elimination

As I scuff my feet on the way to Practical Training, my wet boots make a obnoxiously wonderful squeaking sound. I giggle. My fellow Titles regard me with sky high eyebrows and maintain a good five foot radius around me as though they think they can catch my crazy. Don’t worry children, you won’t catch it, it’s genetic. Still I wouldn’t wander too close. I bite. As I push open the door to the Practical Training room one of my obscenely long fingernails gets caught. I bend it back and forth until at last I can tear the tip from the rest. It remains stuck in the door. It is yellow and grotesque; a deliciously gruesome tribute to my insanity. I frown as I move to take my place among the others, the claws on my left hand are no longer all the same length, that’s depressing.

Apocalypse’s replacement is an ugly toad-faced creature. Well as ugly as you can be when you’re engineered to look perfect. Her personality makes her ugly; it’s what twists her lips and sits on her eyebrows. I will call her Toady. Doomsday delivers an eloquent speech about whatever painfully useless thing we are about to be forced to do. Her words are chosen with beautiful precision. Clears throat: “Blah, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah, greater purpose, blah.”

Her speech almost brings tears to my eyes. If only she wrote novels we would all waste away into the depths of starvation devouring her every written word. Toady pushes a metal box on wheels into the room and opens it. Inside, packed on ice is a human brain. She sets the box on the table and reaches in to retrieve a shiny little knife. The first person goes up in numerical order and takes the knife, cutting a clean slice out of the brain. She takes the slice in her right hand and brings it to her mouth, in four bites it’s gone. She swallows hard, her face exhibiting a significant lack of satisfaction with her culinary experience.

Who’s brain is that? She just took a mouthful out of a person’s identity. Dreams and fears, desires, memories, knowledge, darkest secrets, greatest virtues—all that’s left is the tiny residue clinging to her unamused tastebuds. The next person goes up and does the same thing biting off some mathematical aptitude, with a small side of ability to maintain homeostasis. One by one they take a sliver and swallow. Finally, Doomsday calls me down to the brain. My feet move unattached to my body, my shoulders sag and my lips are pursed. Bump Nose’s voice whispers in my ear. Keep you’re head down, do as you’re told and this will be the last generation of Titles, you can end all the suffering. I pick up the knife. A thought occurs to me. Why are we being forced to do this?

For what feels like an eternity I stand there in front of the brain, knife in hand. I don’t want to eat that. I have never wanted to do something less. At last I turn away from the brain. In one fluid movement I throw the knife upward with a firm jolt. It lodges itself in the ceiling, it’s butt waving back and forth upon impact. I clear my throat to speak. “I’m not hungry.” With that I walk back to my place, nerves itching for an electric jolt, shoulder blades aching for a bullet, yet I’m delivered no such liberation. Because for some reason the gray blob in my head is infinitely more valuable than that one.

The next person goes up cautiously, a nameless, faceless number. I’m not paying attention. I hear the chink of a new knife being placed on the table. My eyelids droop. Yet after five minutes in occurs to me that the Title is still down there holding the knife over the brain. A male face, stony and white, looks deep into the space right above the managed organ. With a ringing sound the knife hits the ground. He begins to walk back to his place. Then the push of a button. Burnt hair. Blackened corpse. Putrid stench. He is dragged away by Toady, leaving a trail of black on the perfectly manicured floor. Within half an hour the brain is fully devoured.

I gingerly step over the trail of black on my way out. I killed another person today. I had one simple task and I blew it. I swallow hard. As I open the door the fragment of my fingernail falls out, hitting the ground with a barely audible sound.

My feet move quickly. I look up to find myself at Bump Nose’s door. I open it with far too much force. I turn to Switch, 14, and 12. “Leave!” I shout. They look taken aback. I shoot them my trademark “I’m violent and unstable” death stare and their tired legs begin to comply with my order. 12′s eyes catch mine, I see sadness and confusion swirling deep in those dark brown orbs. My gaze moves to the ground.

I turn to Bump Nose who appears only moderately amused. “Yes, Seven?” My mouth decides to speak without consulting my brain. “You want me to serve your purpose? Tell me why. I don’t want any more unanswered questions. Tell me everything about everything. If I’m going to be crucial in creating something, I’d like to know a little bit more about what I’m creating. Not telling me is not an option. I will throw myself from the edge of the stairwell before I blindly do one more disgusting, arbitrary thing requested of me.”

I stand with erect posture and unmoving eyes. I feel strong in my conviction despite the tangled rambling mess that just spewed from my lips. Bump Nose regards me intently, eyes probing deep. He looks tired, like he hasn’t slept in a thousand years. He covers his mouth slouching, and closes his eyes. Finally he speaks.

“The end of this process is very near, I’m confident that with the research I am doing I will likely be able to fix your problem. Even if otherwise, my colleagues are refusing to give you up and wait another 18 years. Just do your job and you’ll make it to Level Three. You will win, prove yourself worthy out of all the masses. Everything you ever wanted Seven.” I lean forward into Bump Nose’s face, my voice low and menacing. “You know what I want? I want you to give me a reason why it’s worth it to live, and if you can’t then I want to die.”

“You tell me that my participation in the plans you speak of will allow for the creation of a better society. I don’t believe that for a second. I do not believe that someone who thought the current society was a good idea is capable of creating a world where I have the liberty of sleeping with both eyes closed. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life serving someone else’s purpose of making this planet even worse.” Bump Nose regards me like some kind of unidentified particle that he found floating around in his glass of water.

“Seven, you have to believe me, I know with every fragment of my being that Ang—she will make things better. This has been the plan all along. Things are going to get so much better, a perfect society where everyone is happy. This is just a momentary blip, a phase. If you do your job Seven you can help to fix all of this.” I stare Bump Nose down, anger bubbling through my veins.

“Listen to me. I will end my own life before helping her. Unless you give me a reason, unless you prove to me things will get better. I want to know every detail of everything, who is she and how did we get here?” I’m yelling probably louder than I should, but at this point I don’t care. Bump Nose’s face conjures a textbook image in my head: a slug under a salt shaker. He’s the slug alright, but I have a feeling the invisible hand holding the shaker over him does not belong to me. He rubs his eyes and looks up, his voice softer than falling snowflakes.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” I sit down. He sighs, the final sigh of defeat I have been craving for so long. “I was born in the year 2010 in Rotterdam, Holland. My parents were well off having made their money in the pharmaceutical industry—the pill was called Telomern and could decrease your risk of developing cancer by more than 40%. They owned a private research institute in Amsterdam which I inherited in 2042 after my father died of cancer, my mother had passed a year earlier of the same affliction.”

“It was in the December of 2043 that I met Angelica Tull, I was alone at a bar just outside of the city, the walls were a murky brownish color and the lights had to fight their way through a smoky haze. There was fuzzy yellow stuff poking up through rips in the green stools and my tonic to gin ratio was significantly lacking in gin. I complained to the bartender. Yet I don’t blame him, those were hard times.”

“I was about to leave when I heard the bell ring at the door and in stepped the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Heads turned as she entered, eyes lingering too long on her flawless geometry. She walked all the way to the end of the counter and sat down next to me with elegance unworthy of the peeling cushions. She had an aura of authority, confidence, power. She cleared her throat, her accent American, somewhere down south. She asked for a Bloody Mary for herself, then she turned to me and to my utter astonishment and asked for a shot of gin for ‘her friend.“’

“The bartender was promptly obedient. I remember watching as she sipped her drink trying to commit all of her features to memory, thinking I’d never see her again. Her hair was so blond it was almost white and fell down her back in a gentle curl, caressing her jawline. Her eyes were shockingly blue, light and clear like the winter sky—how it used to be. Her clothing was clearly designer, yet it looked as though it had been dragged through the elements. She had a fresh red scratch under her perfectly pouted lower lip.”

“She smelled like the streets, like she’d been sleeping curled up in a cardboard box and there was an odd white stain on the back of her dress. She caught me looking at it and turned to me, a voice like lemon meringue, southern twangy, but sweet. “It’s bird poop honey.” My eyes drifted to her hands, there was a college ring on her right hand: Yale. Around her neck was a tiny golden cross. I turned to her and asked “Now how did a nice girl like you end up wearing a dress with bird poop on it.” She smiled. ’It’s a fashion statement, the new cool thing, like hover Ubers or bluetooth condoms. She took a sip of my drink.”

“It wasn’t until I woke up next to her the next morning that I realized I’d payed for the drink she “bought” me. Not that I cared. I turned over to see her sitting on my bed holding my business card. I remember her reading it back to me teasingly, in a self important voice. “Dr. Albert Blitz, Lab Director, Genomics Department.” I remember the confidence in her eyes as she asked me:“So Doctor Blitz, are you hiring?”

“She told me she had worked seven years as a brain surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and had a background in neurological research. So I hired her. I know it was stupid to hire someone just like that, I didn’t even look her up. She has that effect on people. She had an aura, and I was still getting over the death of my parents. I had no other family, my friends were all in Rotterdam. Once she worked with me in the lab I saw that she was competent with all the information and equipment and thought this resume enough.”

“It was nice to have her there, she would wake up early and run every morning returning with breakfast pastries and coffee. She was always happy, always smiling. Within a year I asked her to marry me and she accepted. Within another year she had received a grant to add a wing to the lab dedicated to neurological transmission. I was quite surprised at the time, neurological transmission was this obscure tiny branch of research, often neglected by the scientific community.”

“It’s in essence a merger between neuroscience and computer science. You see Seven, the brain is very much electric, it’s basically an extremely complicated computer. Angelica’s branch of research dealt with taking the information in the brain and downloading it to a computer in order to transmit it to another brain—essentially a brain transplant. It was a very controversial form of research. It was illegal in America and most other developed countries. As usual Holland was the exception.”

“Most deemed it impossible to actually apply, plausible only as an abstract theory, but Angelica was obsessed with her work. She would spend days in the laboratory tinkering away at a looming metal contraption, ordered box after box of equipment. There was a cardboard Everest in our basement by the time she was done. She never let me into her branch of the laboratory until one day about a year later when she showed me two mice, one albino and one brown.”

“She first demonstrated that the albino mouse had been taught from a young age to get through a blue maze in five seconds, while the brown mouse had been taught from a young age how to get through a red maze in five seconds. Then she demonstrated that neither mouse could get through the opposite maze in fewer than 15 seconds regardless of the number of trials. Throughout the rest of the week she went through a series of procedures mostly surgical, essentially downloading the information from the mouse’s brains onto a computer.”

“From here she took pluripotent samples to regenerate new brains and inserted them into the skulls of the preserved rat bodies. They were put into a machine hooked up to the computer—similar to a 3D printer—and within a month the new brains had switched information. The maze experiment was done again and the opposite results were achieved. I was completely baffled, scared almost, it was so science fiction. I asked her if it had just worked on rodents, she told me that she had done extensive research at her past job. It had worked on primates and it had the definite potential to work with humans.”

“I remember the look in her eyes, it was sheer insanity, yet there was also passion, beautiful, inspiring passion. Finally after two years of marriage I typed her name into a Google search engine—there were no results. There was no record of her at Mass General. I kept searching. Finally I found an article. Four years before at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City there had been an incident involving neurological transmission. A surgeon had attempted to transfer the brain of a 46 year old women with fatal colon cancer into the body of a 17 year old girl.”

“The transplant was successful, yet the parents of the 17 year old—who had died during a surgery for the removal of a brain tumor—had thought they were only agreeing to organ donation, not for a stranger to be put in their daughter’s body. In addition, the surgeon who performed the failed removal of the brain tumor had been the same surgeon doing the brain transplant on the 46 year old. The tumor removal surgery had a 95% success rate and had been expected to go perfectly, members of the surgical team claimed that the surgeon had been negligent. There was speculation that the surgeon allowed for the girl to die in order to use her body for the experimental procedure.”

“With this, a strong case was filed against her, she was about to be found guilty for both killing the 17 year old through negligence, and lying to the parents. She was going to be locked up for life, yet before the trial was fully finished her entire apartment building burned to the ground. The fire was traced back to her room. An unrecognizable body was found and believed to be her’s. Her death was ruled a suicide. At the bottom of the article was an image of the surgeon—it was my wife, with shorter hair and tanner skin in a white lab coat, and under a different name: Annabelle Truth. I couldn’t believe it. I knew there had to be some kind of mistake.”

“When I confronted her she burst into tears, she told me that the 17 year old had died naturally during the surgery and that because of the organ consent issue the hospital wanted to get rid of her. The rest of the surgical team claimed negligence because of hospital politics. The family of the 17 year old had consented for all body parts to be used in organ donation, the procedure was new and there was no specially designed legal consent procedure for it yet. As for the fire, she had been cooking on the stove and fell asleep—she had not been sleeping well because of the stress of the trial. She made it out through the fire escape at the last moment, got in her car and drove to her summer house on Long Island.”

“A few days later she read the article I had found in the newspaper and realized that the world thought she was dead. She knew that if she was found alive she would face life in prison. She bought the cheapest plane tickets she could find and ended up in Holland. She lived on the streets for a week before meeting me. When I asked her what she intended to do had she not found work and she laughed and told me that she had read somewhere that prostitutes received retirement benefits in Holland. She chose the name Angelica when she met me because it was her favorite character in some musical.”

“Admittedly her story seemed outrageous, but I knew there is no way she could have done any of what she was accused of. I loved her and I believed her. For many years after that all was well. She worked on perfecting her project and I kept the lab running. Then when things started to get bad, as the environment deteriorated and the world war began, I would frequently hear her sneaking off in the middle of the night to make urgent phone calls. I heard the voice on speaker phone only once, a strong New York accent, rapid like gunfire. It turns out he was the Ex husband—and the source of the mysterious grant that allowed her to pursue her controversial research. I soon found out that he was the lead scientist in charge of the moon biome project.”

“We were to move the entire laboratory onto the moon. When she first announced the plan, I was incredulous, but within two years I was living on the moon biome watching nuclear bombs explode on the surface of the Earth. I watched as with each little mushroom cloud the Earth became less green, less blue and closer to grey. Once the Earth became completely uninhabitable, we had a new project. The leader of the moon biome and Angelica’s ex husband, Roderick Griff gave a speech to the 105 researchers inhabiting the biome: our task was to create a race of humans capable of existing in the harsh conditions that had befallen the Earth.”

“The majority of the people on the biome were to be responsible solely for the immense job of keeping the biome habitable for us. Roderick was responsible for keeping the place running and keeping us on target. Angelica was responsible for downloading the information from our brains and transferring it into new bodies she cloned from our old ones so that we could stay alive for however many centuries it took for us to complete our research. I was the former world leader in eugenics research, my job was to create a new super-resistant human, capable of surviving in impossible conditions.”

“It was tedious work, looking at trillions of DNA samples and choosing the best ones. Millions of human DNA samples, even other species; I experimented with all of it. Every day I labored, in the same lab chair, neck hunched over a microscope for centuries. Angelica went back to Roderick, to him she was Annabelle. He had golden brown hair like me, yet his skin was slightly darker and his eyes black to my grey. His hair was straight to my slight curl and his cheeks were without my dimples. Every once in awhile Angelica would come back to me, one night here, one night there. She assured me that she was just with Roderick out of necessity of meeting his needs for the good of the entire biome. She told me it was unwise to defy him.”

“Meanwhile she asked me to do more than simply create a race that could withstand the Earth’s conditions, she envisioned perfection, a true genetic utopia. Perhaps I should have hated her, or at least shouldn’t have trusted her. Yet I couldn’t, I still loved her. I remember how before the Earth blew up I would come home every Friday night at 6:00 PM and she would be there in her “Quiche me I’m Irish” apron making chocolate chip peanut butter cookies.”

“Half of the chocolate chips themselves were made out of solidified peanut butter, the other ones were normal chocolate chips. It was the coolest thing. She would dance around the kitchen in bare feet listening to “If I Had a Million Dollars I’d Buy Your Love,” the version by Barenaked Ladies. She never liked more than one artist’s rendition of the same song. Whatever was the first version she heard was the only version.”

“Finally in the late 2200s I had completed my work. I had cracked the basic code and we could start repopulating the Earth. Then came the question of government. We were split into factions: one wanted a democracy for the entire world, one wanted a monarchy under Roderick, others wanted some form of communism, others still—like Angelica— cared only that it was a utopia. I stayed out of it.”

“When it came time for the final brain information transfer into the new, resistant bodies half of the transfers didn’t work, leaving all but Angelica’s supporters and Roderick’s supporters braindead. Angelica was sure that Roderick shared her utopian vision and that he would make his followers support her. Perhaps this would have been true once, yet Roderick had changed. When it had come time for him to do his first brain transfer he was weary of trusting the technology and decided to wait for the next set of transfers. It was a logical pattern of thought, the procedure had only been performed once before on a human and the side effects were unknown.”

“However without the transformation the alternative was death, or it was for the rest of us. Roderick was a brilliant chemist. Every day he injected himself every hour with black vials of liquid. When he wasn’t injecting himself he was making more, he spent every second of his life practically keeping himself alive. There were no noticeable side effects of the brain transfers, yet the side effects of Roderick’s injections, though cleverly hidden, were severe.”

“He was losing his mind. Seeing things. He was always sick, heroine skinny. He began to form this crazy idea that when you had a brain transfer your soul died and you became a evil mechanical representation of your former self. It was the fear that the consciousness you had in your original body would not continue into the new body. Yet he was a genius, he had most fooled about his less than stable mental state until the final night before the move back to Earth. We woke up that morning to find all of our weapons and most of our resources gone, Roderick was also gone. He left a note explaining his perspective on the brain transfers, saying that he had gone to rule the surviving mutants on the lower continent and if we tried to land our ship there he would use the weapons he had stolen to shoot us out of the sky.”

“The original plan had been to start the new race on the lower continent due to the severity of the ice age on the upper continent. Therefore Angelica ordered some of her supporters to go down in the spare ship and take Roderick out. Before they even landed their ship exploded. He had somehow wired the system so that as soon as the ship crossed over the first longitudinal line going over the continent it exploded, that was our second to last ship. We had no choice but to establish our base on the upper continent.”

“Angelica left Roderick’s supporters on the biome saying they would come over on the next shuttle—of course there was no other shuttle. On this continent Angelica devoted her life to forming the utopia she desired. She envisioned this school, “society,” to create the perfect person and an army of superior humans to take back the lower continent. Yet as long as Roderick is in charge no army can match the lower continent’s technology and numbers. Roderick has to be disposed of, yet his security system is impenetrable and he only lets people who haven’t had the brain transfers close to him. That’s where you come in Seven.”

I cut him off quickly. “Wait.” “None of us have had brain transfers, what does this have to do with me?” Bump Nose frowns. “I have yet to figure out how to make the mutations that are needed to thrive in this level of environmental destruction survive in a developing embryo without the pregnancy naturally terminating. Until the age of nine, your fellow Titles are raised on a protective biome here, then those who prove themselves worthy are transferred into superior bodies. I have managed to program the bodies so that they can grow and develop from there.”

“Seven you have never had a brain transfer into a superior body, your set of mutations is all I could possibly manage to do so that the environmental effects would still be minimal and the embryo wouldn’t terminate. With the superior brain transplant bodies I can closely regulate methylation, but with you and your predecessors it has been almost hopeless.”

“We have to send you to the other continent so that you can get close to Roderick and kill him. Based on his communications with Angelica over the years, when he sees you he will assume you have the secret to how he can survive the methylation issue the Earth presents without his injections and without a brain transfer. At this point he is desperate enough to do anything. It’s a long shot, but it’s all we have and it’s what we have been working toward for centuries with all your predecessors. This is the only way to end the elimination stage and start a true society on the lower continent.” He looks at me expectantly. I regard him coldly, utterly lost and dumbfounded. “How exactly am I going to get close to Roderick and kill him, how can he even tell that I don’t have the transfer?”

Bump Nose regards me with a deep grey stare and sighs sadly. “When you have lived through as many years as Roderick and I have lived through this is a distinction that can be made easily. Just looking at you, the way you walk, the way you breathe, a single look into your eyes; I can tell you have never had a brain transfer. He will seek you out.” I swallow hard. “What will he do to me?” Bump Nose’s face goes sour. “Something that will kill him. I’m sorry but that is all I can say about that.”

I can hear my heartbeat in my chest as I close my eyes and attempt to absorb. But I can’t absorb this information. I have no room. It’s too much. In a slow trickle, I begin to emit words. “So you actually believe that Angelica is going to create a happy utopia? She kills for the purpose of achieving her whims and manipulates her way out of it. She has created this hellish society. She’s just going to create a worse one down there.” My words are measured, Bump Nose regards me, eyes dark. “I trust Angelica, I love Angelica...”

I rise to me feet cutting him off. I kick his desk with a loud bang that echoes through the room. “YOU MORON!!! YOU INCREDIBLY DAFT CREATURE!!! SHE USED YOU!!!” I regard him expectantly, he does not look convinced. “Hey, try actually reading one of the Practical Training textbooks she writes some time. There is no love, at most there is symbiosis. Humans interact with other humans for their own benefit. She needed you for her utopia, to make her perfect people, she tracked you down, tricked you into marrying her and left you for Roderick. Anything she has ever done for you has been in interest of achieving her own twisted objectives. If you had ever gotten in her way she’d have killed you instantly without a second thought.”

I stab him with my words relishing every puncture. I’m pouring my own pain into him, waiting for him to snap under the weight of my emotions. It’s liberating. Finally he does, standing up and slamming his hands on the table. “DON’T YOU THINK I KNOW THAT?” He collapses back into his seat utterly defeated, head in his hands. “I know Seven,” he whispers, “I know.” I sit as well, guilt and sadness soaking through me. Finally, he looks up. “I’m weak Seven, I will admit that. I will tell myself what I need to help me sleep at night, even if I don’t believe it.” I study the backs of my hands in silence waiting for him to continue.

“You know what we agree on though, Seven?” I look up. “We both agree that things can’t go on like this. Things somehow have to change. You doing your job is the only hope for change, and you’re right that things could get worse, but there is a small chance, that maybe, just maybe we can change things for good. I’m willing to take that chance.” I purse my lips. “Seven if you don’t do this then you will be killed and I will have to create another you who will kill more people and cause more problems, and maybe they will use their position of power to make things better, maybe they won’t, but you Seven, you can do that. Go do your job, gain Angelica’s confidence, change things.”

I feel lost, like I’m floating around in an ocean with currents that one second are burning hot and one second are freezing cold. “Think Seven. Tomorrow you have a choice to make.” I take a deep breath, get up and leave. My tongue tastes like tired, salty tears.