Chatper 1

Year 44 DE May 14th
(Dawn of Eminence)

So long adolescence of the frightened soul
You’re entering the ritual
Lay Down your every fear upon the Altar Child
Prepare to play the man’s role.

-The Teeth of sea and beast

 

               

I wake up to her standing over me in my bed, pale, eyes glazed over, her hair a mess and her night gown clung to her sweaty body.  She’s ghastly pale, heavy bags under her eyes. She is gaunt.
“Icarus.. I.. I need to be buried..” she says at almost a whisper
                I rub my eyes as I start to rise out of bed. I can hear the birds chirping outside my window. Blades of light came in, slicing up my room.  In the morning cheer, a walking corpse seemed out of place.
She puts her cold, clammy hand on my shoulder; she reeks of booze and BO.
                “Icarus, I need you to bury me. I’m... dead. I shouldn’t be here.”
                “Mom, have you been drinking?” I say.
                “Honey… Please. I need this.”
                Her hand slices into the heat of mine as I bring her to the basement. My mother suffers from a delusion ever since the accident and her reincarnation. Reincarnation: a stupid flowery name for when someone dies and their backed up mind is placed into a new body that has been either donated or sold and have plastic surgeons reconstruct the face and body as close as possible -- if you are rich like us, that is. So she, in fact, isn’t wrong; she died. She should be dead. My father never had those last moments erased before the “reincarnation”.  So because my mother’s mind is more frail than most she has a depersonalization disorder. It’s what happens when, “I think therefore I am” turns into, “I think, but I am not.” So the only way she can rationalize this is to insist she is dead and demand us to bury her.  This happens once every few months.  She won’t let anyone touch her to try and erase the memories. It’s too much of an embarrassment to have her go to counseling for an important man like my father. So he found his own solution.
We bury her.
                She squeezes my hand as I unlock the basement door and take the steps down. The basement is lavish, large drapes covering walls to look as if they are holding out the light. A hardwood floor that reflects the candlelight and always empty pews. It was a priest short of being a church, or a killer short of being a bad horror movie. In the center of the finished basement we have a casket with a hole underneath. I help her in and as I close the lids.

“Thank you,” she sighs as she is enveloped in darkness.
                I lower the casket into the hole with the automatic mechanism.  This has to be done or else she won’t eat or drink. What’s the point of a corpse eating? So we have this ritual so she doesn’t actually die. It takes a day usually and she is rejuvenated and perky.
Then the cycle starts again.

                As I sit at the island in my house’s large open kitchen I rub the bumps at the base of my neck. This is where the stim implant was put into me. While not yet fully mandatory they are usually installed in around the age of eighteen, my father had one put in me when I was eight. Almost losing his wife he wanted to make sure his son had the same insurance. So since eight I was connected to the global network. My memories everything I am stored in a computer as well as a small chip in the implant under my skin. My life reduced to ones and zeros. It’s strange to think of life being reduced to a series of electrical synapses in our brain. A series of on and off switches that when amassed together is who we are. My thought is broken by the babble on the little TV on the kitchen counter
“Jason Carway, the owner and mastermind behind Prometheus Systems, announces his plan to make his implants universal and available to everyone.  Some say he is trying to bring the classes together, others say he is trying to make humans irrelevant, while Jason says he is just trying to make the world a better and safer place.               “Jason Carway is pushing for mandatory installation of his implants now that most jobs require you have one. Later, is the black market body trade becoming an epidemic? More later at "“
                “That’s enough of those a******s,” I thought to myself. I sat there, eating my bagel in silence. After moving from the city years ago, I thought it was way too quiet. There was always a hum of busy noise. Car horns, people yelling. It took me awhile to realize that it isn’t any quieter up here -- just a different kind of noise. Instead of insufferable noise of the human habitat, I am listening to the sounds of the natural habitat. A myriad of sounds, bugs buzzing, birds singing their songs, the occasional wolf in the night; all of them trying to assert themselves, sexually or territorially. It leaves an earthy taste in my mouth as I listen to the racket. It doesn’t mix well with my bagel.

I decide to go next door to see my uncle, Henry the local eccentric hippy prepper. It’s still cool despite being mid may. The luxury of living up in the Adirondack Mountains, some of the woods higher up there is still some remaining snow. The last of the waning corpse of winter; holding on for dear life.   I hear a “thwap” as an arrow sinks into a target and my uncle looks at me grinning.
                “Hey there, Icky. I think I can finally best you and your hawk eye,” He says as I approach.
                “We will see, old man,” I reply, grabbing my bow off the picnic table. It’s a light instrument resembling a recurve bow, although it’s made of an alloy that gives it more power than the compound bows of the past.
                I draw, aim, and release all in one quick motion.  My three fingers moving with machine quickness, the arrow sinks in next to one of my uncles, stripping the feather off on one side.
                “I’ll be damned,” he says, “What the hell kind of sorcery are you working with, man?”
                This is an old tradition between us trying, trying to best each other, trick shots. It started after he read me lord of the rings as child to help me sleep at night.  I became enthralled with Legolas, the elf, and wanted to start learning to shoot bow and arrow. My mother objected, my father was indifferent, and my uncle leaped at the opportunity to teach me something.  Having no children, he projected his need to be a father on me, even though the man was near his 70’s without ever having a reincarnation. It’s rare to see anyone that age, despite the medical advances making it easy to live regularly to 100 years or more, unless they are of the pauper class and can’t afford it.  
                “Your old man is still out of town?” he asks.
                “Yeah, It’s been 3 weeks now.”
                He examines an arrow’s feathers. “You know I don’t agree with what he does.”
                “I know. I know.”
                “Never liked a man who profits from war and suffering,” He comments more to himself than to me.
                “I know he’s your father, I know Carol fell in love with him years ago, but he is married to his company and his vision.”

We talk about this a lot, my absent father, my broken mother, how I should feel about it. He knows that complex emotions are not tangible to me.  He is quiet for a moment, rolling the arrow back and forth in his hands.

“The Freethought Movement, they have it right. We should not let technology take our humanity away.”
                I stand silently. Politics aren’t my thing. Prometheus Systems wants to standardize the singularity. They want everyone to be “connected body and mind” to their network, to live forever in a paradise that we create here. With a fee, they back up everyone’s memory so they can live in any body they want or without a body and just transmit themselves to other people who act as puppets temporarily, Echoborgs, or green eyes. When an AI or someone wants to be somewhere without leaving their home, they control them and they see through these special contacts that are standard issue. The contacts glow green when someone else is in control. Essentially people can bi-locate; they can always live forever as long as the money flows in to keep their minds backed up on a hard drive somewhere. They acquire people from agencies that hire people as their job to let someone control them for a certain amount of time. It’s a shallow job that can put you in a lot of danger. Green eyes tend to be targeted by the Free thought Project and its sympathizers as people who have betrayed their humanity. There has been a few bombings at donation centers, These centers people can go to and sell their body to be used to house someone who has died, They essentially turn the body into a puppet that is controlled by the stim implant. The person they were is effectively wiped off the earth. The poor do this because it pays well, they can set up their remaining family for years depending on the body. There is always a shortage in usable bodies. “They want to make the rich immortal and wipe out the poor.” That is how the Freethought Movement summarizes it. They see Jason Carway as a false profit promising a false salvation, while the world sees him as a messiah.
                “Governor Percy has it right, He is having a protest down in Austin Texas, I am surprised that state hasn’t seceded its already like another country.” Governor Cornelius Percy  has fought technological progress since long before he gained office. Texas is one of the only states where it isn’t mandatory to have a stim implant to work. They donation centers, and any enhancements are highly taxed. “Texas is a state of humans, A state with a soul” Is Percy’s slogan that you hear everywhere.
   “There’s no room in this world for a man who thinks he’s a god,” He declares as he draws back his bow. I notice his pristine shape; it always takes me by surprise. The muscles in his arms work like tight cables as he knocks his arrow and draws. His stern but friendly face focused a crooked nose, and a silver pony tail hanging to his mid back. The arrow is loosed and strikes the target, piercing a quarter he had glued there.
                He grins, “Think you can hit a penny at 40 yards?”
                “Of course,” I say.

                The thing about memories is that they aren’t corporeal, they are malleable. Every time you unpack a memory it changes. Like clay, it’s the same item, same memory but you leave imprints and it’s never the same. Human memory is fallible and prone to influences. It’s what makes last memories so ephemeral. The thing about last moments is you don’t realize they are the last. It’s just another day you take for granted in the obdurate gyre of your life. We want certain moments to be evocative, that’s why we taint them with happiness when we recall them. The fact is there are places you have been, people you have talked to for the last time, and their features have already faded from your mind.