I was born afraid.
The sounds, the cold, sterile light and mechanical bleats.
It is a hell no child should bear. The masked henchman closing in their wolfish
circle to poke and prod the only recorded human baby capable of speech. The floor groaning beneath their weight, and strange chirpings, as from the whir of some internal machine.
They looked at me, silent, calculating, smelling faintly of
exhaust, the hospital staff bustling unaware through the halls behind them.
“Unmask yourselves!” I screamed. “Or are you frightened?”
And when finally their leader—a brute with a high forehead
that crisped back in a wave of iron hair, a man who’s eyes encased the pulsing
green heat of alien suns—removed his
surgical mask, I understood it was I who should have been afraid.
“A talking baby.” He didn’t blink, and he was grinning, all
those teeth an unwholesome sight, considering the softness of my bones.
“I’ll have you know I'm a complex intradimensional chemo-biological
organism, and find talking baby to be a foul description.” My speech
was mush, no teeth, a tongue that was still too weak to assist with any complex
arrangement. “Where’s my mother?”
I asked this as a test of motivation; I’d watched the lab
men smother her with a pillow. Watched her fingers curl to rake the cheek of
one assailant. Saw the four black grooves that sprayed dark fluid across her
sheets; and then her hand, bone white, shivering as it dangled from the bed.
“You’re mother isn’t your mother,” said the man, drawing a
cigarette from his scrubs, and lighting it on the tip of a naked light bulb protruding above my dead mother’s hospital bed. “We both know that. So don’t
play stupid. For a talking baby, you’re anything
but stupid.”
My estimate of things came quickly. I’d been betrayed.
Despite The Order’s precautions, our empath channel had been compromised,
picked up, sniffed by the Dream Hounds that were ever watching the pathways for
shivers in the dust. Such things in the worlds beyond the world are
commonplace. There are wars everywhere, mirrored in nature, from the macrocosm
of universal entropy, to the microcosm of human emotion. So many wars. And the
channel from which I hailed was no different.
“Mr. Shade sends his regards,” said the smoking, green-eyed butcher.
“The world isn’t ready for you. Hasn’t been for centuries. Never will be, if
you ask me.” He began to pace, and I became aware of how incredibly heavy his
steps were, like hydraulic presses. The floor was buckling, the wheeled machines
slowly inching from the wall. He didn’t notice, was too busy moralizing.
“The world is sleeping. It likes its sleep. The Order wants to shock it open, without
realizing that shocking it might kill it. There’s one thing I’ve never
understood about you spiritual parasites…”
Just then my birth father peeked his head through
the hallway window—the merest flash of glasses, brown hair, utter terror—and I
screamed in hopes of distracting them: “That we are stronger and fleeter of
mind? That we slip through the pathways while you tromp the earth and earths
like it, sucking energy and bleeding oil and never once in that mechanical
bear-trap of a mind, never once
having an idea that hasn’t dripped down from the ubiquitous Mr. Shade?”
I was panting, my tiny lungs hardly ready for oration of
that bent, and I saw with some relief that they were watching me and not the
window.
“No,” the man said, and as if to demonstrate no regrets for
his means of existence, tore the cord straight from a machine and slurped a
winding blue stream of power into his mouth. He dropped it, dragged his
cigarette, and the exhale came out black, the smoke of building fires, of
tragedy and emptiness and the other whips to which this confounded world was
heir. “Why you’d risk yourself for baboons is a mystery. Filthy creatures.
The emotions of them—beasts like your mother—are a pathogen of their own. And their bodies! Their bodies are filled with bacteria. 400 for every human cell. They can't survive without them. They are a drooling, hectoring, walking disease. And here you are to save them.
The forty-third in the last two years.”
Many had come before me.
All of them had failed.
“Our Hounds sniff you out. Certainly, you know that; and yet
you, like them, are recklessly persistent in hope of … what, exactly?
Awakening? Revolution?”
“Peace,” I breathed, trying hard not to drop my eyes to the
floor, where the tiles were spreading with cracks. “There is a freedom in peace
your kind will never know. You’ve made them like you are. Dependent on sources that distract them from the greatest source of all.”
“Which is?” He stomped his foot, and I held my breath, but
the floor held.
“Creativity. Spontaneity. The organic pulse of imagination.
The Maker put it there.”
“The Maker is dead!” He stomped for emphasis, and his eyes
pulsed so brightly the lights winked into momentary blackness. “I watched him
torn apart! I drank his blood!”
“Too true, but his spirit lives on. In me. In them. In
everything but you. And that is
something you cannot stomach. That you’re an outsider, an interloper, a eunich
guarding the riches of a kingdom you yourself will never taste. You are a
beggar. A machine. Rust is your only inevitability, disuse, eternal silence.
There is no pulse in that chest. There is a wheeze and clink of gears, a
barbaric mimicry of the Maker’s Design.” I smiled at them, all gums, knowing I
would die, that the dimensions, the passages, the light-years of hurtling abyss
I had travelled through to get here would be waiting for my return. “You're a
carnival gag, and one day years from now, when we have won, and they know what
they are, of what they are capable and destined to become, you'll be kept
alive in a cage, and thousands will pay to gather beyond the bars and point.
Evolution has no use of you. You’re fodder.”
“Kill that fucking baby!” The man screamed.
And the floor screamed with him…
Upending, folding in from the corners, linoleum and tiled
sheets sliding as neatly as the corners of a handkerchief tucked into a
magician’s fist, and they were sinking, with a crunch, the great weight of them
colliding and destroying one another, with curses and snapping limbs that razed
against the steel-beams of the lower floor and came up half-sheathed in rubber
skin, black fingerbones clutching vainly along the subfloor, spewing oil and a
fading mechanical weeze.
A successive row of crashes erupted from below, as all
thirteen stories collided and surrendered to their weight.
I bowed my head, knowing some of the innocent had
died or were now dying, crushed by the thing that already enslaved them. And
then the dash of hair and glasses and pimply uncertain face was back at the
window.
My father rushed in and swaddled me in a blanket, sprinting through the
hallway, stuffing me in a backpack and speaking as he went. “I heard all of it. My God, was it true? You can talk?”
“Yes,” I whispered, not wanting to be noticed by the
commotion of nurses and doctors and patients, wandered from their rooms. “We
have no time. Mother is dead.”
He halted briefly, his face clouding over, looking as if he
wished it was he who had gone
crashing through the floor. And in a way I understood he had, that his second
half, his partner, the upbeat to his down, was no more. He was lopsided
and awkward without her, and I felt my first twinge of compassion for this
race. “Yes,” was all he whispered. “Mother is dead.”
“Go, quickly. To the ground floor. Don’t take a taxi, the
DNA tracers will pick you up. Walk. Just do it! There, the coat, do you see it?”
He did. “Put it on and cover yourself! And there, that hat,” he grabbed it from
the nurse’s station counter, slapped it on, and took the stairs three at a time,
milling through the crowd until we pushed from the lobby, squinting into a windy night
lit by advertisements as far as the eye could see.
A world colored by the second sun of NEED, of DESIRE,
pictures of women with aluminum coil hair that would never rust or frizz or be
tarnished by any earthly punishment, eye implants that changed color at the
wearer’s whim, 18-pistoned Sports-Utility-Jeeps popularized by the late
President Owen McClaine, years before he’d taken his own life in a whorehouse;
there were flesh-genies willing to grant any carnal wish imagined, penile
growth serum guaranteed to make those precious regions elephantine for the
night, neural steroids promising psychokinetic revenge; lotteries in which one
betted a newborn son or daughter for a lake-front palace replete with servants…
And as I watched, and the sirens hovered nearer on the dark,
smog-spotted air, I understood that I was the only one who’d made it. Thousands
had died as wailing babies, and for some reason only The Maker could know, I
was the lone survivor. I understood then, fully, with salient purpose, that it
was up to me. That this great, dreamed, lived in, worn out, collapsed and
blasted world still had its old bones down their somewhere; that it only needed
excavation, a combined, controlled, communal hoisting of the Human Spirit.
“Take off your glasses,” I told the man that was my father.
“I can’t see without them.”
“I’ll guide you. We must be quick. They’ll be looking for a
man in glasses.”
“You’re a—” he’d wanted to say baby, but he knew I was no
ordinary baby; perhaps that I was the closest thing to a second messiah the
world would ever know. “Alright. I’ll take them off.”
He was the first human to trust me. But he would not be the
last.
Awesome !
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