‘Who survived, anyone new, anyone else but you?’ (Porter Robinson, Sad Machine)
It was on their way back to Rakim’s place on that night that they first heard the alarm. “Oh shit!” As their brisk walk turned into a frantic run, they got near enough to see first the smoke, then the reflection of the flames on the other buildings, and finally the flames themselves. “Oh no!” Under normal circumstances, fighting fire was Irshad’s stock and trade. She would stand side by side with her teammates, with their equipment, fully alert.
Unfortunately, that night took place after Irshad, in her characteristic generosity, had volunteered for a double shift to offer relief to one of her teammates. Already on an odd sleep schedule from sleeping at night rather than during the day as she usually did, and so exhausted from staying up twice as long as usual, the bat had slept right through her fire alarm. Normally, a bat’s ears would have heard a fire alarm and she would’ve awakened fast enough to escape.
It had been the siren.
Years of the fire truck’s siren had eroded her hearing to next to nothing.
Before she’d woken up and understood what was happening, practically everyone else had already evacuated the building. It took a moment for people to even notice that she wasn’t down there. By the time her teammates had showed up, the building around their apartment had already started breaking down because of the fire in ways that made escaping from it without getting burned, without the help of anything or anyone, virtually impossible.
Ogun yelled after Rakim in a panic as he saw the bat take flight next to him, against the firefighters’ warnings to stay back. As the sound of the hatchling’s whimpers as it risked its life to save Samus echoed in his mind, he flew all the way up to a window of his flaming building to find his mother and bring her out himself. Ogun freaked out and, without thinking about the consequences, ran into the building against warnings not to do so as well, breaking out of the grip of the firefighters who were trying to hold him back.
He tried to find fire stairways that he could climb, but it was no use: some of them were already on fire, or too damaged by the passage of the flames to safely climb. People on the street gasped when they saw him come out of a window to climb up the side of a building with all four limbs, looking more like the kind of monster that he usually didn’t want to look like than he ever had. Rakim thought he’d found her. Was her leg trapped under something? Was she still alive?
Ogun cursed when he saw that some of the windows were also broken and ablaze, restricting which ones he could use to get in and out of the building. The firefighters, while still begrudging him for plunging in where it was their own job to go, were getting the trampoline and net ready below him, in case he fell from the building. Rakim thought he could get his mother out through a window, but just then the window collapsed from the fire, blocking their way out.
More than ever, his lifelong fear of fire nailed him to the ground, frozen in fear as his hell raged around him even while he heard the chimera yell out his name from a lower circle of it...
***
When he came to, he couldn’t tell how, but the first thing he noticed was that he was different somehow. But the first thing he asked was whether she’d made it or not. When he heard she didn’t, he just screamed, and screamed, and screamed, an ear-piercing, never-ending bat shriek that shattered the sky in half.
He would never accept this.
This would never be okay.
Ogun yelled out in vain after him, trying to get him to stay long enough to be able to talk to him, but Rakim was inconsolable beyond measure. His entire foundation for existence had been ripped out from under him. He would listen to no one. He had nothing left to listen for. As thunder cracked above them, the chimera’s calls for his beloved’s return reverberated uselessly over the treetops as the bat’s shrieks were so loud they drowned out the sound of thunder itself.
When Ogun could tell that he was gone so far that, even with his bat hearing, he would no longer hear his calls, the sounds of his calls were replaced by the sobs that wracked all four of his heads at once as he wept for the loss of his beloved Rakim.
***
“You’re back!”
Rakim looked up from his seat at the Bolgia. He still didn’t drink, but he was having coffee, which it turned out the bar served after all. “Oh, Betta!” It was the red fish he’d fought that time. “How have you been?” He looked at the bat incredulously. “How am I? I thought you were dead!” This half of each year Betta was a ‘he,’ Rakim had learned, even though he’d been a ‘she’ when they’d fought. Everyone in his species worked that way at different times of the year.
“I was,” the bat smiled bitterly.
Betta looked at him with a half-burned cigarette dangling from his mouth, with that look he gave when he wasn’t sure if you were shitting him or not. Finally settling on not, he gave Rakim a knowing look. “I get what you mean, yeah.” The bat looked different somehow, but the fish knew better than to ask in what way. It would’ve been rude. “Have you seen Ogun?” Betta shook his head. “I hear Ogun’s been at Soma’s for a while. Why, are you looking for him?”
Rakim nodded. “You could say that, yeah,” he answered, getting up and getting ready to leave. Betta hid his surprise of the bat’s sudden departure under his customary blasé façade as well as he could. “Hey, kid?” Rakim turned to look over his shoulder on his way out of the bar. “Sorry to hear about your mom,” the fish added, throwing down his burned cigarette to light another one. Rakim raised an eyebrow at him. “Thanks,” he replied as he walked out the door.
***
“Oh my God, Rakim, you’re back!”
He’d been gone for a month by then, with complete radio silence. Ogun had begun to believe that the boundary that he’d crossed this time had finally pushed the bat away for good, with no possibility of him ever making up for it. When he saw Rakim landing in Soma’s grove after all this time, even though he tried to remind himself that it didn’t necessarily mean that the bat had come back to him specifically, just knowing that Rakim was still alive and had chosen to come back to him brought him the greatest sense of relief that he could imagine ever experiencing.
“I thought you’d never come back,” he shook his dragon head.
He started running to Rakim to hold him in his arms, but when he saw the bat’s dour expression and closed body language, something held him back, no longer sure of whether a hug from him would still be welcome or not. “Well... I am. In a sense,” Rakim cautiously responded, still examining his arms and legs as he spoke. “In whatever sense I can be at this point, I suppose,” he half-asked himself aloud, unsure of whether it was even a rhetorical question or not.
“It’s good to have you back.”
Ogun was still too emotional to really smile, even though he wanted to. Rakim sighed. He felt guilty about having left. In his absence, Ogun had fallen into a deep depression, and had started spending all of his time at Soma’s, talking to him about how much he missed Rakim to an extent that drove even Soma, with his caretaking personality and his own affection for the bat, to become overwhelmed in his own unsuccessful attempts to address the chimera’s infinite grief.
Usually they balanced each other out as friends, both believing in nature and technology alike. In moments when he’d lost his patience with Ogun because of how badly the chimera was being affected by the bat’s loss, Soma had even told Ogun that he shouldn’t have done what he did. He told Ogun that he’d crossed a line people were meant not to cross, which was something that Soma had always told himself that he would never say about anything. Mandrake wouldn’t have been proud of him, the snake couldn’t help but think, but he’d just been felt so at the end of his rope by then that he let it out and hadn’t been able to take it back, even though he regretted it.
“Is it?” Rakim asked him.
The worst part when Soma had said that was that, when he asked himself the question, Ogun himself couldn’t tell for sure whether he’d done the right thing or not. It had hit a nerve.
***
After they’d pronounced Rakim and Irshad dead at the scene, Ogun had freaked out and taken both of their bodies to bring them all the way to Soma’s for additional emergency measures. He hoped against hope that the snake may have found a way of prolonging their lives that the paramedics had not. While Soma’s luck had been incrementally better with Rakim than with Irshad because there had been slightly more of his body left to work with, and was able to hold Rakim in brief stasis with his abilities after he had lost Irshad despite his best efforts, Soma still couldn’t stop Rakim’s condition from being ultimately terminal, and only a matter of time.
While Soma hated asking Mandrake for favors in general, considering the circumstances, Soma still asked Ogun to call Mandrake to ask for his help to try to put Rakim into a deeper, longer-lasting state of stasis until a more long-term solution could be found, if such a thing were to ever become possible. Most of his original body was gone, and none of them, with their knowledge of genetic engineering, hedge witchcraft or technology, had any idea of how to bring him back. So because of the extremity of the situation, Ogun asked for Soma’s permission to try something he had never tried before. Soma first refused, but Ogun made his case, passionately.
Soma agreed.
Unlike Rakim, Ogun had been an atheist for most of his life, and an agnostic at the most the rest of the time. In his early childhood, he’d taken an interest in Voodoo, the unpopular faith of his ancestors that his grandparents had discarded for more conventional beliefs long before he’d been born. He’d been discouraged from pursuing his interest in these beliefs and, told that they were superstitions that played into stereotypes that made his people look bad, he grew up still often thinking with models based on these figures that had been presented to him, even though he didn’t really believe in them deep down. He’d always thought that he never would.
When Rakim died, Ogun broke. He became so despondent in the wake of his loss that he was just completely unwilling to consider life without him at all. So while it would not normally have been something that he would have done, he’d become so desperate for any way to solve his problem that would work that he’d become willing to consider solutions that he would never have considered under other circumstances.
Tracing a veve on the ground, lighting candles and incense, he chanted a low, persistent plea to his namesake, the loa Ogun he was named after, a source of inspiration to him in his way of life all along. In its own way, the concept of this loa had motivated him to start working with prosthetics, to become a transhumanist and a technopagan. Historically, people had always based new-for-then beliefs on their immediate surroundings. Why should he have been any different?
So he prayed, in his mind, to the unbroken line since the first cavemen, since Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods, to the primal force of blacksmithing, to that same melding of metal to metal that melded lion to dragon to ram to snake. Ogun prayed to Ogun, who had been sent down to Earth to make the Earth into a place where people could live, whose Earth would always be under construction. He called upon the fire in which the world was being forged every day, that would always refuse that the way things are for us now are as good as they can possibly be, that would always fuel the belief that it can be reformed into a better shape for the good of all.
To him, it was just another extension of the instinct to survive itself, at its most basic level. It was using every means at his disposal to go on living. As Ogun danced and pleaded and chanted and prayed, even though he never would’ve thought it possible, he’d somehow successfully invoked his divine namesake after all. Summoning the loa into his body, giving control over to him, becoming his ‘horse,’ his conscious mind almost blacked out altogether from his awareness while all of his tools and electronics started jittering around him as though they were coming to a life of their own...
He forgot most of what he did on that night after that.
When he came to the next morning, he woke up next to Rakim, waiting to be activated.
***
“So that’s how that went down,” the bat said after the chimera had explained what had happened to him. “I’d been wondering about that.” An uncomfortable silence hung between them. Much as people talked about it, breaking the laws of Nature, God and Man to bring a loved one back from the dead was something that didn’t happen every day. “I should thank you, I guess.” Ogun looked downcast. “I should apologize to you, is more like it,” his ram head said sadly. “What makes you think that?” His snake head sighed. “There was no way to ask you. I would’ve asked if I could’ve. I didn’t know any other way. I had to make a decision.”
The bat thought about it, and slowly nodded. “I can see how you would’ve thought that, now that you mention it.” Even though Ogun was much taller than Rakim, the chimera had to struggle to raise his eyes to meet the bat’s gaze. “Isn’t that why you flew off into the night, though?” He had to ask. “At first I was mad that you didn’t save her,” he admitted. “Oh Rakim, we tried!” his lion head wept, staining its mane with tears. “We really tried!” The bat nodded.
“I realize that. It’s... It’s just never going to be easy not wishing you’d saved her instead of me.” His dragon head nodded, sniffling. “Yeah... I can see how that would be hard to get over,” he gulped. “Well... You did what you could with what you had,” Rakim offered, even though he couldn’t take the pain out of his voice as he said it. “Thanks for telling me how it happened after all, at least.” This prompted Ogun to finally ask the next question on his mind.
“Where have you been?”
“Killing drones, for one thing,” the bat admitted. “I flew all the way back to my homeland... Do you ever get ads, Ogun?” The chimera blinked. “Uh, yeah.” What an odd question that was. “Are they usually well-tailored to what you’re looking for?” It was another odd question, but not a hard one. “Never, actually.” Rakim nodded. “Now imagine if the same algorithms that are used to send you these ads are used to gather information about you, except instead of sending you ads, they kill your family. Tell me, Ogun...” The chimera gulped again. “... Don’t you think that would be a lot more annoying than getting the wrong ads?”
Ogun was shaken. No matter how much they talked, there would always be aspects of Rakim’s experience that would go beyond what he’d be able to have complete access to, he couldn’t help but think. That was just a fact of life. “To say the least,” Ogun nodded grimly. “I shouldn’t think of it as ‘killing’ drones I guess, more like ‘destroying.’ I’m no longer sure what that means, being the way I am now. But if your people were being exterminated by the thousands by a foreign government, you’d been given super powers, and everyone thought you were dead, so you could get away with it, Ogun... What then, precisely... would you do?”
The chimera sighed. He knew he couldn’t ignore what the bat was bringing up to him. “I honestly don’t know. I’ve never been in that situation. Maybe the same thing you did. I don’t know. I don’t hold it against you, if it’s what you need to know.” Rakim nodded. “It’s a start.” Ogun blinked. “You mean there’s something else?” This time it was the bat’s turn to look downcast. “I took a page from your book, Ogun... I did something else I never thought I’d do.”
***
“How did you get this number?”
When he had first reached his homeland, the first thing that Rakim had done had been to spend some time alone in a secluded area outdoors getting to figure out how he worked. His body was different now. He went through the same forms that his mother had taught him with his new body, the same ones he had seen her do with her cyborg arm that morning. He got used to when this or that joint would resist or yield unexpectedly compared to his previous body.
Once he got startled when a bladed chain shot out of his forearm at the end of an arm movement to go embed itself in the bark of a nearby tree. He figured out that he had some of them stored in each of his limbs, and they seemed for all practical purposes indefinitely extensible. He could even electrify them and his entire body at will if he wanted to, and with enough trial and error, he learned how to get them all under his full, voluntary control.
He could withdraw or extrude razor-sharp metal claws now. His vocal range expanded even further to include ranges he could voluntarily direct to slice rocks in half at a distance. His flight speed had been increased to an extent to which he could even break the sound barrier if he chose to do so. His flight to his homeland would have been impossible for any normal bat. He had a built-in fire extinguisher, but no flamethrower, not even a lighter. He was glad about that.
When he’d realized that his body was now indistinguishable from a cis guy’s in every way, he’d wept for joy, at least at first. He’d never thought that something like this would have been possible for him, not in this life. Then he wept with rage and grief when he thought about how badly he wished that this transformation had not been tainted by just how much he’d had to lose as he’d gone through it.
It had been too high a cost for anything, to be sure, but one way or the other, there was no going back for him. As he considered what to do in the aftermath of his drone-destroying spree, he realized that he needed answers for himself that he thought no normal person could provide. In light of this, after much hesitation, he grudgingly decided to do something that he’d always thought that he’d never do.
“I mean, how did you summon me?”
She didn’t always remember to use the right kind of language to address her most recent audience right after being pulled through a dimensional portal. “Are you Mnemos?” the bat asked the rat. “How do you know my name?” Had Soma told him? Yes, even she owed Soma a favor. But then, he would never have betrayed her secret to someone, however he felt about that person, would he? Knowing her name gave someone some power over her, however limited.
“I thought I recognized you at the Bolgia after having read about you in one of Ogun’s magic books one time,” he answered her. “I’d never seen someone make the walls bleed before.” She sighed. She’d hoped that hadn’t been going to come back to bite her in the ass, but so much for that. “Oh, that’s easy,” she said, “you just kind of have to scare them straight. They’ll bleed, you’ll see. It’s just an area of effect thing.” He blinked. “What?” She shrugged. “Nevermind.”
So he had remembered how to trace her Seal, and he had gathered the ceremonial breadcrumbs. As he had solemnly tossed them into a magic circle like an old man at a duck pond, six pigeons had appeared from the sky to come peck them up off the ground in it before they coalesced in a mess of feathers to become the rat’s head, torso and four limbs. The half-goddess, half-demon, all-rat of Memory, Mnemos, looked him up and down, gauging him.
“None of your people have summoned me for quite some time, and not many of you overall, at that.” In ancient days, a lot of alchemy had started in the Middle East, inspiring Greco-Roman philosophers to develop their own take on it. Yet over the years, Rakim’s people had put serious restrictions on the use of several kinds of magic, including evocation. “Many of you believe none of you ever should,” she tilted her head at him inquiringly. “Desperate times,” he explained uncomfortably, looking at his feet. “Fair enough,” she shrugged off. “You had something to ask me?” He stopped, and thought about his question for a moment.
“How are you?”
This time it was her turn to blink in surprise. “That was your question?” No one who had summoned her had ever asked her how she was before. “Well, no,” he answered, “it just seemed that, before asking anything else about me, it’d be more considerate to start by asking how you were doing, you know?” She considered this. Most summoners typically launched into a litany of demands. If he meant it, it was almost... refreshing? Did she get refreshed by things anymore?
“I was just being chased, actually.” She may as well have answered truthfully. What was he really going to do if she did? So she took his question at face value. If he meant it, he’d be glad she did. If he didn’t, then to hell with him, she grinned privately to herself. “So a little out of breath for now but, for what it’s worth, I guess you inadvertently pulled me out of a bit of a jam,” she recognized. “It should take them a bit to figure out where I went, before they can catch up with me.” He raised an eyebrow at her quizzically. “Do you get chased a lot?” She scoffed. “Rats get chased by cats, don’t you know?”
He looked at her disbelievingly. “What kind of cats would chase a rat like you, though?” What a curious fellow. Should she have been more careful around him after all? He seemed so harmless. “Well, there’s SpeedRun, a cheetah so fast that, when she stops running, her spots keep going without her, DamageBoost, a puma with BDSM-based powers, and RNG, a chaos panther who’s also a black hole.” She scanned his face for signs of the names’ recognition, somewhat reassured to find none. “And they’re all after you, all the time?” She gave him a look. “No, that’s just right now.” He almost gasped. “There are nine of them in all. Nine lives for the Cat’s Eye.”
He thought about the implications of what she’d said, not just for the world in general, but for her life in particular. “So you always have to be on the go, don’t you?” he asked her. “You never really get the chance to settle down anywhere.” She wasn’t sure how long she had with him, and knew she shouldn’t waste too much time talking to him, but part of her was enjoying this conversation for what it was while it lasted. Why not? “It never feels like long enough, now that you mention it, no. It may seem ironic to you, but... I envy mortals sometimes, people who get to settle places, even though some of you may envy me for all I know.”
He nodded. “It’s always easy to envy people when you don’t know just how hard they really have it, isn’t it?” She chuckled. “It is.” He tilted his head at her. “What do they want with you?” She sighed, and shook her head. “The Cat’s Eye has always wanted to extinguish Memory. When they burned Alexandria, when they burned the witches, when they burned books in bonfires, they were always trying to kill me. It’s what they do.”
It was so much for him to take in, that there was this whole layer of a world above his world that he had never known about, with its own rules and problems and things that seemed mundane when they were being taken granted from within by people who had always existed alongside them. “So there are other... embodied concepts, like you, out there?” The rat nodded. “I’ve met Deconstruction, for one. She’s much nicer than most people seem to think, really.”
The bat thought about the possibilities that such things may have opened up. “Have you met Death?” A chill seemed to go down Mnemos’ spine. “Why, you want to talk to her?” Apparently even the rat could be scared. “I was wondering if I could bargain with Death,” he said in a bittersweet, wistful way, fully aware of how farfetched it sounded. “Death doesn’t make exceptions.” He thought about her wording. “Can I argue on everyone’s behalf, then?”
She looked at him with a pained expression that said ‘This is the part of my job I hate.’
“Listen, kid... You seem like a nice kid. I’m gonna give you a piece of advice: stop and think about it for a second. Imagine someone so heartless, so resistant to sentiment, that they were there at every death ever since the beginning of time, that their essence was not only not weakened but actually strengthened by this, and that it had always been so... Well kid, do you think you could make someone so entrenched, so heartless, and so powerful change their mind?”
Rakim winced. “Probably not,” he shook his head regretfully.
“Every time someone dies, all of their memories that no one else remembers from them disappear. And that loss damages me... Death and I aren’t friends. We’re not even on speaking terms. So no, unfortunately, I can’t help you talk to her.” The bat sighed, and nodded in response. “I understand,” he said. “The best I can do is Taxes,” she added, tongue firmly in cheek. Oh, Death and Taxes – very funny, he rolled his eyes to himself in his mind.
“Are you a goddess, Mnemos? Is that what your people are?” She seemed to infer something from what he’d asked. “You’ve been having a little crisis of faith, haven’t you?” His expression told her she was right. “Well, are you, though?” he pressed on. She furrowed her brow. “Some of us think we are. Personally, I don’t think so, to be honest. To me that just sounds arrogant. I mean, I know we might seem like it from your perspective I guess, but it’s not really how I tend to see myself. My powers feel like they have too many limits for that, and I didn’t create the world. I don’t legislate morality. I just try to continue to exist day after day, like you.”
It all depended on what someone’s definition of a god was. “So what are you, then?” She didn’t want to lie to him, but she still wanted to give him an answer he could understand. “You’ve seen people do glitch runs of games before, haven’t you?” He nodded. “Yeah.” What did that have to do with this?
“Imagine being a resident of a game world for a moment... You see this character, being controlled by a player you know nothing about, walk backwards, go through portals, and unlock powers with controller tricks... They do things that appear nonsensical to the people on their own layer, and it gives them access to options unimaginable to most players. They know how the rules work well enough to break them. It lets them slip between the cracks of their world.”
For most of his life, the onus had been put on Rakim to prove he was a ‘real man’ to everyone around him. The implications of what it would mean for everyone to have been living in a putative virtual world in which no one was really ‘real’ after all were far from lost on him. “So you’re players doing a glitch run of the world itself,” he continued her metaphor. “If that helps you, yes.” For a moment, Ogun had allowed a player just like her to ‘play’ him. But how could a mere character remember a player’s tricks? “Mnemos... Is there an afterlife?” He was going to have to get around to asking her eventually. “Will I ever see my mother there again?”
She weighed her words carefully. “Your mother is well-liked in the... gaming community,” she answered. “She was a good bat character with good controls. They don’t make many of those, you know.” The lump in his throat had never felt so big.
“Is my God real? Have you met Him, Mnemos?” He was almost afraid to ask, but how could he not? When would he ever get the chance to ask again? “Your God keeps a low profile,” she said, “or at least that’s what people say about Him. I’m afraid I don’t know for sure.” He was perplexed by this. “You really don’t know?” She gave him a look confirming that she really meant it. “There are atheists and believers even among us ‘gods,’ if you can believe that.”
He tilted his head at her. “What about you?” She winced. What a delicate question that was. “I have to admit I’m personally kind of an atheist, Rakim... For some reason, I just tend to think that, at the layer of reality that people like me exist at, if there really was one, great, big, overarching God, we would know. Then again, you could just as easily make the argument that the layer above us is just as invisible to us as our layer is usually invisible to people like you...”
So even she didn’t have an answer for him. He couldn’t really blame her for that. Not everyone he talked to was going to have all the answers.
“I suppose if it becomes a matter of knowing for sure, it’s no longer really about faith, is it?” she asked him. “All of my life,” he answered, “for all matters having to do with how I should live with life, how I should treat others, how to be kind, I always felt like I could turn to faith for guidance, and trust it not to lead me wrong. It was one of the single few guiding principles that I based my life on. On some level, I still feel that way, about how to deal with the living, I mean.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “And about the rest of it?” He sighed. “Ever since my mother died, I’ve been questioning whether or not believing in God and in an afterlife would ever be enough to be able to help me accept the pain of her death. But every time I turn to this belief for help about this... It still hurts! It just hurts so much. Nothing I try to tell myself about it can make the pain go away. I just can’t accept it, no matter how hard I try.”
She didn’t want to admit to him how much she related to him about that. “I get that. Maybe we’re not supposed to ever accept it, for all I know,” she shook her head. “You really looked up to her a lot, didn’t you?” He became angry at himself. “For all the good that did her! She deserved better than to die like this, Mnemos!” She didn’t look dismissive. “Everyone deserves better than this,” she answered seriously. She looked sad.
“I know, but... she was the one who was the hero, Mnemos. She was the one who saved others, the main character of the story of our lives. I was the one who was a secondary character in her life. She deserved better than to die from something that she saves people from every day, that I couldn’t even save her from the one time she needed me to, when my turn came to. I wasn’t able to rescue her, just as she rescued others. How can I ever forgive myself for that?”
“You’re not a firefighter, Rakim,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know you’ve been trying to live up to her for a long time, but if even the people who worked with her every day, who she trusted with her life, weren’t able to save her, it makes sense that you couldn’t. Your mother was a warrior. She died at the hands of fire, her most hated adversary. Would she ever have listened to anyone asking her to quit? I don’t think so. She had her own life, and died a warrior’s death.”
Rakim sighed. He knew she was right, on some level. It would have been foolish for him to have expected his mother to limit her life so that she could make it all about taking care of him. She’d taken risks to rescue others than him because it had been her decision to make.
“You’re the goddess of Memory, aren’t you?” He was going somewhere with this, she could tell. “In a manner of speaking, yes.” He nodded. “I need to ask you something about my memories since what happened.” A look of understanding dawned on her face. “Ah, yes, you’d want to know about that, wouldn’t you?” She seemed to know what he meant, he noticed. “Tell me, Mnemos... Why can’t I remember my own mother’s face?”
She had a grave, somber expression. “I could technically tell you that, but... it doesn’t seem fair for me to be the one to tell you.” He looked puzzled. “So someone else should be the one to tell me, then? Can you tell me who that is, how to get to them?” “You already know how to get to them,” she told him, “it’s someone you know very well. I have every reason to believe they’ll tell you. If they don’t... drop me a line, why don’t you.” She was reasonably confident that it wouldn’t come to that, but it seemed like a considerate offer for her to make, in any case. He was shocked when she told him, although he supposed that perhaps he shouldn’t have been.
“Do you have any more advice for me?” She thought about his question for a moment. “Well, kid... It’s your life, so ultimately, you should probably do what you’d do, not what I’d do. That said, if there’s anything I’ve learned in billions of years’ existence, it’s that love can be pretty hard to come by... It can get pretty lonely all by your lonesome among those billions of stars out there. In all this time, I barely ever found it at all... I wouldn’t let go of it lightly if I were you. But I’m me. How would I know, you know?” He took in what she’d said, and slowly nodded. “Can I ask you just one last thing before I go?” She gestured for him to do so. “Shoot.”
“In all your years, have you ever seen a moth spin herself into a flame cocoon?”
She scratched her head a bit. “Not that I can remember offhand... That doesn’t mean I can tell you it never happened, mind you. You’d have to ask a moth, I’d think.” He forced a smile. “Thanks. I’d always wondered about that.” She shrugged. “No harm in asking, kid.”
A woman seemed to walk out from behind an invisible curtain next to where she was. “They’re on our trail, dear,” she affectionately reproached the rat. Mnemos grunted knowingly before following her down a hole that the newcomer had just created in the ground next to them.
“Yes, Taxes,” she answered her girlfriend dutifully on her way.
***
“Mother,” he’d asked her, “did you ever wonder what I’d be like if I hadn’t been your son? If I hadn’t been an immigrant, or a bat, or trans, or gay, or a Muslim? What do you think I’d be like then?” What odd questions kids asked their parents sometimes, she’d thought.
“Then you wouldn’t be Rakim,” she’d smiled at him.
***
“Did I ever tell you what happened when I tried to draw the Prophet, Ogun?” The chimera was nervous, but could only answer truthfully. “I don’t think so, no.” A cautious answer, but one that Rakim thought rang true. “He was a figure I admired. Kids like to draw figures they admire, you know? But my mother told me why we choose not to do that. Do you know why we don’t do that, Ogun?”
He scratched his lion head. “I think I might, but it seems like I should let you tell me what she said right now,” his dragon head answered gingerly as well. “She told me that the Prophet was supposed to be able to be the idea that all of us had of perfection. And since no one’s depiction of Him would ever be perfect, because all people are flawed, they could never hope to do Him justice, could they?”
His ram head whimpered. “I knew I could never do you justice either, Rakim,” his snake head admitted. “Are you telling me you really wish I hadn’t tried?” his lion head asked him. “Well... I’m not the Prophet,” the bat chuckled grimly. “I was never perfect to begin with. I always felt broken, needing to be repaired in some way. Now I guess I finally have been, after all this time.” He craned his dragon head forward. “So what are you telling me, then?” Rakim looked at him as if he’d been trying to see into his soul.
“Why can’t I remember what my mother’s face looks like, Ogun? Can you tell me that?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? He’d always intended on answering it, but he’d always been dreading it all the same. “When we were trying to put you back together, Rakim...” It hit him just how much he felt like Isis having put Osiris back together after he’d been shattered into a thousand pieces. “... We had to make some tough calls. There was no time.” The bat looked at him expectantly. “The brain is still a very mysterious organ, Rakim. We had to improvise.”
The bat’s eyes narrowed. “Is my mind still my mind, Ogun?”
“Yes... and no, depending on how you look at it,” was all he could say in response.
“What did you mean about my brain? What happened to it?” His ram head couldn’t meet his gaze as it spoke. “We weren’t able to save your flesh brain, Rakim. Well, we were able to save some of it, but... just not enough. We couldn’t get what was left to work on its own. So I, so we... I had to make you another one. There was no other way to make you ‘work.’” The bat considered the endless implications of this.
“But how?” His snake head looked even more sheepish than his ram head had when its turn came to speak. “I programmed into your new brain everything that I remembered you having ever told me... Every conversation we had, what every place where we’d gone had looked like. I did searches for places you’d been that I’d never seen, to find images of them to give you. I put in every game you’d played, every book you’d read, your fighting style, every song I could track down you’d ever heard, every life event you told me about having been through...”
His lion head had to take over as his snake head ran out of breath, which almost never happened. “I managed to get the data from all of your chats, all of your e-mails, every Youtube video you’d ever watched, your personal logs, your browser history... I used them to recreate all of your memories, bit by bit. School, your home, bullies, your mom, our dates, your meals, your fights, our jokes, our dances, your friends... I talked to Soma, to your shark ex-girlfriend, to your gorgon, even to Betta, to capture their impressions of you, and put in how you’d acted around them. Everything you had conflicted feelings about, the way you’d always move that rug back...”
“But that’s where it goes!” the bat couldn’t help but to jump in and insist, just as he always had. “Oh my God,” he added, noticing what he’d just said, “you really did bring me back, didn’t you?” he shook his head disbelievingly. “So that means... Did you go through all my stuff? Do you now know me better than I know myself?” Ogun looked downcast, but was doing his best, reminding himself that it made sense that Rakim would’ve had a lot of questions.
“I must’ve seen a small part of it by accident when I was getting the data out. I always looked away as fast as I could to try to see as little as possible, but I wasn’t always able to. Of course, I can’t make you trust me if you don’t... I don’t have any evidence of what happened. You have the power to decide not to believe me, if you choose to. Even now, telling you this, I have no idea what you’ll say. I’m crossing my fingers you’ll believe me, but I don’t know.”
Rakim tilted his head at him. “But I thought you programmed my behavior into me?” How could Ogun not have been able to predict his behavior, in a context like that? “I programmed in your memories, opinions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, habits, attitudes, the pros and cons you saw to various issues, the factors that seemed to affect you when you’d changed your mind about specific things over the course of your life... I don’t have a script of anything you might ever say from now on though. Every factor in you can combine with many other factors in ways that are mathematically unpredictable. You were made to be... emergent.”
This was a lot for the bat to take in, but... It was a start, for what it was.
“So if I wanted to leave again, you couldn’t do anything about it?” Ogun looked grim. “Believe me, if it had been up to me, you wouldn’t have left the first time. But I couldn’t do anything about it then, and I still can’t now.” Rakim nodded. “You see, Ogun... Most people create machines to do something for them, something that they want done, but that they don’t want to have to do themselves. The machine is a... service creature, of sorts, isn’t it?” The chimera nodded grudgingly. “Most of the time, it is.” What troubled waters he’d ventured into, the more he stopped and thought about it.
“You see, in a sense, it’s almost like you’re my god now, isn’t it? I mean, you did sort of create me now, didn’t you?” he asked Ogun. “I don’t think of it as that,” the chimera answered. “Your experiences, your decisions, everything you accomplished, everyone you’ve ever met... It’s the events of your life that shaped you that created you, the version of you that I tried to rebuild, in the first place. I could never have come up with that on my own from nothing. It wouldn’t have meant anything if I had. It’s only the person you were that gives meaning to the person you are now. That meaning... I didn’t create that. I could never have created that.”
The bat seemed to understand what he meant. “I didn’t try to ‘make’ you. I tried to give you a prosthetic brain, to save who you were.” Like a video game character starting back from a save point, Rakim couldn’t help but think. “Religion is a kind of prosthetic, isn’t it?” the bat mused. “We can’t live with having lost someone, so we make another version of them in our minds to try to heal some of our pain with it, a version of our loved ones that will never die.”
The chimera nodded. “It’s true I did always think we came up with religion because death was so fundamentally unacceptable to us that we had to come up with a way to refuse it somehow,” his lion head admitted. “But I didn’t bring you back for me. I brought you back for you. All I know is, I told my gods it wasn’t fair to expect me to go on living in a world without you, and somehow they listened to me. I brought you back because I love you, Rakim. So if you need to go to prove to yourself that I didn’t program you to stay, I won’t force you to stay... I’ll just really miss you a lot,” his dragon head’s voice broke with emotion as he spoke.
“So the reason I can’t remember her face... It’s because you never saw it, isn’t it?” He shook his ram head no. “She always chose to keep on her veil around me. So I didn’t really have a point of reference for what her face looked like.” Rakim remembered that she’d showed him her face a few times, it was so eerie, remembering having told the chimera about it, but not remembering what it had actually looked like. He thought about his gorgon friend, the one he had always met only in the dark, who refused to be seen as either a man or a woman, but who the bat knew through his echolocation, through sharing their voices in the dark with each other.
“My mother didn’t want people’s opinions of her to be based on how she looked. That was something that was always important to her,” he remembered, “she used to talk about it. Ogun...” He tilted his snake head at Rakim. “Yeah?” It wasn’t an easy question but he pushed himself to ask it. “Do you think we can bring her back someday, the same way you brought me back?” The chimera winced.
“I want to figure out a way to bring her back.” Rakim thought about it more. “I want to be able to bring you back, too. I want to be able to...” he trailed off. “Ogun, I want to be able to bring everyone back someday. I don’t want there to be death anymore.” The chimera stopped and thought about what the bat had said. “I’d never done what I did that night before. I don’t know if my namesake would agree to help me again... I’m the one who owes him a favor now. This almost never happens for anyone in the first place. So I don’t know,” Ogun admitted.
“I’d have to reverse-engineer how I did it while blacked out for you, but... there could be a way, for all I know.” Rakim nodded. “I know it’s unlikely. It just seems like if, somehow, we could do it, it would really be worth it, wouldn’t it?” Ogun had to agree to that. “The best things in life are there to be shared, that’s what we used to say, isn’t it?” his ram head answered. “By the way... I had to do some serious digging for spare parts when I was putting you back together.” The bat tilted his head at him. “You did?” His lion head nodded. “Even after having gone on a total junkyard spree, I had to scavenge everything from my place.”
Rakim gasped. “You mean... your consoles, radio, speakers, synth, TV, DVD player, computer, phone...?” Ogun gave him a meaningful look. “You’re all of them now. They all came apart and to be put back together, to give you life. Uh... You can basically play music and get channel five now. If you want. I guess.” The chimera looked down at his feet awkwardly like a schoolboy. “Is anything left?” Ogun brought out his hand from behind his back.
It was his clockwork butterfly, fluttering off from his finger to go perch itself on a nearby branch.
“Oh, Ogun!” Rakim finally jumped at the chimera, throwing his arms around his boyfriend’s torso, nuzzling each of his heads in turn as relieved sobs wracked Ogun’s body. His love had finally come home to him after all. “Of course I still love you! I could never stop loving you. My brain is different, but my heart is the same. It’s still the same heart that fell in love with you...”
