by Ryan Schow
Walking up to my future self, examining a body so wrought with abuse it hurts my eyes to see it, I say, “It’s now time to see who you are, and what you’ve survived.”
Standing before her, I take her only hand in mine, try to inject a bit of myself into her. It feels like shoving light into the kind of black hole where only nothingness exists. Seconds later, I draw one last breath, then slip my mind inside hers, into her brain. It’s like crawling in old motor oil and sludge where a thousand people are drowning and screaming all at once.
Balls Deep in the Biological Wasteland
1
Navigating through my future self’s mind is me moving through mountains of inundated slop. There are layers upon layers of…what? Good God, what is this?! Trying to get to a space of clarity in her mind, I feel my emotions dulling, becoming disorienting. Sucked into the mire of her psyche, or whatever this is, my senses flare, and my senses contract. Panic slithers inside me as I’m swallowed by whatever this protective layer between me and my future self is.
Can I get out? If I turn around now, can I get out? My head says I could get lost in here. Or trapped. Oh my God, I’m so out of my depth here!
Then I feel something reaching out to me in the wet, fetid slurry; it’s an energy, or a beacon of energy. Moving through the mire, psychically squirming my way through lakes of emotional squalor and debris, I’m overwhelmed by its dragging weight. This mind I’m in, all this heaviness I feel inside the future me—all this slick, slurping mud—it’s not something you feel between your toes and fingers as much as it feels like the vast collection of all the emotional turmoil I have yet to suffer. We’re talking lifetimes of built up anguish, depression, guilt, pain, loss, hatred and rage, all made into something I have to pass through to reach future me’s core.
The way I’m feeling right now, if I close my psychic eyes and surrender myself to sleep, I could never wake up. I could just get lost in here forever. Perhaps this is what the future me has done. I feel myself letting go, surrendering. Then the beacon of light flares again, giving my mind purpose. I reach for this energy source like it’s a life preserver. It pulls me to safety.
After what must’ve been eons of time passing, as the emotional waste packed tight around my future self’s psyche begins to thin and the foul density gives way to the slenderness of my earlier, less painful life experiences, the vice-like grip on my emotions loosens.
The light of her is as bright as the sun!
Once I get clear of what I just passed through, I’m left to marvel at how the future me used the darkest, scariest and most painful elements of her life’s experiences to create an otherwise impenetrable membrane of protection around her mind. If my clear, accessible mind were a castle, all this sewage I spent forever swimming through would be the moat.
Is this her? Is she the beacon? Or is this just a guide?
I follow the light, narrow my focus to only it, try to draw it near me, though what’s happening is I’m actually drawing myself toward it. Progressing more swiftly through the less condensed layers of her mind, the rest of this impenetrable barrier burns off like fog and suddenly I’m just there, in her mind. Right next door to her soul. My soul. Two sides of a one-sided coin.
I now have unrestricted access.
The warmth and love that fills me is the familiarity of me. Like home. In here, I’m my greatest self. Untangling my senses, gathering up my bearings, I give myself over to the comfort of this space, only to find something unexpected. A maturity, perhaps? It kind of feels like that, but there’s more to it. This isn’t maturity as much as it’s a depth of experience, an indomitable strength.
My heart soars.
You’re this worthless, beastly child all your life and then one day you wake up and realize you’re Superman. Or Captain motherfreaking America. Dang, this hundreds-of-years-old version of me feels like a f*cking beast! Yet there resides a peacefulness in her, as well. A tempered resolve.
How can this be?—the condition she’s in?
This force of strength she exudes, it’s a dense atmosphere I must pass through on the way down to her/my center. As I’m delving deeper, I’m thinking, there’s more? It’s when I finally reach her core that I see the true Raven de’ Medici, and her entire history laid bare before me. I can’t ever remember being this excited, or this nervous.
If I had a body, it would be dry mouthed and wringing its hands.
The movie reel of my life rolls forward. I sit back. Watch the show from the beginning. With my mind, and perhaps this is me not wanting to relive my past, I fast forward through the fat Savannah years, and the bad ass Abby years, slowing to normal speed a short distance forward in time from now.
Her past; my future.
Then…Jake.
In the very near future, Professor Jake Teller and I bump and sputter our way into a semi-decent relationship where the sex is great but the communication and the emotional give-and-take sucks butt juice through a straw. He can’t handle who I am. Most people can’t. After two years of this, I catch him doing it doggy-style with one of his students, this red headed sexpot of a girl whose brain is all book smarts and zeroish intellect. In these memories, Jake’s ginger smiles a lot and claims to just love blow-jobbing him. I hate that bitch already. The way my future self detests this house-wrecking toilet roach, she’s lucky to even be alive.
My inner voyeur rolls the reel back to now, redirects the lens to my friends. Brayden and Julie sink into a highly dysfunctional relationship and marry despite her baby being Emery’s. They have three more kids, but the two of them are never really happy. And of those three new kids, only one of them is Brayden’s; the second is this guy’s she met at a bar and the third is Emery’s.
Eesh, what a scandal bag!
The movie switches reels again and up comes Netty on the big screen. She hooks up with this stock trader she meets in San Francisco and together they have two kids and a pretty luxurious life. Me and Netty aren’t friends anymore, because I’ve screwed that up. And I’ve all but disappeared from her life. My heart plunges further into despair as the reel spins on showing me more unsettling truths. The next truth is devastating.
No, it’s worse than that.
Seven or so years after his transformation, my father is shot in the left temple by a hitman with a high-powered rifle. The 7.62 round makes an exit wound the size of a cantaloupe. He’s dead in some model of Audi not yet made. A bystander finds his brains fanned out like crimson oatmeal all over the passenger seat, which in itself is horrible. Still locked in this memory, me and Orianna, we lay him to rest on a cold winter day. As I stand graveside, seething, hurting, hating, things are changing in me, becoming darker and more erratic, way more bitter. It doesn’t help that Orianna is drunk. That she’s well on her way to crashing through rock bottom.
On the day my father is killed Orianna starts drinking again and never stops. Her mind is lost to booze, then cocaine and heroine. Where I hold my grief inside, where I use it as fuel to strengthen and direct me, my emotionally bankrupt mother takes her grief out on any man who’ll have her. She delves into meaningless sex and diet relationships to keep her pain underfoot.
If she can just stamp out any feeling she has about love and commitment, she tells herself, then maybe she can stop loving Christian. Or mourning him.
It’s a terrible plan from the start.
Three years to the day after my father dies, Orianna power-loads the pills and then guzzles down entirely too much booze. Getting behind the wheel of her Mercedes, she steers into oncoming traffic at one hundred and forty miles an hour, killing herself and two teenage drivers of the other car—a brother and sister heading home from college.
Of the three of them, Orianna was the one with all the STD’s.
Eventually I hunt down the hitman who killed my father. He is holed up in some shitty Mexican hovel prepping for his next contract. For a long time I couldn’t face him. Then the anger got the best of me and I could. I needed to. For this par
ticular monster, this hired gun who stole my parents from me, I orchestrate a slow yet heavy-handed death, one that starts with me finger-digging his right eyeball from its socket. When the authorities find him, it isn’t the sort of crime scene you would want if you were a junior detective. The kill room was littered with body parts. It was soaked in more carnage than you’d think possible given the details of the human body.
This is where my thirst for vengeance really kicks into high gear.
Revenge, however delectable it seems in the moment, doesn’t bring my father back. Nor does it return me my mother. And it certainly doesn’t ease the hatred that has its icy fingers scratching holes in my already demolished heart.
With every tragedy, I feel myself descending into madness. My future is a pit of quicksand that keeps sucking me further and further down, even when I yield to the struggle.
Parts of the present me are trying to distance myself from future me’s memories, but the effort is futile. The emotional “junk” I was forced through to get here is the same muck and mire that keeps me here. Locked inside these memories. Locked inside her.
I live through the deaths of my family; I bear witness to Brayden’s future misery with Julie, and what will be the loss of one of Netty’s boys to World War III; I see the lives of my friends, many who turned out normal, and then others who had a harder life, like Tempest (who goes off the deep end for about ten years wasting away to drugs and pornography after her father leaves the family and his church for a younger woman) and Georgia (whose inability to resolve the forces inside her finally consumes her and lands her in a fireproofed room in a state run mental ward); I’m shown how I can’t trust men for the longest time because any trust I could’ve felt for them as a gender was wrenched from me by the likes of my father, Dr. Gerhard/Holland and Dr. Delgado.
To be violated, genetically raped, forced to become something lethal and ferocious—a weapon used to murder a friend and potential boyfriend—if you think about it, how could I have turned out any different? Who I have become is a result of my freewill being hijacked by deviants and me being really, really pissed off about it. This feeling is more than an emotion barring its teeth; it’s wrath becoming my dominant emotion. The one not only guiding me, but driving me.
Already, current me can feel what’s coming and I want out of future Raven’s head. Psychically, I try to drag myself free, but a thousand invisible hands hold me hostage. They pin me down, force me to watch. To live. To surrender to her. I fight against her because anymore, all I can do is fight.
“Stay!” booms the voice, a voice so rich and determined it can only be my future self.
Me.
I double my efforts, try to shake the psychic bonds loose, but my future self has the kind of grip not even Chuck Norris could break.
Oh my God, what’s coming next, I can feel it like a thunderhead in my chest, and I don’t want to be here when it breaks open.
2
The way you watch a horror movie, how you see the killer springing the trap on the last victim, but you don’t want to know what’s next because your heart is wobbling with absolute terror, that’s how I feel moving through future Raven’s memories.
Yet the reel keeps spinning, projecting…
I am her, she is me. What future Raven experienced—my future, her past—I’m living it in the present moment, through her, as though her future memories are my own. The way I’m experiencing this, it’s as if I’m there, as if…
….I’m her.
In the fall of 2082, anyone I knew who wasn’t dead perishes in the nuclear holocaust. For so many years, like everyone else, I believe the triggering of the bombs was an accident. The survivors are told a malfunction in the network of nukes inadvertently prompted a GO response throughout half the world’s supply of nuclear weapons. Thousands of nukes detonated where they sat, pulverizing millions in the blasts, radiating billions to death in the subsequent fallout.
This lie was beaten into our heads the same way a cover-up to every other grand conspiracy is beaten into our heads. It was Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Tim McVeigh, Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth. All specialized, carefully crafted disinformation to further the sphere of control.
In response to such a catastrophic, global loss of life, the United Nations Council for Freedom and Equality (UNCFE) demands the end of nuclear technology, which isn’t much of a stretch since most of the engineers died in the blasts anyway. For the survivors, depression hits so hard we feel lifetimes of the worst grief imaginable. Billions gone, just like that.
Dead.
In 2097, proof the nuclear blasts were coordinated and carried out by members inside of UNCFE emerge. Faithless to the accuracy of mainstream news boutiques (they failed to verify facts as much as they simply reposted newswire-fed propaganda), I conduct my own investigation.
With each damning revelation, my hostility grows, until one day my heart thumps with such a blistering hatred for the injustices heaped upon us that something unstoppable awakens inside me. A four-headed beast far worse than anything I’ve ever conjured emerges to lay waste to those responsible for the deaths of the greater population of our world.
The guilty who left our world a smoking, uninhabitable ruin, they pay dearly; they pay with their lives.
Turning their bodies inside out in less than a second, that is my answer. After the first dozen or so victims, I realize swift death is a fate far too humane for them. There isn’t enough shock. For taking ninety percent of the human race, I believe with all my heart the guilty can never suffer enough. But I try anyway to bring about untold levels of suffering. I become exceptionally creative. The way I end the lives of these loveless, heartless pricks is both brutal and appalling; the way I surrender to my lust for vengeance, it leaves me feeling vile and insane, more monstrous than even I thought possible.
As her, in the future, I come to loathe myself for even being capable of such horror. So much so that I no longer want to be me.
In one century of life, to go from being this fleshy, innocent dunderhead no one likes to having a body count somewhere in the hundreds (I stop counting because the killing is beginning to haunt me), I realize something disturbing: I’m becoming like Mengele. Which means I’ve got to stop. But I can’t.
I don’t.
Inside my future self, my mind is fast becoming a Jell-O pudding pop—all squishy and soft and useless. The beacon inside future Raven’s mind that draws me through the slurry of refuse now returns with affection and understanding, like a hug you feel in your heart, if you had a heart, which—inside the psyche of my future self—I don’t. I pray the beacon is here to take me out of this place.
But it isn’t.
3
As my future self, I spend more than a hundred years in veritable isolation. I roam the ever changing earth like a vagrant, not making friends, not conversing with strangers, not doing anything but existing, contemplating, philosophizing. What I search for most are answers. I need to know why I was put here on Earth. I need to know my purpose. When no answers come, I open a psychic link with the doctor at Dulce because I have to know if I can do something useful with my genetic and psychic modifications.
I’m not even sure if he’s alive. More than a century of me being me has passed.
He is.
When it comes to the doctor from Dulce, I must say, I’m truly appalled by the man. That thing. But I need him. For a short while, he becomes my Wolfgang Gerhard, my Enzo Holland, my abhorrent lighthouse in the buttery-thick fog of this besmirched life. Through conversations, the doctor gives me plenty to consider. What that reptilian motherf*cker never does, however, is give me hard answers.
The hell with him.
Seriously.
So I spend the next fifty years not talking to him. By this point in my life/her life, I’m more than two hundred and fifty years old and lightyears wiser than I was at seventeen. And in these two hundred and fifty years, I evolve into a political fiend, studying the u
nderbelly of what has become an extremely corrupt political system, worse even than the blatant corruption of the twenty-first century.
In my infinite wisdom, I decide my mission in life is one of spreading peace. So after years of researching and planning, I mount my charge once more.
My inner demons suck down the side of me who understands wanderlust, and I swiftly, violently return to that which I do best: I embark upon a massive killing spree of the globalist cabal that mortifies the repopulating world. All in the name of peace, of course. My theory is, if I can wipe the world of its most corrupt turds, and flush their fraudulence down the toilet, the world populace would rejoice.
My God, I’m thinking, future me has so many targets!
We’re talking about the bought and paid for Presidents and heads of state, the crooked Senators and Congressmen on the take. No single criminal is safe from me/her. If I find a person guilty, I turn their body inside out in fractions of a second. Think of it as me dropping a lit stick of dynamite into a fifty-five gallon barrel of guts, and them boom!
You get the picture.
My methods of justice horrify people wholesale. Every act of carnage, every radical example I set, word of retribution gets front page coverage, so to speak. For months, years, I move in the shadows, slaughtering the guilty while leaving no traces of me behind. The levels of bloodshed are off the charts. Embarrassingly so. Naturally, propaganda and spin takes place. These dead people, they’re painted as crusaders, martyrs, men and women whose lights fell dim far too early, that kind of shit. And me? I’m painted as the Devil himself. Naturally.