Ascension

by Jeannie van Rompaey

  I google the gym equipment Osiris has told me about to find pictures of these cruel machines which only make me more depressed.

  I click on war, battles and armies and terrify myself even more.

  Odysseus doesn’t know what is going to happen. His nose is stuck in the past as usual without a clue that something frightful is about to take place. Brahmin nods knowingly and says, ‘You just wait and see. Durga will tell us when she’s ready.’

  She does. We are assembled in The Great Hall as usual. There is Durga in her chariot, flanked by her warriors. Osiris is third on her right in the front row in his lion’s head helmet, the most spectacular of them all. The choir sings on a raised platform behind her. Brahmin leads everyone in prayers. Time for Durga’s motivation speech, but there is something in the way she begins that warns us that she is about to tell us something special.

  ‘Members of Compound 98,’ she says, ‘the time has come for the games to stop and the real fighting to begin. After the parade I shall select the warriors I need for the first attack.’

  Oh my Zeus. My heartbeat is so loud everyone must surely hear it. I just know Osiris will be selected. How could she not choose him? I’ve been expecting it, of course, but not this soon. I’m tempted to run out of The Great Hall, find a lavat-cube and throw up, but no one ever leaves the parade until the end when Durga dismisses us. I cross my three arms, hold my stomach tight and try to stop the pain. Some hope. Durga is still speaking.

  Here’s the totally amazing thing. She says our army is not going to attack another mutant humanoid compound, but some sort of installation in the sky peopled by non-mutant humanoids. Not aliens. Not Martians. She calls them completes. Wow! I had no idea such beings existed. I thought we mutants were all that was left of the human race. Seems I was wrong.

  According to Durga, these completes are the ones who locked us up in compounds on Earth while they escaped to live a life of luxury on planets in the sky, taking most of Earth’s remaining resources with them. That’s how they’ve been able to develop technologies beyond our wildest imaginings. They also raided the museums and art galleries and stole most of Earth’s treasures.

  ‘It’s my intention to recover them,’ she claims.

  I see Ody’s eyes light up. So that’s where the promised artefacts are to come from, he thinks.

  I don’t give a shit if they bring these crappy old things back or not. All I want is for Osiris to come home to me in one piece. I don’t want his body parts scattered over some planet in the sky.

  ‘We too shall have the chance to live on an uncontaminated planet,’ Durga promises. ‘We too will enjoy the better way of life these completes have created for themselves. They have treated us like second-class citizens long enough. We go into battle with right on our side and we will win. The result – a better life for us all.’

  A stirring speech. A big cheer goes up, but I only pretend to join in. Osiris is a dedicated warrior. He is going to leave me to go to war. There is no doubt about that.

  ‘Now,’ Durga says, ‘let us bow our heads and pray for the success of our mission and the safe return of our warriors.’

  In spite of Odysseus’s belief that religion is a humanoid invention designed to control the workforce, I can’t help thinking that, when Osiris marches off to war, a few of Brahmin’s prayers can’t do any harm. They may even help to keep him safe. I find myself bowing my head. My prayer, the first of my life, pleads with the Gods – whoever they may be – to keep Osiris safe.

  I don’t care if the mission is successful or not. I don’t want my life to change. All I want is for my Osiris to come home to me, safe and sound.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mercury Reformed

  (according to Mercury/Michael)

  Journal Entry

  We arrive at Hos-sat. A huge dome in the sky. A smell of antiseptic. Pure. Clean. A memory of the stuff Kali insisted on putting on my grazed knee as a child. It stung, biting into the open wound like a jab from Hugo’s tongue. Same smell here. Strong, unremitting, invading every space. A cover-up for other less agreeable smells, I shouldn’t wonder. And less agreeable activities. A touch of apprehension. My old worry about being some sort of experiment returns. I imagine my body on a slab, opened up, dissected.

  Mr Suit, or rather Mr Alexander Court, my father, is clearly well respected here. A person of some importance. He strides down the stainless steel corridors with me in his wake. As he passes the reception areas for each department, I hear a chorus of ‘Good morning, Mr Court.’ ‘All ready for you, Mr Court.’ ‘This way, Mr Court.’ We enter a white-walled room where a group of hospital staff awaits us. I am introduced as “Patient X – the special patient we’ve discussed.” The group is introduced to me as “the A-team, the most skilled team in Hos-sat.” Men in suits – doctors or surgeons – thin, efficient-looking nurses in blue and white uniforms, orderlies dressed like me in blue monos and two women in severe black trouser suits, one very tall and broad, the other short and plump – the therapists: all of them completes, as far as I can tell.

  ‘You have all been briefed on the procedures.’

  ‘Yes indeed, Mr Court.’

  My father runs those sharp eyes of his around the group, rests them on each person in turn. ‘I hardly need remind you that you have been entrusted with a very special task, one that involves top security. No word of what is being carried out here must go beyond the people in this room and I must be kept up to date at each stage of the proceedings.’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Court.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Court.’

  ‘We fully understand, Mr Court.’

  James Bond couldn’t be embarking on a more secret mission than I am. Or one more fraught with danger. Now I know what it means when they say your blood runs cold. It’s me that’s being talked about, little Mercury, the messenger, Patient X, a mutant humanoid soon to be transformed into a complete.

  Journal Entry

  In the end I refuse the offer of therapy. No point. I made my decision to become a complete the moment I realised Mr. Suit was my father.

  The first operation is over. When I come round from the anaesthetic, he is sitting at the side of my bunku. My eyes flicker shut and open again.

  He grins at me, tells me I look like a chrysalis, wrapped up as I am in bandages.

  ‘Soon,’ he says, ‘you will emerge as a butterfly.’

  I raise an eyebrow. ‘A caterpillar grows wings. I’m supposed to have had mine removed.’

  He pulls a face. It was a joke apparently. Irony. He’s nervous. I can see that.

  I try to put him at his ease, although surely it’s his job to make me feel relaxed. ‘Has it gone well, the operation?’ I ask. ‘I didn’t feel a thing.’

  ‘State-of-the-art technology here you know. Just wait until those bandages come off and you’ll be a different person.’

  He seems to think I should be pleased about that. I summon up a smile to make him believe that I am.

  Journal Entry

  My father is here again. He asks me if I have any questions. Lots. I usually try to answer my own questions through research, but without access to an auto-put that is impossible. I start to barrage with him questions. When I am going to meet my biological mother? Who else knows about me? Has he found out where that doctor in the white coat took me when I was a baby? Where was I before C55? Kali told me she’d found me “crying in the wilderness.” How did I get there? How did Earth become a wilderness? Was there really a plague that killed everything off? Why did some people become mutations and not others? Did he think it right to shut us up in compounds?

  He doesn’t answer all my questions, but he does tell me about my mother. I can see by the look on his face that it’s not good news. There’s a catch in his throat as he says, ‘Michael, I’m sorry I have to tell you. Your mother died giving birth to you.’

  It’s a shock in one way but I’m not really upset. I can’t grieve for someone I’ve never known. Kali is my mother. Always
has been and always will be. ‘That must have been awful for you – losing both of us at the same time.’

  ‘Michael, I….’ He says my name as if he’s trying to stamp it on my memory so that I’ll get used to it. ‘I let people think it was Melanie, my wife, your mother, who had the mutant gene, whereas, as you know, it was me. I can’t tell you how guilty I feel about that.’

  ‘You had to protect yourself. It was logical.’

  ‘Logic doesn’t always help absolve your conscience.’

  He finds it difficult to speak for a moment so I change the subject. I ask another question. Or rather two. ‘What happened to me? Where did they take me?’

  ‘At the time I had no idea. I was told to forget about you, to tell others that you had died in childbirth, but I was determined to find you, Michael. I failed miserably. No matter who I asked or how many websites I searched I couldn’t find you. Years later when I became a member of the Symposium – that’s what we call our government – I managed to access certain secret files. Babies born with irregularities – in other words, mutations – were sent to be looked after in institutions on Earth.’ He pauses. ‘Compounds specifically designed to accommodate such children. As far as I can make out they were run by trained personnel. When the children were old enough, more permanent placements were found for them.’

  ‘In other compounds?’

  ‘Yes. Procreation between mutants was at an all-time low and there were always females willing to bring up these children as their own.’

  ‘Like Kali.’

  ‘Yes, like Kali.’

  ‘Kali told me she’d found me crying in the wilderness. Do you think I escaped from the baby compound?’

  ‘Very unlikely. And why would Kali go outside to an area she knew was contaminated? No, I think that’s a story she made up, Michael, to show you how much she wanted you.’

  ‘Do you think most of the mutant humanoids without parents came from the satellites originally – as babies?’

  ‘It does seem that completes are more fertile than mutant humanoids. Generally our babies are born without mutations but there must still be a residue of contamination in our bodies so sometimes a mutant baby is born – like you and I.’

  ‘So people on the satellites who have mutant babies don’t want to keep them?’

  ‘Most of them would like to. I wanted to keep you. You must believe that, Michael. But it wasn’t allowed. Mutant babies were removed straight after birth. It was the law.’

  ‘A law made to segregate the “normal” from the “mutated.”’ I hear the bitterness in my voice and feel my anger growing but try to keep cool.

  ‘That was clearly the plan. But Michael, you mustn’t think I approve of this. I was horrified when I found out what had been going on. Horrified and disgusted. Now that I hold an important position in the Symposium I intend to work to get those laws repealed.’

  ‘What is your important position?’

  ‘I’m the Minister for Culture.’

  ‘Anything to do with Worldwideculture?’

  ‘Not really. Well, yes, in a way. Look, Michael, no more questions for now. It’s important you get some rest. You’ve had a major op, you know.’

  I don’t feel tired, but Father doesn’t want to answer any more awkward questions. His face is drained of colour.

  Journal Entry

  My father brings me a present. A portable compu.

  ‘Wow! Thanks,’ I say, as I fire it up.

  ‘You’re going to have a lot of time on your hands while you’re recovering,’ he says. ‘I thought you’d like something to keep you amused.’

  ‘Great. Has it got – you know, what you said – unlimited access?’

  ‘It is uncensored, yes.’ His eyes twinkle with amusement. ‘It can probably provide you with most of the answers to that long list of questions. But I must warn you, Michael, you may find some of the answers a little disturbing.’

  My fingers are already busy and I’ve found one programme about the apocalypse that looks interesting. I can hardly wait for him to leave so that I can start checking it out.

  He has more to say. ‘Michael, I do hope you’re not lonely here. I know you haven’t got many people to talk to and I’m afraid I can’t visit every day.’

  I don’t know what he means by lonely. I’ve always been alone and now I’ve got this compu I’ll have plenty to keep me occupied.

  Journal Entry

  Guess what I find out today, dear Journal? Here’s a clue.

  ‘This is the way the world ends,

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.’

  I discover various theories about how and when the Earth became one huge polluted mess. There are personal histories, opinions from environmentalists and politicians and theories from academics. I’m hungry for facts but there are so many different versions.

  Here’s one version. From 2015 onwards everything started going downhill. A plague infected plants, animals and humanoids. It spread quickly, contaminating everything it touched. An evangelist preacher declared it was God’s vengeance on the arrogance of the human race, like Icarus flying too close to the sun. That’s one explanation.

  Like all history, there is more than one version of the truth. I click on to another page and another and another.

  I can smell antiseptic again. It drifts into my room through the air conditioning unit as if determined to banish any stray germs that might seep in from the outside world.

  Why did the Earth die? Because we didn’t take enough care. That’s why. We used up the resources. We ignored poverty. With a series of antennae we increased the number of electrodes in the atmosphere. Radiation fever. All because we had had to have mobile phones, microwaves, electronic devices of all kinds.

  And then there were the wars. War upon war. Chemical warfare, gas, nuclear bombs, nuclear fall-out. No wonder the atmosphere was infected. No wonder people became sick. I read article upon article, rant upon rant about this.

  It started earlier than you might think, this carelessness. The first mutant humanoids were glimpsed in 2030. Yes, that early, and it was from that time that public creativity began to die. No more filmograms were made. TV transmissions stopped. No books were written – or if they were, not published or distributed. No artists, no musicians, composers or architects …. Or almost none. It was if, in the face of such depression, humanoids lost heart. Someone – I haven’t yet discovered who it was – someone began initiatives to address that problem. To encourage us to re-energise, to be creative. Worldwideculture perhaps, although I have found no mention of that company.

  The privileged – those with money or power or both – escaped, sped away in their rockets to pollution-free satellites in the sky, taking many of Earth’s assets with them. If you did a lot of networking you might just have been lucky enough to join them. It depended if you knew the right people or slept in the right bed. Those with no money, no power or influence were abandoned in the wilderness to become contaminated by the toxic waste. They became mutants. Or the children of the contaminated became mutants. One or the other. That is not quite clear. The timescale is not clear either. Giant domes, the compounds, were built to house the mutant humanoid survivors and keep them separate. That much is clear and borne out by my own experience.

  I read with amusement and not a little anger that computers were set up “even in the compounds” so that “even the mutants could feel they were contributing to the creative regeneration.” I object to that “even”. It shows what they think of us. All these articles, written by uncontaminated human beings, are so patronising.

  Still, I don’t suppose they ever expected a mutant humanoid to read this stuff. That’s why our compus on Earth are censored. It is gradually becoming clear to me that it is not in the interest of the privileged classes to permit the underclass – yes, the underclass, because that’s what we have become, us mutants – to access every single site on the world wide web. We cannot be t
rusted. If we know too much, we may stop being pliant workaholics and rebel.

  I find myself getting hotter and hotter. What a cheek. These people think they are so superior to us. Do I really want to turn into one of them? Is it too late to change my mind?

  A nurse bustles in, takes one look at my flushed face and insists I close down the compu for today and get some sleep.

  Journal Entry

  I’ve had no pain from the operation. None at all. Wrapped up in bandages I feel more like an Egyptian mummy than a chrysalis. I am not exactly dead, but ready to be born again and today’s the day….

  The nurse unwinds the bandages and folds them neatly round her arm. The doctor examines my bare back. He nods, satisfied. No pain but lots of itching. I try to look over my shoulder without success. When the doctor has gone I tell the nurse I want to look at my back in a mirror. There were not many mirrors in the compounds (why should ugly mutants want to look at themselves?) but I’ve seen them here in the bathrooms. The nurse does not recommend it but I insist and, in the end, she is quite helpful. I stand in front of one mirror and she holds another up behind me, adjusting it so that I can see the result of the op. My shoulder blades look a little inflamed and swollen, but she assures me the swelling with go down and that the redness will fade in a day or so. There are no feathers poking through.

  Back to my compu. I’m fascinated by the plethora of stories about the end of the world and the efforts to rebuild it. So much opinion is bandied about it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. The scientists blame the politicians. The politicians are determined to blame each other. The journalists wrangle among themselves about which of the reports are the most accurate. All the participants in the ongoing debate are so competitive, so determined to prove their opponents wrong that no conclusions are reached. Anyone with an ounce of sense can see that, if they all worked together as we did in C55 under Kali’s guidance, they would achieve far more than through this incessant bickering.