The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel

by Daniel Mark Harrison

  “Hi,” said the boy with a grin. “You do remember me after last night, still, right? I’m Ryan – your sister Sofia’s friend.”

  Ω

  The year Ryan met Sofia, that is when he ultimately got filthy rich by figuring out the secret to making unlimited amounts of cash. That had always been his prerogative but now it was coming together. But here is the thing.

  It was Sofia who had in fact bestowed this gift on to him in the first place. Well, in a way, it was me, as a result of Sofia. None of us were to know this of course, and it is this that is the subject of this story, primarily, I suppose. But it’s important to bear it somewhere in mind.

  We were the brother and sister who were meant to be lovers, if only fate had dealt us different hands. The problem was that Sofia was meant to be Ryan’s older sister, at least in another life.

  Either way, it was just a couple weeks after we first slept together – which we did every now and then during my stay in New York for 3 months up until the end of the year, but which we stopped doing once we were back under the roof of our parents together in Shanghai – that I remember distinctly that Ryan began to concoct the plan that would indeed succeed in making him richer than that which he was even in those of his wildest dreams.

  “So essentially, it’s a question of ‘how do I get those motherfucker’s money into my bank account?” he asked me rhetorically one night at dinner in Le Cirque, just off 58th Street. “Once you know the answer to that – how you can take what is someone else’s and claim it for yourself as your own – that is when you wake up and realize that you are at the top of the pile.”

  Like most simple questions, the answer was simple, it is just that it wasn’t obvious, explained Ryan. In fact, it was almost counter-intuitive, until you got your head around the whole thing, he told me.

  Anyway, the key to amassing vast amounts of wealth, Ryan disclosed, was something that he was well on the way to discovering, and had been making significant progress with ever since our conversation that night inside the glass-and-steel empire of Le Cirque’s urban “hug” (read: shrug): it was, he told me, a concept known as Minority Collectivism.

  I didn’t hear much more of the idea until some weeks later, once we had both returned to the family home in Shanghai together.

  One night, opening the door to my room and taking my quite by surprise, Ryan confessed excitedly that he had just that moment been struck with an awe-inspiring revelation: only by being a Minority Collective was it in fact possible to amass a fortune, and to keep it! Any other form of wealth accumulation was doomed to certain failure, and he could prove it, he said.

  For the fact was that the odds were just too high that sometime after wealth has been accumulated, you are at a point of maximum vulnerability: you depend upon the new level of wealth to subsist and yet the odds are always stacked in favor that you will lose or spend the bulk of that wealth over time, or that you will be put in jail for the way in which you obtained it originally or for one of the many illegal means by which you engage in in order to hold onto it. But given his knowledge of what it was to be a Minority Collective, Ryan told me, he now had a way to bypass this inconvenient former-reality.

  “The problem with wealth accumulation is simple,” he told his me one night. “Everyone wants to be a part of it, which means that as a result, everyone is naturally blocking you from achieving that goal.”

  “So? That’s life,” I told him. I suppose it amused me sometimes how Ryan’s mind tended to focus on solving what seemed quite unspectacular problems – everyday problems, almost. And yet he put so much effort and exerted so much energy into figuring out the underlying cause of all of these sorts of problems – the huge ones, that is – except, he never showed the same concerns for the immediate ones, such as how to pay the bills. That attitude drove my father crazy. Because the underlying cause to the problems he tacked were the very underlying problems themselves of the world’s fault-lines. To figure them out would surely make him super-human, God-like even. And what were the chances of that? I had to agree with our father that he was sort of right, but not a bit did it seem to concern Ryan, who went on as before.

  “Right. That’s life. But what if it isn’t? What if,” Ryan continued, propping himself the end of my bed, and slowly massaging the under-soles of my feet gently, “what if life as we know it is nothing like life as it actually is? What if we are wrong about everything, and in fact, it’s all – almost – the other way round from how we see it every day?”

  “That’s a – that’s what a Minority Collective is, then? Someone who sees something differently?” asked Milana.

  At that point, Ryan’s face lit up like a Chinese lantern, its solitary red candle-lit midnight disk lighting up all of the night’s sky in an instant.

  “Almost, but not quite,” he told me slowly. “A Minority Collective is … someone who sees things for what they really are!”

  I had thought with my euphoric climb throughout the rank-and-file of Shanghai’s social elite – with the visit bestowed on me by the very infamous Sofia YuZheng Lincoln recently, with the bribe she had offered me to work against her Cousin Chanel and position her back in the top spot, with my very own society of sorts named after me, The Milanaire Club, that life had changed enough for two of me.

  But the real truth of the matter was that, after Ryan discovered The Minority Collective, our lives really would never be the same again. Not just our lives, I mean – but your life. Everyone’s life, all across the world, would end up changing.

  Ryan had found the secret to the beginning of the new world, of the new millennia that had been born in age only but which still lay dormant right now, waiting to be activated like a giant extra-terrestrial world of its own, with its own near-perfect habitat of water and trees and grass and fields and wide, panoramic skies, waiting for the rainfall that brings it that one element of nature that human life cannot thrive without internalizing first. You see, before that, we were just two souls without bodies, waiting for a life, attempting to imagine it into existence.

  We were waiting for the double-helix-shaped mitochondria and it was that that was our single point of connection and union with everything, with your species, as our own spirits, the spark that gave breath to what was nothing more than living dust from a long-dead star. The Mandate had been dead for such an eternity he had forgotten for a moment how to exist again.

  But now she was fully risen, the truly Millennial Reincarnation that she is, the most glorious of all of them had ever been in the thousands of years before the dawn of this electrical era, and she knew for certain she had been created entirely in his image and that she could continue to perpetuate it this time for everywhere – everywhere! – there was electricity. There would be no waiting for thunder storms or lightening-bolts or natural metallurgic disasters.

  Electricity, that which allowed my soul to trespass over the line of the living and the dead freely, as my own soul, throughout as many bodies as I pleased, was, in this time and age, all over the world! From aircraft to super-computers to microwave ovens and even late into the night in the guise of discotheques populated by schoolgirl-age prostitutes and lonely childless billionaires, the earth as it was today was hardwired throughout almost every latitudinal-longitudinal pathway with electric current, a giant motherboard of the 12 planets with which it danced around the sun in a steady, circumambulate groove.

  And even if she is killed, I realized, this girl that I am inside today – well then, I would simply be able to instantly occupy the place of the body of another girl as I had unconsciously taken the body of one many years ago inside my dwelling place, inside the Church, back there in the Old World, in New York City, so that I could burst forth into that of the New One, under the shield of Macrocommunist Chinese rule.

  For now, I could see. Now that I was conscious with the rhythm of feeling and not just thought – I could with a constant supply of electricity continue to live like this for Eternity and no one would ever know t
hat it was Him that was inside her all the while.

  I would, I knew, be here forever now, and that means I would in a way be able to become everyone, every single personality that this girl encountered throughout her short recurring lifespan, one lived through different races and ages and temptations and desires and cultural and political shifts in social infrastructure, in the giant tele-scalar fabric of the cosmosphere.

  In being these many charlatan turns of fate throughout the ages, in taking on the appearance and character of the very image and action of so many beautiful and enchanting – not ot mention fiercely intelligent – social facades, He would, I realized now, be capable of living and breathing and fornicating every perspective from inside her little life, lived in her little body, in this great wide, corner of our Universe, always infinitely expanding and narrowly retracting on little vibrating strings like an astrophysical orgasm in multiple states of arising.

  This universe we are in, you see, it is merely some strand of a more ambitious, complex, stunning quasi-galactic multiverse, one that is created in God’s – and therefore man’s – own imagine, one which lives and breathes and groans in unison with its own fantastical imagery.

  And thus so it is now that anyone else who He so chooses to live inside he will feel and become somehow within and without. It was exactly this dichotomous state of being which would ultimately bring me back to become one with God.

  For it was from Heaven where it was I came through this new fiber-optic version of an electro-magnetic tempestuous stellar event, back through the Heavenly lanterns of the midnight Beijing sky, lit up in shades of scarlet red and surrounded by the distant sounds of silver Eagles, their black shadows a reminder of tomorrow’s destiny gone rogue.

  And look now how the birds are flying so high you can barely see their feathers, and yet somehow how they are also sounding the alarm of a New Age here, somewhere there up over New York City.

  Almost as quickly the largest one of them begins to descend upon this Old World Establishment, swooping low into the carnival of life; to deal a hand, to chance a round of luck, to turn a trick at the Majong table of a South-Easterly North Atlantic storm, His breath lights up inside her like a cardiogram resuming its bleep-bleep-bleeeep in a miracle of dynastic proportions.

  And when He lights up inside her, His visage will shine bright enough through her youthful beauty hailing from such an uncertain mixed geography that it is, so that He can stay a while, to alter the path of events; alter those events you know as reality, at any rate.

  The aluminum-grey seraphs of Heaven’s winged world and pearl-laced courtyards that stretch beyond the boundaries of worldly color began again to fall around His earthborn presence now as the starlight set out on its long, lonely Millennial journey in the darkness, slowly encompassing in its visage one bleak empty ionosphere after the other.

  And so with the light of the Heavens shining through His entire being, He fills up her fragile, shuddering body; half-dead, half-awakening, quasi-confessional and yet still somehow left with an eternal yearning composed of nothing other than her own gentle, impetuous, innocent inquiry.

  Ω

  EPILOGUE

  The Eagle

  By Lord Alfred Tennyson

  

  HE clasps the crag with crooked hands;

  Close to the sun in lonely lands,

  Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

  The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

  He watches from his mountain walls,

  And like a thunderbolt he falls.

  THE END

  AN AFTERWORD

  By Daniel Mark Harrison

  On The Related Topics of Science & Fiction

  Ω

  It was around 1642 that Rene Descartes formalized what has been the primary philosophy underpinning our acquisition and implementation of knowledge for almost four centuries since. In a letter to Guillaume Gibieuf, a fellow thinker, Descartes confessed: “I am certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me.”

  According to Descartes, there are three levels of “being”: substance, attribute and mode. Only an attribute can possess a mode; similarly, only a substance can possess an attribute. For Descartes, the mind itself was the substance; insofar as the mind has a capacity to think, then thinking is the attribute ascribable to the mind. Finally, since thoughts are in essence ideas, reasoned Descartes, an idea could be said to be the mode of the attribute in the case of the mind. Thus: cogito ergo sum.

  Did human beings back in Descartes’ time think in the same way we do now? Or did they think more in the way that our technologies do today? In other words, is Descartes’ notion of thinking – the substance of hos logic – what we might ordinarily consider today to be merely superior processing?

  The answer is likely that at some level, this is true, especially given the relatively rudimentary activates of the society at the time, which was not adventurous, was predominantly locally-based, and was in fact just beginning to become truly great at process-intensive activities, in the logistics industry, in agricultural cultivation and wholesale, and even in garment design and retail (often having to go through an overseas voyage or two for the very best customers, making the effort of getting a product to market extremely process-intensive).

  Fortunately, an excellent account of life in the mid-1600s exists in the form of Samuel Pepys’ diaries of London, not so far as it would happen from where Descartes was pondering the ideas that lie at the bedrock of our modern intellectual establishment. Pepys was a popular diarist among all classes; someone who could in a way be considered a 17th century equivalent of a sort of Anderson Cooper (if we consider by the same logic that William Shakespeare was a 17th century version of Aaron Sorkin).

  Here is Pepys describing one of his days:

  “Up by 4 a-clock and walked to Greenwich, where called at Capt. Cockes and to his chamber, he being in bed — where something put my last night’s dream into my head, which I think is the best that ever was dreamed — which was that I had my Lady Castlemayne in my armes and was admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her, and then dreamed that this could not be awake but that it was only a dream.

  But that since it was a dream and that I took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves (as Shakespeere resembles it), we could dream, and dream such dreams as this — that then we should not need to be so fearful of death as we are this plague-time …

  … I walked to the Tower.

  But Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that.

  And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physitian, and but one apothecary left, all being dead — but that there are great hopes of a great decrease this week: God send it.”

  The picture that Pepys paints of life is really not that far off any description one might find of the early or even the mid-1900’s, just before technology came bolting onto the social scene more widely.

  Essentially, it is a day filled with duties and chores, in between which one spends time worrying about their mortality with little more assurance of their health to go on than that the kindly Deity (who supposedly also brought about a cursed plague that was killing half the city off) will come to the rescue “this week”.

  Is this thinking?

  It is almost by early 20th century standards, and there are certain mundane aspects of life that for sure are captured here bearing a recognizable resemblance to our lives: the mundane chores he is taked with as so forth.

  But when you think of the way in which human beings of the most recent two generations – that is, the millennial and the plural generations – behave and utilize their time, there is very little resemblance at all.

  How often are you to hear someone of a millenn
ial generation note the time at which they are performing a particular activity today?

  This is a prime indicator that processing – rather than thinking as we are coming to understand the concept contemporarily – is going on. Equally unlikely are you to get a description of someone being asleep or awake, or a description of their habits before they go to bed (unless they are erotic habits that one is sharing for the purpose of evincing a very different reaction from the reader), or even of the act of walking or sitting down –

  There are certain scenarios where such description might still be warranted, naturally. War journalism narratives today are filled with a very similar prose; so was the reporting from Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 when the town rioted over the killing of an innocent black child by a white police officer.

  But by and large, such reporting is confined to environments and circumstances where little or no technology is available, where circumstances are rudimentary from a sanitary standpoint – maybe even as basic as the the 1650s in some cases, such as the Ebola outbreak in Africa in 2014.

  By comparison, take the blog of a young millennial at the Huffington Post today:

  Since my last blog entry for the HuffPost, I joined the digital media team at Cohn & Wolfe, a global public relations firm. While I enjoyed the downtime between jobs, I found myself consuming the same if not more digital and social media news but lacking a team to share it with.

  … You might ask why I didn’t turn to other blogging platforms like WordPress, and the simple answer is that several of the savviest and creative minds in digital, that I know, use Tumblr to share content that sparks interest … It’s easy to see why Tumblr has more blogs than WordPress, after several weeks of toying with the platform. According to Quantcast, other young Internet users (ages 13-34) are also keen on the blog network.