The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel

by Daniel Mark Harrison

  Sofia wasn’t surprised by anything Ryan told her, and she had also expected him to be one of her Uncle’s lackeys so it was starting to click into place. What he said next however did surprise her. It showed.

  “And I am the one who designed HaiSoc,” he said at last.

  “Mason’s thing? You can’t ha-how?”

  “I did. Your Uncle is not aware of that though. I never felt … compelled I guess is the word to tell him. You know, Mason – he’s Chinese,”

  Sofia nodded. “I understand. You didn’t want to offend my Uncle’s mianzi. Criticizing the Chinese to a Chinese. But what happened? You must admit it’s very hard to believe such a claim, all the more because you are only telling me and have never mentioned it, said anything to anyone.”

  “It’s not that simple. Both Mason and I stole HaiSoc. I improved it – beyond recognition – however. It wasn’t meant as a social network, not at first.”

  “Who did you steal it from?”

  “Who do you think? From Beijing. Right out of your government’s headquarters. It was just for fun, we wanted to see if we could do something with it, something specific – because it was the single shittiest piece of software in the world it was hard. But we did; at least, I did. So we –”

  “I don’t understand,” Sofia interrupted Ryan. “Why did you want such terrible software?”

  “We wanted that particular software because it could do something –” Ryan stopped to correct himself. “We thought it was capable of doing something incredibly brilliant if it was only programmed right, that’s all.”

  “What was that? What’s this gotta do with my video anyway? I don’t even know you?” asked Sofia.

  Ryan rubbed his eyes with the back of his palms and put his hands behind his head. He leant back. Her eyes locked with his.

  “I’ve been up the past forty-two hours and this coffee is kinda kickin’ in real slow. Is it possible you would know a place we could go do some blow together before we get into this?”

  “Do you know why I am here?” Sofia asked a little too self-righteously. “Do you know what got me in this trouble in the first place was that … shit!”

  Ryan kept his gaze straight, sincere. “Absolutely. It’s why I asked you. Who do you know who changes in under a month?”

  He was devastatingly handsome. If they did blow together she’s end up wanting his cock inside her after a couple hours. Sofia’s sex slipped a little on the inside run of her panties. Her stomach fluttered.

  “Mine is just around the corner,” she said, getting up from the table. “Don’t forget to pay. I’ll wait for you outside and have a cigarette. There’s more than enough for the two of us there, and I guess you are right. This light is killing my eyes.” And with that, the icy blue eyes that had been all his the entire twenty-two minutes sunk behind the deep black hue of her custom Chanel sunglasses, out of sight, belonging once again to Asia.

  Ω

  “The kid was black – only sixteen, but somehow he managed to make it past the barriers,” she could hear the guy on TV saying as she awoke. “Anyway, the cops shot him point blank – that’s right. Straight in the back. Bang! Bang! Two shots. They say they thought it was a Taser or a blank but – you know how the public feels about cops right now, they’re not exactly thrilled. And there’s a lot of talk that these New York cops, they’re high all night on confiscated coke just to clock out the shifts, ‘cause by the time they are out of Central Booking it can be anywhere in the next afternoon.”

  Sofia groaned. “W-what are you watching?”

  Ryan was sat up in bed, shaking his head, looking directly at the TV with the remote half between his left thumb and forefinger, semi-pointed at the flat screen.

  “You got it all wrong – these guys are fucking criminals!” Ryan muttered under his breath. “So what the fuck was he doing running from them then, huh?”

  “You wanna turn that thing down?” asked Sofia, rubbing her eyes.

  “Yeah, there was no doubt about that,” came the voice from the TV. “The kid was DOA; I don’t think anyone is disputing that. What they are disputing is whether his friend finished him off – like a mercy killin’. Cause he was in such bad shape, his face – it was – let’s just say it wasn’t something to look at for the folks at home.”

  “Everyone’s crying out that the cop turned a blind eye to what he was usin’ deliberately ’cause the kid’s skin color,” Ryan began to explain to Sofia. “Which isn’t fair, but then again, you can’t say the cops ever helped their own cause much – and why is it always the ones that look like the worst fucking neo-Nazis, you know? Anyway, there’s the is big deal now, cause the judge, he put more black kids behind bars than any judge in the past two decades in the country. That’s including Texas, too.” Ryan whistled. Sofia groaned. But he continued somewhat excitedly.

  “There’s gotta be something wrong with that,” he muttered, as if trying to make his mind up.

  “So ….? Why are you telling me all this?” asked Sofia eventually, half awake in total bemusement.

  Ryan looked down on the girl he had fucked three times in five hours last night before falling into a blissful slumber. In some ways, looking at her like this, she reminded him of his sister, Milana. For now though he put that thought out of his mind.

  “Get up – I’ll show you why.”

  “You mean – there’s a reason?”

  “You bet there’s a reason. There’s a very big reason in fact.”

  “And that is?”

  “You’re not gonna believe it until you see it,” Ryan said. And with that, he kissed her on the head and walked out the room, towards the bathroom.

  She really would have to get up then to find out, she figured.

  Ω

  Sofia discovered that contrary to what she had prepared herself for, her life in New York was no less important nor less luxurious than the one she had lived in Shanghai, still replete with the trappings of worry-free spending and first-class travel, entertainment and dining. If anything, in fact, the whole transition from public life in the East to semi-public life in the west meant it was in fact a social move upwards, given the constant chauffeuring and door-holding and palm-pressing that seemed to happen everywhere she went with Ryan now. It was like there wasn’t a guy in the whole city he didn’t know. Passports, drugs, hacks, banknotes, fake Bitcoins – he had all the friends to make any getaway or entry point possible, it seemed.

  “Moving to New York when you have capital and influence is a lot of work in theory only,” Ryan had told her once, mistakenly assuming she was worried about slumming it from here on in, Ryan being the third son of two parents who had died poor when he was young and whose two other siblings had amounted to nothing much, her being used to having pretty much whatever we needed – if not always wanted – since she could remember. (Despite the politics she never went wanting a day in her life, and she tried to explain to Ryan once. For whatever reason, such logic was lost on him.)

  Publicity had been before, back in Shanghai, Sofia felt, at times all-consuming, especially given that it had started when she had just begun to sexually mature and hadn’t abated since. There were photos in which she looked awful – so many of them. Her pretty face, even when bearing no clinical sign of happiness or a smile, and her eyes, commuting deadness and despair in every glance, and her whole body, slouched through that vaguely physical agony brought about by a severe round of never-ending circuitous routes of sadness trodden within her head, and her hair, which up until only recently she had worn mostly unkempt, albeit washed; her whole teenage body, which she realized now for these reasons should have been rationally completely and utterly abhorrent, nevertheless never failed to capture the public imagination in one way or another as photo-article after blog post after video-comment went up about who she was, where she went to school, and who – if anyone – she was in love with (someone dead, she once felt like crying when reading this; someone dead whom I shall probably never meet for this is my f
ate).

  Sofia knew she didn’t love Easton. She was settling for him. She could never work out why he had chosen her and not her less intelligent cousin Chanel, who was so much more fitting for Shanghai society anyway, being three-quarters Chinese against Sofia’s fully fifty percent Caucasian, which was not thought to be pure.

  But here was the ultimate paradox she found, for as in-your-face as life could get at times, New York was also a gigantic, impossibly high-ceilinged metropolis of nobody caring about anybody. Thus, while she found that she might occasionally be caught in the glare of the camera flash-lights one morning leaving home, that very same afternoon she could equally find herself up somewhere on the upper west side completely lost and alone and abandoned to nothing but parkland. After a certain hour in the day, once the papers littered the streets and sometimes after the sun had begun to set but had not yet filled the bottom edge of the horizon, when the garbage trucks were filling up and returning home and the drug dealers were preparing for their first shift into Manhattan of the evening via one of the bridges or tunnels, she felt here in the city just another totally insignificant stranger going about her insignificant business.

  All of these nuances served for a very confusing state of affairs, she found, for as pleasant as the respite may be, Manhattan was about as far removed culturally from home as she could have expected. Home for her, she realized now, giving in to her own previous denial, was Shanghai.

  New York was very different under the surface. The snow-white glittering cityscape that you see portrayed in the movies in reality yields to a much rougher, deeper twenty-four-hour liquor-and-hard-drug-fuelled, non-stop chemical imbalance of antisocial geeks, wannabe extroverts and psychopathic narcissists, resulting in an incongruous duality, thought Sofia.

  In Manhattan, it always felt like everyone was taking part in some sort of sadistic fight-or-flight marathon-sprint, not to achieve a sense of personal fulfillment but rather to achieve temporary mental rebalance so that they stand a chance at competing in the ultimate dream showdown, and thus potentially indulging in the manic psychological rush that comes as a result of winning uber-big.

  Like a casino, however, only a few of the players stood a realistic chance at winning unless they resorted to cheating or somehow prostituting their psyche. Thus the primary chemical compounds upon which this island city was run, she assumed, ultimately yielded to a larger and more persistent pool of legalized narcotics designed to dull your senses to the pop-or-drop that drives the frantic chest-thumping of the American Dream up and down the avenues and across the streets in a symphony of carhorn choirs religiously seven days a week.

  On every level, it seemed that New York City was constantly brimming with a certain shrieking madness that sought its justification merely on the basis of pointing a long finger over the adjacent block to a more excruciating type of mental illness that’s so far been given the wink, nod, all clear, or more usually, ignored uncharitably as a result of this manic race to bottom of social order and etiquette.

  There were the sweltering, roach-fleeced kitchens of the midtown tourist restaurant chains crammed full to the brim with illegal aliens working on slave wages every day of their lives, playing over and over and over in their minds nothing other than the encroaching reality that is fast approaching when deportation will become unavoidable. This might have seemed almost inhuman, were it not for your late night taxi cab driver who was later taking you back home, and with whom you entered into briefest and most uselessly uninformative dialog (something to do with the city Mayor). He was surreptitiously knocking back a post-midnight Valium, without exception, sporting a cheap energy drink made in China just to keep his head somewhere in the game for a 72-hour shift which doubles up with him playing the big-shot executive over his two-year old Blackberry as he tries to hustle a cut-price offer for the import of second-rate – and likely stolen – hospital equipment from Myanmar (“NO borders – NEW opportunities!”).

  Manhattan, being bigger and better than anywhere else in the world, she soon found, got the prize every time when it comes to a showdown of bigness: it’s greedier, more ruthless, more badly-behaved and self-confessed alpha-neurotic than any city on earth. A far cry, for sure, from the seagulls over the shores of Ohio.

  But behind the bigness there is a certain fragility lurking that all New Yorkers will look the other way if you happen to delve too deeply into. Manhattan, despite the flickering never-off nature of its commercial demeanor, is, when you look under the hood, little more than a bric-a-brac shrine built in honor of a bunch of antiquated values that no one really wants to enforce anymore, that no one ever believed really existed in the first place, and for which no one could honestly claim that they would, if asked, lay down anything of real significance to uphold. It’s the casino with just the chips; try and cash out and they’ll invite you back in to play for more until they’ve cleaned you out and you’re starting at the small stakes games all over again. At heart, this was the domain of the crazed and desperate.

  For sure, the city was an undisputed leader when it came round to keeping up with the fastest and most networked gadgets that could and did guess your favorite music and find you the nearest one-night stand or coke dealer and match supply and demand so that it fit as neatly in place with the limitations or expanse of your present budget; in fact, she surmised, had she been poor, she thought it was even great at helping you score a buck or two on the latest financial exchange or long-distance betting scam; New York was a shrine to money, and manufacturing it was it’s raison d’etre. Anyhow, if you didn’t have the cash to hand, there were she had spied a couple all-hour joints that looked the kind of place which would end up offering someone a bunch of loans both parties knew would never be paid back.

  She asked Ryan for the details once, and he explained that the whole system was set up like this since inception.

  “It’s a scam, and the rich – they get that it’s a scam and they play a long and even build into it. Every now and then one or other of them gets ruffled for something, but that is just the risk of getting seriously fucking rich.

  “You don’t think insurance ain’t a ponzi scheme, or the stock market ain’t some pyramid house of cards you don’t understand your math though, that’s the truth.

  “So it’s an economy incentivized not towards productivity per se, but only headline productivity. In which case, if it’s just the headline you’re counting, and the items in the list are whatever – make-believe, I dunno, forgotten maybe a better word – if they are are all that, then why should the lender care when the loan was already insured and the fault will end up being the borrower’s?”

  “But why borrow like that?” asked Sofia.

  “That’s the Dream – borrow till your broke or a billionaire. It’s the same dream you find in China – but it’s not a Chinese dream original. We exchanged it for a bunch of Wal Mart products and industrial plastics years ago. The borrower, it must be assumed, is not one individual, or if he is, he is simply one face of what amount to several potential identities that slip in and out of the country’s multiple luck cartels, these lucksome joints the lucksomest of all of which is New York City, but here it is not Shanghai – this is ultimately just one avenue on the grid of the United States that is to the borrower nothing more and nothing less than life’s journey to find the elusive American Dream. If you can’t wake up, then you don’t suffer, is the thinking.

  “But that’s all bullshit. There’s much more going on in the outside. C’mon,” said Ryan. “We’re here now. I can show you exactly what I mean.”

  “What is this place?” asked Sofia, scrutinizing the old 100-something street brownstone carefully.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ryan. “This is where I grew up. This is home.”

  “So you are rich then? This place must cost about ten million all-in?” Sofia frowned.

  “Not mine. I rent the room from someone. C’mon, we can talk about that later. Right now, I am gonna show you how the real economy
works.

  “Get ready to freak the fuck out, I’m telling you,” he said, and with that, he popped opened the front door and Sofia followed him inside up the staircase.

  Ω

  It was sharp and violent. And remarkably drawn out, too. “Who am I?” said Sofia to herself while it was going on. “I feel like so many ghosts right now.”

  “Number One Sister!” muttered Ryan. His breathing was hard and demented, like someone with a chronic lung infection.

  “T-then w-who are you?” asked Sofia.

  “That’s a secret even your mighty father will not ever know, I guess” said Ryan, breathing harder, stabbing stronger breath by breath.

  She saw Easton somewhere, walking over to her and pulled gently on her mane of hair. This was nothing like that. And then Ryan kissed Sofia, or Milana or Stephanie – who was she?

  Was she the grown-up, able-bodied, beautiful, voluptuous Stephanie – born into a different body the minute her soul slipped through the confines of her bowels on the operating table that night, such was her desire to reincarnate so pronounced, and such was her soul so pure, it permeated the heart of a virgin girl and made her an amphetamine addict before delivering her a sort of momentary peace as her tongue played with his for a long while?