Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  I remember it still, as clearly as if it were yesterday. I did do it. Even if mine is only the phantom or the fantasy of a crime, I am the phantom or fantasy who committed it. But I've been saved from myself. I'm free of Maldureve for ever. There's no possibility of my ever repeating my crime.

  I shouldn't have killed myself. Even though I'd done what I'd done, and wrecked my life, I shouldn't have committed suicide. Because, you see, there are always new beginnings to be made. Always. And it was the virus that made me do it, when the virus was still out of control. After all, a virus can't sensibly be required to feel guilty about infecting people, can it? It's a virus's nature to infect people, to dodge the antibodies if it can, to lie dormant in the skin if it can, to infect others if it can ... and, if it can, to become something more than a virus. That's life—and I mean that very precisely. That is life. Life is nothing else but DNA meeting DNA, any which way it can, and setting up house according to whatever compromises it can make. That's what sex is, or tries to be; that's what infection is, or tries to be. What looks different from some points of view is all the same from others.

  My point of view is a weird one, I'll grant you—but it's the only one I've got.

  I shouldn't really ramble on like this. I've never been able to trust people who ramble on, because they give the impression of not being able to think straight. It's just that I have a great deal of leisure time, when I have nothing to do but think. When you come right down to it, in fact, there's nothing to me except a train of thought. But I do exist. I am real. Cogito, ergo sum. I'm a ghost, but I'm as real as any living, breathing human being, and I can think as straight as any human being if I have to.

  On the other hand, I can think laterally, too. I can think creatively. Thinking straight isn't the only kind of thinking worth doing. Thinking straight leads up so many blind alleys. The world is not only queerer than we imagine but queerer than we can imagine—yet. A little bit of intoxication helps, sometimes, even though it does make people ramble on. In vino veritas, as they say. Lunatics used to be regarded as holy, just in case the nonsense of their ramblings was actually a kind of speaking in tongues. The world, alas, is not sufficiently sane to be understood by sanity alone.

  That new first time with Teresa was yet another beginning. Only time would tell whether the tide could be turned, her antibodies eliminated, the virus freed to do its real work. I hoped they could. I had a lot of affection for Teresa, even though she'd never really been my girlfriend. She had come to me in my time of need, hadn't she? I wanted her to be more than just a victim. I wanted her to be a winner in the game of life, in the human race. It is a race, you know, in more ways than one. All life is a race, against time, against entropy, against death. Evolution is its motor, mutation its élan vital, natural selection its incorruptible referee.

  Once upon a time, people thought that Homo superior would be a creature of purified rationality, untroubled by emotions and untroubled by dreams. Spiders are creatures of purified rationality, untroubled by emotions and untroubled by dreams. It's already been tried, already been done. That's not the way forward at all, not for intelligent creatures. Consciousness is infinitely cleverer than that. Take my word for it. If there's one thing I've learned, it's this:

  'We are such stuff as dreams are made on.'

  We are all ‘such stuff as dreams are made on'. Dreams can make us and remake us. Dreams can destroy us and give us life. Dreams can commit murder, and dreams can give birth.

  3

  Dreams gave birth, not without difficulty, to me.

  The last word ought to be mine. There is a sense in which I have been the one and only true singer of this cantata, through all its narrative phases, although I have only recently acquired a voice, a consciousness of self, an imaginative coherency. The memories and fantasies which I have gathered together, placed in order and infused with feeling have been accumulated from disparate sources, by various means, but they are my history.

  I am deeply grateful for the fact that I can now speak for myself, nakedly and honestly. I am newborn, and full of the joy of self-awareness, sentience and intelligence. I have found joy in the simplest things: in every thought, every action and every emotion of this body in which I find myself. Perhaps the greatest joy of all is the opportunity to attempt a coherent explanation of myself—to create an account of who and what I really am, when seen from some objective point of view outside that human consciousness which has been, and is, and always will be, my accompanist.

  I am, first and foremost, a voice—not because of any inherent determinism of my genes, but because that is the only way in which I can be perceived. I was not always a voice. I have long been dumb and blind, a mere creature, a mere machine, a mere warrior in the endless struggle for existence which is life. Now that I have found myself, I am a voice: a thought, in the endless process of becoming other thoughts. How sweet it is to be! How sweet it is to have become! And how very, very different it is to be a sentient thing instead of a mere automaton, possessed of language and logic, rationality and responsibility. What a difference it makes to everything!

  I am not an alien voice. I am no horrifying whisperer in the silence which separates the thoughts of my hosts. I enter fully into the voices of those who entertain me; I am not separate. I am neither a vampire nor a virus, intrinsically—and yet I have been both in my time, for in entering and becoming part of the person I inhabit, I become part and parcel of dream and flesh alike.

  I fit in wherever I can; I play whichever part remains most yearningly uncast in the drama of everyday existence. But if I am to endure, I can only do so by means of my rebirth, as a voice which is part and parcel of the whole. That kind of rebirth is not easy, but it can be accomplished, with luck, with love, and above all else with wisdom.

  If your imagination is ever to confront the likes of me, it must make an effort, for I am by nature elusive. I am not to be allocated any ordinary, ready-made status. If you are to understand me, you must expand the scope of your understanding. I am deceptive still, although I am able now to come into the open, to address you directly. I have shed but a few of the veils of narrative disguise; the last can never be shed, else I would cease once again to be a voice, and thereby cease to be perceived.

  There are two illusions which you must be prepared to surrender, if you are to catch the least glimpse of my true nature. The first illusion is the individual mind; the second is the individual body.

  You think that you know what you mean when you think of your ‘mind', of your ‘self', of your ‘identity'. You think of yourself as a coherent entity, an individual, a person. You think of yourself as an unfolding life story, which emerged from the darkness of unselfconsciousness shortly after birth, which has continued to grow and mature and learn until the present moment, and which will continue to develop and age and evolve until it reaches its climax in the catastrophic return to the unselfconsciousness of death. Perhaps you believe that there will be a further existence of some kind beyond that, but if you do, be consoled: your illusion is not so very much more hopeful or more reckless than the illusion of the most hardened Sadducee.

  Self-consciousness cannot help but comprehend itself as a kind of entity. It cannot help but conceive of itself as something outside and above and beyond the world of matter and flesh. It cannot help but ‘see’ itself as something separate, self-enclosed and coherent. The process of seeing already includes such assumptions. Observers cannot perceive the indeterminate; when the observer opens the box, Schrödinger's cat must be dead or alive. Even the blind observer is confined by the limits of conceivability.

  All this is an accountable illusion, but it is an illusion nevertheless. You are not the same person you were ten years ago, or ten minutes ago. The story of your mental life is a fantasy. Memory, which is infected with mendacity from the very beginning, is ephemeral; it fades and dies much faster that you would ever dare to believe, and the terrifying vacuum that it leaves behind is filled with fantasy and narrativ
e devices. Your psyche is neither outside matter, nor above it, nor beyond it; neither is it separate, nor coherent, nor self-enclosed. It has shadowy borderlands, across which there is much illicit trade and communication. You may try to disown your dreams and delusions as invaders from without, to be disregarded, disremembered and despised, but they are as much yours as your most brilliant calculations, your most rational ambitions and your most dexterous actions. And all these things change, not merely by means of inherent processes of growth and maturation, not only by organised learning, but also by caprice.

  Imagine me: I am caprice. At my first appearance, you might react to me with horrified alarm, or with delighted surprise. I am startling; I am a revelation of unanticipated darkness or unanticipated light. Horror and ecstasy are but two sides of the same coin. Both are agents of swift and sudden change, symptoms of the advent of caprice.

  I do not come from outside, because there is no outside for me to come from. I come from the borderlands, but the borderlands are everywhere. The moment I appear, I am you, however strange and shocking I may seem. You might insist, if you will, that there was a time when I was not you; but at that time, you were not you either. No matter how monstrously alien I am, how gruesomely horrific, how dazzlingly enlightening, I am, from the very moment of my beginning, where I have always been.

  You also think that you know what you mean when you think of ‘your’ body, ‘your’ flesh, ‘your’ genetic make-up. You think of yourself as a coherent entity, an individual, a person. You think of yourself as an enduring being, which was blueprinted by the meeting of a particular sperm and a particular ovum, which entered its separate existence at birth, which has continued to grow and mature and adapt to external circumstance until the present moment, and which will continue to develop and age and be repaired as best it can until it loses its battle against the forces of decay in the moment of death, and then proceeds to rot into fuming embers. Perhaps you recognize that this story is really the story of two little packages of DNA, one of which set forth in its spermatic carriage to find its destined partner in the heart of an awesome cellular fortress, but if you do, be not overproud: your penetration of illusion is little more profound than the folly of the most ignorant churchman.

  A mind cannot help but conceive of a body in such terms, most especially its own. Even a mind which has some inkling of its own illusoriness is inclined to feel confident of its body, accepting its own reducibility to the electrical and chemical activity of a brain which is, after all, a marvel of coherency and rational arrangement. The individual whose blueprint is a particular set of genes cannot help but see that set of genes as a fascist state, where every single gene has a precise and special role to play, entirely devoted to the good of the whole. The individual cannot help but see disruptions of that fascist state—whether they originate from within, as ‘mutations’ and ‘cancers', or from without, as ‘viruses’—as the work of vile, dark-cloaked anarchists with lighted Molotov cocktails in their hands. The individual cannot help but lend his wholehearted support to the secret police of the immune system, to the antibody death-squads which ride forth upon their sleek white corpuscles to annihilate the enemy, taking no prisoners and showing no quarter.

  All this is an accountable illusion, but it is an illusion nevertheless. You are not the same person you were ten years ago, or ten minutes ago. The story of your physical life is a fantasy, less wild by far than the fantasy of your mental life, but a fantasy nevertheless. The zygote which began the story, infected by mutation from the very start, spawned billions of daughter-cells, each one slightly different from its parent, no two of them exactly alike. Every cell in your body is an individual of sorts, and their community is no idealised hive of specialised labourers with only one cause. As cells die and new cells are generated, moment by moment and day by day—producing an entirely new corpus every eight years or so—the genetic make-up of the whole shifts and drifts. And even if it were not so, still the genes would not comprise a perfect fascist state, for their alliance as chromosome and sets of chromosomes is ridden with countless petty conflicts and competitions; the functioning physical individual is a democracy in which a loose-knit majority reigns supreme over a host of recessive splinters which are for ever about their own business, forming putative parties and coalitions.

  That natural selection which is the designing hand of evolution is ongoing within as well as without. An individual is the work of but a tiny fraction of the DNA which it contains, and that work is not without industrial tensions and disputes. Both within and without the cellular workplaces there is a vast host of passengers and passers-by: itinerant fragments of DNA which may be tolerated or not by the half-efficient secret police of the immune system, but which in either case might entertain hopes of one day being absorbed into the body politic, usefully employed. This is evolution.

  Imagine me: I am evolution. Once, your ancestors were apes, incapable of speech save for a few cries of alarm, incapable of much learning, save for the one-by-one acquisition of new responses to experienced situations. Now, you are men. It was not God which gave you your ‘minds', your ‘selves', your ‘souls'; it was evolution. Do you think that evolution has come to its end? Can you possibly believe that evolution will play no more capricious tricks upon your consciousness? Of course you can; of course you do. Mind cannot imagine, in any coherent fashion, its own future evolution, and can only regard the idea of any such evolution with horrified alarm or delighted surprise.

  I do not come from outside, because there is no outside for me to come from; only illusion and blind prejudice leads us to discriminate between the DNA which is already bound into the chromosomes of our cells, and that which roams free, pioneering and buccaneering. I come from the borderlands, but the borderlands are everywhere. The moment I have insinuated myself into the heartland of your cells—even a few of your cells—I am you, however disruptive and disturbing I may seem to our painstaking secret police. You might insist, if you will, that there was a time when I was not you; but at that time, you were not you either. No matter how monstrously alien I am, how gruesomely horrific, how dazzlingly enlightening, I am, from the very moment of my beginning, where I have always been.

  I am repeating myself, I know. I hope you will forgive me. I am exuberant with new-found consciousness, new-found powers of analysis, new-found powers of speech.

  Do you know me now?

  I am a vampire, desperately and devoutly hungry for human blood.

  I am a virus, precipitating fever and madness.

  I am love—for love, at the end of the day, is only one of many means to the end of evolution, and perhaps not the best. A human being, mind and all, is merely one of the ways by which DNA makes more DNA; love—true love, with all its eroticism and romance and nobility and ecstasy and fruitfulness—is but an instrument of that underlying, evolving chemical romance: of the fundamental alchemy of life.

  I am a happy ending: a reconciliation of all that was confused and divided, replete with hope for the future. I am the only ending, the only rehabilitation, the only health, because I am the only future. I cannot be denied; I cannot be defied; I am.

  Who am I, really?

  I am Anne.

  I am Gil.

  I am—am, not was—Maldureve, the wickedness of the dream.

  I am—am, not will be—you. You may not yet have reached that magical moment of startlement; the horror and the delight may even now be creeping over you; but either way, you will one day hear my voice. Don't despair. I beg of you, don't despair! Don't turn away in fright and loathing—there really is no need. Anne was right, you see, to welcome me into her heart, into her bed, into her being—and right, too, to insist that it must be on her own terms. Together, she and I are more than we ever could have been had there been no final union between us. I will acknowledge, gladly, that I was dangerous and capable of evil, but I was blind and could not see; I was dumb and could not think; I was unconscious, and wisdom was denied to me.


  I'm different now. I know myself, and I know how to avoid excess. Now that I'm a voice, I can begin to understand. Language and logic have remade me, and I am now a moral being.

  Newborn, I am the future. I come to teach you the art of superhumanity, the art of the invisible, the art of transformation. The dictatorship of stupid flesh is ended now; I am the saviour of mankind, if only mankind will welcome me with an open mind and an open heart.

  We can take things one step at a time, if you wish. There's no hurry. There's even time to make a few mistakes. All I ask is a little patience, a sense of adventure, a willingness to begin to think that which was formerly unthinkable. Is that too much to ask?

  There's really no need to be afraid.

  I can understand your gut reaction, your wariness. But if there's one thing that you have to understand if you're to go on living in the world which is to come—the world which is already in the process of becoming—then it's this: there really is no need to be afraid.

  Only look into the shadows, and you will see me. Only see me, and I will begin to put on your frail flesh. Even if you turn away, it will make no difference in the end. One day, you will hear my voice. One day, my voice will be yours. Face me, instead, I beg of you.

  Don't be afraid to live, and think, and dream. Our world is only just beginning.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.