Chapter 2
Scent

"Mayan sweet onions?" she inquired with a hint of suspicion and distaste.

"They’re good, try one," replied Michelle, Sarah’s roommate. She was an English major of a culinary bent that sometimes bewildered her pragmatic and stolid housemate. Every evening they would argue over whether to cook something elaborate or use up more of the prepackaged foods, like the just-recently-expired macaroni and cheese which she so loved. Often the argument would devolve rapidly, causing Sarah to eat out at the Chinese restaurant down the street or to go hungry in protest. Aside from these kitchen fights, however, their apartment’s atmosphere was at least amicable, and neither was willing to pay the exorbitant San Francisco rent on her own.

"It’s not as if they’re prone to spoiling, unlike some foods I could mention. Besides, you would do well to have a little, you’re nearly anemic as it is."

Sarah had another diagnosis with regards to her constant state of exhaustion, but she let that remark go. It seemed premature to make any assumptions about her own state, anyway, given that she barely understood the mechanisms by which her body performed its enigmatic operations. The last time she had really paid attention to its signals was her bout with stomach flu at 15, being bed-ridden and therefore bereft of distractions. She felt again the sensation of crawling all over her skin and cringed a little before smelling the sweet onions that crackled in the pan beside marinated tofu and an assortment of fresh produce. Not half bad, after all...

"Well, perhaps you’ve talked me into it." She speared a forkful of the impromptu stir-fry and bit. The tastes mingled in her mouth, the textures merged into an idyllic blend, the soft heat of some unknown spice pricked the tongue with devilish temptation. It was at times like these that she had to concede Michelle knew what she was about.

"So, how was your little night-time excursion this time?"

"Early morning, more like. Did I wake you?"

"Decidedly not. Your noticeable absence from the breakfast table and Lit of the Diaspora did clue me in somewhat, however."

"I’m sorry if I worried you. I was... thinking."

"I hope you don’t intend to keep ’thinking’ on Professor Daly’s very regimented time. You missed the entire first half of the Harlem Renaissance."

"Michelle, come on. You know I usually don’t do this sort of thing."

"Don’t kill the messenger. You’ll have to come up with a pretty darn compelling analysis of why Zora Neale Hurston had such trouble in getting recognition by Thursday if you want to get back in his good graces. Anyway, the fact of your meanderings doesn’t bother me so much as your unwillingness to talk about them in any but the most general detail. Early morning? How early? Did you take a bike, or walk? Did you want to watch the sunrise? Did you see anyone?"

"Give me a break! Aren’t I allowed at least a little privacy?"

"You’re right, I’m overdoing it. Let’s call it water under the bridge."

Sarah looked at her askance, but said nothing.

"There’s a concert tonight. Paul and his jovial company are playing, would you like to go?"

"Have they kept on singing songs about sea-sickness and the loose women one finds while traveling from port to port?"

"That was the last concept. They’re all about Kierkegaard now."

Sarah groaned with only a hint of sarcasm. Still, it was a clear progression, since their first experiments had relied on the ingredient lists of snack foods for inspiration. Yet even as they had moved away from pure silliness, she had secretly hoped they would reprise these early stages of their career. Such youthful exuberance was hard to come by in a world that seemed increasingly too grown up for her taste.

The pair walked together down toward the Embarcadero. The sun was gorgeously dipping under the horizon, seeming to grow drowsy and ready to seep contentedly into the dusk. The pink-orange light appeared to extend the street they walked on and the pier at its end into a glittering avenue across the water of the Bay. Sarah had a sudden urge to run the rest of the way down and out into the ocean, but restrained herself in deference to Michelle’s thoroughly grounded expression. The latter had been engrossed in the study of epic poetry as of late, and had grown more serious even than Sarah had been before her transformation into a late-night vagrant. Here was an interesting inversion of their usual dynamic, she thought. Her inexplicable wanderings, now, were exemplary of a certain uncharacteristic flightiness that she was normally able to suppress, which had somehow grown more and more prevalent over time.

They could have taken a more direct route, but both preferred to enjoy the seaside view. A few blocks south, they walked up a short ways along the steep hill leading towards the club at which their friends were slated to play. Once they arrived, Sarah was reminded of how much she disliked the place, given its cramped atmosphere and high prices. Yet there was no help for it, and she did want to support Paul’s endeavors, however misguided they may have seemed in the past. He and his colleagues had grown more and more intense as of late, and their seriousness had reaped its share of benefits in terms of the actual quality of their shows, if not necessarily the unadulterated entertainment value.

"Good evening, fellow earthlings," Paul pronounced with mock seriousness. Sarah thought it a little fatuous, but smiled nonetheless.

"Tonight we will be bringing you a series of ditties inspired by none other than everyone’s favorite Dane, Soren Kierkegaard!" Without further ado, they launched into "On The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates."

Sarah was surprised at the purity of the sound she heard. It was if the awkwardly-wielded guitars had been replaced with an orchestra of pastoral beauty, each note dissolving and reforming in a web of droplets on a morning at the height of midsummer. The singing, once it began, was not the adenoidal voice of a boy just out of high school, but a refined tenor with enunciation crisp as the scent of a wood fire. In fact, the song was so precisely honed that she felt as though she were alone in a room with the band, or even more surprising, that she was merely another character within the drama it portrayed, so wrapped up in the story that there was no room for intrusion by any distraction. The noise of a truck backing up outside became a part of the fabric, enhancing rather than interrupting the flow of sound with its melodious beeping.

Why, she wondered, could her own distractions not similarly enhance her work?

Walking out of the club later that night, the world seemed as though it were veiled behind a newly-woven shroud. The thousand little lights of the city around them had been doused by a clean rain, sprinkling atop the architecture both old and new that stretched up the incline and curved into the overpowering sky. Never before had either girl been so struck by the mere vibration of air in an organized pattern, yet it felt like they had drowned in crossing a vast river, and their heavy bodies floated along the stream in a semblance of peace. They felt humble, like snails climbing the post of a trellis in a garden somewhere, dimly aware of the possibility of claws coming to snatch them away, if they were not already in the grasp of things too large for them to comprehend.

"Wow, that was... I don’t quite know what to say," Michelle said.

"’The world is too full to talk about,’" Sarah replied.

"What is that? I recognize it, almost."

"Rumi."

"Of course, I was reading the Mathnawi just the other day. Well, it’s only that... I wonder. I mean, I know how I felt during that – and I could guess from your blissed-out expression what state you were in – but –"

"But how do we really know what the other experienced? I wondered that myself," Sarah sighed. "Sometimes it seems like other people’s lives are a whole separate story, a largely disjointed narrative that we can only hope to enter for a brief cameo, and then we’re shuffled aside and put back in the prop closet until we’re needed to further the plot."

"I hope I don’t play such a minor role in your chronicle."

"Don’t worry, you’re guaranteed a mark of honor in the dramatis personae. But I was just thinking of this bank teller I saw this afternoon..."

Sarah envisioned him again in her mind: a clean suit, intense almond-shaped brown eyes, and very tall. Tree-like, in fact. Suddenly his image grew and turned dark and enormous, his torso transformed into a sequoia rising toward the sky and undergoing 600 years worth of growth in only a few seconds. She floated up and peered into his intent face once again. Involuntarily, she gasped. This was the same man who had confronted her on the bridge!

"What’s wrong?"

"Oh... I just got short of breath, that’s all."

"But what about the bank teller?"

"Oh, nothing. He forgot to button his shirt properly, and it looked funny. Let’s get home, I have to make sure I get to class on time tomorrow."

Sarah was still reeling. What could he have meant by telling her about how long it took to jump? She had been so convinced that her encounter had been a dream brought on by her lack of sleep, but now she was unsure. Had her subconscious merely picked up a vaguely familiar face to trick her into thinking they were one and the same?

No matter. She resolved to go back to the bank in the morning and make some discreet inquiries. If nothing else, it was certain that she should not be overhasty, as she had been mistaken before. Time would tell if he had any insight into her curious condition.

***

"My good sir, I am glad to see you are back to normal."

The doctor looked down at the bewildered Michio with a paternal condescension. The patient looked around the office, elegantly furnished with a low-set lacquered couch on which he sat and a chair for the psychiatrist, the walls lined with the ubiquitous rice paper paneling that still radiated a stark light of even intensity. How had he arrived here?

"You have experienced an episode of mild psychosis. As this is a first-time occurrence, there is no reason to worry about the long-term health of your mind just yet. However, we would like to ask you some questions, and keep you under observation if necessary."

"But..." He was ashamed to feel so out of sorts, as if he had become a madman overnight. Yet there was no way to deny that the very same morning, he had walked out of his door and seen an absolute void before he collapsed. It was not a mere darkness or grayness of the mind he had seen, but a vacuum that trapped the light in a place out of the reach of his retinas and induced a total cessation of all sensory input. For all intents and purposes, the entire world outside his home had not existed.

"Don’t worry, I have been trained in the very latest of Western psychiatric techniques for evaluation and treatment. If there is anything wrong, we can surely resolve it with ease."

As the doctor was speaking, a man in a kabuki mask entered the room and crouched, staring directly at Michio with an implacable forcefulness but making no further move. Michio’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. Certainly no one had entered the office, and to question the doctor would only give him cause for concern. He returned his attention to the globe the doctor had on a shelf, and tried to ignore everything else in the room.

"Can you describe for me your profession?"

"I’m a writer, for periodicals and the like. Some journalism, some editorials."

"Do you write anything else?"

"I write stories... they aren’t very popular, mostly."

"And what is in these stories?"

"Many different things. The plots often come from old stories and myths."

"Were you perhaps frustrated that your stories weren’t more successful?"

"Of course. How could I not be?"

"Was it a bothersome situation to be in, writing so much to no avail?"

"I suppose. Listen, Doctor, are you trying to say that the fact that I’m overworked made me collapse?" Michio risked an oblique glance over to the masked man, and found he was there the same as ever. He declined to comment.

"I make no assumptions about my patients. I merely question and observe."

"Well, I believe that was the reason. Simple enough, right? Is there any more you need to know?"

"...I suppose that, given your lucidity now, we can let you go after all. The main worry came from the fact that your grandfather was known to suffer from depression, and eventually disappeared, as you know. But please, if you have any concern, do not hesitate to return. Your father has been a good friend to me, and this practice."

Michio’s grandfather had indeed vanished, although the Okakura family was loathe to discuss it. He was unaware of his father’s foreknowledge of this doctor, but it was not out of place, given how many people within society he had made the acquaintance of.

"Thank you, Doctor. I appreciate your concern, and will commend you to my father."

"Thank you. Do take some rest."

Michio rose to exit, walking toward the door, and the man with a mask in turn rose and started backing out of the room. With each step, he continued to back up at the same rate that the other man advanced, in a bizarre mirror image of his movements. They continued this strange dance down the corridor, until finally they reached the outside. Suddenly, the man was nowhere to be seen.

The well-manicured garden of the doctor’s office was complete with a miniature waterfall and an attractive asymmetric design that achieved a dynamic equilibrium between the elements of water, plant, and rock. Michio trod on the slate slabs that were laid out along the pathway, counting each one as he went to have something concrete to hold onto. He stepped into the road, and began to walk home at a quick pace, as his house was not far. He only hoped that as few people as possible had heard of his embarrassing display of weakness, for it would not at all help his reputation to be known as one who would faint merely upon stepping out the door.

He had pushed the curious man into a deep part of his mind, and would not recall until much later that he had even imagined seeing him. How ridiculous was that notion! The character would make excellent fodder for a low-brow serial, about an elegant and refined secret lover to some servant or washerwoman. It would practically write itself.

No! What about his aspirations? He wished to be casual yet gripping, subtle yet unpretentious. This was none of those things, and was so low as to be repulsive. But he was obligated to pay the bills somehow, and even the repugnant pseudonyms could serve his purpose if necessary.

This was never what he had wanted, but there was little way to make a living at being creative unless people truly loved what you were creating. He could serve a need for entertainment, but nothing more elevated had ever emerged from his pen. Nor did it seem that this would change with any rapidity.

Entering his house once again, he sat at the desk and examined his manuscripts. The characters were writhing on the page like a fine black lattice being blown about in the wind. He turned away in disgust. If he could not even rely on the sanctified rigidity of his own reality, how could he ever hope to impose order on a another world of his creation?

The words continued to rustle impatiently on the pages. He rose, unrolled his tatami, and prepared to take a nap. The doctor had advised him well, he thought. Just as he began to close his eyes, a shadow appeared across his pallet of a girl with long hair, but he was too exhausted to wonder at it, and fell promptly asleep.

***

Bernard stood outside his home and workspace, glancing about in frustration. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary. The street, covered with a translucent skin that shimmered like alabaster, was designed to be traversed by transparent bubbles that could roll around on ripples in the pavement. Pedestrians only going a short distance were usually the only ones to walk on it, but he had the feeling that the man he had seen had been traveling much longer, and he had most definitely been on foot.

"What troubles you, Bernard?" asked his neighbor, a woman by the name of Alice. She wore a blue silk dress that had a series of ties along the curve of her spine, and to call it flattering would be an understatement. Her long hair framed a face intelligent and serene, with jade-colored eyes and a brow knit in inquiry.

"Did you see anyone pass through here that was out of the ordinary?"

"No, I’m afraid not." Alice glanced at him thoughtfully; she was a historian, and noted how much he resembled a prince of Ghana in his white shirt embroidered with a gold crest that might have belonged to any number of royal family members. The outfit allowed a wide range of motion, and she noticed also how he held himself with a proud bearing that reinforced the impression of royalty.

"There was most definitely a man here, who was dressed in a pale mask such as one might wear for pantomime."

"Was it porcelain white, with thin curves for the eyes?"

"Yes. You didn’t see it, did you?"

"Of course not. However, the thought of masks reminded me of the props used in the theater of Japan." She brushed a strand of long black hair out of her face. "My great-great-grandfather was an aficionado of the Noh performances, even though they’re only revived very seldom now."

"What was truly peculiar was that the computer didn’t report his name, and had no memory of the incident when I tried to question it."

"I couldn’t say. Perhaps he’s unidentified."

Bernard’s eyes widened. "Surely there can’t be just any such folk running around in numbers."

"No, but not everyone wanted to have the ocular tagging; some old folk found it demeaning that they would submit themselves to the government centers merely for the purpose of having a marker fitted onto their corneas. The sensory enhancement benefits aside."

"But who wouldn’t find it useful?" asked Bernard, flicking his lenses into ultraviolet, then infrared. Alice radiated a particularly intriguing pattern of thermal energy, and he returned quickly to the visual spectrum out of embarrassment. Even such a supposedly enlightened culture as this still had some room for shame, although she retained her composure and made no comment.

"Anyway, I don’t think it matters why the computer didn’t identify him. If you can’t find out who he was from your own machine, just ask around. Here, I’ll consult." She glanced over to her own domicile, and paused to consider a moment. "Strange, nothing here either."

"You don’t suppose that he could be..."

"Superaffective? I wouldn’t be so hasty to conclude that. Although he certainly had some way of convincing the computers very thoroughly that he didn’t exist. Frankly, I suspect the opposite may be true."

Bernard paused to muse on her implication. Humans without affective capability were becoming more and more common, and this was indeed the focus of his research. There had been a rash of cases wherein children were born without any facility in manipulating their charisma, and his goal was to reverse this process if it could be done, seeking new ways to influence the expression of the appropriate genes so that they could function in society, or, if it were not possible, to prepare people for the consequences of losing their marvelous facility. He had not encountered a full-grown adult without any affective emanations thus far, but in retrospect, he had not been aware of any that had come from the man in question. Then again, he himself might have been subjected to influence that was too subtle and powerful to detect. What if this man, a master manipulator of affective control, had somehow escaped the net of the government, and retained his full power despite all the campaigns to put a finite cap on the abilities of the psychically gifted? It was a chilling thought that he might have done anything, and gone completely unnoticed by a world that assumed no more of his kind existed.

"You would know better than I," she continued. "Nevertheless, he seems to have gone now, and without knowing in which direction he went, we have little chance to discover his location. I believe I shall go back to reading my texts on Alexandria now, if you will excuse me." Alice nodded deferentially and stepped through the boundary of her home, which took the current guise of a massive redwood tree. Houses often reflected something of the personality or current whim of their owners, and could be rearranged to any configuration that was desired. Bernard’s dwelling took the form of a quartz pyramid, so that the light inside had the character of a smoky fluid seeping in from the sun.

There was little now to be done except return to work, given that there was no hope of finding the man with any rapidity. He stepped through his wall and returned to the drafting table. Here, he summoned up a symbolic model of chromosome 11, and initiated a search of regions with homology to the one that coded for charismatin. This technique was one that they had been using for a time with some success: proteins of analogous function had been found at a rate of several per day during the early years, but now it grew more difficult to find ranges that had not already been plumbed. It took a series of intricate simulations to determine the viability of such an analogue before it could be utilized; the fragility of human physiology meant that only some of the possibilities would be accepted in the actual body, and it was the task of the new wave of geneticists to use their human insight in conjunction with the computer power lent to them. The computers here had the their sole disadvantage against the humans; they lacked a certain intuition about the human body, being unconfined to any one physical vessel, and could often miscalculate drastically unless guided appropriately by a knowledgeable operator.

Today’s search was not going well. The regions that had already been used were highlighted in red on the symbolic representation, and any given region could be magnified by a simple command. It was a curious fact that the original charismatin had been found adjacent to the gene coding for the olfactory receptor that corresponded to the odorant molecules given off by the vanilla bean. Substitutes had subsequently been found in a variety of locations; remarkably similar regions had been found near the genes that allowed one to recognize the smell of cinnamon, anise, jasmine, and, curiously enough, onions. There were still many receptors that were not fully understood; the simulations appeared not to change whether or not these genes were expressed, and thus their potential to produce structures that were functionally analogous to the appropriate protein remained unevaluated. There was always the possibility that some of these were simply glossed over due to oversimplifications inherent in the model; despite the incredible computing power that had been developed in the last decades, limits were still inherent in the finite capacity and processing speed that even the most advanced models could provide.

Bernard had grown so intent on the trance-like state necessary for conducting his research that he failed to notice nightfall coming on until his room had switched over entirely to artificial light. People sometimes opted to have their lights simulate full daytime until they were truly ready to rest, but increasingly there was a movement towards restoring the natural sleeping pattern with the rationale that humans had followed it for millennia and it was only with the advent of electrical lighting that so many began to become sleep deprived. This was a blessing and a curse; it generated increases in the productivity of the laboring population, yet it decreased their energy levels and made them gradually grow more stressed and world-weary. The 21st century had seen this problem come to a head, so much so that doctors had begun prescribing rest breaks from all contact with the modern environment and resorts sprang up advertising a primitive lifestyle. This invention of the marketing departments of what had previously been luxury hotels was pure genius; not only did it mirror the change in the cultural milieu precisely, it was much cheaper to maintain, given that practically no energy was required to sustain such a place. Bernard recalled his father having spoken of staying in one, but being so perturbed by the fall of natural darkness that he left without even spending the night. Humans were a strange bunch, indeed.

He roused himself from the half-slumber of maintaining the visualization, and the genetic model collapsed into nothingness at once. In his more naive moments after completing a bout of research, he had wondered where the material he had manipulated so tangibly only moments before had gone. The explanation that it was merely a temporary figure formed by what was essentially a conglomeration of programmable nanobots did not satisfy the intuition to the extent that one might have desired. There was no help for it, however; the wonders of technology had long outstripped the palpable understanding that people could acquire from their surroundings.

Willing the smoky quartz about him to become transparent, Bernard pulled up a chair and prepared to bask in the glow of the stars. The roof showed a thin tracery of common constellations, and if he had not already known their names, labels would have appeared for his convenience. Being something of an amateur artist, he would sometimes sketch in the mythological figures that were said to correspond to the various constellations with a stylus conjured out of the air, and if his rendition of this one or that proved to be particularly attractive, he might even set it to be preserved for a time before inevitably coming to dislike and discard his creations.

Delphinus was visible tonight with unusual clarity. As a child, he had always liked the idea of dolphins very much, but the seas were an object of constant fear, given the strange artificial fauna which had been discarded by humanity, with their poor imitations of artificial intelligence from some now long-abandoned project of sea exploration. The forms and mechanisms had become too swift and advanced for the still limited power of computer vision and cognition; as a result, they moved too quickly, but were half blind and had poor judgment, and so often mistook innocent creatures as antagonists, blindly lashing out with whatever defenses their designers had somewhat foolishly bestowed upon them. Some had a figure reminiscent of sea-horses that were given thrust by propellers and possessed retractable arms in place of fins, while others appeared as though someone had constructed an articulated mannequin of an octopus, with jointed tentacles that could move independently. These mechanical life-forms had long ago lost all connection to the human world, being unable to receive any form of external command and transmitting no "data", for indeed they could no longer collect any. The organic marine life had mostly adapted to these, being clever enough to at least avoid them like any other predator, but humans, being by nature clumsy in the water, could not get away with such ease, and swimming was largely considered a dangerous activity.

In recent years, a project to collect the errant devices had been undertaken with some success; their more advanced successors combed the ocean looking for them, and broke them down into components to make more destructors. These had been built in such a way to ensure that they had much less autonomy, however, and had no defensive capabilities, since they were completely unnecessary, as people of the day had finally figured out. Perhaps one day Bernard might even go in the water again, but for the meantime he had resolved to stay far away from it.

Looking again at the stars, he remembered one of his favorite things to do on clear nights. Standing from the chair, he willed for the lower half of his pyramid to project an image of the stars visible to the southern hemisphere, as if the earth below did not exist. Now he was at the center of a vast sphere, surrounded by void and tiny pinholes of light perforating its dark, dark fabric. He recognized the Southern Cross in the distant austral part of the sky, and wondered idly what it would feel like to be on the other side of the earth. Rationally, of course, he knew it would be much the same, but the fantasy of passing through some vast tunnel and emerging on the other side remained a compelling one, despite its insurmountable obstacles. Was his experience after all that different from anyone else’s, Earth-spanning tunnel or no?

Humans had always been meant to understand each other, and themselves. From the first instant one looked into the mirror, everyone knew that a reverse of direction did not mean that there was any difference between the person here and the person there. It was as if two mirrors were placed side by side, and in the reflection beyond one’s own one saw the entire human race, all of one’s ancestors stretching back infinitely through time.

Bernard reflected on the curious fact that, before the advent of video technology, it was impossible for one to see what it was like to wink at oneself with both eyes. To do so would even have seemed a complete impossibility, a sign that reality had lost its grip and that the world was becoming unreal. Even one hundred years ago, however, one had needed only to set up a camera with sufficient delay and the impossible became commonplace. Now, with the visual enhancements proffered by the ubiquitous contact lenses, it was no stretch of the imagination to see the view from the back of one’s head, or any other place whose viewpoint could be calculated by the computers.

He looked at the stars again, but this time with different eyes. It was as though he peered out through an X-ray telescope, with false color calculated by his ever-helpful machines. Nebulae and galaxies appeared in every direction, taking wonderfully evocative shapes before him. Yet viewed from another angle, they would have totally different figures. Which one was the correct interpretation? All, and none. There was no way to determine whether or not these celestial objects might not reveal the face of some purported God if viewed from another place, but the judgment would be so subjective anyway as to make no difference. People were always too hasty to see things that weren’t there for the sake of their hopelessly inadequate schemas. Not only that, they were too ready to dismiss outright the things that did not confirm their own prejudices. It was these qualities which made Bernard despair of ever finding some way to meet the crisis facing the next generation; he was too set in his ways, like so many others, always believing he had found the solution when it was merely a way to stave off the problem another year or two.

He tightened his focus onto one distant, flashing light; a pulsar, its impossibly dense neutron core rotating at a speed many thousand times the fastest gallop of a terrestrial horse. There was something comforting in its regularity, flashing every four seconds like a manic version of the lighthouses of old, a beacon in the vast sea of space-time. He imagined the absurd image of a lighthouse keeper, residing inside the star, warning the space vessels that passed of the rocky gravitational well created by the same mechanism that was the source of his livelihood. A pretty quandary in which to be trapped, without doubt.

Though he had tried to keep from sleeping by occupying his mind, Bernard had grown too tired to continue, and lay down on his bed in exhaustion. Just before he went to sleep, it seemed to him that he heard a voice say, "Even so, my friend, even so." E-mail: vokuro@adelphia.net