Every
lifeform's death diminishes me, for I am a part of Lifekind.
Chant 363 of the InnerSelf LifeCreed, circa 2141. Two thousand
repetitions a day for the first twenty years. Do I remember them all? The hell
I do.
The Common Good is the only
Good. There's another one. Twenty-five thousand repetitions
so far, and counting.
Suffer in My
Name, and ye shall enter the Eternal Database of Redemption.
They say no-one can get inside your mind.
Bullshit.
They've been inside mine so often there's nothing left that they haven't
scrambled and poached, picked apart, put together, psychescanned and mesc-ed
with and rebuilt with cortisynth and hyperthalamus and generally fucked with. I
mean, I might even be imagining you altogether. I might finally have gone
crazy. They can do that, you know, send you crazy for awhile, all part of the
great InnerSelf Experience I guess, who knows, it might be my turn for that
this time, what the hell, there's been worse.
You don't believe me? Man, I've been a cripple to get in touch with my
helplessness, a bondage whore to feed my feminine side, a soldier to rid me of
my distrust of authority - and that was just the Normforms. Finformss,
zero-dwelling Aquaforms half a mile from tail to snout, methane-breathing
Xenforms, I've seen em, done em all. And you know what?
Bullshit. All bullshit.
I guess they were trying to do me a favour. A skycycle, driven at speed at an
immovable object at three hundred and twenty an hour, can leave a hell of a
hole in a guy. Or was that just another one of the InnerSelf programs? There
are days when I can't even remember that. No, on reflection they'd never have
done that to me. Too much fun.
Suffer In Me. Suffer With Me.
Through Suffering alone shall ye find Redemption.
The Kindgom of the
Mind is the Ladder to the Stars. Post-hippy bullshit of the
purest ray serene, piped out at a precisely-calculated assimilation rate on a
frequency even my brain can't black out. Sense-enhancers to stop me fighting
it. And an authentic InnerLife program - one of thousands - to verify my
enlightenment ratio. Get your head round that, sis. Or whatever.
Fact is, brain matter's in short supply around here. Even such lowgrade matter
as mine has to be refined and recycled. Twenty years ago - inasmuch as time
still matters nowadays - we did something, don't ask me what, split the wrong
atom, shifted the wrong antigen, pressed the wrong button, screwed with Cosmic
Forces and infected the species. Result? Near-total wipeout. I was mostly out
of my skull at the time so I wasn't taking much notice, and nowadays I'm out of
my skull
all
the
time. I was Chosen. You too, perhaps. Yippee.
Welcome to the wonderful world of formaldehyde.
Wanna know something? I'm glad you're here. We could put our heads together -
sorry, bad taste - I don't know, what do they call it now, interface or
something - compare notes. I like to think you're female. Not that it matters
anymore - or so the InnerSelf people tell me - but I like to think it anyway.
Let me introduce myself.
Oz "Mad Dog" O`Shea, Hell's Rider, multiple rapist, murderer, drunk
and till recently sole occupant of Booth 235479, InnerSelf Developments (New
York City). Subject Under Surveillance Category G (Genetic Redevelopment to
you, sis), subcategory Experimental. Membership number 390992, but you,
sweetheart, can call me Oz.
So, what's a nice chick like you doing in a place like this? I assume you're a
chick. Not that it matters. Been one myself, as I was saying, so don't take
offence at the terminology. Welcome to hell.
Not that I thought it was hell when they brought me here. No way. Thought I'd
struck it lucky, back then when they pulled me out of the wreckage and stripped
me down like an old bike for parts. Hear them tell it, I was gonna be a new
man, an
enlightened
man...
Hell, I was going to be the future of the whole fucking
race!
They needed a volunteer. The way they told it, I was going to be God and Adam
and the Second Coming all rolled into one. To bring us back, they said. To put
things right. To find the part of us which went wrong, find it, isolate it,
wipe it out and begin again. A
willing
volunteer, they told me, might earn himself certain privileges in
exchange for saving the race.
I was willing.
They managed to save most of my mind. First for interrogation purposes - they
wanted why, who, when, what I was on, the same old crap. Then bye-bye,
switch-off, or worse. Oh yeah, there's worse. The City of New York State
Penitentiary houses half a million discorporate inmates on one database -
all wiped in the big Power Strikes of the Twenties, ha ha - all awaiting
InnerSelf Enlightenment and maybe Redemption.
Oh yeah. Didn't you know? We're all gonna be Redeemed. Leastways we would be if
there was anyone left to do the Redeeming. But it's all automated now,
sweetheart; all docbots and psychemechs and empascanners sliding little
syringes of craziness into our poor helpless cortexes, little surprise-packages
from the Good Olden Times like in the days before the world lost what few poor
marbles it ever had.
I always liked a chick with brains. Nowadays that's all there is. The
growth-tanks are still out there, use-restricted by the InnerSelf
Corporation on moral grounds but functional still. That's where they grow the
Normforms - minus brainstem - and the Xenforms we like to use in our InnerSelf
jaunts out of the skull. All for the purpose of SelfDiscovery, SelfImprovement
and eventual Nirvana. A shot, a gray shift of nothingtime, a shutterclick....
and here we go again. What's it to be this time? A furry Felform? A Dolphform
singing weird scales under fifty million fathoms of liquid carbon dioxide? All
I know, is it has to be intelligent. The path to Nirvana is a thinking path,
the Redemption man says.
Through
suffering our goal. Beetles, it seems, don't suffer enough.
How long has it been?
A hundred thousand mindmovies. Every one a slice of life. A three-dee
Feel-o-matic, sense-enhanced Supasound InnerLife Experience (registered trade
mark of the InnerSelf Corporation slash company logo red-on-black ground). Cut
off when They decide. Turned on when They see fit.
Oh, they're clever. They've given me the White Room scenario more times than I
can recall. Patient waits, restrained; taste of foamrubber gag in mouth. Kindly
face in medical mask -
Ah yes, we're
awake, I see. How are we feeling?
- Loaded syringe shoots
straw-coloured liquid into my bruised arm. I like that touch. The bruise. It's
the details that count when you're going for realism.
I'll give them this; they've really tried. Makes me wonder how many billions
died, way back when the world was sane, that they should hang onto me the way
they do. Course, they're machines; machines just never give in. Not till
something breaks or runs down. Programmed for Nirvana, they never let up, even
though the subject will never be Nirvana material. Every time, they scan for
change. Every time, the same sad faces, kindly reproach, regretful shaking of
synth-o-skulls and back to the White Room scenario, electroshock walls and
graveside manner.
Pray for Redemption, they tell me in their sweet mechanical voices. Pray for
Redemption. You die -again, again, again and again - that Humankind should
live. Find the fault, put it right. Test, crashtest, retest. What Oz endures he
endures for your sakes, citizens. Isolate the rogue gene, the psychopathic
missing link in his fucked-up scrambled brains, and eradicate it from the clean
wholesome battery-operated future.
Hold that thought.
Bullshit.
The problem is this. Someone told them there was something worth saving. The soul,
the elusive spark no-one has yet managed to isolate. That's what comes of
trying to bring religion into the world of electronics. I've told them before.
Told them a thousand million times. There is no G-SUS factor. They've been
looking for it for so long that even if they found it they probably wouldn't
know what to do with it. What the hell does this G stand for, anyway? God?
Genesis? Ginelli's Pizza Emporium? General Accident Insurance? Greetings From
Hawaï? Gagging for a drink? But a machine's faith is infinite, its patience
longer than God's. They'll find it, they assure me. It's in there somewhere. I
just haven't suffered enough.
I've lived so long so often I've even begun to have memories. I'm not supposed
to, you know; wipe the slate clean and make it squeal anew, if it breaks, chalk
it up to experience and bring out a new subject - though I'm not sure how many
available subjects there are left - and begin again. Trial and error, not
necessarily in that order, trial by mechanical jury, trial and control.
Could be that I'm just the control, and that the real experiment is going on
someplace else, maybe just down the passage.
Could be I'm all they have left.
And yet I have a memory - or a dream, or synthscan recall, what the hell -
of a hilltop; cheering crowds, of the lance in my side and the sun
filling the whole sky with a whiteness bigger than God.... And in my dream it
seems like all the lives I've lived, all the part-lives, the fragments of
sensation, the fake memories come down to this one moment, a fleeting instant
of Redemption, an ex-marks-the-spot of perfect understanding where everything
comes together for just one single second before entropy drags it back forever
apart and I understand that behind all the InnerSelf posturing and bible-thumping
there may have been a core of truth... Take a man apart and find the wheel
which turns the human race, the mystic spiral beyond DNA which keeps us bound
together. Maybe inside that axis there's the Redemption gene, the thing which
turns bad to good, straw to gold... The G-SUS factor.
Is that what you're trying for in me? Is that it? Genus messiah vulgaris, the
last link in the chain of redemption?
You are part of Humanity. You
are all of Humanity.
Chant 5742 of the InnerSelf LifeCreed, circa 2141. Test the subject to
destruction, rebuild, begin again. I sense that I am a kind of challenge. Cure
this, you can cure anything. God is in your genes. Simply let him out.
The White Room coalesces around me; bright spotlights winking against brighter
needles; metal clamps tightening around my temples as they begin the process
again.
-
Ah, you're with us
again. And how are we feeling today?
I try to bite his pixcellated fingers through the rubber gag which he
forces between my teeth. He won't feel a thing, of course, but the satisfaction
remains. The look on his face is one of polite regret.
-
Aggression, mister
O`Shea. Don't you know that all LifeKind is one?
The
needle descends towards my face in a steady, merciless arc. Its load of
salvation drips venom into my open eyes.
Through Pain My Deliverance. Chant 49900 of the
InnerSelf LifeCreed, five thousand repetitions.
However often you say it, babe, it's still bullshit.
My God, My God, why hast Thou
forsaken me?
The machine with the electronic clipboard stops, whirrs mutedly to
itself for a moment, moves on. Inside the zillion synapses of my jellied brain
the sly G-SUS factor continues to evade them, the one gleeful grain of
Redemption right at the bottom of the whole sad world's shitty store.
The memory stirs again; the lance, the soldiers, the chants and circus
catcalls, my own voice ringing out in pleading and command.
Why hast Thou forsaken me?
If only He would.
Joanne Harris
