I, Alien

THRESHOLD by Terry McGarry

THE SOUTHEASTERN VERANATHOR Center for Neurosuppression has been grown in the shape of a tree. It is not a tree—it is ordinary plant tissue designed to mimic the form of a broadly spreading warmwood. In older, more affluent parts of Verana-thor Island, homes are grown over generations from genuine hardwood stock, the earliest chambers burrowing farther from daylight year by year, the out-erwood hardening and darkening into an impenetrable encrustation of bark. Here along the sunny coast of the island state, professional accommodations are grown cheap and quick from production-grade cellulose, and the walkway I stand on winds among anonymous clusters of the simplest, most common designs: bulbous mushrooms, cylindrical stalks.

Why couldn’t one of those have been the place? Why must my destination stand out so sorely? This faux tree is a profound aesthetic deception: the intricacy of leafless branchings suggests the fractal density of the neurons they destroy here, while the gracious spread of boughs supersedes the technical with the hortitectural, making you forget that what goes on inside is illegal in every other nation on the planet.

This is the only place in the world where it is legal to evict ghosts from your own mind. This is the only place in the world where it is legal to reject immortality.

My name is Nethon. The community knows me as Tollisdela Nethon Arimthora, vocational ceramicist. Nethon is my selfname, Arim was my bearer, and Tollis was my quickener. It’s best to be clear on that, since naming conventions differ so widely and change over time. I don’t know where this record will ultimately end up, or who will read it. I’m not even sure why I’m making it. Procrastinating, I suppose. Enjoying the feel of my claws scoring the tablet putty. Enjoying being me, just me, alone with myself. Trying to decide if that feeling is worth committing murder for. Trying to decide whether or not it is murder.

I thought I’d know, by the time I got here. All that long way, loping past windfarms and moss refineries on four sore feet, I thought that when I stood in front of this entryway the decision would bubble up from inside me—truth and right chiming like a clear bell, calm and certain. But I’m more terrified now than I was when I set out from home.

And more lonely, in this shell of mortal flesh. It is a pleasant shell. Arim, who did not know Tollis personally and wants no part of this decision, has a muscular build and a beautiful glossy chestnut coat, pale shadow striping in the underparts, fur so thick as to afford barely a glimpse of dermal ossicle. Here in Veranathor, boasting is socially unacceptable—but you can praise the physical attributes of your bearer or the cleverness of your quickener, and it’s considered to amount to the same thing. That’s fine where my bearer and I are concerned, since we’re genetically identical. But until I reach puberty, I am me, not my quickener, or all the quickeners that came before mine.

I think I might do anything to stay that way.

I can’t let them strip my self from me. I can’t let them take over. They might outnumber me hundreds, even thousands to one. There’s no telling how many generations Tollis carried. They can impose their interests, their pursuits on me, shoulder my learning and my passions to the side. I am a talented ceramicist—not the best or brightest who ever lived, at least according to those who were around at the acknowledged height of the ceramic arts, but consistently original and pleasing. And I love my work. It is unique to me, imbued with my personality and no one else’s.

And yet… can I be sure of that? Can I be sure that I’m not somehow being directed by the ghosts I carry, that my work is not somehow improved by then-presence? Can I take sole credit for anything I’ve ever done?

“Oh, their personalities are in there,” my friend Melen says. “It’s just all subconscious. You’re not aware of it. You’re not aware of them. But they’re in there, those souls. In you. They may be dormant but they’re not comatose. Glaciers look dead and frozen, but they expand, contract, make forays and retreats— they breathe and move and behave. They influence you whether you know it or not.”

If Melen is right, it means that I have a microcommunity of ancient minds nesting under the floorboards in my head. A haunting of ancient minds, whispering to me in my sleep, influencing me, prompting me.

The thought of that blanks my sight white with rage.

Melen cannot be right. Melen is only a bearer, a fleshgiver, and knows nothing of quickening. The en-grammatic neuroencoding perpetrated on me by my quickener is inert, nonfunctioning, until my maturing body secretes the neurohormones that can stimulate the designated receptors. Children do not produce those hormones. I do not yet produce those hormones in sufficient quantity to wake Tollis’ ghosts. Until I step off the cliff of puberty, the pathways of the past are closed to me—and I am safe from them.

But I’m nearing the cliff. I can hear the winds whistling up out of the abyss. I have begun to have bad dreams. Dreams of places I have never seen, feelings I have never felt. Alien emotions, alien sensations, alien attitudes. There are monsters in me and they are shifting, stirring. I perceive them in brief bursts of firing synapses in the small hours, like looming shadows silhouetted by sudden glare, the eye-searing shock of lightning in the coal deeps of night.

They will wake. They will engulf me. They will submerge me. I will drown in them. Drown in ancestors.

Unless I get them first.

I want to blame it all on Tollis, but that would be unfair. Tollis was a victim, and can’t be faulted for the cruelty of others—or for possessing the memory of that cruelty. Tollis had no choice in what happened, and no choice about whether to remember it or not.

But I do.

The trouble with freedom of choice is that at some point you have to exercise it. Once I make this choice, there will be no going back. And I don’t have enough information to be sure I’m choosing correctly.

I have only external knowledge of Tollis: a lightleaf imprint of Tollis’ bearer, found in Tollis’ carryall and passed on to me by Arim (why carry an imprint of your bearer when you can just look in the mirror? yet people do); news stories I researched myself; and Arim’s verbal description of the stranger on the trolley platform. I know of Tollis’ trauma only through hearsay. The one who was Tollis, a dark, coarse-coated native of some mountainous northern land, with ice-shard eyes, a ready grin, and a burred accent, died when I was quickened. There is no one I can ask, “How many lives did you carry? How many did you pass on to me? Will you live quietly inside me once you’re freed, or will you enslave me to your foreign desires?” I have asked prepubescent and postpubes-cent quickener friends to describe their experience, and nothing they have said convinces me that they remain entirely themselves and have not become puppets of their forebears.

The news stories of Tollis tell little of the quickener

and focus predominantly on the horror. Quickener, bearer, one offspring, two parents, and two visiting siblings attacked in their Veranathor home, beaten and tortured, all but one killed. The details are gory and I don’t like to think about them. If I receive Tollis’ memories, I will have to live with that experience for the rest of my life, and it didn’t even happen to me.

For all I know, Tollis might have wanted to end it all that day. Who can say for sure that Tollis, standing on that transit platform, didn’t plan to jump under the trolley’s wheels, or ride it to an observation tower for a fifty-length dive? But there was Arim, full of me, standing beside Tollis on that station platform, and there was I, overeager then as now, tearing free of the pouch prematurely. Arim had no idea I was coming. Tollis simply happened to be the only quickener there. Stimulated past resistance by the pheromones and bloodscent, by Arim’s cries and mine, Tollis, willing or unwilling, slid my small body from the fleshgiver’s blood-slick claws and did what millennia of biological evolution compelled:

Quickened me. Electrochemically stimulated my brain to think, forging pathways that in other species’ young would take weeks to years of experience to form, forcing myelinization to flash-pave those pathways against erosion. My cardiopulmonary, sensory, and nervous systems, allowed to develop in safety within my fleshgiver’s pouch, were fully prepared for use; with the exception of the armor plating that would later form in my skin, physically I was already a fully functional miniature replica of Arim; but until Tollis quickened me, I lacked motor skills, coordination, spatial perception, tactical and strategic comprehension. Tollis bequeathed to me a full set of survival skills—enough, in the primitive, predator-rich environment that bred us eons ago, to keep me alive long enough to reproduce.

And then Tollis passed on life and spirit, memory and identity as well. Quickening me past bearing. Quickening me into a quickener.

That degree of quickening—soulgiving, the elder cultures call it—is death for the quickener. No one knows why, any more than they know why we sleep or why we dream; there are as many theories as there are sophists. No one even knows precisely how, any more than they know precisely how it is that we think at all. Consciousness and memory are hotly debated topics within the sophistries. But it seems to me that there’s more to this than neurotransmitters and electrochemical copying, or quickening wouldn’t kill you. There’s some sort of transfer of spirit, of soul, something profoundly more than mere brain chemistry….

Why did Tollis quicken me? It meant that that experience of torture and bereavement and rage would live on for at least one more generation. Was it ego, or sacrifice, or cowardice? Did Tollis feel it was preferable to continue suffering than go into oblivion? Did Tollis shy away from selfdeath when the void roared, and grab panicked, desperate hold of neural immortality? Or did Tollis courageously agree to live on with trauma rather than end a line of predecessors?

Allowing puberty to thaw the memories in me, and passing them on in turn, could be consigning Tollis to eternal damnation.

Denying the hormone surge of puberty could be wiping out millennia of ancestors.

I don’t know how many predecessors there were. How many were quickened by those who’d been quickened by those who’d been quickened before them. Everyone who knew Tollis, who could have answered my questions, is gone. By choosing suppression, it could be that I’d destroy only two of us—myself and Tollis—and one of those deaths a mercy to a tortured soul.

There is only one way to find out, and there is no way back from it. The only way to find out if something will break is to break it. The only way to know the future is to go there.

And so I sit here on a bench in sight of the entrance of a clinic that can excise these ghosts from me permanently, and make no move to cross that threshold.

Memory-murder. Killing the mind or minds I host. There’s no way to pass them along unsampled. There’s no way to give them to someone else to hold. If I die without passing them on, they die, too. And I will die without passing them on if I walk through that entry-way, because it will burn out the parts of my brain where the ghosts lie dormant. Someday, perhaps, there will be better therapy, temporary suppression, denial of integration; perhaps someday you’ll be able to let the ghosts wake, get acquainted, and then decide if you like living with them or not; perhaps someday you’ll even have the choice of storing predecessors and passing them on to the next child undamaged while you yourself forgo the next life for restful oblivion.

But not now. For now, it’s all or nothing. I must jeopardize my identity by allowing an unknown number of strangers—one of whom I know for a fact has experienced unspeakable horror—free reign in my head, or I must silence them all permanently, whoever they are, however many of them there are.

Bearers live one life and then they die. If they can bear that, why can’t I? What gives me the right to impose myself on the next generation?

I know now why I’m writing this. Because I had decided not to go in to the center. Because I couldn’t take the risk of committing murder. Because I had decided to go home, and let nature take its course, and let the neurohumors wash over me and float me away into whatever half-life I am destined for. I wanted to keep some record of my own voice before it merged into the voices of the ages. I’m still me, right now. Just me. Nethon, alone, on the cusp of adulthood, unpolluted by adult hormones or adult memories. I just wanted to be me for a little longer before I gave up and turned for home.

But I’m not willing to give up. I’m not willing to give up my self. Maybe it is murder. But if it is, it’s in self-defense.

I am under siege, and I have a right to protect myself.

I’m going in.

Yes. In the end, I went in. And I saved these tablets—I’m not sure why, but most likely for the same reason that I saved my predecessors: because every echo and reflection of thought and identity is precious, however fragmentary, and in whatever form; and because change comes when and where we least expect it. In a clinic chair. On a trolley platform.

I stepped over the threshold of the suppression center and saw a neurosophist and told my story, much as I told it to these tablets. And, just as at the end of these tablets there was a little room left to write, which I use now, at the end of my interview there was a little room left for the sophist to comment. A little space of time and consciousness as I laid my arm out to be shaved and used my claws to lever the dermal plates apart to admit the injection. Just enough space for the sophist, leaning in to administer the neuro-phage, to say, “Wasn’t Elindela Tollis Noranthora killed by anti-neurosuppression extremists?”

No. But Tollis’ family was. And that memory is worse than my worst fears. But having Tollis’ conviction and courage to draw on is more wondrous than my sweetest dreams. And Tollis is only one of the precious many who share this lifetime with me.

I let the armor plating close on my flesh before the injection could go in. I snatched the arm back and ran. My memory may be degrading after all these years, but as I recall, I ran all the way home.

If I was relieved at the choice I made, I will never know whether it was because there were so very many spirits collected in Tollis and I had avoided by the thinnest wisp of chance becoming a mass murderer, or because my dearest Melen was right, and our fore-spirits have their own survival imperative, just as our forebears did. The survival instinct of consciousness is no less potent than the genetic imperatives of flesh.

Unlike my adolescent self, however, I do know who I am writing this for, and why.

You bear Melen’s genes, not mine. Your body, your reactions, your speed, your physical proclivities will be Melen’s. That is a glorious thing. It would be a poorer world without Melen’s verve, Melen’s keen eyes, Melen’s kind heart. I love Melen deeply. And just as I suspect that the minds stored within a quickener have fundamental urges and requirements and defenses, I suspect that flesh has its own personality. Soul is as much a thing of flesh as of mind. In that, as in so many things, you are the child of us both equally. I cherish that. I celebrate that.

But I must warn you. Melen was ever contrary and rebellious. Risk-taking, stubbornness, hardheaded opinionated determination—these are your genetic legacy. Combine them with what you will get from me, and I have no doubt that you will find yourself on that same threshold one day. Or one very like it.

I am not begging for my life, or the life of those who came before me, those who nest in me as I nest, thus far unfelt, in you as you read this. My life will end when I quicken you. Other philosophies hold differently, but that is my belief, beloved child-to-come: Tollisdela Nethon Arimthora will leave this world the moment I waken the consciousness of Nethondela Tollfs Melenthora. I don’t mind. I don’t resent you for it. Were there no irresistible biological imperative built into my flesh, had I the choice to ignore the sonic and pheromonal triggers Melen will emit when you tear through the pouch, still I would quicken you, even knowing it was my death. You are our future. I grieve only that I will not have the joys of your fleshgiver: the joy of sleeping with you tucked in my arms; the joy of watching you grow into yourself, your unique and precious self.

I do not beg for you to quicken me in turn. I do not beg for you to turn from that entryway or deny that injection. You are blessed to live in a nation grown in freedom. You are blessed to have the choice of that threshold. The decision is entirely yours, and I do not write this to you, my child, in hope of playing upon your sympathy and manipulating you into permitting the thaw of memory should you prefer complete independence.

I write this to free you from the onus of it. I write this that you might know me, and us. Should you choose to allow me, and Tollis, and all our predecessors entre into your mind, should you choose to share your life with ours, you will have made that choice with an understanding of precisely who you are letting into your head. You need not accept us blindly. Squeeze the palm heart before you buy it, to be sure its center is not rotten. Kick the tires of the vehicle, check the teeth of the draftbeast. Squeeze and kick and check and question, question, question.

And if you choose, for whatever reason, to suppress us, to keep us frozen, to pour lime into our nest under the floorboards of your mind, you will still have some sense of who we were.

Of who I am.

Go on now, and be you—not me, not us. Encumbered by neither ignorance nor guilt.

How can I love you so, without knowing you, never having smelled you, touched you, seen you?

And yet, somehow, I do.

Remember us to the future, my child. However you can, however you choose.

Remember me.