by Jeff Wheeler
Although that was a rhetorical question, I still answer him, if only to spite him. “Well, you would have been pulled to me instead, dehydrated and sweating blood.”
This doesn’t stir his rage. Or perhaps he’s sufficiently enraged, but, like other handlers that Mr. Yoigan Dixen sent in the past, he has mastered impassivity. From his stare emanates a dark aura that suggests he wishes he could plaster the deserted old street with my brain. “Never touch me again,” he says. Then his head tilts as if listening to the distant wail of sirens. “You are compromised. Did they scan your soul crest?”
“No!” I blurt, managing to pull myself upright.
The blue gleam of the transit rays barely lights the night, but I swear I see his eyes narrow.
“You look . . . disorientated,” he says.
I shoot him a glare, he meets my gaze, and I withdraw. “Try travelling the rays without boarding a lightbooth.”
“All right. The package?” He extends a robotic hand and I relinquish the backpack. When he opens it and sees the inventor inside, a frown visits his face, making him appear older than his thirty-something years. “You were asked not to use the compressor or leave a witness.”
“He was reaching for the alarm. That would have triggered the soul crest scanners.”
“You couldn’t just kill him?” He pulls out the matter compressor and inspects it. The device is merely a sort of transparent gun with an orb containing harvested transit rays at its centre.
“I already told Mr. Dixen I don’t kill. If that is against my oath, then I should be dead, shouldn’t I? What was it he said? Yes, a witch is bound by her word.”
Without another word, he yanks the inventor out of the bag—the bald man is still unconscious—drops him on the ground, and squashes him under his boot. Then he ambles towards his thrumming glider as if he didn’t just kill a man. “You know what this means. You switch before morning.”
I follow behind him with a glare I wish were a dagger. As I do so, I can’t help but wonder how many shots from that matter compressor would shrink a man to nothingness. Can the glassy gun even do that? If something of that nature is possible, perhaps it would have been a kinder demise for the poor inventor.
* * *
My life’s an irony. A depressing one at that.
Every time I behold the Dixen empire, I’m confronted by that irony. I feel shackled, despite my ability to wear the faces of my reincarnations, to experience freedom in its raw form. I feel subjugated, because Mr. Dixen has the most important of my gifts contained in the centre of his empire, where he exerts absolute control and power.
You see, when people identify a man as powerful, the variables often considered are his wealth and strength. With these he can afford other aspects of power like influence, a network, an army . . . Mr Dixen packs the best of these facets. His empire encompasses a fourth of the city, his subjects a legion of over ten thousand stern, jacketed men, and within his muscles and sinews course the strength of a hundred men. I still can’t seem to forget the memory he beamed into my biocrest following my unsuccessful rebellion, a memory of him killing a thousand men in ten minutes during the Crest War.
This is how I know he his powerful. This is how I know I will never be free.
As our glider thrums over the expanse of imposing sky towers and artificial trees more efficient than natural ones in metabolising carbon dioxide and secreting oxygen, the death of the inventor haunts me more than the sadness brought by my subjugation and the life I’m about to give up. He didn’t deserve to die, if only because he had a wife whom I’ve now widowed and children whom I’ve rendered fatherless.
I, on the other hand, am alone in this world. I have long since my third lifetime (when Mr. Dixen murdered my second fiancée) surrendered to solitude—a necessary decision, seeing as every switch I make with my reincarnation means a “reset,” a new life stripped of family, friends, and acquaintances.
We dock before a heavily guarded building of the ancient sort—the Hall, I call it. It’s one of the many structures in the empire made of stone and slate, which, for some reason, Mr. Dixen favours over light technology. As I alight and walk in the predawn gloom through the unsmiling puff-chested men flanking the road and into the building, my handler waits inside the glider. The guards don’t follow either. Right from that ever-vivid night when Mr. Dixen extracted me from my foster parents’ house and charged me with fulfilling an oath I still don’t remember swearing, I have always been allowed alone inside the tower. It’s that one place I enjoy a little peace. The one place I feel safe.
The base of the Hall, unlike its towering roof, is simply rectangular, with its length a hundred times longer than its width, a hundred pentagons carved into its stony floor. The first pentagon, as Mr. Dixen taught me, represents my present life. The ninety-nine others are doorways to my reincarnations. He said that many lifetimes ago he helped me build the portals so I could escape the bounty on my head by switching bodies with my reincarnations, and in return I offered him a hundred lifetimes of servitude. I gave my word, apparently. Now I have to keep it.
I stride to the sixtieth pentagon, pick up the blade I left there on my previous visit, bleed my palm, and paint the lines of the sixty-first pentagon with my blood. I’ve often wondered if I could open all the portals at the same time. I’m even tempted to satisfy that curiosity now, but seeing as that would require a lot of blood, I chant in Igbo only to the sixty-first door, “Oge erugo, ogbanje m. Bia za m oku.”
The pentagon lights up, its ethereal blue shafts rising until they touch the roof. And I sit cross-legged and wait. Sometimes it takes days for a reincarnation to hear my chant and answer. It all depends on her location at the time of my calling. Once, it took three weeks. This one arrives immediately, and we sit and talk like friends we both don’t have and share our loneliness, despair, and frustration before I touch her.
* * *
My life’s an irony. A deep one at that.
The mirror is a part of the wall, with no borders suggesting it’s mounted, as if the lightwall is organic and grew a looking glass just to emphasise that irony.
First, it acquaints me with the person I’ve become, the absence of blemishes on my warm skin, the shades of black in my deep green eyes, the stub of a nose resting over heart-shaped lips . . . Then it adjusts its focus to the door behind me, taunting me, daring me to step past it with a smile. I’m a stranger to everyone beyond that door, and a stranger I will remain the next time I change.
It’s all a cycle. A never-ending cycle.
This time my hair is unusually long, almost touching my waist, and its green is tinted with strokes of black, just like my eyes and nails. I will have to trim it or plait it into manageable locks so that it doesn’t get in the way on my next mission. Hopefully, my identity will be compromised again soon and I’ll switch to less attractive, less ironic features.
I splash water on my face as though to wake myself from a bad dream, dry with a towel from the hanger, and slouch towards the door. It dissipates, melting away like a sheet of ice subjected to extreme heat, ushering me into a hall filled with computers and dozens of tailors designing outfits on the systems’ large slim screens.
Most of the tailors turn to regard me as I walk between them towards my spot. They have every right to stare, and I doubt that my recently acquired beauty is to blame. Who still wears leather when everyone else is looking seraphic in their lightclothes and their assorted wallpapers?
A man with dirty-blue features (eyes that disguise their focus in a funny way, nails that hover over the tips of his fingers like ancient hoes, and hair lapping onto his scalp like a nylon wig) points at me from the exit, where another man in an all-black police uniform stands. The policeman walks forward, a glowing blue device clutched in his big hand.
My heart kicks at my chest, causing me to stop. I could try to run, but there is only one exit, and the hall is clean—confined by lightwalls equipped with top-notch scrubbers—without a single wisp of t
ransit ray that could have carried me out of the building at least. Whether it would have dumped me by the precipice of a two-hundred-storey tower or left me hanging in the open afternoon air, since I’m too dismayed to paint an anchor at the moment, is a risk I would have been willing to take.
“Ms. Raima Conaro,” the policeman says. His badge says “detective.” He brings forth his device, but hesitates with a frown that accentuates the artistic curves of his thick brows. “You are wearing leather . . . May I see your biocrest, then?” His voice is the sort that invades the depth of your skin and incites a vibration from there.
I squint at the scanner, as if that can clue me in on the type it is.
Those brows of his arch—they make me want to lick my finger and smooth them. And his lips shift in a one-sided smile that makes me wonder whether the juddering of my heart and the beads of sweat manifesting themselves on my skin are threatening to betray my unease because he’s obviously investigating the missing inventor and matter compressor, or just because of him.
“Don’t worry. I’d need a warrant to scan your soul crest,” he says with a wider smile that pushes his nose farther downward.
With a sigh, I roll up the left sleeve of my brown jacket and expose the glowing blue pentagon attached to my wrist like an old television screen to its frame. Most people wear lightclothes because they make them look immaculate, but this leaves their crests vulnerable to scanners. I, on the other hand, prefer leather—and long sleeves—simply because it interferes with the transmission of information between scanners and crests.
“That’s a unique biocrest,” he says. “Is that an upgrade? Can they even do that after birth?”
Since I cannot tell him that the biocrest passed to me from the future when I switched bodies with my reincarnation, I decide to parry his questions, my heart fretting all the while. “Don’t scan the wrong crest, Detective. I need my mind intact,” I say. “Why me, anyway?”
He peers at his pad as my biometrics are pulled from my crest and onto its screen. “We are scanning new employees in every company across the state.”
His remark makes me flinch. “That must be some odds.”
“Yeah. A thousand new employees and counting.”
“So how does this work?” I need to know.
He eyes my biocrest and I shove down my sleeve. He smiles. “Tell you what . . . I’ll tell you everything over dinner tomorrow evening.”
I wince. It isn’t a wince as such. It’s just the only expression I can come up with to shroud the half smile half frown twitching the muscles on my face. I couldn’t possibly say yes to him, because, apart from the facts that Mr. Dixen is very fond of murdering my lovers to get to me and that my next switch with my reincarnation will destroy any relationship I build now, I suspect the detective knows about my previous night’s break in and is just biding his time in the hope that I will slip up.
This is evidence that my soul crest too was compromised in my last mission, as I feared. That’s the only way he could have traced me, for when a crest is scanned, the scanner imprints a sort of beacon, call it a malware, on it. And anytime that crest is in proximity with a scanner, the beacon activates, alerting the authorities of its position and of the crime for which the crest’s wearer is wanted. If imprinted on my biocrest, this beacon, Mr. Dixen said, remains with the body I give up during a switch. But if imprinted on my soul crest, the beacon follows my soul into my new body.
I stick out an unsure finger. “You are Detective . . . ?”
“Poi,” he said. “Lei Poi.”
And thus I reckon I’m doomed. His family owns Poi Security. Still, as I say yes to his proposal, it isn’t simply to dampen his suspicion, but also because I want to see him again, even if from afar.
* * *
My life’s an irony. An embarrassing one at that.
Some people say that beauty is a curse. I think I concur. A beautiful woman should have many friends. Her beauty should charm and distract. Yet, I lurk in the shadows of the palm trees skirting the dinner garden’s western border, chewing mint and coveting the lives of the regular men and women sitting across from each other with smiles too careless for their glowing lightclothes.
I long to amble out there swathed in my own lightclothes and warm the leafy chair directly under the mosaic spotlight while I wait for Lei—the detective—if only to prove to the world that I too belong, that I too can go on a date. But those light-emitting clothes make me nervous. They don’t only leave crests vulnerable to scanners, but, should their power supply fail, their transparency would leave the wearer naked also. Besides that, I would look odd in my leather slacks and jacket in the midst of these folk.
I’ve only come to observe the detective, and that I shall do.
He arrives at exactly eighteen hundred clad in his police uniform, settles right under that spotlight, and sets something—his scanner—on the glass table. This makes me curse and grind my teeth as though there’s an old nail there that needs crushing. I can forgive his uniform, probably because neither am I properly togged up for a date, but his scanner is inexcusable. This, as I suspected, isn’t a date, and with a few pats on the chest, I console my heavy heart and commend myself for lingering in the trees.
He unrolls the paper-thin phone circling his wrist and speaks into it, and as my trousers’ pocket begins to vibrate, his big eyes beeline to the palm trees and he waves. This makes me swallow. My mint goes down with the spittle and I nearly choke. I don’t know what unnerves me more—my not remembering ever giving him my phone number or how he discovered that I’m in the trees. The thought of the latter quickens the pace of my heartbeat since it supports my dread that the Muna Bio-Tech scanners actually read my soul crest and that now the crest will not stop broadcasting its position every chance it gets.
I quickly fish out the old Android in my pocket and place it against my ear just to make sure that it’s him calling.
“Ms. Conaro.” That stentorian voice of his makes my skin flutter.
I clear my throat. “H-how are you doing this?”
“Couldn’t risk you leaving town. So I embedded a tracker in your biocrest when I scanned you yesterday,” he says. “Come out and sit down. If I wanted to bring you in I would have already.”
I manage a relieved sigh because it appears my soul crest didn’t betray me after all. Of course, my biocrest has been compromised by the detective’s malicious code, but I can always make a switch to escape him. Apparently, my silence and contemplation stretched longer than can be endured, for he begins to speak again.
“It seems you didn’t exist until yesterday,” he says. “In fact, you don’t exist at all on any database.”
There are a few faint transit rays floating low around me, and I had anchored on a piece of paper scampering in Keepings Park near the city’s western outskirts on my way here. I could touch a ray and be done with this . . . him. But my curiosity prevails. “How do you mean?”
“I have discovered what I call ‘retrievers.’ Each one of them come and go in the span of a week—sometimes up to a year. And inside that time span, they steal or destroy the prototypes of new technology and every evidence of their designs. And you, Ms. Conaro, just popped into existence yesterday.” His voice is filled with the sort of certainty that borders on pride.
I want to smile. I really do, if only because the detective just revealed to me that my soul crest is uncompromised. Although he does have the pattern of my activities worked out, it could have been worse had my soul crest been scanned. He would have been able to download sensitive information like the number of times I’ve been reincarnated, or the families into which I’ve been reincarnated, and he would have discovered that, unlike every other person whose reincarnation happens every hundred years, mine has happened sixty times in the past ten years, and they all happened on the days his so-called retrievers disappeared.
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” I say. “Are you saying I was born yesterday?”
He chuckles. “Don’t be coy. Your biocrest was installed very recently.”
“Last I checked, the crests can only be installed at birth. It takes a whole childhood to bond those things.”
“But yours is a unique crest. One I haven’t seen before. Futuristic even. I’ve checked the Conaro clan’s database. Conaro. That’s your clan, right? You are not there. Someone has secretly developed a way to extract and install crests in adults. I need to know. Who installed yours?”
“What?”
“You work for someone. I need to know who. I can help you, Raima. But you have to trust me. You can trust me.”
His empathetic tone breaches my mind and flows like a chemical signal from one neuron to another, inciting in me a gnawing desire to implicate Mr. Dixen and sit back and watch how the whole thing plays out. Unfortunately, my better judgement suggests that the implication wouldn’t stick. If Mr. Dixen is powerful enough to live for hundreds of years without attracting any suspicion, then he could very easily shake my unsaid allegations off. Apart from that, there’s only one retriever, and nobody has the technology to install crests on adults. At least not yet.
I must have been lost in my rumination because I realise too late that someone has crept up to me from behind. It isn’t the detective, though. The creeper’s stern voice identifies him as my handler.
“Give me the phone,” he says.
On the other end of the line, the detective resigns himself to desperation. “Raima? Are you there? Raima?”
With a sigh, I terminate the call and surrender the phone by passing it over my shoulder without looking back. As my handler confiscates it, he intones, “Let’s go. You have a new mission.”
I spin around. “I don’t need this now. He can track me.” I point at the detective who alternates between staring at his phone and peering at the palm trees. “What I need is to sw-switch.” Now that I think of it, a vacuum more expansive than I’ve ever felt before opens in my heart. I don’t want to switch. I don’t want to lose my newfound beauty.
