Incarnate- Essence

by Thomas Harper

  “Everything go smoothly?” she asked as I went to the sink.

  “I guess we’ll find out when these overnight bacterial growths come in,” I said, rinsing my hands.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” Akira said without looking at me, “I did some tests with these new stocks. I didn’t see the same contamination as our old stocks.”

  I gave a brief shrug, “Laura says the contamination might have been her spacing out and forgetting to use sterile technique.”

  “These growths should be fine,” Akira said, exhaling slowly as she opened the bread bag and removed two slices.

  “Have you talked to Masaru lately?” I asked, drying my hands on a towel.

  “You’ve been asking that a lot the past few days,” Akira said, looking down at her partially constructed sandwich without moving.

  “Just curious.”

  “No,” she said, “but, that’s not his…” she exhaled again, “I did get a hold of Salia, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She gave some of the sample she took from you to a couple friends of hers,” Akira said, setting her knife down and turning to look at me, “the ones I told you about.”

  “The physical chemists.”

  She nodded. “They were as puzzled as I am about its high-energy state. They performed circular dichroism experiments on it and…they got some really weird results.”

  “What kind of weird results?”

  “It showed chirality beyond what’s already present in the molecule.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “It’s like…” she pondered a moment and then said, “you have a left and a right hand. They’re both chiral. Mirror images. There isn’t a way to rotate them in three-dimensional space so that they become exactly the same overlapping shape. Then we can say that you have two chiral centers, if we ignore your feet and other body parts. These results, though, make it look like…it’s like it’s saying you have six hands when clearly you have only two.”

  “What does that mean about the molecule?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, something like excitement in her eyes, “and that’s not all. They did a Stern–Gerlach experiment on a breakdown product of the molecule. It showed the positive half and negative half quantum spins as expected. But it also showed some zero-spin component.”

  “Once again, that means nothing to me.”

  “I’m still wrapping my head around the whole quantum spin thing, too,” she said, “but fermions, things like electrons and quarks, aren’t supposed to have integer spin. Especially zero spin. Salia told me her friends are all excited that this might be evidence of supersymmetrical particles.”

  “Supersymma- huh?”

  She shrugged, “something really important that physicists have been looking for for a long time. Supposed to wrap a lot of things up in a nice bow. I told Salia to convince them to wait before publishing their results.”

  “Great,” I said, “apparently I’m the key to unlocking all of physics. I imagine Benecorp already knows all this stuff.”

  “Probably…” she said, bowing her head, excitement sapped.

  “Was Salia asking questions about my sample?”

  “Yes,” Akira said, “I told her it’s a possible nanoparticle toxin.”

  “Which it kind of is,” I said, “seems to give people brain damage.”

  “True,” Akira said, “I think she bought the story, but she’s smart. I’m sure she’s doing experiments to test it already.”

  “We’ll have to bring her in on everything eventually,” I said, “if we want to make it available to the world.”

  “Eventually…”

  “Are you skeptical about what we’re doing?”

  “About whether we can do it?” she said, “no. I think there is a scientific explanation for your reincarnation. Which means it should be able to be reproduced in other people.”

  “I mean more about whether we should do this,” I said, “like Masaru…”

  “Yes,” she said, “and no. I don’t know that it will be the human catastrophe Masaru seems to think it’ll be. But…I don’t know if it will be the Rawlsian veil forcing everyone into perfect morality like you think it will be, either.”

  “Then why do you want to help me?”

  She shrugged, “I think you’re right that…that we don’t really have any better options.”

  She’s doing it purely out of curiosity.

  “If we succeed,” I said, “will you take it? Will you accept reincarnation?”

  “I…it’s complicated.”

  I studied her face for a moment, but she turned around and went back to making the sandwich. It wasn’t something she wanted to discuss.

  Why would someone like Akira, someone obsessed with modifying herself, refuse this?

  I decided not to push the issue further.

  “Were you able to listen to that podcast?” I asked.

  She stayed quiet for a few moments, laying pieces of lunch meat on bread. Finally, she took a deep breath and said, “how much longer do you think it’s going to last?”

  “How much longer is what going to last?”

  “Their fame,” she said, “the sympathy people have for us right now.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, setting the towel down as I looked out the window, seeing Darren in the driveway with the hood of our electric truck open.

  “People might lose patience in us if we don’t act soon,” Akira said.

  “Some might,” I said, “but I still think it’ll market well to do it on Easter. Especially in the CSA.”

  “I just can’t help but think of the children still being held,” Akira said as she cut the sandwich she’d made into tiny squares…she can’t think of those children without equating them to Yukiko. She continued, “are we willing to let them suffer longer just so we can market our cause better?”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but hesitated. I had been about to say she needed to think about the big picture – that the marketing will be better in the long run, thereby helping even more children – but I didn’t want to sound like Sachi. Instead I said, “It might actually be better to let the story wind down a bit before we do it. Right now, the traffickers are probably on high alert, expecting us to come after them while the story is still hot. We’d be better off waiting until they let their guard down.”

  Akira sighed, holding the knife in her hands as she followed my gaze out the window where Darren was shoulder deep into the truck’s hood. He’d claimed to have learned how to work on electric vehicles with the farm equipment he used earlier in his life.

  I could tell that Akira agreed that letting the story cool down a little was a good idea, but that she knew it wasn’t my real reason for wanting to wait. She knew that it was about the big picture.

  “We spent a little over a week in that refugee camp near the wall,” Akira said, still staring out the window, “a week, and I can’t stop thinking about it,” she shook her head, “I still wake up in the morning feeling like I’m there. I still have moments of panic when I think I’ve lost Yukiko. And that was only after a week. I can’t imagine what it must be like for those kids.”

  “Humans can be very adaptable,” I said, turning away from the window, “especially when they’re children. Regina spent ten years in captivity, getting moved around to different owners, and she’s bounced back pretty well.”

  “I guess…” Akira said, unmoving as she gazed at the sandwich.

  “But the time we spent there was hard on you for other reasons, wasn’t it?” I asked.

  Akira said nothing for some time, slowly cutting the sandwich. I waited patiently as she walked to the sink and rinsed the knife off before placing it in the dishwasher. Finally, she said, “You mean the miscarriage.”

  “Yeah.”

  She took out her cigarettes, looking at the half empty pack, and then set it down on the countertop before gazing back out the window again.

  “It wa
s more than that,” she said, “it was the feeling that everything and everyone I loved was…was being taken from me. Masaru was dying. Yukiko probably…” she paused a moment, picking the cigarettes up again and taking one out, “and then when that happened, it was just…like a reminder. A reminder that I wasn’t allowed to have any kind of happiness.”

  She studied the cigarette in her hand for a moment, but didn’t light it. She continued, “You know, I can’t even picture my father’s face anymore. The last time I saw him, he was sick. Cancer.” She sighed, “I felt bad for him when I saw him sick. Can you believe that? After the way he treated me, I felt bad for him. He looked so pitiful lying there. He’d always been this larger than life person to me. Frightening, even. Especially after he’d beat me for being…for being what I am.”

  “He beat you for not being what he wanted you to be,” I said.

  Akira shook her head, “he was a piece of shit. But I still can’t help feeling…maybe he was right. About me.”

  “He wasn’t,” I said.

  “I know…I know,” she said, “on an intellectual level, I know that. But I still have this feeling that I’m just a fraud. People see me as a woman, and I feel like I’m fooling them into believing that. That I’m being dishonest. That my feeling like a woman isn’t real, but that it’s all just some kind of illness I have, or something I still might just get over at some point. I didn’t think that way before. But when I got pregnant the second time and the amniocentesis showed that the fetus had two Y chromosomes…and that it would miscarry. That made me realize that I’m not a real woman. That I must just be pretending to be one,” she ran a hand over her short hair, “and now I don’t even look like one.”

  “None of that’s true,” I said, “Christ knows I’ve felt like all different kinds of people. And if you aren’t a woman, then-”

  “I feel so bad for Masaru,” Akira said, “and for Yukiko.”

  “They’re lucky to have you,” I said.

  “But do you know what was even worse about being in that refugee camp?” Akira said, “What, in hindsight, makes me…makes me…hate myself even more?”

  I said nothing.

  “Seeing all those people there,” she continued, “and knowing that I helped put them there. I pretended the whole time that I was the moral center of our little group. The one who could reel in Sachi’s worst tendencies. I pretended that the people there were better off because of what we were doing. I hid in that stupid fucking mansion on my stupid fucking computer and just closed my eyes to everything that was going on around there.”

  “I think all of us didn’t see what it was we were-”

  “That just makes it worse,” Akira said, tears welling up in her eyes, “and now those people are still there. Children are still held in captivity. And with those families stuck south of the wall…they’ll keep getting desperate enough to sell more of their own children into slavery. And I just…I can’t turn that blind eye anymore. And a part of me wishes I could, because the way I feel now it just hurts so much.”

  I approached Akira, putting my arm over her shoulders as she broke down crying, cradling her face in her small hands, cigarette still dangling from her fingers. I hugged her tight and she turned toward me, putting her face into my chest as she bawled. I rubbed my hand gently against the back of her shaved head, feeling sobbing convulsions rack her small frame. In the other room I could hear Yukiko start whimpering at the sound of her mother’s cries.

  Chapter 13

  “I’ve never heard of a sitar,” Laura said, pushing hair back from her face as she gazed perpetually downward.

  “Really?” I asked, feigning incredulity, “I don’t think anything that’s been made in the past few hundred years holds a candle to traditional Indian music.”

  Laura grinned at the ground, “I thought I was an old timer for preferring nineteen nineties grunge rock.”

  The two of us walked down the road toward Cortez, coming back from Deidre and John’s house where we had been visiting the children. Four of them had already been adopted by people – three in Cortez and one in Durango. Deidre hired some investigators from LoC Security to look into prospective adopters, making sure they weren’t going to be bad parents. She said seven more of the kids have potential parents from other places around Colorado, too. Regina and three of the other older girls elected to stay, taking jobs at Deidre’s house to help with the other children to whom they have become attached.

  Regina’s eighteen years old. But I suppose someone with an eight-year old’s biology can still have motherly instincts.

  The sun bore down on the parched earth as I listened to Laura’s feet scrape lazily over dusty pavement. Before getting back into town, we passed a large, empty space owned by the Cortez Crucible, where their militia ran drills. Flags with the Colorado flag containing a yellow Gadsden snake and the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ slogan below it were regularly spaced on their property near the road. The soft popping of distant gunfire could be heard in the midday warmth.

  Rows of solar panels lined the highway’s shoulders and partition, soaking up the abundant sunlight. Some of the solar panels also had screens on them running advertisements for local businesses. It seemed that someone could rent advertisement space for every screen down a certain length of road. Laura and I stayed off to the side, in the shade of the solar panels, away from the electric cars hurrying in both directions. Shade provided only minimal relief from the merciless sun, heat radiating from the large panels.

  Our way back into the city took us into a newly developing part of town. The buildings all took one of three different designs, corresponding to the three different companies that were able to acquire property on the new street. Signs out front showed that one company hired LoC Security, another Liberty Protection, and the third had hired Cortez Crucible for security. All three organizations had people there to monitor construction, the guards walking about, openly carrying rifles.

  “Please,” I said, “it all sounds the same. Listen to some Carnatic Raga’s from southern India and tell me that doesn’t sound amazing.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard Alice in Chains?” Laura asked.

  “Of course,” I said, “I can hear you listening to that noise from your room.”

  The image of myself in a past life came to mind – Chiranjeevi Johnson, a drunken invalid by that time – hearing some of that same nineteen-nineties era music Maya would sometimes listen to. That would have been around the time Laura was alive for the first time…

  “But it’s good noise,” she said, a spark of passion in her voice that I rarely witnessed.

  “If you say so,” I smirked.

  “You sound just like my mom did,” Laura said.

  “She didn’t approve?”

  Laura shrugged, staying quiet for a few moments before saying, “she was always very proper. Said it was because of living in East Germany for most her life.”

  “Afraid of informants,” I said.

  “She brought me to an Alice in Chains concert in Frankfurt,” Laura said, “nineteen ninety-three.”

  “Really?”

  “She hated every minute of it,” Laura said, “but she knew how much it meant to me.”

  “Your dad let her take you?”

  “No,” Laura said, the spark of passion gone, “that was the one and only time I went to a concert.”

  I was about to ask how close that was to when Laura died, but decided against it. We walked on in quiet for some time. I knew it couldn’t have been long before. Laura became even more laconic than usual when it came to the events surrounding her death.

  “I think we can safely say that new music is shit,” I said after a few minutes.

  “Agreed,” Laura grinned without looking at me, “that shit Aveena is always listening to feels like giving my ears an abortion.”

  I chuckled, “it might at least be somewhat more palatable if we could hear all the notes.”

  Laura raised her gaze, looking down th
e road into Cortez.

  “Doesn’t seem worth it just to hear that shit,” she said after lowering her eyes again.

  “It seems now days, every generation hates the music of the next,” I said, keeping my eyes focused on the road in front of us.

  “Hasn’t that been true for a long time?”

  “Not as long as you would think,” I said, “but, music tastes change a lot faster all the time.”

  “But not yours,” Laura glanced over to me.

  “My music tastes have changed,” I said, “but not very fast.”

  “You’re still stuck on ancient Indian shit?” Laura smirked.

  I shook my head, “I lived in India during the mid thirteen-hundreds. It was an interesting time in the evolution of Indian music. I think it was around then that my music tastes were changing from the more percussion-heavy tribal music I enjoyed from East Africa. I lived in India again in the mid seventeen-hundreds and fell in love with what the music had become. Classical European, East Asian, and Meso-American music just didn’t…it didn’t hit that same spot for me.”

  Laura nodded slowly, “what you’re saying is that it’s possible for us old-timers to grow to enjoy those musical abortions Aveena tries pushing on me every time she comes over?”

  “Old-timers?” I asked, “you’re putting yourself in the same league as me, eh?”

  Laura shrugged, “Maybe not the same league as you, grandpa, but I guess I at least have something in common with some of those kids we rescued.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m an old woman trapped in a young girl’s body.” She paused a moment and then said, “did you hear the music playing in that video those vigilantes posted?”

  “I’ve seen the video, but I don’t remember the music.”

  “I don’t know how anyone could get pumped up to that,” Laura said. “Then again, my pumped-up days are probably long gone, no matter what music I listen to.”

  “People are getting impatient, aren’t they,” I said.

  “With their music?”

  “No,” I said, “with us. Last night another trafficking house was hit. Two of the rescuers were shot and several kids were hurt, but they were able to get them out.”