The Reincarnation

David pressed play on the CD player and the symphony started again. He returned back to college in his mind, and the years that came after. There weren’t many. He had finished in what was then the typical five years, going into what was cryptically referred to as the “real world.” He had never picked a major, not really. Cobbling together enough classes in environmental studies and business to convince the dean of his college he was going out in the world prepared to be an environmental entrepreneur, not even David understood exactly what that meant.

He moved to the city only for the possibility of decent employment. He didn’t want to waste his time in his small hometown, getting paid so little he would likely have had to live with his mother and her obsession.

But the city sickened him; first mentally, then physically. He had been a rising star in a young firm, but had plans to get out just the same. He was working on environmental issues, trying to ensure that some safeguards were put into place to stem the tide of an increasingly anti-environmental, corporate-run world. Good at what he did, but constantly nervous and distracted, he always felt as if he were an actor rehearsing a play, one unable to remember his lines. He was always looking for someone offstage to whisper his lines to him and tell him how to continue on with life – someone to make the decisions for him, give him direction. He felt as if his real life hadn’t yet truly begun.

One time he gave a speech about the work his organization was doing and was so nervous he skipped an entire page of it. He didn’t think the audience even noticed. He remembered his armpits soaking during the speech, sweat running in rivulets down his arms and sides, sopping his starched white shirt, hoping it wouldn’t show. He wasn’t asked to speak again and was glad. No matter how much he believed in the cause, he was too nervous to do it any good. He had no confidence in front of people, and didn’t seem able to overcome it.

He also felt a certain hopelessness in his work. For every victory, there were a dozen defeats. The environmental movement would gain an inch here, and lose a foot somewhere else. He was losing his will to fight. He’d had enough. He dreamed of getting out, moving to the country, focusing on his life.

Then the cancer struck. Lots of people walked around with the stuff for years without even noticing it. But David did notice. He was so in tune with his body, the cancer was immediately known to him. His heart, his lungs, his kidneys, his intestines – they all told him what he didn’t want to know, but couldn’t ignore.

He’d had a friend in high school who had walked around for five years with a lump in one of his testicles. He had known it was there, but couldn’t face the reality that it was killing him. Eventually it did. How many times a day did his friend feel it? he wondered. He had probably groped in his pockets constantly to see if it was still there, as the tongue is compelled to probe the rotten tooth again and again. Like moths fly into a flame; the flame seduces them, then consumes them, as the cancer did his friend. David wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

David was an adamant vegetarian, and thought that cancer was a cruel joke to someone who cared about his body as much as he did. Still, it crept into him somehow. He was never able to pinpoint the exact cause, if there was only one. With the state of the environment, he figured it could have been almost anything – the air, the water, the food. Still, the way it hit him had always struck him as strange. Wham, he woke up one day and knew there was something very wrong with him.

He tried to avoid the Church clinic, not wanting to support them. But the wait at other facilities was so long, he finally gave into his mother’s pleas and went to her doctor. His mind reeled from the test results. It wasn’t even a cancer they could define in traditional terms – it was everywhere, all over his body, slowly eating up everything he was. That was the way his world ended; not with a bang, but with the splitting of a single renegade cell, effectively putting an expiration date on his birth certificate.

David quit work at once and commenced his search for a cure. He didn’t think he would find one, but didn’t think he could go on for long if he didn’t do everything he could to look for one. As unlikely as it seemed to David, his mother found the solution. His mother and her religion.

The holy trinity his mother worshipped, and that David couldn’t piece together just moments before, was God, medicine, and the soul. The Medical Church of America dabbled in – and sometimes plunged headfirst into – them all. With people like his mother backing them with their pensions, the Medical Church of America grew beyond not only the size of any other religion, but well beyond the scope of any organization the country had known before. They were officially nonprofit, and this status opened many doors that were otherwise shut to the capitalists of the time.

David learned a great deal about the Church just out of idle curiosity. His mother always had information around the house about the Church, and he read it, more to see what kinds of crazy things he could expect next from her than from any real interest. The division of the Church that was in the business of medicine wasn’t satisfied with the fix-er-up attitude of typical practices. It viewed them as chop shops posing behind the facade of medical science. They wanted more, and got it. They started preventive medical clinics all over the country, and encouraged, indeed demanded, that all their followers pursue a vegetarian diet. More, a vegan diet. No animal products of any kind were going to taint their followers’ health or their souls, or so the pamphlets read.

The Church had rewritten the beginning of Genesis, or at least reinterpreted it; progressive revelation they called it. They took the lines from Genesis literally: “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat (Genesis 1:29).” They had plenty more to back it up. They pointed out to their followers that “Thou shalt not kill” didn’t come with any disclaimers about thy neighbour or his wife, let alone his ass or his ox. It didn’t matter to the Church that later Biblical instructions seemed to contradict God’s initial dietary command. In their minds, the first instruction stood. It was only after the Fall that man started eating meat, much to the chagrin of God. They pointed out to their followers that Jesus Christ was a vegetarian.

It turned out the strategy worked well for them. As the Earth grew poisoned with mankind’s excesses, the Church’s followers alone, it seemed, managed to avoid the plagues striking the nation. The chemicals that were spilling into the environment magnified in animals, especially in their flesh. People eating them magnified them further, and died in epidemic proportions. The Church even had a line from the Bible about this: “And while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was chewed, the wrath of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord smote the people with a very great plague (Numbers, 11:33).”

The Church was also ahead of the curve in another way. Once the Earth warmed, food for animals became scarce, both from crop-destroying droughts and from the explosion of the insect population. There wasn’t much left for people, let alone animals. There was even legislation on deck to restrict the sale of meat, but the market took over before it could be passed. Once its true costs were passed on to the consumer, meat simply became too expensive for people to buy.

David was glad he had been raised vegetarian, despite the nature of how it came to be that way. His mother never gave him any meat, and he had never asked for any. One time when he was young he had dinner at a friend’s house. A tiny chunk of flesh had found its way into his salad. His mouth had rebelled instantly at the unctuous, dead taste of it. He never wanted that taste in his mouth again.

The Church was also involved in reincarnation. They wanted their followers with them forever, and figured if they could find the technology to do it, it must be God’s will. To David it was a crock of shit, and he wasn’t shy about letting his mother know it. But she never really heard his complaints. She had been skeptical at first, too, until the religion had “taken to her” like a brain transplant.

His mother learned at one of her meetings about the Cryonics Laboratory the Church had started. Cryonics was in its infancy then, and cryobiologists were hard to find, let alone cryonicists. The former believed the body could be frozen in pieces; the latter that it could be frozen whole. David initially didn’t care for either party, but agreed to go with his mother to the Lab.

They wouldn’t be ready for any experiments for a year at least, they had told them. There were a lot of things to work out, none of which were easy for David and his mother to understand. Still, David remained interested enough to keep checking in with them every few months, taking interim treatments that would help him survive until they were ready.

It was a long year. David survived it. His mother didn’t. She had caught a cold after being baptized for the umpteenth time. It led to one of the superflus plaguing the country, and she succumbed to it.

At death’s door, she exhorted David to go to the Lab. She would get so worked up, she would practically fall out of her hospital bed. “Go, Davy. For me. You’ll see, the people from the Church will take care of you after I’m gone. Go, Davy, promise your dying mother that.” He did, and he went.

The Lab was finally ready for him. After seeing his body wither down to the bone for a year, he went without any hesitation – regardless of his reservations about the Church.

His memory of the suspension was a void – blank, null, zero, cipher. Although the years he slept matched his age almost to the day, he could have been vitrified for twenty-five seconds or twenty-five centuries and not known the difference. He remembered nothing of the time. He hadn’t aged a day.

Now, he had been revived. What now? he thought as the symphony broke out into the “Ode to Joy” choral finale.

Now I live.