The Reincarnation

“Get up. David, wake up!” Laura was shaking him.

“Up, up, yeah, up.” He was muddled, but rose.

They got into the car and drove to a nearby shopping mall. After a methodical search that involved walking nearly the entire lot, they found an unlocked car with the keys in it. It looked old – its owner probably wouldn’t have even entertained any notions of someone stealing it – but it would have to do.

Laura got into the car and picked David up on the other side of the mall. He had driven the Lab’s car into an underground parking area deep in the bowels of the building. As Laura drove up, she remarked to herself how good David looked as he stood waiting for her. He was tall, and even though he was so skinny, extremely handsome. He got in and they sped off.

Victor Grey surveyed the Earth from 25,000 feet. Damned shame, he thought to himself. People need to be saved from themselves. Grey knew a thing or two about saving people – it was his business to know these things. From what he understood, a very valuable person had escaped from the Lab; one that needed to be saved – well, captured anyway.

Grey knew about the cryonics experiments the Lab was conducting. He knew they were finally seeing some success after decades of research. How incompetent are they? he thought. How could someone disappear from right under their noses? Well, that was what kept him in business. Incompetency. Stupidity. Avarice. Greed. As he stared out the window, he reflected on his conviction that he was merely a man that understood his era, and extracted all he possibly could from the follies of his contemporaries. He continued surveying the planet below him, the barren landscape looking like a war zone.

Damned shame, he thought.

David pushed on his eyelids with the tips of his fingers, trying to press out the air bubbles that lay under the contact lenses Laura had made him put on earlier in the morning. He was comfortably dressed in a long sleeve sweatshirt and jeans. The sweatshirt smelled faintly of perfume – it was Laura’s. His hands and face smelled to David like the beach – sunblock. They also smelled like camping – insect repellant. His mind raced as he looked out the window, but his voice was calm when he spoke.

“What’s happened to the Earth?” He had been surveying the landscape all morning. He knew where they were, but couldn’t believe his eyes – what were once forests had disintegrated to wasteland. Whole lakes were dried up and nothing lived where they had been but dust devils. “There was nothing like this in the films – they made it sound like all of this was happening in other countries.”

“Well, whatever predictions you can remember from your time have likely come true. The Earth is heating up, has been for decades. That’s why we’re headed north.” She saw him pressing his eyes again. “Those are a pain, but you get used to them – they keep out ultraviolet radiation. And get used to bug spray, too. It keeps them away so you don’t catch some tropical disease that has no place on this continent.”

“Why? How?”

“Why? How? Don’t think you’re the first to ask.” She paused, regretting her outburst. “I’m sorry, David, and I don’t blame you personally, but when you lived must have been one of the most selfish times the Earth has ever known. All the time growing up I used to ask myself, ‘What kind of monsters were those people?’ Now, the rest of us have to be very careful about everything we do.”

David was taken aback by this. Sure, he had known about the various scenarios that had been playing themselves out in the world, the different predictions about mankind’s true impact on the planet that housed it. But they had seemed so academic then – merely words on a page. “I thought the effects would have been more moderate than this.”

“Well, it did happen slowly at first. It was probably happening when you were alive. It was gradual. But at some point nature started to rebel on its own. One natural disaster led to another. It was out of the control of people.”

“So what did they do?”

“What you probably did. By the time you were frozen you probably had to wear UV protection all the time. You probably had to limit your exposure to the sun. You probably had to filter your water to drink it. Those kinds of things. Well, everyone made those concessions, and then a lot more as time went on.”

“Tell me more,” David said, not sure he wanted to hear.

“You name it. Overpopulation, refugee migrations; deforestation, soil erosion. All those bogeymen came out of the closet and had a field day.”

David listened with discomfiture. “I always thought that tomorrow would be a better day than yesterday, that things would always get better,” he said, his mind echoing that that was the definition of progress. “How did you handle all of this?”

“Not well, I’m afraid. I became clinically depressed like a lot of other people. I started taking an anti-depressant, and even though the drug helped me focus on my work, I had to stop taking it. I felt like it was murdering my soul.”

David thought how he was partly responsible for her ordeal. His actions in the past, rational enough at the time, caused sorrow and desperation in the future he was now living in. His actions, compounded with everyone else’s, created the world he saw outside the window of the car. He felt guilty. “What did you do then?” he asked.

“I convinced myself that my reactions were normal – that it was healthy and appropriate to respond the way I did. Our whole culture was acting pathologically. I just accepted that I was different than the people around me. They were the ones in denial – it was their defense against a situation they couldn’t control.”

“I went through something similar.” David paused, recollecting, anxious to comfort Laura. “I was working in an office in the city, trying to save this abstraction, ‘the environment.’ I was working to save things I’d never even seen or experienced – whales, rainforests, endangered species – and it was depressing. I mean, just living in the city to save the country was absurd enough, but I couldn’t even afford a place with a backyard. I couldn’t stand it, but the cancer hit before I could get out.

“At least I thought it was cancer,” he concluded. “Bastards.”