Player One: What Is to Become of Us Read Online Free PDF

afterworld for myself. In the past, I have tried to convince myself that there is life after death, but I have found myself largely unable to do this.”
    Alcohol loosens tongues, and Luke knew he was in the presence of an unusual mind. He asked Rachel, “Do you believe in sin?” As he asked this, he was wondering if she considered him hot. At the same time, he was wondering if he had a chance with her. At the same time, his subconscious was churning through a list of random images: the church basement on a Tuesday morning, lit by a cold sun through the south window and quiet as abandoned Chernobyl; fragments of old Battlestar Galactica episodes beaming from his TV while he watched from the kitchen, eating Campbell’s soup straight from the can; a trio of sparrows outside his bedroom window, fighting over who got control of the ledge.
    Rachel said, “I believe only in human behaviour. And I think that if your brain forces you to believe in sin, then you at least ought to calibrate sinning. Religions seem to have no Richter scale of what’s worse than something else. If you do one thing wrong, no matter how small, you’re cast away for eternity. I also find it interesting that no religion has any dimension of ecological responsibility.” Rachel paused. “Luke, I get the impression that you once believed in religion but you no longer do. Am I correct in thinking this?”
    Part of Luke was wondering about Rachel’s speech patterns; hers was neither an indoor voice nor an outdoor voice — something like robotized phone menus for United Airlines: The estimated waiting time for the next available member of the United Airline’s quality assurance team is . . . seventy-five minutes. The rest of Luke was thinking about all the dark secrets he knew about his former congregation — might as well start thinking about them in the past tense now — and he thought about his family members and all the crap they put everyone else through. And he thought about his friends and their families and their ongoing family scandals. And he acknowledged that every human on earth is a bubbling cauldron of dirt and filth. Then Luke became slightly spaced out and looked once more at the TV monitor above the bar: BUS CRASH INJURES THREE. HYDRO RATES TO INCREASE 1.5 PERCENT. OPEC MEETING GENERATES CONFLICT. All the crap and evil and meanness in the world — every single person on the planet! — and the best the news can come up with is BUS CRASH INJURES THREE?
    Luke looked at Rachel. “Yup. I no longer believe in God.”
    “Oh. Okay. Why is that?”
    “Because one morning I saw a sparrow yawn.”
    “Yawning as in waking-up yawning?”
    “Yes.”
    Rachel
    Rachel is sitting at a bad computer in an airport hotel cocktail lounge with red plasticky walls and is contemplating leaving but decides to stay because she is on a mission, a mission that began because last winter, outside the kitchen, she heard her father say to her mother, “God, what a waste of a human life.”
    “Ray, don’t talk like that. We need to find a way to get her to meet people. Maybe some men her age.”
    “And then what — she’s going to get married and raise a happy family?”
    “Ray, why are you even bringing this up?”
    “I’m bringing this up because we never bring it up. No grandkids. No son-in-law. No nothing, just a robot forever, working in the garage eighteen hours a day . . . She has no sense of humour. Medically, clinically, scientifically, no sense of humour. And for that matter, no sense of irony or empathy or affection or —”
    “I’m glad we’re talking about this. You think marriage is an option for her? You think her having a child would make everything better?”
    “Frankly, I do. Never been kissed. Never will be kissed. Christ, how sad.”
    “Stop!”
    As a result of overhearing her father’s sentiments, Rachel has determined that her life’s mission is to bear children and thus prove to the world her value as a human being. She