You learn everything about the 20th century from the other patients. Every pop culture reference, joke, and piece of slang. There's history you weren't taught in school, too, like it was scrubbed clean of all the West's faults. Dirty secrets about America, and you're actually embarrassed your countries merged in 2019.
But will they, this time, with Liber8 on the loose?
They call this "The Nuthouse," but many of the people at Riverview are here voluntarily and by all indications sane. They come in with their own clothes and belongings, and only anything sharp is taken away, along with choking hazards like shoelaces and belts and scarves. You always liked scarves, but they got in the way and so did ties, when you were hunched over a panelboard or transformer. Your face so close to a circuit that people would kindly remind you there were magnifiers for that.
"There ain't enough beds for these assholes," your chess partner tells you, nodding at the sullen young woman handing over her long, turquoise fabric. "There's people in real need here. These fakers just want the attention."
Drug addiction, depression, melancholy suicidal thoughts. Just as many people here are schizophrenic and can't take care of themselves, but your heart goes out to those people who want to stop breathing. Some come in on gurneys, while others give their parents a limp hug and shuffle in on two feet.
"They're aliens," your partner whispers, and he doesn't mean the human kind. "Rip off their skin and they'll be green underneath." He's not being sarcastic, either. Yet they've got him on a lower dose.
One day the pills make you drowsy; the next night you can't sleep. You were calm, under the circumstances, until a week into your treatment. Now the anxiety keeps you wired and nervous. The dayroom lets in lots of light on sunny days, but now it's too bright, so you trade a week's dessert for sunglasses. You're dizzy when you try to stand up, try to walk, so your doctor finally, finally lowers the dose after months of suffering. You've learned from fellow patients how to fake sanity. They let you out to walk the grounds, to go from building to building. You're one of the least threatening schizophrenics here. You started teaching the others physics, for chrissake, and at least a quarter of them would listen.
But in Group, you're prompted to remember, and you bite your nails - you do that now - and fidget, and under the gaze of eight sets of eyes and the earnest prompting of the group leader, you admit that it's hard. It's hard to feel part of a world that isn't your own. You leave it vague in Group. Talk about your Vancouver childhood like it was 1974 and not 2059. (The world will change so very, very much.) They don't believe for a second you have a rich dad and two graduate degrees. Why would you be here? You prefer being quiet in Group, listening to these people's stories, their struggles. Riverview is boring without it, even with the dayroom's TV. Even with the small library of books made of real paper. Ripped and stained and smelling of cigarettes, but tangible, like an e-book isn't and can't be. You're actually allowed to borrow more than one at a time, and the nights you can't sleep, you devour them. At the bottom of the shelves you find the classic science fiction. William Gibson, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells. Tonight, you pick up "The Time Machine" again, because someone's screaming down the hall, and you need something to help you forget.