Showing posts with label reincarnation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reincarnation. Show all posts

Sunday, October 30, 2022

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 27, 2398

When Ramses returned to the lab, he inspected it, but by then, Angela had reviewed the cameras. When Erlendr teleported there in his body, he was seemingly disoriented. He didn’t have some elaborate plan, and likely still doesn’t; it was an act of desperation. He wants to be free, and he probably felt like this was his only option. He stole the LIR Map for the same reasons, because it happened to be the nearest object when he first appeared. He might have even been only hoping for a stack of cash, or maybe a change of clothes. He got lucky, really, but now they suspect he’s using it to avoid detection. The map seems to show you what you need to achieve your objectives, not necessarily what you consciously wish. All he wants now is to stay out of sight, so it’s showing him CCTV blindspots, speed traps, and the like. That’s just the guess, though. At least that was Leona’s guess, once she returned home from rescuing her husband.
She and Ramses are sitting across from each other in his apartment. “I’m sorry.”
“You bent over to plug something in, it’s fine.”
“I’m not sorry for that. I mean, I am—I feel like an idiot—but I’m sorry that I’m trapped in this body.”
“Wait, are you apologizing to me because you look like me now?”
“I haven’t showered, I close my eyes when I go to the bathroom.”
“Do—do you want me to absolve you of some kind of sin? Do you want me to give you my blessing to use that body however you need to?”
Ramses sighs. “I’m just apologizing. I would apologize to her, but she’s not here. You’re the closest thing I got.”
“Rambo, you built me the body I’m using right now. You took a sample of my DNA, and cloned me. You have seen me naked, and we’re all friends here. You don’t have to be uncomfortable. This is just a substrate. It might have been weird in the past, but with consciousness transference, it’s just not a big deal anymore.”
“It still feels like a big deal. She wasn’t an empty clone, she was a real person.”
Leona nods. “Did you ever meet Téa Stendahl?”
“She was before my time. You told me about her, though. She was your brother.”
“That’s right. In one reality, she was my brother, and in the next, she wasn’t. She was born Ed Bolton in the eighteenth century, and traveled through time starting in the early nineteenth. He died, and was reincarnated as Theo Delaney. Fastforward to when my husband went back in time to kill Hitler, and created an entirely new reality, and suddenly I didn’t have a brother anymore. I didn’t even know what he was to me until my brain was blended later. When Arcadia was tormenting us on the island, we sometimes had downtime, and we got to talking about it. I asked her why she identified as a woman, even though she had more memories of a man. Was she transgender? She said, no. I’m just me. I’m not a man, or a woman; I’m not even salmon. I’m a person. When I was a man, I felt like a man, and now I feel like a woman, but if the powers that be see fit to reincarnate me as a praying mantis...I suppose I’ll feel like a praying mantis. There was a praying mantis sort of creature in the grass next to us while she was explaining it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Not really,” Ramses admits.
“I guess I’m saying...relax. You’re fine, Reaver’s fine, I’m fine. It’s gonna be fine.”
“That’s not necessarily true. Erlendr is still out there, somewhere.”
“We’ll catch him,” Leona says confidently. “He doesn’t have an identity here, so he can’t even leave the country.”
“He has the teleporter, and he knows how to use it.”
She shakes her head. The teleporter will run out of juice, if it hasn’t already, and he won’t know how to get more. Even if he did, he doesn’t strike her as the type of person who knows enough about technology to modify it to take him anywhere but right back to their lab. “He was only scary because of all the power he wielded in the main sequence. It was power that he was born with, and which is now gone. I bet he doesn’t even know how to drive a car, because he’s never had to before. We will catch him, and we’ll switch you back. Do you believe me?”
“I guess,” Ramses replies bashfully.
“I promise you, this is all going to work out. I just flew a helicopter in and out of a portal that took me to another reality. We’re closer than ever to figuring this all out. Now come on, let’s get back to studying that timonite. Trina is still our first priority.”

Monday, November 22, 2021

Microstory 1761: Pavo Matic

Sanela Kolar and Marko Matic met in The Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the 1930s. Their relationship blossomed after their families immigrated to the United States together, and they were married in 1948. They had their first son immediately, and decided to name him Pavo. He was a good boy, who followed the rules, and cared deeply about the people around him. Perhaps he cared too much. He didn’t like seeing anyone hurt, and he especially hated the concept of death. He always knew about his father’s temporal condition, which caused him to sense the moment of people’s deaths upon looking into their eyes. He was glad to have not inherited the same characteristic. When his younger siblings were still young, Pavo was approached by a man who appeared to be standing on a different continent entirely. He would turn out to be The Delegator, whose responsibilities included delegated assignments to those entrusted with maintaining, or perfecting, the timeline. The Delegator was actually in Stonehenge, in the past, and could transport himself to any time period, anywhere in the universe. He told Pavo that he was born with his own power, and was, in fact, unique. He had the ability to reincarnate people at will. It would be his job to bring people back to life that the Delgator’s bosses, the aptly named powers that be decided were worthy of the gift. Pavo didn’t like that someone else would be making these decisions, but he learned that it was a lot more complicated than that once he began his new job. He was free to facilitate the reincarnation process for anyone he wished, to any mother he chose, but he was expected to drop everything, and go work for the PTB whenever they summoned him. They were pretty good about making sure he wasn’t in the middle of a freelance job.

As far as the jobs went, they weren’t as simple as snapping his fingers, and conceiving an immaculate child. It was a long process that required both lead in, and follow through. In order to bring someone back to life, Pavo had to first learn about who they were before they died. Once he had all of this information, he had to spend all nine months with the new mother, visiting and caring for her during the entire pregnancy. Transferring someone’s consciousness to a new body was simple enough. People in the future did it all the time. Making sure that their soul followed them there was an entirely different story. In that future, it just sort of happened, because clone bodies, and other artificial substrates, contained the barebones ingredients for life, but weren’t actually alive. To reincarnate someone into a new body, with new parents, was a lot more complex, and something researchers never thought to do. Verily, they would not be able to if they tried; not like Pavo could. He coaxed the soul from the aether, and transplanted it into the womb of its new mother, precisely as the egg was being fertilized. It couldn’t just be any ol’ egg, or any sperm. They had to be genetically similar to the original subject, meaning that Pavo would have to search for parents first. This was not an impossible task, and it didn’t require any technological intervention, but it was time consuming, and entailed a shocking amount of meditation. His was a powerful ability, and a rare one, but difficult and tiring, so he could only do it so many times, for so many people. He would never be capable of sustaining an entire population of immortals in this manner. He had to find the right candidates, who deserved to return, due to a set of criteria that he could not come up with himself. For that, he needed help.

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Microstory 1542: Waterslide

As a religious ________, I’ve heard all the ________ for what happens after you ________. Some say there’s a heaven and a ________, while others really just have a ________. Some have different ________ for different kinds of ________, and some think we’re all just ________ in together. Some believe our ________ survive, while our consciousnesses do not. Lots of people believe in some ________ of reincarnation, but none of them ever came close to the ________ about how that works. I can hardly ________ it myself, and a part of me still doesn’t, even though I’m looking at it right ________. It’s a series of waterslides, which you go ________ in order to reach your new ________. Really? Water____? I don’t know what to make of it. I’m watching all these ________ choose their paths, and they don’t seem to take any ________ with it, but I’m not quite that accepting. I have to find out just who the heck thought of this ________, and why. One of the people here in ________ of facilitating the ________ tries to be as helpful as ________. No one else is asking any ________, so she seems all right with ________ mine. The slides are complex, and there is no map. You choose the one you ________ to go down, but that does not lock you in to one path. You can ________ over to another slide if one happens to intersect with yours. You can even ________ off and land on an entirely separate one if it happens to be below ________. Where do these ________ end? Well, some will ________ you into another human ________, but others lead to an ________, or even an insect. Some of them exit right back ________ at the ________, so you can ________ again, and a few will ________ you into an ________ worker, like the ________ who’s explaining all this to ________.

The first thing I note after the explanation is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to figure out which ________ path to take. She notes that a ____slider will always have a choice to either ________ their destination, or go back up and try ________. That’s evidently why most ________ aren’t asking her questions. The majority of ________ have already been through many, many times, and they just keep not ________ satisfied with their ________. Not everyone even gets the chance to reincarnate at all. Only those with the potential to contribute more to the ________ are here. The rest are sent off ________ else, and she doesn’t know where, because she wasn’t here when the system was first ________. This means that she doesn’t ________ who came up with this, or what their reasoning was. Surely early ________ would have been confused by the ________, as waterslides would not have been ________ yet. I ask her if there are any other ________, not because I’m disinclined to do what everyone else ________, but because I want to know ________ about how this works. Sure, she says. I can take the stairs. No one has ever ________ before, even though it would result in getting to pick whatever reincarnation you ________, because it would take decades to get all the way ________, and be as tiring as tedious as it would be on ________. I smile at the ________, debating taking it, just to be different. Then I hop onto one of the ________, don’t bother trying to alter course, and accept my ________ once I’ve reached the bottom. I’m ________ as a pangolin in China, and things go downhill from there.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Microstory 1149: Téa Stendahl

Literally in another life, Téa Stendahl was a tailor. She was originally born a man named Ed Bolton in the late 1700s. Years after the turn of the century, Ed jumped forward exactly one year, and there he remained for precisely three seconds, at which point he jumped forward again. He spent three minutes here, until it happened yet again. He continued to do this unwilling, both increasing the number of years he passed over, and the amount of time he spent upon his return. He would skip years according to the Fibonacci sequence, and spend three somethings (minutes, hours, days, etc.) there, before moving on. In the mid-20th century, he died in a car wreck, but he was an old man by then, and felt he had lived a decent life. He had eventually accepted his new pattern, and helped a lot of people along the way. He would never see is best friends again anyway, as they were traveling through time in the opposite direction, so it was all right that it was finally over. Except it wasn’t. Téa Stendahl was born a normal child, into a lovely family. She enjoyed fashion and sewing, but had no clue that this was not the first life she had experienced. As she grew up, though, she started recalling events that never could have happened to her. Her parents figured she just had a grand imagination, but they still sought help from a child psychologist. He was unable to understand what was happening with her either, but she eventually no longer needed his help. As time went on, she remembered more and more of her former life—or perhaps, more accurately, her former lives. While most jumps allowed him to retain all his memories, there was one thing that never stayed the same.

Bolton stopped going by his original name, instead adopting a new variation each time he jumped. In different time periods, he was called Ned, Teddy, Eddie, Edward, and Theodore. He could always remember the names he used to use, but was unable to revert to them at will. The people in charge of his time traveling were messing with his brain. They must have been messing with the minds of Téa’s new parents too, because her newest name couldn’t have been a coincidence. As the powers that be would have it, Téa was able to see her friends again. After they too were reincarnated, they suddenly jumped in the opposite direction, and met back up with her near the middle of the 21st century. They were surprised to find their companion with a new gender assignment, but not bothered by it. Téa felt that she was a woman, and it was unclear whether the powers that be transformed her on purpose, or if at least part of the reincarnation process was out of their hands, and subject to nature’s whims. Either way, she was happy. She later returned to her roots as a tailor, opening a clothing shop on an island on another planet, in another galaxy. There were others like the three of them, who were sent to various time periods, completing various missions. They weren’t always wearing the right clothing to blend in with the natives, so she was there to provide them with authentic clothes and accessories. They couldn’t just look like they should, like one might find on the set of a historical film. They needed to utilize materials and dye that could be found in any given time. Sometimes, her customers wouldn’t remember that they had ever gone to The Hub at all, instead believing they blinked, and were just suddenly wearing new clothes in the past or future. She even did this for the past version of herself, which was an interesting opportunity to gain rare perspective.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Microstory 842: Band Together

I’ve seen enough weird stuff in my career in the agency that it’s pretty hard to surprise me. I’ve encountered ghosts, monsters, aliens, and people with special powers. Everything has a logical explanation, whether it follows the public’s understanding of science, or not. Even time travel has its set of rules, and by the time the first temporal anomaly was discovered, my division had already come up with protocols to deal with it. This last assignment I’m working on has me all confused, though, because while it seemed a classic case of past life resurgence, there appears to be a time component as well. My subjects can’t explain what happened to them, but from what I gather, they were first born a few decades ago, but die in a bus crash a few decades from now. This means that a version of each of them is already out in the world, living their lives as thirtysomethings in a local band, still trying to get a record deal. Somehow they die in the future, and instead of being reincarnated sometime later, their souls were transported back into the past, and now they’re teenagers. Nothing like this has ever been recorded before. Our researchers have been looking into it since they first started claiming to remember their past lives, but they can’t come to any sound conclusion on how this happened. What’s clear is that there is definitely a still-living band, and that these teens are genetically identical to its members. Now, like I said, we have protocols for this. Normally, we would send any traveler from the future incapable of returning home to pocket dimension that a race of friendly aliens designed for this very thing. Theoretically, they’re meant to live out the rest of their days in there, and leave the timeline undisturbed. But my superiors don’t think this is fair to do to the band, because they didn’t ask for this, and returning them to their original point in time would be just as dangerous to the timeline as leaving them here. Besides, since they were born and spent the majority of their new lives totally oblivious to the fact that they were reincarnations, we don’t really have the right. So the agency made a decision to use them positively. Recruiting people who have information on the future is not unheard of, but it requires special permission, from a very picky committee. They approved a program, however, that would allow these children to continue learning music, while also training to become agency assets. They chose me for this, because I have considerable experience in both fields, and they felt I would be a good influence on the youngsters. I hope they’re right about me, because I’m not totally convinced I can do this.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Microstory 609: Destruction of an Infidel Place of Worship

This may come as a surprise to some Lightseers in the galaxy, but there are those who not only don’t believe in the Book of Light, but actually believe in some other thing. There are, in fact, a number of religions in Fostea that conflict with Lightseed teachings. Some have adopted belief systems from foreign worlds, others are holdouts from the religions of old, and a few even take their cues from Earthan traditions. What is strongly considered the worst of these religions is called Pantheonistry. It is also probably the strangest. Pantheonistry teaches that there is only one person in the entire universe. This single entity has been, and will be, reincarnated quadrillions of quadrillions of times, throughout history. This means that every person you encounter is actually you, either earlier in your total history...or your future. You are supposedly just one life of the multitude. The entity—which goes by many names, including Panthos—will never be able to find peace until it experiences literally every single person’s life. Pantheonistry was retained from the old worlds, but has been altered to better fit in with Fostean culture. Yet it is still very much unlike Lightseed. Fostean Pantheonistry rejects the idea that there is one entity, but instead that there are at least two, and as many as thousands. These entities are constantly clashing with each other, which is meant to explain anything from war to personal opposition. This version of Pantheonistry encourages people to find something called a “tribe” which hopefully only includes other individuals that are reincarnations of their particular primary entity. Of course, in our great galaxy, we do not discourage anyone from finding like-minded friends, but most non-Pantheonists would agree that this theoretical connection is not enough. The fact of the matter is that these Pantheonists are helping people for irrational reasons, under the belief that they are somehow the same, when really it’s just a clever disguise for charity, A few dozen tribes have been formed so far, and unfortunately, the faith is growing, which means that the number of them will only increase. The good news is that we have at least one fewer of them to deal with than we did before. The meeting house of one tribe (its name unimportant) was effectively destroyed, which excellently fulfilled the requirements for achieving the ninth taikon.

Sunday, April 2, 2017

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 6, 2121

When Leona Reaver was thirty years old, she was senselessly killed in a car accident. Her husband, Horace, flew into a fit of rage, and killed a great many people. It hadn’t been his first time, but it was the first time it had had consequences. He had the ability to redo every single day one extra time. Usually, his murders took place during the first round, but her permanent death had destroyed his mind, and his capacity for self-restraint was lost forever. But then their daughter, another time traveler, came back with a proposition. She would send his consciousness back in time to when he was a child so that he could start over. Unfortunately for him, too many things were different. Yes, his beloved was still alive, but they didn’t meet when they were supposed to, and she ended up falling in love with the man who had been responsible for her death in the other timeline.
Leona ended up figuring out how to hack into Mateo Matic’s temporal pattern, and join him on it. Her alternate husband grew even angrier for this, and made many attempts on Mateo’s life, always failing, and eventually being killed himself. She and Mateo continued their adventures, but they were not always together. At one point, he was sent back to the 1940s so that he could witness a now-friend of theirs murder Adolf Hitler. This major alteration in the timestream created a third reality. Mateo himself was never born. Leona’s parents both died, causing her to be adopted by a lovely couple; ironically the same parents who had adopted Mateo in the previous timeline. Leona’s brother was never born either, she never fell in love with Mateo, and she never became a time traveler. She spent twenty-eight years of her life totally oblivious to all this.
It was only then that she was ripped from her life, and thrown into a world with time manipulators, salmon, and powers that be. Five years later, one of these time manipulators finally caught up with her. Nerakali had the ability to extract memories from an alternate timeline, and implant them in the mind of the version of that person in the current timeline. She called this blending, and it is how Leona was able to remember her old life with Mateo, even though all those events had been erased. This was all common knowledge to her friends and family. What they didn’t know about her—what she never breathed a word of—was that Nerakali had also given her the memories of that original timeline. She could remember her time as Horace Reaver’s girlfriend, and later wife. This was important, because at the moment, on July 6, 2121, Leona Delaney was alone on a beach with Horace Reaver. It was awkward, but they were going to have to talk eventually.
Earlier that morning, Saga Einarsson stood before everyone, and explained what expiation they were charged with completing. It wasn’t really her, though. A time manipulator was taking control of her body, and speaking her orders without having to actually be there with them. Every three days, a new person would go missing, and this time it was a woman named Stendahl. Like with all the other people Arcadia had taken from them, no one could actually remember this woman. It was hard for them to wrap their minds around the possibility that they experienced these deep, personal connections with people, only to have them torn out of time so thoroughly that they didn’t even feel loss. Leona and Paige were different, though. They couldn’t remember details, but they did feel that someone was no longer with them. Before Téa was taken, she donated her socks to Leona, which provided a sort of psychic connection that could not be completely severed. She did the same to Paige by donating a pair of her pants.
There were a few things about Téa Stendahl that Leona knew to be true. Téa was born a man in the eighteenth century. In his twenties, he became a salmon, and started uncontrollably jumping forwards in time. Through this, he eventually met Aura Gardner and Samsonite Bellamy, though they all three had different names. Téa, while going by the name of...oh, what was it? Theodore. Yes, Theodore Bolton. Leona couldn’t believe she managed to remember that. Upon Theodore’s death by what might have been a car crash, he was sent forwards in time once more, to the year 2018, but it wasn’t really him. He was reincarnated into a new family, becoming Theo, Leona’s younger brother. At first he knew nothing, because he was just an infant, but over the years, memories started coming back to him. By the time he was an adult, he could recall as much about his literal past life as anyone could of their earlier experiences. He later met up with his old friends from the past, and did his best to maintain a relationship with his now-sister, who was a time traveler herself.
This was all well and good, but then Mateo did that thing where he went back in time and helped change history by killing Hitler earlier than he would have died. Since this changed Leona’s upbringing, it meant that the man once known as Ed Bolton could no longer be reborn as her brother. Hell, his mother, and their mutual father, never even had the chance to meet. And so the powers that be, the people controlling all of this, simply chose to place him in some other family. This was when he became a she, and she was named Téa Stendahl. Since Nerakali had blended Leona’s brain, she could remember her former brother-slash-now sister. She could remember feeding him baby formula, and teaching him how to walk, and helping him with math homework. She could remember the love she felt for him, the pain of having to leave him behind all year, every year while she hopelessly jumped forwards in time, and the joy of seeing him every moment she could. But Téa never understood any of this. Sure, they could tell her that she was born as Theo in an alternate reality, but that was not something she could truly comprehend. Leona eventually had to face the reality that she no longer had a brother. Reconciling the contradictions between the three lives she remembers living was something she’s never really been able to do. It was a work in progress.
Another thing, however, that Leona could remember of Téa Stendahl was that she had a history of letting people down. More importantly, she had a history of making things up to the people she loved. Leona always knew that, no matter what, Téa would do everything she could to make it right, to repair any damage she had caused. And so this was their job for the next three days. They were tasked with working with someone who either they had wronged, or had wronged them. This was why Leona and Horace were sitting on the beach together, forbidden from going far enough away to find one of the other groups. Their special location was their old camp; the one they supposedly used for decades before being assigned the construction of a new camp. Their memories had been altered, which meant they hadn’t actually spent all that time there. It was just a falsehood, but it still felt real, which made it that much more sad to see the camp in such poor shape. They hadn’t come back in years, and the shelter was falling apart. It was a mess; a suitable symbol for their new lives as island survivors.
When Mateo and his friend went back to 1945 and killed Hitler, life for Horace Reaver was destined to change as well. His salmon time power was different before. He would still go back and relive every single day, but he had no memory of the first time around. He possessed only feelings; a sort of déjà vu on steroids. Everything he did felt familiar. This gave him an advantage—say when betting on a sports competition, or getting into a bar fight—but it was also stressful. Nothing felt exciting, and he could never really do anything spontaneous. Fortunately for him, his luck would change. He met a young man by the name of Serkan Demir. They started battling this evil corporation together, and quickly fell in love. They spent decades as a family, along with Paige, whom they had accidentally brought with them on a trip from 1970s Stonehenge. He was not the twisted killer from the first timeline. He did not murder people for sport, and then rewind the day to absolve himself of all consequences. Nor was he the ruthless business magnate of the second reality, so obsessively focused on reclaiming his love, Leona, that he no longer cared about anything else. He was a new man...a good man.
At some point, though, this new Horace Reaver encountered the brain blender, Nerakali Preston. For reasons known only to her, she blended his brain as well, implanting memories of the first and second realities. Suddenly he could recall all the death and destruction he had purposefully caused. He could remember killing his own mother as a child to prove to himself that he was a time traveler. He could remember killing his own fiancé, in this bizarre ritual sacrifice, before going back in time and marrying her. He could remember going on a killing spree after one of his best friends literally drove her to her the true death. And he could remember being given a second chance, and wasting it by dedicating his life to his former friend’s misery. This was likely what Nerakali had in mind when she forced these memories upon him. She wanted Horace to go after Mateo again, to rekindle their hatred of each other in the future. But this did not happen, because not only could he still remember the reality where he was good, but what she didn’t know was that he had forgiven Mateo even before the third reality was created. He did not return to his life as an adversary. Instead, he became friends with Mateo and Leona, and that was what he remained, even today. Leona knew this, but it was still awkward between them, because they were two of only a handful of people who had memories of all three alternate realities.
They stared at the ocean together. Every once in awhile, one of them would open their mouth, as if to say something, but they never did. They now had less than three days to air their grievances, which might be enough, but they had to start sometime. If they didn’t come to some kind of understanding between each other about what they knew, and what they felt, Téa would remain lost forever. If they didn’t complete this expiation, Arcadia would never her bring her back from the void, and they would never see her again. To most of the others, this probably wasn’t that big of a deal. After all, the whole point was that they couldn’t remember she existed in the first place. But Leona could. Mateo, wherever he was, could too. They would feel that pain for the rest of their lives, so it was time to get to work. She looked Horace dead in the eye. “You go first.”