The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel

by Daniel Mark Harrison

  Was she a media intern called Gina, with a sister who died in a car accident in 199- no, wait, that was her own life she was dreaming of, right?

  Despite Ryan’s cover, nothing could stop the voice from overhead; the voice of the deceased, of which Ryan Priest – and not Ryan Dreyfuss (the nephew I never had) – was a member. It was a voice from overhead.

  It was the voice the voice of someone much greater, much Holier than either of them both. They could feel its power stir inside them. And the voice spoke: “Lights on …”

  Ω

  PART 3: Soul

  CHAPTER X

  I Feel Therefore I Am Not

  Ω

  October, 2014

  OF ALL my children, the one I love most is the one who is most my equal in all respects but gender. She is the deviant one with all the introvert insecurities I have often fancied myself burdened by; the one with all the natural chutzpah that made me beyond wealthy, beyond powerful, beyond immortal; beyond being just a character playing another part in another typical three-act show for the gods but instead a living, breathing, creating some kind of self-made God of my own accord.

  This one my wife and I named Milana, after the Roman city in which she was consummated, and not far from where I was just yesterday, writing these very pages.

  I returned to Italy a week ago after getting a strange call from a long-lost friend who in 2003 had been about to be found out for running what was then the largest ever ponzi scheme in history, and who had blown his brains out before he’d been caught. Since I was in Shanghai at the time I received the call, and I wished to divert the action as far away from my place of abode as possible, I asked the imposter – who was mimicking my long-deceased friend – to meet me in Italy, the place of my daughter’s consummation. There, I challenged him to do something only Ryan, my friend, would have been able to do: to meet with His Holiness and use the Vatican Ethernet to trace the video of my daughter that was threatening her reputation.

  “Is it done?” I asked, as Ryan came bounding down the stairs, not a little out of breath.

  “You bet!” he replied, patting me on the shoulder the way he always had when he was at the height of his fame and riches. “You look in great shape by the way – new girl?” That was just like Ryan.

  “Thanks! Something like that, yeah. In fact, I only just got to know the girl recently – some billionaire’s blond!” I raised my two eyebrows in unison as if to confess secret shame that was anything but guilty. “The thing that happened, that you had to see the Holy Father about, just now, I mean; that’s what got me into this whole sordid affair, really,” I explained to what seemed to be my old friend.

  He rolled his eyes. “Typical Milana,” he said. “She’s just like you are. That’s the crazy sort of stunt that you would have pulled at the same age I think if I was a girl.”

  “You mean like the one you pulled on Alyssa all those years back?” I asked him.

  Ryan shrugged. “Alyssa?”

  “What?”

  “D-don’t you mean L-l-leiticia? I thought Alyssa was her sis-”

  I slapped my pal on the back. “Of course, how insensitive of me!”

  “Not at all.”

  “It’s been such a long time, that’s all.”

  “You not angry with her at all?” Ryan asked.

  “Of course not. I’m her father. We’re genetically connected, if only in this lifetime!” I said.

  “Tell me, did you think I had copped it that time?”

  “I did,” I confessed, not revealing that I suspected such to be true. This was a trick of the mind; one only had to feel the difference between these two gentlemen. Granted, both were identical in appearance; both had the same after-shaven metrosexual scent about them, the same giant, red lips – red almost, I often thought, like a woman’s lips look like painted. But their texture – that is, their personal identity – was essentially different. I knew it for a certainty. “Where do you think we go after this?” Ryan asked me, uncharacteristically. There, that’s what I am talking about …

  “You mean you and I? Or the girls?” I replied.

  “There are two different places you think?”

  “I think maybe, in certain cases, sure,” I told him. “And there are two sides to me, too. There’s the person here that is talking to you now, and there’s the other Daniel, the one living out there in the real world, from whose cognitive faculty in a sense all this crazy stuff is coming out of.”

  “I think I get what you mean,” said Ryan.

  “Just like there are two Milana’s, or two Sofia’s. There is the real thing. And then there are those sophisticated, powerful young ladies who are fighting their turf back in Shanghai.”

  “And me? What about me?” asked Ryan.

  I paused for a long time and considered whether to broach the fact or not. Ultimately I decided I would, since he was the one who brought it up in the first place.

  “I know we’ve known each other a long time, but your name isn’t really Ryan, is it?” I asked him.

  “How do you know that? Who –”

  “It’s Ramon, right?”

  “Y-yeah –”

  “Why do you go by the name Ryan, then?”

  “I dunno, I like it better I guess.”

  “Do you know why you got the name Ramon, though?” I asked him. “Because the only reason you got called Ramon, or Ryan as it might be now, was so that no one would see who you really are,” I said plainly. “So no one knew who Ramon was in real life.”

  I pointed to the Holy Father, who only moments ago had allowed me to use the Vatican cyber security team, the very best in the world, to detect the videos of Milana and Sofia and capture them back from the dark forces of the net.

  “Him, up there, Pope Benedict XVI. He was once called Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Did you know that? Anyway, like all Popes, he changed his name by the order of a guy named Ramon Jose Castellano. Ramon held the ordination ceremony. That was in March of 2013.” Ramon, or Ryan, considered this for a moment. “Do you remember what happened that month of that year?” I asked him. His eyes lit up.

  “That was the month that Bitcoin broke out of the bag. It went to fifty bucks I think. Fifty or maybe high forties. Then it crashed though.”

  “But it was exactly that month that Bitcoin – and by association Crypto – began to go mainstream, wouldn’t you say? That’s when CoinDesk was thought up. Same month, same year. That’s where the movement started.”

  “Are you sayi-” But now I knew he knew too, so before he could say anything else to reveal the secret which I promised to keep forever from the rest of the world, and which I am writing here in the form of fiction to preserve without exposing, I put my hand up to hush him. And both of us, sinners to the core, rich as we could dream of being and as villainous as animals throughout parts of our lives, bowed our heads before the one who stood high now on top of the stage, the crowd cheering him at an almighty pitch, an octave, then a decibel, and then ten decibels higher, confetti flying through the air.

  And a silence fell when the one I knew as Satoshi Nakomoto put his hand up against the crowd and made the shape of the cross in the cool Spring air, blessing us with the incredible genius he was to be the first ever Catholic that did something about the problem of money being the root of all evil by creating its replacement. I looked over at Ramon and as I caught his glance, I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: the man deserved to spend the rest of his days in this country in peace, in the Vatican City, with its gardens and Churches and grandest and most mercenary of histories. For what was greater still than that was the future – the future of money, no less – that lay underneath all that history, and all those towering Church steeples and under the gold and silver and most precious and sacred of millennia-old branded garments like the Tyumen Shroud which covered Jesus’ face after his crucifixion was done. For under the Churches, in the lay chapels which were inaccessible even by the Italian government itself, was the unifying curren
cy invented and carefully cultivated by a team of top-notch tech guys who administered the thousands of hard-drives and cloud-servers and information-sharing software packages that created a soft hum as they preserved and fortified the world’s greatest innovation ever, Bitcoin. There, under the Vatican, it could never be touched by anyone, because of the reason it was in the midst of the one place no one but the Holiest people on earth were by law permitted to enter.

  Bitcoin’s Blockchain, sprawled underneath that colossus called the Vatican City, in so many various parts and across such an intricate fabric of mining channels diverting their presence to the world’s fastest economy (on the other side of the world) via nothing much more complex than a technology that worked like a simple IP re-router, was doing something really dynamic: it was changing the nature of money, from being the root of all evil to the stem of all that was good and right and Holy. And now that most holy of innovators, Satoshi Nakomoto, was the Pope of Rome, but no one knew it.

  And he was stood above us, mere mortals by all comparison, giving us the Blessing of our God, which Ramon and I received like the disciples of his were surely were. And I knew then that this Ramon, the one of storybook history, the one who would use money to make the world a better place, would use all the rest of his possessions to do just the opposite, and I knew too that his possessions were worth far more than his money, for his possessions were pain and envy and a deep, black, gigantic greed the likes that the once-holy catholic and apostolic Church had now become, mired in politics, the object of a torrential power struggle that played out across the European continent like the burning hot orange sparks of the ash of a bonfire, burning up into the heavens an offering to who it is hard to say any longer, such is the multitudinous presence of so many gods in history’s narrow, bountiful arc.

  CHAPTER XI

  The Mandate

  Ω

  September, 2015

  I WAS sat on the balcony in the cool Fall of my West London pied-a-terre smoking a cigarette and drinking a bottle of Chateau La Tour ’82 when the bell rang. The last person I expected to see at 10pm at the end of a weekend was stood there on my doorstep: Mason Feng Lee. Bold Sharp Blade, of all people! The young People’s Republic icon of all that is great in technology, capitalism and politics had clearly made the 13,000 kilometer journey to the westernmost part of this world exclusively to see me. Given this reality, I ought to have acted better behaved, but I was drunk by that point.

  For a while I left Mason standing outside my front door without saying anything. He walked about and knocked, and knocked again on the low door to my small – but prohibitively expensive – mews house. It is located just off the Portobello Road near the Notting Hill Gate – one of the more glamorous areas of the city, certainly.

  When I eventually opened up, I did so putting a finger to my lips to indicate he should be silent. Mason said nothing. This irritated me in a way, and so feeling the annoying irritation I began to interrogate the billionaire playboy mindlessly.

  “What the hell is going on over there?” I said, in a voice that was far too loud.

  Across the road, we could both hear the creaking of an open window.

  “Oi! Oi!” came a noise from the window. “It’s the bleedin’ middle of the night. Knock it off, you two!”

  “Just the other day I had Easton knocking on the door of my hotel room in Roma – except he wasn’t Easton. His name, I believe, he said was, Ryan. No – Ramon? One of those, anyway. Clearly you have a bug somewhere in the system. I would tell you to fix it but you’re clearly way out of your depth.”

  “Oi!!” came the cry again from the creaky window, this time accompanied by the rage of a sleep-deprived face.

  “C’mon then – motherfucker!” I said under my breath, sticking a middle finger up at the hostile interlocutor. At that point Mason pushed me inside my house. My head was spinning with the alcohol whizzing around it, and in such a condition I fell back easily and more or less compliantly allowed him to come on in and close the door silently behind him.

  “I mean what the hell is going on? You do see my point, right?” I complained to Mason.

  “Not now. In the morning. I need to sleep first. I have come straight from the airport. We’ll talk later – go to bed. You’re drunk.” The way he said drunk was in such a tone one reserves for those objects of a special sort of derision.

  “I’m dru-nk,” I muttered under my breath, before collapsing on my bed and falling into a somewhat disturbed but still dreamless reverie.

  Ω

  I awoke about five hours later on my couch to see Mason glaring at me sharply. My head was sore. I instantly began to rebuke him now, the soreness of my head making my irritation only more pronounced. Despite the fact that he was a billionaire kid going on Master of the Universe, and no matter that I was hardly more qualified than he technologically speaking to give him a lecture on in-game automated efficiency programming, he took what I had to say with a slow bow of his head, which was done out of his Chinese habit I guessed. It works – that habit. It placates the enemy, as it placated me just then. I can’t say why, but it just did. Primal instinct, or something of the sort, governs our most intimate emotions more often than polite conversation: a deft bow of the head painted a picture in my mind of a thousand apologies.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said, drawing some breath finally. “I don’t want to give you hell over this my friend but seriously – what is going on out there in China?” I asked him for the countless time. “And my head is splitting. Do we have any aspirin?”

  Mason handed me what looked like two aspirin and a cup of water. Gratefully, I swallowed back the pills and took another gulp of water to lubricate the dryness in my throat. He waited patiently until I was done and settled back in a reclining position on the couch before beginning again.

  “It’s not so much something going on out in China,” Mason said. “It’s here – in places such as this one. In your London pied-a-terre, here, right where we are sat now. In your living room, which I have no idea whether it is, or is not, your living room at all.”

  “It is in the story.”

  “In real life?”

  I remained silent. Mason didn’t object. Chinese people rarely expect you to answer such a direct or personal question, just merely to consider that it is being asked in the first place, and so I gave that some consideration.

  “In the parts of the story where the narrative is complex, that’s where we’re running into problems,” Mason continued.

  “How about where the story is purely imaginative? When it’s purely made up and there’s nothing in it whatsoever based on real life in the narrative? Have you had an opportunity to–”

  “We tried it, sure,” said Mason, cutting me off. “We just tried exactly that, in fact. Only problem is, it seemed to bring out the exact opposite effect of the intended.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “Well,” Mason started, “We tried to go back and get the guy who killed Tamara all those years ago in the car accident. The New Yorker …”

  “Uh-huh. Why did you do that though?”

  “We figured that by getting access to him we would be able to see where the psychological damage to Sofia was done all those years ago.”

  “What happened? Did you get anywhere?”

  “It sort of back-fired, in a way. In other words, it created an alternate history of sorts that we now have to work into the narrative,” said Mason, slowly. “Do you understand what that means?”

  “Thanks yes – I know exactly what that means,” I responded. “We’ve now essentially – for all intends and purposes – got two completely separate histories of the same event, one of which is true and one of which is imaginary, but which are virtually indistinguishable from one another if you go any sort of a fact-finding mission because the information has been installed across the internet, across the various Blockchains used for all the commercial transactions that all the banks have in place, and in t
urn in all the transaction payment ledgers all over the world where such receipts as would be required would be expected to be found. And being a car accident –”

  “We have no witnesses to know which version of events is true,” Mason and I said in unison, as the Chinese kid finished the sentence off with me.

  “What do you want me for, though? Look, I am just the fucking author. I can help only up until the point. There is a sense in which you are control of this story, too.”

  “Is there really?” asked Mason.

  “There is.”

  “Which sense is that?”

  “I honestly don’t know the answer to that,” I replied. “But what I am saying is, now that the previous book is written, published – out … there,” I swung my arms around to point somewhere distantly far off, “selling like mad and consumed by the global public, well. The story is in everyone’s heads. I cannot just change it. The imaginary part has been combined already with the real part, and it’s become complex already. It’ll always be complex now.”

  Mason and I looked up suddenly as a bolt of lightning seemed to flash-flash-flash through the half-open window of the living room. It was him, not I, who seemed to be expecting this. It was him who spoke first, therefore this time.

  “Here it comes –”

  Suddenly the clouds went very dark, and then bright, and after that, laser-like rainbows came pouring out of them as the substance of the clouds was visibly pulled apart from itself, a whole block of mist separating in an instant from some sort of braid of many smaller rainclouds. The clouds looked like pieces of discarded bait being ripped at either end somewhere deep under the ocean by a family of hungry great white sharks. In a heartbeat they seemed to have become separated in unequal portions and stretched out across the bottom of the horizon, rising with the heat of the early pre-noon and then collapsing back on themselves into the stray pocket of icy cool British autumnal air. All around the sky pools of mirages appeared to float and then disappear and reappear elsewhere.