Incarnate- Essence

by Thomas Harper

  Without my tech there was no way to know if Darren or Christina were caught. Or who else in Goodwin’s entourage was caught or killed in the blast. Or which of the dignitaries present survived. Or what’s come of the deep fakes I’d released, or the collapse of the Global Prosperity Network used to connect major governments and multinational corporations.

  This whole thing’s turned into an even bigger disaster than Wichita. Kali got what she wanted. So did Christina. Once again, I’m left with nothing but injuries and more blood on my hands.

  I cursed myself, wishing I’d just let my right hemisphere kill me. The outcome would have been the same. Except maybe the guard I shot could have lived. Yet another part of me wished I’d just started shooting at the Benecorp guards who apprehended me, taking as many of them down as I could before they ultimately killed me.

  My right hemisphere would have. If only it had control of my unified-

  The door opened. A uniformed guard walked deliberately into the office, closing the door behind him. He had a bland look on his mustachioed face, neither angry nor apologetic. He walked behind the desk, the name plate reading Colin Trammel, and sat down in the squeaky swivel chair. He didn’t say anything for some time, staring forward blankly, doing something on his ARs. After what seemed like a long time, he focused his gaze on me and gave a weak smile.

  “I’m sorry to’uh kept ya waiting,” he said politely in a thick southern accent, “as you can imagine, things’re a bit chaotic.”

  “You mean with Lind dead,” I said,

  He exhaled slowly, standing up from the chair, walking slowly around the desk. He crossed his legs, leaning against the edge of the desk, facing me. He lightly set something to his side, lifting his hand to reveal the Indian tech I had plugged into the CSA’s servers.

  “Guessin’ this’ yers?” Trammel asked, “Director Mitchell wanted us tuh figguh out what it is fuh’m.”

  “Candidate Mitchell,” I corrected.

  He smiled, exhaling and nodding. “After this lil stunt? Ain’t guhn be no election now, boy.”

  “I’m not denying anything I did,” I said.

  “Didn’t expect ya would,” Trammel said, “but it does mean we got leverage over ya.”

  “You want me to turn informant?”

  “Yar mixed up in a dangerous game here, boy,” Trammel said, “but I ain’t without pity. All God-fearin’ people go through crises’uh faith when they young. Ya wunnuh what else’s out they’uh. But I assure you, it’s only danger and despair outside the light’uh Jesus.”

  “Are you going to interrogate me, or just preach?” I asked.

  “I could put inna good word for ya if ya told us where the Anonymous Knights’re based,” Trammel said politely.

  He doesn’t know I’m a forty-eight? What have they found on the tech?

  “Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you,” I said, staying with the story that I was part of the AKs.

  “Ya know they’re usin’ yuh’s pawns,” the guard said, his voice still polite. “They don’t care ‘bout ya.”

  “They wouldn’t do that to me,” I echoed my old prisoner’s argument, “they wouldn’t lie about it. You lie!”

  “Suh shame, really,” the guard said, crossing his arms, “so many young people lahk you get’n caught up in this false ahdol. Their hearts’re in the right place, but if they put that kinda energy ta the one true Gawd, they could really help a lotta people.”

  “That’s enough,” a voice boomed.

  Both of us looked to the door, seeing two people in suits. One of them took a step inside, the other following.

  “Get out,” he said to Trammel, who hesitantly obliged with an irritated look. The three newcomers strode in, closing the door behind them, staying quiet for some time as they looked me over. Finally, the first one said, “That was quite a show you put on. I gotta applaud your audacity, kid.”

  “Who are you?” I asked, trying not to tip my hand.

  “Name’s Martin Colburn,” the younger of the two said, “vice president of Benecorp’s southeastern regional biomedical sciences division,” he signaled to the gray-haired man on his right, “this is Lew Gladwell, our chief of security.”

  Why is the VP of the biomedical science division here?

  “I imagine you’re wondering why all of us have come to visit with you,” Colburn said, as if reading my mind, “given some recent developments, we’ve decided to use some extra leverage in our…negotiations.”

  The door opened again. Two more guards came in. The first one led Laura into the room. She was also in cuffs, her tired eyes looking to me apologetically. The second guard pushed Eduard Winkler in, strapped to a wheel chair. Bandaging was wrapped haphazardly around his injured leg, face hastily washed but hair still covered in dust and small debris.

  Gladwell took Laura from the first guard and roughly seated her next to me. He then took Winkler’s chair from the second guard and dismissed both of them.

  “You see,” Colburn said, “my German comrade here immediately recognized your friend when we were alerted to your little misadventure. But when we asked him about it, he started getting a bit…cagey.”

  “You’re making a very big mistake here,” Winkler said in German, voice trembling.

  Colburn smiled, looking into Laura’s eyes, “It would make things easier for everyone if you just told us why you’re so important to Sovereign.”

  Laura spat in his face. “Go fuck yourself, you cunt-faced piece of shit.”

  Colburn stood up, taking out a handkerchief and carefully wiping the saliva from his face. He signaled to Gladwell who reached down and applied pressure to the injury on his leg. Winkler cried out, struggling, unable to move his hands. Gladwell then pulled out a knife, cutting the straps holding Winkler to the wheel chair. He lifted the Sovereign executive from the chair, threw him onto the desk, and brought the knife to the quaking man’s throat.

  “We can do this real easy,” Colburn said, walking over to Winkler to look him in the face, “the more you resist, the more it just makes me want to know what’s important about her all the more. What that says to me is that she’s worth more to you than your own safety.”

  “You low level dickhead,” Winkler said, “You have no fucking idea what you’ve stepped into. Call your headquarters and they’ll-”

  Gladwell slid the point of the knife lightly over Winkler’s skin, the blade sharp enough to draw a few droplets of blood in its path.

  “Call headquarters?” Colburn scoffed, “haven’t you heard? Your CEO’s dead.”

  “So is yours,” Laura said in a low voice.

  “Exactly,” Colburn said without taking his eyes off Winkler, “that means there’ll be management restructuring.”

  “If I tell you anything, they’ll kill me,” Winkler growled.

  “What do you think we’re going to do to you if you don’t?” Colburn asked.

  Gladwell put the knife up to the guy’s cheek and sliced the blade through the flesh. Blood poured from the wound. Winkler cried out in a shrill screech.

  “We’re going to find out either way,” Colburn said, his voice both soothing and menacing, “I’m not afraid to have her skull cracked open to take a look around if that’s what it comes down to.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Winkler said, “You have no idea how valuable of an asset she is.”

  “Then tell me,” Colburn said, “both our CEOs were killed in the blast. All three of us have a unique opportunity here.”

  “Sovereign will pay you millions in crypto,” Winkler said, “just release the asset to me and I’ll make sure you get-”

  “I’m not interested in the money,” Colburn said in a loud voice, taking his face away from Winkler’s before continuing again in the gentle, threatening tone, “I’ve worked the CSA division for over a decade now. It’s a dead-end fucking job working with these religious nutters in the CSA. And I know someone like you would never get put in a highly public position,” he turned back to Winkler
, “if the asset is as important as you say she is, we could work together on this and make a name for ourselves. I just need your cooperation.”

  “Sovereign won’t show me leniency if I go telling some middling level asshole like you about this,” Winkler said, “at best they’d shove me in some dark corner where I won’t bother anyone.”

  “Well, it’s either that or this,” Colburn signaled to Gladwell, who pinched the knife blade over Winkler’s nose, slicing the tip off.

  Winkler screamed, trying to bring his hands up to his nose. Gladwell grabbed his left hand and held it to the table, putting the knife up to his pinky. When I looked at Laura, there was something like glee in her expression, watching the Sovereign employee be tortured.

  “No! Stop! I’ll tell you!” Winkler cried.

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Colburn clapped his hands together, “see, it’s not so hard,” he turned back to look at Laura and me.

  “You’re going to fucking regret this,” Winkler said, trembling.

  “We’ll see about that,” Colburn said.

  “She has-she has a brain implant,” Winkler said, his voice shaking, “State-of-the-art technology. It’s taken decades to develop. It’s an organic input/output that can transmit and interpret neurological signals using a Solberg-Morse interface.”

  Colburn looked back to Winkler, “so you can hook her up and read her mind with a computer or something?”

  “Yes,” Winkler said, panting, “theoretically. This-this type of technology has n-never been tested on a human before. If you have two people with the implant…the Solberg-Morse interface can take the holistic pattern of n-neural communication and convert it into code, translate it to the holistic pattern of a different brain and then convert it back into neural signals.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you can actually link the brains of two different people so that thoughts can be shared.” He paused, exhaling slowly before saying, “Our…other subject was killed. When this one was stolen,” he glanced at Laura.

  “That’s it?” Colburn asked.

  “If there’s more, I don’t know about it,” Winkler said, “the project was indefinitely shuttered after that incident. I was one of the people thrown under the bus for what happened. They demoted me and sent over here for this kind of shit.”

  “But you’re aware of the procedure?” Colburn asked.

  “Yes,” Winkler said, “I oversaw the t-team doing the brain implant. There-there were other teams, too, but I have no idea what they were w-working on. I’m not even aware of where we found the s-subject in the first place. Unlike you, I know not to ask those kinds of questions.”

  “If I wasn’t chained to this bench, I would kill you,” Laura said, everyone turning to her, “I hope nobody else does it before I get the chance to.”

  “She’s feisty,” Colburn said, “but nobody’s doing any killing until we can test this out,” he looked Gladwell, “I sense a big promotion for both of us if I can get this to work.”

  “But you need another subject,” Winkler said. “You only have the one.”

  “Actually,” Colburn said, looking over at me, “I think we’ll have a second one soon enough.”

  Time seemed to lose all meaning. Beeping and humming warbled through my head. My arms needed to move, and it drove my mad. Flex. Extend. Twitch. And then the heat. The unbearable heat. Sweat poured from my forehead, mouth parched. And as quick as the heat came, it fell away. Freezing. Shivering. No escape. But my limbs…I needed to move them. Flex. Extend. Twitch. The pressure would build up. And then the heat again.

  There was a split-brain episode in that time between a Planck time and an eternity. Even my right hemisphere was confused. The thoughts came in like Scrabble pieces thrown against a wall.

  Pressure building up, released by rapid movements. Flex. Extend. Twitch.

  Dreams mixed with reality. The room swirled into faces. Laughing faces. Crying faces. Screaming faces.

  People came in, their voices making sounds without forming any intelligible words. Thoughts coursed through my mind like a flash flood. Crashing. Roaring. Murky. No words I could understand, only letters and syllables jumbled together.

  Visions of past lives faded in and out. Distant. Flickering. Real. Like the projection of a poorly lit movie on a jagged surface. Colors were pain. Smells were fear. Sounds were heavy. The weight of time pressed on my head like a herd of mammoths. I flew through worlds terrible and large. Snow met fire and air met famine. Fever pulsed through my mind like life and death. Rinse and repeat. And all of it was inundated with the shapes. Extending into volumes that didn’t exist. Folding in on themselves. Fractals exploding through space and time. Light passing through my arms. Flex. Extend. Twitch. Light spiraling in the air, curving through the extended space. Sounds in gradients of pitch and volume, deep and screeching, quiet and deafening. The buzzing helices walked and buzzed.

  They knew.

  The pain was terrible. Seering. Fast. Sharp. Every injury incurred within this lifetime – was it still this lifetime, or was it the next? – felt like someone digging into it with sharp claws, probing my flesh for a soul-shaped hole.

  I moaned. My voice sounding like it was coming from someone else. The taste in my mouth bitter and unrelenting. As if my tongue itself discerned beyond what it was capable of tasting. I questioned whether that taste had always been there, throughout all my lives, but this was just the first time I’d noticed it.

  The pain, too. It felt like it had always been there, but now was the first time I’d noticed it. And now that I noticed it, it would never go away again. That pain would always be there, in all my future lives. Or recurring past lives. Editing into my memories. There it is. Inescapable.

  They knew.

  I didn’t know how long this went on. Chronons. Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days. Weeks. Months. Years. Decades. Centuries. Millenia. Ages. Eras. Epochs. Eons.

  But slowly, the delirium started to wane. The pain began to fade. Thoughts grew clearer. At one point, I could think clearly enough to realize what had happened.

  They cut my head open again to do to me what they did to Laura.

  I panicked, hearing the instruments monitoring my condition beep faster, which only added to my anxiety. The world spun in a dizzying array of confused colors.

  I can’t sleep now. They robbed me of my sleep.

  The panic wouldn’t go away. I had to kill myself. I couldn’t imagine going without sleep. All this needed to be reset. Split-brain. Implants. Sleeplessness. Being captured. I had to do it before they realized what I really am.

  …they knew…

  I had to die before they tried running more experiments on me to find out how to reproduce reincarnation. They couldn’t figure out before me. And I couldn’t figure out without being able to sleep.

  I had to die before the lack of sleep drove me mad, the way it’s been driving Laura mad. It would be even worse for me, because they had done something to Laura’s brain to make it so she could go without sleep and not die. But the Sovereign employee said they had numerous teams. He wouldn’t know how to keep me from going mad from lack of sleep.

  The panic was almost too much, causing me to cry out. I thrashed my limbs about, but couldn’t get them to cooperate in order to walk or grab anything. I tried to form words, only numb sounds escaping my mouth. Shadows floated into the room and strapped my arms and legs down. I wanted to tell them no, they didn’t understand. I wanted to know why they were doing this to me. One of the shadows stung me with something and the world faded.

  I awoke, still panicked.

  But I had fallen asleep.

  “Ugh.”

  A sense of relief briefly came over me. They hadn’t robbed me of my sleep. The sleeplessness must have been a procedure unrelated to the implant. Panic returned when I remembered my situation. My limbs were still strapped down. An orderly was in the room, checking my IV drip.

  “How-how long?” I croaked, finally able to
form a coherent sentence.

  The orderly looked at me, but said nothing. They walked out of the room, leaving me staring at the ceiling, listening to all the monitors beeping and humming. A few moments later, Colburn and Gladwell walked into the room.

  “Feeling better?” Colburn asked.

  “How long…how long was I out?”

  “About four days,” Colburn said, “after seeing your brain scans, we were worried the growing polymer screwed something up. Fortunately, your vitals seem to be evening out, and here you are, talking to me. Although it looks like this isn’t the first time you’ve had brain surgery.”

  “Seizures,” I groaned.

  “We’ve been looking into you,” Colburn said, walking nonchalantly to the window and opening the blinds, “we know you’re transgenic, and I’m almost certain I’ve seen your face before…but we don’t know why Lind got the CSA to let us take you in. The stunt releasing all that dirt on the Chinese government…it has the Anonymous Knights written all over it. But I didn’t think they accepted people like you.”

  “The other Knights…don’t know,” I said.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” Colburn said, turning around, “you’re one of those forty-eights. A terrorist.”

  “The…virus,” I said.

  Colburn grunted, “your virus failed. GPN is still up and running.”

  “F-failed?”

  “Either way, it doesn’t matter,” Colburn said, “none of that’s my concern. With what we learned from the Sovereign employee, and reverse engineering the other subjects implant, we’ve been able to develop a new one. Now we just need to see if it works.”

  “This could…kill us,” I said, “or…make us…insane.”

  “It might,” Colburn shrugged, “we’ll find out for sure, soon enough.”

  Colburn went to the door and signaled to the orderlies. Four of them came in and got the bed ready to move. I sat helplessly as they wheeled the bed and monitors out of the room, down the hall, and into an examination room where I immediately spotted Laura, also strapped to a bed. She was shaved bald, some kind of large apparatus attached to her head.