Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  “All that time in the library. You ever read the Bible, Kessler?”

  “No, sir. Though, considering the times, maybe I ought to have picked one up.”

  “‘And the Lord replied, “Should I find fifty righteous men in the world, then I shall spare all on their account.” And Abraham said, “suppose only ten can be found.” And the Lord answered “for the sake of ten, I will not destroy the world.”’ Genesis 18 something or another.”

  “Looks like we came up a little short in the end on that one. About nine short, by my count.”

  “It does feel that way sometimes, inmate,” Captain Waters had said over his shoulder as he walked back toward B Block to get the last of his wards moved in.

  * * *

  That first night, Emmett tried to sleep in the bunk above his new cellmate, but the monster’s garbage disposal–like snores made it impossible. Exhausted and bored, his mind browsed through memories like a bored old drunk in a bookstore killing time before happy hour.

  He rubbed his bloodshot eyes and attempted to squint and blink the weariness out of them. Folks are addicted to the illusion of understanding things, he thought, or remembered thinking at some point. His memory had been slowly handing the baton to his dreams, jumbling up the past with the present. We track our steps. Measure our sleep. Count our calories. We have data for everything. Yet folks don’t know shit about how anything actually works. He could feel the rant building in his mind, but then suddenly sleep grabbed his pillow and smothered him into unconsciousness.

  In his dreams that night, he was back in the prison library, researching obsessively. Folks all had their way of passing the time while they were incarcerated. It was as important as food when it came to surviving in prison. Plotting to kill, rape, or smuggle in contraband were the most popular pastimes, followed by finding religion and getting an education. Trying to figure out how not to get raped or shanked took up a lot of the time in the beginning, but folks either learned that quickly, or they didn’t and one or the other happened to them. Until the library was shut down, Emmett had clocked most of his days exploring and developing his theory of where berserkers came from.

  Had Emmett been incarcerated half a decade earlier, the depth of his investigation would have been impossible. When the United Nations all the way back in 2011 declared that Internet access was a fundamental part of the human right to free expression and opinion, they were not concerned with the civil rights of prisoners in the United States, but that decision planted a seed—a seed that was then watered by Time Warner, Facebook, Google, and other powerful lobbying interests, until the thorny concept of neutrality had grown into such a convoluted root system that it spurred a lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections over the email-only access to the Internet the US Department of Justice instituted when it enacted the Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System (TRULINCS). The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and in a five-to-four split decision the US joined a number of European nations in allowing limited Internet access to inmates for educational and legal defensive purposes, which was all Emmett needed.

  On the surface there was nothing about his explanation that made any more sense than anybody else’s rationalizations—except that Emmett happened to be right and the fact that he was made his theory stick in the craw like the melody of a children’s song after a day at summer camp. Not that it mattered; being right would only bring him trouble, never the peace or closure he’d hoped to find at the end of its fickle rainbow. He was not a scientist, so most of the hows and whys were way over his head, but the way he saw it, after World War II mankind ended up in this kind of bizarre evolutionary period. The number of reproductively viable men in the world had been cut down so drastically and so fast that there was a blip of sorts in the human genome. Had nothing else changed and had folks just gone back to having babies again, the blip would have been just that, a blip. But things did change—a lot of things.

  Science got a little out of control during the twentieth century. Food processing, genetically modified organisms, baby formula, electromagnetic radiation, drugs (both recreational and medical), pollution, and a thousand other “advances” in technology came year after year. When folks figured out that cigarettes caused cancer, and then, in rapid succession, horrifyingly discovered that just about everything else in the modern world did too, fear of “the big C” took over the world and things calmed down a little. But cancer was such a slow-acting death sentence, it never really scared anybody enough to really change their behavior, much less correct the collision course they—we—had set for the apocalypse. Only when folks were pretty much used to the cancer did they start to realize it was just the tip of the iceberg. And no warning labels or education could save us from hitting it.

  The end really began with the world’s refusal to accept the fertility issues that came with the toxicity of what was now the twenty-first century. Of course, a causal relationship between any one thing and infertility could almost never be convincingly established, but the fact was, for generations our collective biology had tried to respond to the world we were creating, and natural evolutionary adaptation just couldn’t keep up. And so humanity found itself in a unique position in the history of life on our planet: pockets of human genetic polymorphic sympatric speciation erupted around the world and went unnoticed by the scientific community.

  Emmett didn’t understand as much of the science as he wished he did. But he had finally gotten his head around what polymorphic sympatric speciation was and why it was manifesting as fertility issues. Polymorphism in genetics, at its very core, was the existence of different versions—or morphs—of a species within the species as a whole. The most common and obvious example of this is the separation of humans into male and female versions. The existence of blood types is another example. At some point, polymorphism had split the human species into a new set of subgroups: those with the berserker gene and those without it.

  Polymorphism happens all the time and wouldn’t have been a problem, at least not an end-of-the-world problem, except that sympatric speciation, which is when a new species evolves within the population of one that already exists, was forced on the human population when those with the berserker gene and those without turned to science to overcome their hidden genetic incompatibility.

  It seemed so obvious once Emmett had gotten his head around it: The two different morphs of the human species that made up the baby boomer generation would have had difficulty producing kids—just like how Rh negative blood in a mother with an Rh positive blood-typed fetus can make birth problematic—but the berserker gene morph made things a thousand times worse, because if that baby did manage to survive, the child would technically no longer be human. And yet, it’d still be genetically close enough that with a little scientific encouragement this new non-human could still produce offspring with a regular human—though with a few quite literally monstrous side effects.

  He’d tried to get further into the biology to understand more about how this all worked but always ended up grinding his teeth and wanting to bash his face into the cement walls. But he didn’t have to understand it all. He got the point: an increasingly toxic world had forced humans to rapidly genetically adapt until we became a hybridized species population.

  Of course, people totally oblivious to the genetic failsafe that had been activated inside their DNA still wanted to have babies. Frustrated parents-to-be, of which not only Emmett and Susan had to be counted among but also Susan’s parents as well, collectively said Fuck you to their biology and turned to science to fix it. Never mind that nobody really understood what the it was that they were trying to fix. Never mind that when you say Fuck you to her, Nature—who is not nearly as impartial as she’s thought to be—almost always says Fuck me? No. Fuck you, motherfucker. Fuck you! and then fucks with you right back a thousand times worse. (Just ask the idiots who introduced rabbits to Australia.) Even now, humanity, or what was left of it, still hasn’t grasped that concept y
et. Maybe folks never will.

  Back in the seventies, Susan’s mother had tried for years to get pregnant, and just as she was about to give up, a Dr. Weiss had come along and cured her by taking her eggs out of her body and manually introducing them to Susan’s father’s sperm. Nobody asked about or cared about what nature was trying to safeguard folks against by keeping them from reproducing. Nature had been the enemy and Dr. Weiss the conquering hero. Susan had been born healthy, beautiful, and perfect in all the ways that could be measured at the time. So when Susan and Emmett had trouble conceiving themselves, Grandma had introduced them to the man who had made miracles happen for her, and Dr. Weiss had done his magic again. A year later, after a couple of failures that Dr. Weiss had used to tweak his work, Jennifer was born, just as healthy, beautiful, and perfect as her mother.

  The first inkling of the idea had crept into his subconscious the night Emmett had killed his wife. Back in the bar, when life still seemed like it had somewhere to go. Back when Emmett had just seen Julie Barnes on the news. She’d been a fellow patient of Dr. Weiss. And if Emmett remembered correctly, Julie’s mother had been a patient of his as well—just like Susan and her mother. The news report had been about how Julie had berserked out and killed her family—just like Susan would less than an hour later, the only difference being that Emmett would murder his wife before she could rip their girls apart, and apparently Brad, or whatever Julie’s husband’s name had been, hadn’t found the opportunity to do that himself.

  It had felt like a pattern, and Emmett’s theory had started forming in the dark corners of his brain as soon as it landed in his subconscious. Trying to pass the time those first couple of years of his sentence (the time he should have spent filing an appeal), Emmett had started looking into just how many of Dr. Weiss’s other patients had berserked out. It had seemed like a stupid line of inquiry at the time—the activity of a guilty mind desperate to find somebody else he could hold accountable for what happened. He’d known it was stupid. Everybody had told him it was stupid. But the more he dug, the less stupid it had become, at least to him. In no time, he’d found himself falling down the research rabbit hole.

  The memory–dream jukebox in Emmett’s head then suddenly flipped to the only significant interaction he’d ever had with Wiley DuPont, no doubt triggered by the monster’s snoring. The day Beast had almost killed him.

  * * *

  Emmett had been sitting at the computer.

  A couple of notepads had been open next to him, filled with his tiny, precise scrawl. In one was a list of all the patients of Dr. Weiss he’d been able to find over the man’s considerably long career as a fertility specialist in the United Kingdom, South America, and then the United States. Almost all the names had a check mark next to them, indicating that either that woman’s child or somebody related to her had been documented as having a berserker episode.

  In the other pad were the notes he’d taken as he attempted to understand the science. He’d chewed absent-mindedly on his pen as he glanced over his scribbles, trying to put it all together. His eyes focused on the name Dr. Julius Weiss written at the top of the page, and then shifted to the crux of his theory, spelled out in all capital letters in the middle:

  DIFFICULTY IN CONCEPTION = NEW HUMAN SPECIATION?

  Emmett tapped on a link in the browser of the computer and his screen filled with an abstract from one of Dr. Weiss’s papers. This wasn’t the first of Dr. Weiss’s research he’d tried to read, nor would it be the last, but it had been the most important to his theory. Not because it explained anything in a way Emmett could understand, but because this was the paper that had given Emmett a reason to carry on. A reason to live. This was the paper that had convinced the grieving father who had turned his back on his own children that there was somebody else he could hold accountable.

  The paper was titled “Declining Fertility in the Modern Age Due to Increased Genetic Incompatibilities in Women Born after 1942.” And as he’d read through the detailed summary, one thought had rattled around his head like a loose screw: You knew, you fucking son of a bitch.

  “In this day and age there is no good reason why a woman at your level of health should not be able to have a baby,” he’d recalled Dr. Weiss’s words to them at some point. His almost nonexistent German accent twisted into a grotesque and clichéd caricature of Hitler’s in Emmett’s memory.

  While caught up in his daydreams, the eight-foot brick house of a berserker that was Beast had bumped into him, snapping Emmett out of his angry, mocking sarcasm. Beast had looked at him like the main attraction in some kind of monster zoo would look at a schoolboy on the other side of the glass.

  “I bumped you,” Beast had said slowly, his words coming out garbled and gummy from his lack of teeth.

  “It’s okay, Wiley.”

  There were about three dozen full-on berserkers that Emmett knew about in the prison at that time, and they were all legends. Like some sick and twisted version of high school popularity, all the inmates knew their names and at least some of their stories. They’d all entered the system before chain reactions had started to become such a common complication that it became impractical to incarcerate every poor son of a bitch whose switch got flipped. But Emmett had never bothered to keep up with developments on shit like that when he was on the outside, and once inside, he’d never wondered why no new berserkers ever arrived on the block. Those were the kinds of observations a caring person might make, and in those days Emmett still didn’t give a flying fuck about anything outside of the theory he was developing and the vengeance it promised him.

  Still, Emmett had known, if only by osmosis, that Wiley was a Bostonian who had berserked out for the first time (as far as the official record went) at a nightclub on Tremont Street called the Royale. No chain reactions had been triggered. He’d been a small (or at least normal-sized) man then, but had still managed to kill thirty-one people and had been responsible for the injuries of at least a hundred more. Emmett had also heard through the prison walls that when Wiley’s incarceration began he wasn’t anywhere close to the size of the colossus he was now. Apparently it had only taken three months in prison for the poor bastard to have been provoked into berserking out so many times that the radical physical changes in his physique occurred. Prison had taken the man and, in less time than it took Time Warner to cancel your cable for nonpayment, turned him inside out, so that the monster that once hid inside him was now all that was left. Convicts had made him into what he was as sport. It blew Emmett’s mind that somehow COs like Black Jesus genuinely believed that rehabilitation was still possible for assholes who would do something like that for fun.

  Emmett had glanced over to where Black Jesus was monitoring them with disapproving eyes. Murderers, thieves, even rapists he agreed could probably be rehabilitated, given enough time and the right system. But folks who demonstrated cruelty like that? Emmett would have preferred those dickheads shot.

  “I bumped you?” Beast repeated, as if suddenly unsure whether or not he actually had.

  Emmett smiled up at him and had been about to say something when a big book hit Beast squarely in the head.

  Fuck.

  Emmett jumped to his feet and stepped protectively in front of Wiley as three Aryan Nation types, all not much more than kids, approached them slowly with books they had no intention of reading in their hands. Emmett recognized the leader by the death’s head swastika on his neck and thought his name was Borman or something.

  “You dropped your book,” Emmett said to him, as Wiley bent down to pick up the volume that had been thrown at him and handed it back to Borman with what he obviously thought was a helpful smile, but which had mostly been just terrifying because of how his HGF-flooded system had built up his jaw muscles and caused his teeth to fall out.

  “Oopsie-poopsie, dropped your booksie. Oopsie-daisy-doodle-o,” Beast sang like a child.

  The Aryans laughed, then the asshole on Borman’s left had drawn his arm back and
launched a new book in their direction. Again Beast was hit in the face. Confused, he bent to pick it up, still seemingly oblivious to the fact he’d been attacked.

  “Oopsie-poopsie, dropped the booksie, need a hooksie, daisy-doodle-o,” he’d sang like an old man with dementia.

  The CO trainer that was supposed to be monitoring Beast was now chatting with a female officer a couple of rows away, and both had missed the whole thing. The only other CO in sight was Black Jesus, but the do-gooder had been too busy disapproving of the fraternizing between the other two coworkers to notice the misbehavior of the inmates right in front of him. Emmett knew they’d all be there to put Beast down in a heartbeat if these assholes were to succeed in triggering the poor guy into having an episode. But by the time it was taken care of, somebody would surely be hurt, or dead, and that somebody would probably be him. Plus, this shit was just cruel and pissed him off.

  “Do you really have to do this bait-the-berserker shit in the library, folks?”

  “You the fuckin’ librarian now, Kessler?” The dickhead on Borman’s right had asked, his thick Boston accent turning “now” to nah and “Kessler” to Kesslah.

  “This is the only computer that still works,” he answered, trying to find a balance between pleading and commanding in his tone.

  Black Jesus had finally realized trouble was brewing and had pulled himself away from the affair his colleagues had been trying to have.

  “Borman, I know you and your friends can’t read, so put the book down before we have a problem here.”

  The Aryan threesome had moved as if to comply, but then Borman himself suddenly lunged forward and smacked Beast hard across the face with the book in his hand. Beast’s face contorted. His pupils dilated. Then with a fury and quickness his previously slow, shy demeanor would have made seem impossible, he had exploded in an all too familiar violent rage.