorry.”

The tiniest tear fell onto the carpet before she shut the door.

#

Octavia had told me that I had two choices, but I’m sure even she knew that was a lie. A life without her was not a real option.

“Hey boss, um, it looks like there’s a dead rat stuck under my treadmill.”

“Sorry Winston, did you say a dead rat?”

“Yup, there’s a dead rat stuck under my treadmill so-”

#

I was relieved to wake up in a strange room tied to a metal chair, because now I knew that Octavia was telling me the truth, that we could still be together. The rest of it, clones and aliens and slaves, was just noise. But why would they tie me down?

It was a small room, maybe about the size of an outdoor shed actually, except it was all concrete and the only light came from a small ceiling lamp in the center of the room. Come to think of it, it seemed straight out of a horror pod.

Suddenly, the door creaked open, and a short, stout, bearded man waddled in. As he stepped into the light, I was sure I knew him from somewhere, a news pods perhaps?

The man spoke in a squeaky, hoarse voice, like he had just been punched in the throat.

“Yes, you guessed right, it’s me, the Chancellor. Please hold your applause”

I would never have guessed someone so un-intimidating was the supreme leader over trillions of people. Well, if that part is even true.

“So, you’re part of the movement too?

The Chancellor threw back his head and laughed the fakest, most obnoxious laugh I had ever heard. He laughed this fake laugh for at least five minutes, wiping fake tears from his eyes.

“You know, I never thought that whole scheme would work. All that stuff about aliens and clones, you really believed all that? Well, love makes men believe crazy things I guess.”

“So, Octavia doesn’t love me?” I asked in disbelief, not caring whether I lived or died if that answer was yes.

The Chancellor slowly exhaled.

“Man, I don’t even know who that is. All the enforcers use fake names.”

“So enforcers are real? Am I a clone then?”

“I’ll explain everything, and then give you a choice. Except this time the choice will be real. To start, you aren’t a clone, you're a test tube baby just like we said. Well, some old fart might argue that you’re more of a cyborg because of that neurochip, but you were born a human. That part about giving you a good life and distracting you with addicting pods in your free time, that’s true too. We can monitor your neurochip and send enforcers to check on you if you’re spending a little too much time not streaming pods. Thrift shops are also a great place to station enforcers because anyone who is interested in the past is already too close to the truth. You are an ethical slave, living amongst enforcers. The 5% aren’t real, just another useful distraction.”

“What’s the Source then?”

The Chancellor glared at me, somehow unaware that he wasn’t even slightly scary, even if I was chained to this chair in a concrete room.

“You’d be wise not to interrupt me again, son. The Source is this entire damn planet: it’s a giant battery. We aren’t on Earth, that was probably the biggest ruse we had to pull off. Running on the treadmills creates electricity which is stored in the planet's core. About 20% of that electricity is used to run this tiny world, although we’ve convinced you that it’s as large as Earth. The rest of it is siphoned off to Earth. There’s better ways to generate electricity, of course, but in our previous experiments we found that making people run all day was to our advantage, that they were too worn out to do any serious thinking. But we still get people like you who break out of the spell. I have to say I’m quite surprised, it’s usually ugly people with no social life or-”

“If you’re going to kill me, just do it already.”

“KILL you? What do you think this is? We are ethical people, and we have always given you a choice. You were never forced to run on a treadmill or stream pods all day, and I won’t force you to go back to that. Our enforcers simply catch people like you who are the slightest bit unsatisfied. We watch over you for a bit too, so you trust us, so you tell us on your own free will if you’re truly unsatisfied, enough to live as a sewer-rat who could die at any moment instead. Enforcers don’t have to make their subjects fall in love, but a lot of the time it’s the easiest way to make you trust us. But now that you know the full truth, you get to make a real choice, and the options are much more pleasant. The first option is to send you to Earth. Sure, you don’t have the skills to get a great job, and you probably won’t amount to much, but there will be people to help you. You can start a family if that’s still what you want. Or, you could go back to your old life, to being an attractive single young man with a rich social life and money to spare. We’ll have to wipe part of your memory and reprogram your neurochip to make you less curious, for the sake of your own happiness. It’s completely your choice, and you can have all the time you need to decide. What could be more ethical than that! People on Earth never get a choice like this. There’s just one caveat: you can’t leave this room until you make your choice.”

It was the easiest choice I ever made.