My neonate
cadaver was exhumed from the womb/tomb of my mother’s corpse as a mere
formality at Mezhgorye’s local military hospital. She’d already been summarily
assessed as DOA herself, and by the time doctors had performed a c-sectioning
excavation of my unresponsive carcass, it wasn’t even alive enough to warrant
wiping off before placing it back atop her rueful remains like some bundle of
befouled and wilted funeral-flowers. However, they had seen fit to drape a
burial blanket over our gruesome gurney before wheeling it all down to the
hospital’s dungeon-morgue.
There was
no interest or impetus to necessitate an autopsy either. So, our familial filth
was directly discarded like a dead man’s losing hand and discretely filed back
into the deck of a neatly numbered cryo-cold cabinet. We were meant to await
administrative approvals for the water-cremation (aka resomation) of our quickly
freezing remains in accordance with those neoteric Kuru mandates that had just
been made in response to an emerging outbreak that would later come to constitute
an apocalyptic pandemic in ways I will chronicle in due time. But by some macabre
miracle, the mortuary’s mutinous employees had decided not to fulfill all their
official duties before having left early that night.
Then, some
hours after I’d been interred in that infernal freezer, the sordid sounds of infant-screams
had inexplicably erupted from my cryo-crypt. An anonymous janitor had been
mopping up nearby with loose earbuds blaring away until she’d inadvertently
shaken one out of her left ear and heard my horrid cries echoing down the
desolate hallways like demonic tremors rippling through accursed airs. A cold
chill shot up her spine. She crossed herself and fled in frigid fear, praying and
screaming in stupefied syllables to intensely implore her glorious god to help
her find someone valorous enough to vanquish my horrible hollers from her unconsolable
ears. Her feet slipped and slid all over the soaking wet floor, sending her
heaping mass continuously crashing into everything around her.
This
jumbled janitor managed to make it as far as the foot of the elevator before finally
fainting at the sight of its doors dilating open to deliver the hospital’s blood-soaked
Commander into this confounded catabasis. The Commander had remained frozen
like a motionless monument of maternal mourning, holding her own blanketed heap
of lifeless flesh in an emaciated embrace and staring through sorrow-saturated
eyes at the confused chaos of the collapsed custodian. A long and mummified
moment festered before her muted mind could make any sense of what her normally
brilliant blue eyes were seeing. She’d been well known as a discerning and
decisive leader, but the tragedy she’d just endured had eviscerated and emptied
out every thinking and feeling part of her.
A mere
moment before she’d entered that morgue-bound elevator, the Commander had
suffered her own mournful miscarriage. After being informed of her infant’s
instant and inconceivable fate, she’d stubbornly insisted on delivering her
devastating bundle of stillborn sorrows to the hospital’s morgue by herself.
She’d hoped this desperate act would’ve afforded her stillborn’s soul at least one
loving embrace before its indelicately mandated immolation.
Her
sorrow-soaked eyes were still desperately drowning in an ongoing deluge of
delirium and despair, struggling to swimmingly see into this sordid scene. Then
a subtle snippet of sound softly swept against her unsuspecting ears as my
recently reincarnated cadaver managed to reanimate its mouth around yet another
inarticulately agonized annunciation. My cryo-afflicted cadence had already
become quite dull, decaying and diminishing exponentially as I weakly waged an
already waning war against death’s cold and tightly clenching clutches around
my critically hypothermic cadaver. My ever-weakening whimpers wafted through
the hindering hallway like a faint and fading fog, drifting just far enough to haunt
the edge of the epidermis around the Commander’s ears. And though they were not
robust enough to enter her higher mind as intelligible sounds, my tremulous tones
were somehow able to speak directly into the soul of her skin, commanding it to
shrivel and shudder in a sudden plague of pallor as my morose message was miraculously
manifested in the subdermal layers of her instinctual skin.
Her mouth autonomously
grimaced with an impossibly greater grief than she’d already been afflicted, and
she gasped at the abominable epiphany her skin had indeed just absorbed and
encrypted in the blood that rushed to flood her mind. She swiftly and
instinctively snatched up the elevator’s phone with an automated motion and kicked
one of her reflexing feet forward to trip the safety-sensor, keeping the
elevator’s un-dinging doors from slinking shut.
As she
waited with frozen ire for the hospital’s gauche, gargoyle-like guard to awaken
and end his derelict delays to answer her call, the insane imagery of this
collapsed cleaning-lady became clear enough to elicit a disdainful annoyance,
as she noticed that this fainted face had failed to comply with those nascent
mask-mandates.
Her valiant
voice didn’t waste any time waiting for the guard to wake his tongue as the
dial tone died upon the receiver’s removal. She spoke through his pre-syllable silence
and her own minutely muffled m-95 mask, ordering the guard to dispatch a doctor
directly to the dungeon-morgue. Then, she shakily stepped out of the elevator
and checked the janitor’s jugular to find a faint pulse. Inexplicably, she reached
into her pocket with one hand to procure an extra mask and placed it over the
custodian’s face, all while clinging quaveringly to her limp bundle with her
other arm’s unwavering love.
The
Commander’s feet had to fight against the frictionless floor as she attempted to
scootch the custodian’s hindering heap off to one side of the hallway. She soon
realized the futility of this fight and instead swung her smooth-soled feet directly
over this human hurdle. But when her soles surmounted that inanimate
encumbrance and landed on the other side, she instantly swirled and slid atop
the mop-slickened floor.
Her balance
barely remained upright. Streams of spasmic maneuvers toggled her between flailing
footsteps and skittering surf-slides. Without ever fully recovering a favorable
footing, she desperately surged toward my morgue-based moans. She barely managed
to avoid bashing her own burdening bundle of stillborn sorrows against the bland
beige walls as she continuously teetered on the edge of a constant collapse,
perpetually postponing a planting fall with unconsciously controlled
contortions. When she did finally find her way to the morgue’s derelict door, her
bundle had somehow remained safely buried in her immortally enduring embrace.
Her infant-free
hand flailed to find the doorknob. As she grasped ahold of it, she tried to lean
on it enough to steady her feet. But the door had been left carelessly
unlatched, forcing her to sling it violently inward against the wall and
stumble into the morgue. Her feet somehow unfolded her figure upright enough to
find her first stable footing in the lifeless liminal space between cryo-cold cadaver
cabinets and an adjoining resomation retrofitted crematorium. The insufferable infraction
of that unsecured door was infuriatingly intolerable, but she refused to think
of anything more than where my nearly imperceptible infant-sighs might still be
summoning her suffering skin.
She slung
cryo-cabinets outward wildly, leaving them open when nothing more than frail
and frozen fatalities slid out with ice-clad eyelids staring back into her
bulging blue eyes. When she finally traced down that icy slab from which my
sparse and subtle squalls still seeped, she’d almost skipped to the next
cryo-cabinet. For the frozen image unveiled by her hand ripping the burial
blanket from my blue and bloodied baby’s body showed no signs of vital life.
Shock
forced her to place her own stillborn bundle right next to my own barely undead
cadaver, resting it atop that same aborted abode upon which I’d recently been
interred. Then she raised me from that macabre burial mound and baptized me in
the morgue’s sordid sink where so much blood had been scrubbed and drained away
by those now absent hands that had habitually held death as its casually
disgusted couriers. The freshly flowing water slowly absolved my forsaken
infant skin of that bitter-most cold and the brittle crystalline blood that had
half-petrified my bones like fossils trapped within my near-fatally afflicted
flesh.
The Commander’s
own emotional state had instantaneously become numbly frozen by my filth-frosted
flesh when she’d first hoisted me into her hands. She’d been utterly dumbfounded
at the impossibly icy chill of my frozen infant skin and the even more chilling
silence of my pale grey hued and unblinking eyes that stared straight back into
those blue-hued irises of her soul. I’d sustained my disquieting calm even as
vital signs so slowly seeped back into my slothfully thawing skin. According to
her later accounts, those cryo-cold cries I’d proffered in that penultimate
moment to her most admirable arrival and rescue of my inconceivably cold
cadaver had been the only occasion she’d ever witnessed me announcing my own
agonies.
But then,
why should I? What could ever be decried aloud by any soul that had been so
silenced by death, before being resurrected back into any realm of blood and
breath, however horrid? And in a world that echoes nearly every cry to and from
an endless audience of unhearing ears, what use is there in bleating such
babble into any breath anyway?
I must
admit that this terrible tale of my befuddled birth was never told to me by
anyone alive. But I eventually inherited the truth of this tale in sealed
confessions and relayed professions of those that could not allow these facts
to fester in their fading and formerly conspiratorial corpses. It would become
incumbent upon me to piece the total truth together, yet certain details do remain
unresolved even now.
One such indeterminate
detail has to do with the shared fate of the janitor, security guard, and
doctor that were all called to respond to my morose miscarriage. They were all officially
designated as deceased on this same sordid night. The janitor’s cause of death
had been denoted as complications due to cardiac arrest. Presumably, she’d had
a slew of preexisting conditions that’d made my haunting cries too horrific for
her ailing heart to handle. Either that, or her lack of mask-compliance had surrendered
her to a rare and rapidly progressing strain of Kuru.
Strangely,
the delinquent guard had reportedly responded to that dungeon with his revolver
drawn and his finger at the ready. He’d accidentally discharged a round
directly into the alacritous doctor’s defenseless skull as he’d stumbled out of
the elevator and onto that insanely slippery floor. Then, this foolish and frazzled
oaf had indiscernibly decided to drag both the dead doctor and unresponsive janitor
down the hallway to that door on the outer edge of the morgue.
The Commander
had heard the guard’s gunshot erupt and echo some redundant number of recursive
returns into her ringing ears. She’d instinctively rushed to lock the morgue’s
door while letting water continue washing over my still thawing skin, returning
promptly to ensure my salvation. As soon as the filth had been rinsed away from
my infant flesh, she’d swiftly shut off the faucet to silence any sound from
seeping into that haunting hallway and surrendering our presence to any unseen
predatory threat.
Her hands
patted my pallid and shivering skin dry with paper towels. Then she secured me
against her own skin and blanketed me in her still maternally bloodstained
blouse. She placed her lips at the entrance to my ear and softly prayed an
arbitrary shush into it. I remained almost ominously hushed and buried within her maternal
embrace as the dragging sounds of the disgraced guard approached and ceased at
the very edge of the dividing doorway.
The
Commander tightly stuffed my eyes against her skin and squeezed my ears in a
burying embrace, trying to muffle my infant senses from what was about to
ensue. The gauche guard moaned several times in inarticulate despair before yawping
his equivocally incoherent, final valedictions unto either the Commander or
some equally unresponsive god. And upon uttering his last languished laments,
he sent another violent gunshot’s shockwaves throbbing through the door.
There was a
dense thud followed by a tense and trembling moment that held like the dead
hands of a broken clock. The Commander waited for the silence to surrender a
sense of static safety before extending an un-cradling hand to slowly switch
the lock soundlessly open. She surgically severed a slowly spreading sliver
from the doorframe so her eye could steal a glance. On the floor outside, she
could see blood hemorrhaging from the guard’s head and flooding down that heap
of bodies beneath him. After skillfully extracting the gun from his lifeless
hand, her feet avoided disturbing any of the evidence left in the wake of this
inexplicable mess and cautiously crept back to the elevator’s phone to ring the
appropriate authorities. But when the elevator spat out an impossibly tall and
notorious figure, it became impossible to notify any legitimate official.
Of course,
the official records of this wreckage all had to be made and mended as
carefully as any mortal wound to protect the hospital, the Commander, myself, and even the befuddled bodies in
the basement. The Commander had to ensure that all official records corresponded
to the proper conclusions and not necessarily the ones I’ve already illustrated
thus far. However, an unreliable source would later claim that these three
departed souls had been exterminated to eliminate any administrative
complications at the conspiratorial behest of the Commander herself. But I can
neither objectively attest to any veracity within this claim nor honestly
admonish it in full. Thus, I’ve reluctantly resolved to include this
inconclusive and personally inconceivable accusation as an offering of
transparency unto truth.
What is
quite clear is that the Commander had confidently concluded at some point that neither
my mother’s DOA corpse nor my own excavated cadaver had any claims to any form
of a father. According to the Commander’s later accounts, this had caused her
immense distress at the time, as she’d known all too well that this fact would’ve
prevented anyone from adopting me outright. At that time, all orphans without
directly surviving ancestry were required by law to be placed into public
custodianships. And she’d known firsthand what atrocities awaited all those souls
that were shunted into such sinister agencies of child services.
So, the Commander
waved her powerful pen over the pertinent paperwork like a magic wand to mend
my name and cleanse her soul of an unbearable, extended, maternal morning. She
became my mother of record, and her own miscarriage was forged into an effigy of
my own undone extinction. I was given a name I shall never give you, as it
never truly belonged to me enough to rightly offer anyone. And as for this
saint that saved me as no other miraculous mother ever known, I shall protect
the sanctity of even her sobriquets and strictly refer to her here with great reverence
as my Mother of Record.
Make no
mistake. I have no claim on her, no misgivings, no malign. She’d made a
pure-hearted claim upon me, but I still have no right within my own mind to
call her mine. As magnificent of a mother as she always was to me, and as I
still remember her to be, I’ve never felt as if I were a proper son or person.
And it would be an unbearable blasphemy to even insinuate otherwise.
Before I’d
assembled all these facts about my entry into existence, my Mother of Record
had always refrained from detailing anything about my origins. She would only occasionally
answer any questions of my father’s identity by subtly insinuating something to
the effect that he was not with us and would not likely be present at any future
point in my existence. There was a certain woundedness in her voice whenever
she’d professed this truth, and I’d always assumed my father had either died tragically
or despicably departed before my birth. Even after all I’ve gathered, this is
the truth I still choose to hold above any conflation of facts.
Ultimately,
these details of my birth were largely irrelevant and have only become distressing
to me now that they’ve been foisted upon me in the aftermath of so much else.
Although, I must admit that I’ve long suspected that some part of me may have
never been allowed to properly form due to the lack of some nutritional truth that
my soul had been deprived of at some point in my development. The omission of
my origin’s full disclosure is obviously one potential proof of such a
suspicion. However, I still wonder if my soul was disfigured in some other
manner during its development, as even after having considered all these
notions, I still feel a sense that my spirit had been further flawed in the way
of a flower long deprived of certain nutrients or a tree whose growth was
greatly stunted by tightly shunted roots.
Although, even
if my spirit had been starved or scarred through this confused conception of
mine or any other confounding chaos, I would really be no different from every
other entity that was ever born upon this earth. I mean, who in this horrid hell
has ever formed any identity on their own that hasn’t festered in falsehoods and
insufficiencies? And don’t we all suffer from an immense if not infinite
confusion as to what role the forces of fate impose on us through the
infectious nature of this malnourishing and maliciously deceitful world that
tells us who we are and what we must become at every inciting, instigating, or
impelling turn, even before our very inception?
Of course,
it’s my contention that the invisible essence of these things that manipulate
and mangle our souls into confused and contrived misconceptions of what we
truly are, can in fact be understood and explained. However, I must take care
to ensure that the light I intend to transfuse into your awareness and
understanding is allowed to seep into your sentience slowly rather than
blinding your mind with blunt bursts of explicit explanations. So, forgive me
for refraining from further stating my epiphanies at this early onset.
Anyway, I
believe I’d merely mentioned the fact that I’d been born during the early days
of that now infamous Kuru pandemic somewhere before my last digression. This pandemic
had motivated the Globally Organized Republics’ Executive Directorate (GORED) to
enact a series of emergency mandates. One of them had required all newborn
babies to be isolated in incubation chambers until it could be ensured that
they were not already infected with or exceptionally susceptible to Kuru. This
meant that I had to be kept in almost complete isolation for no less than the
first full year of my existence.
This
mandate was so strictly enforced that it caused me to be transferred almost
directly from that cryo-cold crypt into an isolated incubator, like a corpse
transplanted from one secluded casket and into another. From my lifeless entry into
this wayward world and throughout much of my lonesome endurance, I was forced
to struggle within some shell or cell just to exist. Although, my own incubator
was not such a restrictive place when compared to those protective tombs so
many of my so-called peers were shunted into at that same time.
My
incubator had been specially equipped at the behest of my Mother of Record and
with assistance from the Odarenny Operatsiya, aka the OO or Double-O. They’d been conducting classified research on the optimization of
infant aptitudes at that same time, and my Mother of Record had been selected
to peer-review many of their studies. She’d already known both the powerful potential
of this project and the devastating developmental damage likely to ensue as an
alternative result of the maligned mandates on isolated incubation. And there
was no way she would ever leave me so alone to cry unto the unhearing ears of
oblivion like so many other infants of that time.
So, my
incubation chamber was well-appointed with auditory and visual apparatuses that
allowed special programing and educational content to stimulate and shape my budding
brain. At times I was blindfolded with hi-fi headphones secured to my ears that
piped in binaural beats, kaleidoscopic soundscapes, and meditative voiceovers that
spoke to me in multiple languages. These assorted sounds were specifically
calibrated and orchestrated to organize my emerging mind like an auditory mold
around the biological assembly-ooze of my materializing mind.
Existing research
had already pretty much concluded that these auditory efforts could ensure the
development of higher IQs, perfect pitch, and an increased aptitude for creativity.
They’d also shown significant statistical correlations for increased synesthetic
associations in many of the subjects exposed to certain visual and sonic
structures. It had been strongly hypothesized that exposing infants to a
progression of deliberately controlled stimuli that were arranged in orders of clearly
logical progression and coherently increasing complexity could effectively
pre-program them with an increased aptitude for complex pattern recognition and
a more generally well-organized coherence of thought.
In any
case, I was sent to soak in my special incubation chamber with such strangely
calibrated sounds while the whole outside world was kept as far away from me as
slumber from an insomniac. My reality began as a series of carefully
constructed dream-prompts that guided my mind along a predetermined and
optimized path while my blooming brain was glued together like some sort of
popsicle-stick kingdom of conscripted meditative consciousness.
The sounds
of seascape waves, windswept skies, and the cacophonous creatures of some
generic jungle were the only natural world I was allowed to know. Their order
was ordained to me with hypnopaedic precision, so there was no doubt in my
developing mind that the true chaos of nature was no more than a misunderstood
complexity that was incumbent upon me to master and organize in accordance with
some stronger sense of lucidity.
I may have learned
more in my first year of formulated lessons than most minds could manage to
make sense of in their first few decades. In conjunction with these auditory
prescriptions my ears had absorbed, I was made to witness an endless stream of
visual presentations that effectively injected correlating content into my
eyes. My ability to perceive the most miniscule color variances was refined
beyond the typical range of trichromats through these vividly defined visuals, and
my eyes’ perceptual acuity developed into the upper extents of testable tetrachromacy.
I was also programmed to apply this trained-in talent to master and memorize
things like the periodic table of elements, the various classification levels
of biological organisms, and the geological eons, eras, and epochs of our
earth’s stone-layered history.
My mind was
so hyper-stimulated by such an endless stream of information that it was as if
entire encyclopedias of knowledge were constantly being injected directly into
a series of ever-deepening aquifers of intel beneath the soils of my sentience.
Before my mouth could even manage most words, I could instinctively spell
almost any word in no less than eight unspoken languages. I could balance
complex chemical equations in my head, and I could imagine myself humming or whistling
along to entire classical compositions from an extensive cannon of notable
musical masters. By the time the Kuru mandates were finally modified to allow
me access to reality, I may have even accumulated more factual knowledge of the
world than many acclaimed academics.
Additionally,
my limbs were wired into an array of apparatuses that helped me develop gross,
complex, and refined motor skills and reflexes. This taught my body how to move
and balance long before I was given enough space to test my actual ability to
walk on my own or explore the outside earth. Such coordinated motions were also
installed into my incipient muscular memory before I’d developed much of an
independent will to initiate them or establish much dominion over them. This
was akin to granting my limbs a mind of their own and an incredible autonomy of
motion, like an appetite originating in the mouth and commanding the jaw to
bite before a mind can even become aware of the act, much less consider the
nature of such cravings.
I was also kept
on a carefully formulated diet that had been proven to increase muscular
development, build strong bones, and promote overall physical health as well.
All these things were intended to contribute to the creation of an optimized
specimen in which to house whatever human spirit I could bring to haunt or
inhabit it. Essentially, I was scientifically designed to be everything humanity
aspires to be.
I don’t say
this to brag, even if my Mother of Record found every opportunity to do so on
my behalf, especially after she was allowed to interact with me without a divisional
layer of glass between us. In fact, I tell you of my training and subsequent
sentience as much more of a cautionary concern. You see, when I was eventually
evicted from my incubation chamber and cast out into this wicked world, it was
perhaps even more chaotic and tragic than my initial inception into that
cryo-cold cadaver-cabinet could have ever been.
I’d had no real-life
experience or exposure within my blood to flow between my pre-programmed mind
and the inherent chaos of the world that slithered against my no longer-secluded
skin. Everything that had happened after my extended incubation was experienced
as an incomprehensible trauma for more years than I can accurately attest, as I
wasn’t even able to sense it all as such. My knowledge of the world was so much
more advanced than the actual state of the world, that I’d found myself
stumbling through life as if my head were stuck in some second-rate augmented
reality helmet that refused to release me from its demented death-grip.
And that’s not to mention all those continuing conditions of the Double O’s other educational experiments conducted on me throughout my young years. Nor is it to convey the impossibility of slumber it all induced on me as a result of this hyper-hypnotic over-stimulation. But of course, I will explain all of that in due time.
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