Chapter One
Slur heroine. The drug of the future. Pure bliss with zero side effects. No one saw a single thing wrong with it, so much so that you could turn on any T.V and see a commercial advertising it. There are more commercials than T.V shows nowadays.
“My name’s Avey Barnes, and I took slur heroin.” my voice is strong, confident, and full of life. A strange feeling to have after uttering that sequence of words. It would have been before 2020, at least. Now it was just a simple focus group for us slur heroine users to talk about what could be improved. You’d think we were discussing blender blades, not a hallucinatory drug.
“And how did you like it?” the voice was soft but chipper, and belonged to an attractive blond woman. The focus leader.
I shrugged. The truth is I loved it. I had never felt so free before. But something unsettled me about saying it out loud. As if John would hear me from across the city…So, instead I shrugged. I shrugged and told her it was “Fine, I guess.” The woman didn’t seem satisfied with my answer. She raised her eyebrows and clutched her clipboard a bit tighter.
“Do you have anything more to say Ms. Barnes?” she asked, her beautiful professionalism managing to stay in tact. It occurred to me that if I didn’t give sufficient feedback, I wouldn’t get paid the 30 dollars I was promised to receive if I partook in this “discussion.”
“Yeah…It was amazing. There weren’t any side effects, and the trip faded away in my sleep, so it wasn’t a random or sudden transition.” I said, my hands moving in front of me, as if trying to translate the words I was saying into strange signals. “And the trip itself…I can’t even begin to explain it. Everything was blurred into static, but glitches of different shades of blue kept slipping beautifully into view. Like the sky or the sea or a blue computer screen. It was…magnificent.” The blond goddess seemed satisfied now. She didn’t ask if I had suggestions to make it better. They didn’t do that anymore. Nothing negative about a project that could shove liability in the direction of the company. That’s what John claimed, anyway. God, what would he do if he found out I was doing this? Quickly, I sat back down.
“Would anyone else like to speak?” The woman’s voice was silky smooth compared to my brash and much-too-thick-for-a-woman voice.
A chair screeched against the floor as someone else stood up. A stout, slightly overweight, man with sweaty skin and oily hair. He was uncomfortable to look at, like his spare time was spent killing women and throwing their bodies into the Hudson. Still, I did my part and sat quietly while he spoke. I heard a few words, like “strange” and “life-changing” which told me he was a new user, but not soon after he started speaking, my mind drifted back to John; to what excuse I would use this time, and how I could back up my story.
God damn John. He’d been my roommate for about two years now. My complicated “lover” for one and a half. I say complicated and put “lover” in quotation marks, because I don’t love him, he doesn’t love me, and we are not in a relationship. We hadn’t even known each other until the day we both moved in. He never left the apartment and was a radical anarchist who grew his own food and hated when I watched T.V…his sex was amazing, though. I smiled at the thought. Complicated, yeah, but not by any means displeasing.
My attention was brought back to the lushly furnished room I was sitting in when the Focus Leader stood up in her bright pink stilettos. We all followed her lead, and then we held hands. It felt all too much like a support group, not a focus group. I’d had enough of support groups.
When I still lived with my parents, they made me go to AA meetings in return for them letting me stay at their place. Except I’m not an alcoholic. Honest to God, I’m not. They were born in 2013, they thought any excessive partying immediately meant excessive drinking and unhealthy behavior. They didn’t seem to understand that everything was different in 2062. That it had been different since 2020. Had they just slept through 40 years of their life and refused to accept change? Complaining about the lack of Breaking Bad reruns on T.V, or the lack of anything on T.V. So I left. I moved out and lucked across John. And I was done with support groups. I didn’t need support, and I didn’t enjoy groups.
Yet here I was, in a mock support group focus group. I guess it was vintage or something, but that’s like saying kale is vintage. A bunch of crazies still eat it, and they ate it back then, but the taste never changed. Still, I didn’t really have much of a choice if I wanted to get paid (and supplied with more slur heroine), so I held hands with the strangers to either side of me. I went to so many of these focus groups, and every time we came back, they asked me different questions but I still manage to answer the same way. Focus groups weren’t supposed to work like this, John said. They had objective partakers who changed every meeting, and it wasn’t some sort of income. If he knew I was at one of these damn things, he’d kick me out faster than his brain could even rationalize. I sighed and then we all released hands. I honestly still don’t exactly know why we did that at the end of each meeting. We didn’t pray or say nice things to each other, or do a circle squeeze and all that other Girl Scout shit. We just…held hands for a minute until the Leader let go. Then we all shook her hand on our way out the door, like we were respectable business men and women, not drug testers. Not junkies hidden behind a drug with no side effects.
The whole “no side effects” claim had everyone rushing towards Slur - yes, the fact that it has a street name should scare you - but what they don’t really tell you is that you can still get addicted. But how is addiction a side effect if nothing happens when you use it? And it’s more than easily attainable? At a quality price? It’s like getting addicted to vegetables. There isn’t anything wrong with it, you just really fucking love vegetables.
So we shook hands respectfully, didn’t question the fact that our leader changed every week, didn’t question that our dates for meetings switched sporadically and randomly. Didn’t question why in the world we placed dark blue droplets in our eyes to feel something real.
We were all a bunch of sheep, and I cannot believe it took me this long to realize it.
