The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel

by Daniel Mark Harrison

  “What the hell is this–” I asked him. But Mason said nothing. Instead, he just waited. “Mason, what is–”

  “Lights up,” came a voice from somewhere – and still to this day I do not know from where it came. But it was clear and purposeful. It was the voice of another writer, maybe, speaking into my own narrative. I couldn’t be sure.

  “What is that?” I asked Mason.

  The voice drifted backwards as if moving out of the pied-a-terre now, away from our immediate presence. It was like it wanted to give us some privacy.

  “For noting here is by accident, merely by design …” it muttered, more distantly still. Somewhere, the voice continued to purr away, in the background. It was like an old gramophone, scratchy and incomplete, but still discernible nevertheless.

  “We’ve got the real thing in this damn system, you know,” said Mason at last.

  “What's the real thing?” I asked. I was growing somewhat weary and impatient now, but then, just as I felt my temper rising, so I felt my anger deflate in an instant and my heart fill with a strange sort of calm.

  Mason smiled at me. I suppose for once he was enjoying the information asymmetry playing to his own advantage. But it was more than that even – his expression looked like one of defeat, as if there was nothing left to do but to let the entire system that this simulation was running on just resolve itself in the course of time via HaiSoc’s (hopefully) sophisticated-enough identity and reality detection software.

  “What?” I asked him again. “What do you mean you have the real thing? You mean here, in the simulation?”

  Mason nodded.

  “What have you got then?”

  “The Mandate.”

  “The –”

  “Yes, the Christ, as you call him.”

  “Which one is he?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Mason confessed. “And it may well not even be a he. But it’s far from done here yet.”

  “You’re sure?”

  And at that moment, the rain began to pour from the clouds above, which opened out wider to reveal an even more intense patterns of rainbow-lights flashing in various ribbons and shapes of different sizes and varieties across the sky above us, while the trees shook wildly, their leaves flying from the weak post-summer tree branches. A big silver bird flapped its wings hard two or three times and began to take flight.

  “I can't switch the damn thing back on to MAINSTREAM either,” Mason said dejectedly. “So all this – whatever this is, it keeps coming back and mucking up the main thrust of the story. Everyone’s getting like, what, two histories now. At a minimum.”

  I considered this for a moment. “That’s how you find the one you are looking for,” I said. “The Mandate – he will only have one history. Even where multiple exist – it will be consistent. It will be linear, pretty much. Because the Mandate lives by the truth – we all do, but the Mandate more than anyone. Do you know anyone at all like that?”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “Someone like that. But maybe it’s not the Mandate, for it’s not a He. She was the Number One Sister of China’s most powerful political society for women. My sister in fact was her Number Three.”

  “I would make sure your sister knows what she is doing,” I counseled him.

  “I know,” he agreed. “They seem – how shall I say?”

  “Closer than friends are most of the time?”

  “How do you know?”

  “There are aspects of this story I too am in control of, remember. But not all of it – you have to be a writer to know. Some of this is just the way the narrative arc is unfolding.”

  “Is what is happening between my sister and the Number One Sister just part of the narrative arc?” asked Mason. He seemed genuinely concerned about Lixue Lai, and for a moment I felt a little sorry for him.

  Ω

  “Tell me what you do know, then,” said Mason, after the next set of pills finally kicked in and I could think straight.

  For some reason, my hangover hadn’t letting up that morning quite as easily as it usually did, so I switched to a couple Percocet, which in under 15 minutes swam headlong rapid-fire into my bloodstream and went directly up to my brain, where it tricked me into thinking I was sober and that I was no longer sore from mixing spirits and wine and whatever else it was I had taken the night before in some sort of boozy solo party on my balcony held just for me, and for me only.

  “What do you want to know? If I gave you HaiSoc?”

  “No,” said Mason. “I invented HaiSoc.”

  “You didn’t. Don’t ever make the colossal mistake of thinking you invented anything in life,” I told him. “Most commonly, you did no such thing, I can assure you of that. You merely sourced it from somewhere – sometimes in bits. In this case, you sourced it from me.”

  “You think you’re God, don’t you?” said Mason, incredulously.

  “To you I do, sure. But that is because to you I am.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Honestly, there is no way for you to know that. There will always be doubt. It’s logical – at least from your point of view it is. From mine, it’s irrational.”

  “Do I have free will? The ability to choose for myself?”

  “You do,” I told him truthfully.

  “How’s that? If somehow you are writing my own fate, how at the same time can I choose that fate for myself? Couldn’t you just go and erase all that?”

  “I suppose I could. But I wouldn’t. I don’t know. You are asking me a question which is just an aspect of something much greater. When you write something, and when you are aware of the fact that writing is, in a sense, the piecing together of a narrative that is speaking out towards you, that is climbing upwards to scale an endless height just to reach you so that it can reach many, many more people, you don’t just wipe out reality. What would be the point in it?”

  “But isn’t it a question of skill, then? Don’t I depend to some extent on you being skilled – lest I get wiped out?” asked Mason.

  “You do, but no less than I depend on you being a person of some value, having a story to tell – or a version of it at least – that is of some value.”

  Mason paused. “So what about the American girl, then?”

  “The one you were trying to sabotage; you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were trying to sabotage her only because she was American, is that right?”

  “N-not just that. She was Lixue Lai’s replacement in the Sorority. That wasn’t right at all.”

  “What if I told you that in fact, Lixue Lai’s replacement was Jasmine, not Milana.”

  “That still wouldn’t be right,” replied Mason.

  “But would you go and sabotage Jasmin, all the same?”

  Mason considered this for a moment. “Probably not. She’s still Chinese, at the end of the day. There is no harm done to the Party.”

  “Do you think I would want to harm the Party?”

  “I honestly don’t know what you would do. Your mind is an enigma to me. Your appearance is an enigma to me. I can’t see you the same way you see me.”

  “But given that the story so centrally revolves around the Communist Party of China, I mean, what would be the upside in that for me? In destroying the party, I mean …”

  “I suppose there isn't one,” Mason conceded.

  “Lixue Lai was replaced because Chanel made the right call early on – at least from her perspective, it was correct,” I told Mason. I braced for the rage. But strangely, none came.

  Instead, he merely asked me: “What do you mean?”

  “No energy to fight?” I joked.

  “Something like that,” said Mason.

  “OK, Milana – the one you know as the American girl – she is Sofia. She is Sofia’s alter-ego, I suppose would be a better way of putting it. That she made all of you lot believe it too is something of anomaly, even to me, however.

  “But realistically, there was never any possibility of
Sofia being kicked out of the Sorority, any more than there was that Lixue Lai would head it up, as delusional, she had hoped – however distantly – would be the case one day. So when the whole thing happened with Konrad – wait, you know it was Konrad who raped Sofia, right?”

  Mason nodded. “I suspected as much. He seems to possess such … a quality …”

  “Right,” I continued. “You are absolutely right. He has that failed streak in him which makes him a likely suspect.”

  “I don’t know why no one else worked that out, quite honestly,” said Mason.

  “Me neither,” I said. “But anyway, so where was I?”

  “You said Milana is the alter-ego of Sofia.”

  “Right, because when Sofia got sent away to the States for rehab, that was sort of the end of the road for her in a way, psychologically. I mean, they put her in the very best rehab that money can buy. It's in Malibu. And she couldn’t handle it – life without her sister, who had been killed by that jerk, the writer, the one who was drunk when he drove into the curb of the road.”

  “The one we tried to regress?”

  “That’s the one. He just drives into the fucking back of her car, you know? I’m fucking glad your government tried him and found him guilty of the crimes that the Americans were too weak to put him away for, personally. Anyway, enough of that. So she had lost her sister Stephanie. She had lost her face. Once you lose face – who are you?”

  “No one,” Mason admitted.

  “Exactly. Is it so illogical then to reinvent who you are and come back another person – one who does have Face?”

  “How did we not see this?” asked Mason.

  “I honestly do not know,” I answered him. “I didn’t even see it, not at first. But stories are like that – they take time to tell. Or at least, it takes time to tell the truth, since there is so much bullshit in between the lines.”

  “It’s exactly the same with code. That’s where the bugs are hidden,” said Mason. “Between the lines.”

  “How about the rape?” asked Mason.

  “It was Konrad. Like I said.”

  “But how has he not yet got caught?”

  “Somewhere, you’ll find a tape recording of a video – I think it’s still on video somewhere – from around the time of the Asian crisis. Nineteen ninety-seven. On that video you’ll see two people: or three people, even. There’s a guy called Ryan, and then there is a girl. Her name is Alyssa, but sometimes it is also Gina.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, I know, it gets confusing. Listen to me: it’s because the technology can only tell the truth, so it keeps fucking up when you embed lies in it. Something like that. It’s always the case, even here in the realm of fiction that you have to tell the truth. Remember that.”

  “OK, I will,” said Mason compliantly. “Where is the video?”

  “I got it recently from an imaginary dialog I had with Ryan, fortunately for you,” I said. “But you must remember to use it responsibly …”

  “Where is it?”

  “At first I thought it was somewhere under the Vatican Church. That was a clever trick that Konrad tried to pull on me, I must admit. Until I realized where it really is – it’s in a Blockchain somewhere.”

  “You are joking, right,” asked Mason. ‘In a Blockchain? Do you know how many Blockchains are in development right now?”

  “I know, I am sorry. I couldn’t get much more out of him than that. I had to show that I was still believing when he took me to the steps of a Church in Milan. He gave me a mighty dirty history, too. I had fucked both Sofia’s mother – but somehow ended up having Jasmin – and, in addition to that, I had apparently spawned Milana once, too.”

  Mason laughed a little and I laughed along with him. We wouldn’t always be like this, friendly and comradely, but it was nice for the moments that it lasted. “Why Jasmin? What’s she got to do with all this?”

  “That’s what I couldn’t work out either,” I said. “I think he’s involved with her. Because otherwise why the sexual reference? The one to Milana is obvious – that’s Sofia, who we know he raped. So the one to Jasmin must be something similar. I have no idea whether it’s consensual or not, though.”

  Mason was very silent for a long while while he took all of what I had said in. Finally, he spoke up. What he asked surprised me. “Who is this … Ryan?”

  “You mean, Milana doesn’t have a … brother?”

  “No, she is an only child …”

  “There is the flaw in the system,” I told him. “That is your Mandate. Find him and you’ll solve this whole darn mess!”

  Mason just stared at me. His has the Chinese poker-face down to a fine precision.

  “How do I find him?”

  “Well, as you saw just now. This type – he comes with thunder a lot. You need to find the place where thunder last struck. That’s because he is both of the real and the imaginary world, and it is electricity, more than any other naturally-occurring phenomenon, which conducts imaginary as well as real number sets.”

  “So thunder – nothing electronic?”

  “Sure – but everything’s electronic. Try and find him in naturally-occurring electricity, that’s the key here.”

  I considered him for a long while. He was a very internal young man. It was hard to know what he was thinking. What he was feeling – if at all, he felt, that was, which I was sure he most certainly did, sometimes. Mostly, though, he just thought.

  “What’s he doing here?” asked Mason.

  “C’mon,” I said, letting out a sigh, somewhat of exhaustion, somewhat of relief. These were tiring questions to keep answering. “Let’s go have a drink down the road. We can talk about this there.”

  Mason readily accepted, which was unexpected, since I didn’t get the impression we were all that close; more bound together by necessity. I told him that I would only be gone for just a short moment while I went upstairs to get my wallet and change my shirt, and he sat down on the couch where it was that I left him.

  I was planning on taking him to something of an early dinner and there to explain how the narrative arc works, to tell him the honest-to-God reality of composing something from out of thin air, that there are not simply true and untrue things, but many half-truths that try and bury themselves in the timeline to throw the story off into a state of confusion and others that peak their head out at you before burying it in the sand and then reappearing suddenly when you least expect it.

  The only way out of the confusion brought about by situational occurrences is to strip off the layers of your event timeline while flicking back – from the present day until as far back as you can remember starting – and to constantly ask yourself “What is it that doesn’t seem right here?”

  I had planned to give him all this information and more over a nice long, three-or-four-hour dinner with drinks and maybe a little cocaine afterwards to ease the passage of the night, London-style.

  But by the time I got back downstairs, Mason was gone. Disappeared. Vanished – back to China, I guessed; like the good indentured Communist Party servant he was, paying a visit to the formerly Colonial power’s capital merely for a fact-finding mission, and not in the slightest for the pleasure of a white person’s social company.

  What help could I possibly be beyond a certain point anyway? That must have been what he had figured. After all – my lot – which is to say the British folk, we showed no muscle to the Chinese when it came down to a fight. That was our biggest, most colossal error of all, the one committed in 1997, when Asia was turmoil. For after a century of pouring capital and resources into that little barren rock known as fragrant harbor – Heung Kong in Cantonese – we had simply gifted the whole thing back to our greatest adversity in history without so much as a protest; we had given it all back to the leaders of Mason’s own homeland, and not just free of charge, but complete with revenue-generating enterprises and a settled population intact.

  And sometimes, I feel, maybe that
is the same thing I did granting Mason the license to HaiSoc, too. Could he be trusted to carry on the legacy in a responsible way? He had seemed like the right guy a lifetime ago – but things had moved on since then. Maybe not any more.

  But there was no turning back now, for the story is moving forward every second that the clock tick-tocks away into the future, and no matter your reality – virtual, physical or intellectual – there is no turning back the clock on the forward march of time, no matter who you are. Not even God himself, I suspect, knows how to reverse time once it is set in place in a Universe as a governing law.

  The only thing that could rescue everything now was if somehow, the order of the entire economy changed. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t just the nature of economics – which is to say, of the practice of labor and consumption, or the art of trade and tender, of the business of production and commerce – that would have to change, but in a sense, the political and moral fabric of society, for these things that our economy, which is merely an expression of its population’s ideals.

  And that’s when it struck me: perhaps that is what the Mandate was here to do. Perhaps he’s here to challenge and change every principle upon which the global economy revolved. Upon which our lives revolve.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Millennial Conception

  Ω

  Around December, 2014

  ALYSSA WAS my original sin, my own sin. That is to say I think to this day she was a self-created sin and that what happened in reality involved no other sexual partner but that of my own creation, the one I imagined in my head. Sometimes it seemed there was no alternate spiritual compass available to me but that which belonged to my own spiritual core. I couldn’t get the easy answers that every other Church goer seemed to find, somehow.

  And then, over time, so the truth began to reveal itself as the wheel of fortune of life’s clock slowly began to roll; it tick-tocked and hip-hopped between the black and red pockets of the tables of our lives, red twenty-one by black thirty-four; clock-clock-clock rolled the ball, dancing and hopping and leaping up into the air the way the balls roll between the giant roulette wheels of the games in Macau.