The 9th Iteration of Youth

Part of a story that went nowhere (circa 2002)

 The Ninth Iteration of Youth.

 

Day 1.

 

I am writing this on a piece of paper taken from a notebook I hope my Doctors will not miss, and the stub of a pencil that one discarded.   I intend to hide it.

                Today they showed me the cake.  I should be well enough to have some, they said by my birthday.   The cake has a number twelve on it in blue icing and red candles (twelve of them) around the edge.  It is a whitish orange with a layer of thick dark red dividing it from left to right.   It will come out of its plastic cover in four days' time.  Until then the preservatives will keep it fresh, until then I am alive.

 I wonder if this is the first cake I have ever seen.  I know it might be the ninth.   For although I am twelve years old, I believe I have been so nine times.  The last cake I remember rested on a white china plate on a gingham-clothed table that stands on a floor of wooden boards under a roof of white plaster and off-white cornices.   I had a party streamer, a balloon, and a book of fighting ships, and – although then I did not know it - seven hours left to live. 

Hail Caesar, in four days, this time, we die.   Yes, I know all about Caesars and Kaisers and Cabbages, and shoes and ships and screaming wax and long sad stories of the death of Kings.   My memory in respect of facts is excellent.   I suspect the history I know is a lie because it explains so little.   Why is it all people dying?  Why is it all people who only live once?

 

Day 2.

 

If you were created a second ago with memories of a full life behind you, would there be any difference to you?  Maybe not, but I have remembered that my memories are false, and I have remembered why.  I was (and will be – for eternity? -) born at the age of twelve months and three hundred and sixty days and I will die when I am thirteen years old.   In between, I live for five days and then death comes.   I am, I think, the first of me to have fully remembered that.  If I am right it is certain.   I have marked the days on the brightly coloured calendar.  Only the method is undetermined – or if not that (for it might already be percolating in the mind of my adversary) – at least unknown to me, unlooked for, surprising, a lethal glimmering novelty. 

Last time (I think I remember) it was a razor blade embedded in a bar of soap, ready for my evening wash.  The edge coated with some poison sliced my cheek open to the bone as I washed, I had long lean cheeks then – not my present chubby articles.  I think.  I think I’m sure of that. They won't let me have mirrors you see.  Another me broke one once and slashed her wrists, little rabbity cuts, quite useless – they should have been made lengthways along the vein.  I was a she then.   That was on her day four – trying to circumvent the inevitable, to duck under the barbed wire of mortality and dive across a different no-man’s land.   I don’t think she knew but she had a vision of it nevertheless; she knew she had to go before they took her.

She died on the next day of a combination of tetanus, loss of blood, and I think a calculated decision not to bother with any more breathing.   I can’t do that.  I can’t even imagine it.

Well not with me. Not with this body.

 

Day 3.

 

In my first me (in the first me I remember) I thought security was a game we all played, and I suppose (memories of that life are faint, now) I disbelieved in everything but my own obvious superior grasp of the games.  Now it seems to me that, then, I walked through a fog of ignorance smelling only a faint jasmine scent of it and ignoring the fact that it clogged my vision.  The idiot.  The fool.  A person being hunted can not afford to smell the flowers, and I am as hunted as a small animal in a minefield under a hail of buckshot.  It may not be the wilful violence that kills me (although it has been, oh yes my masters) but rather that impersonal violence that the small acts drive me towards. 

                I assume I have an adversary.  My physicians do not. They talk about the problems of memory-duplication, of biological synthesis, of the whole black clone technology  - thinking I neither hear, nor hearing understand - they conceal – perhaps deliberately, perhaps they themselves are changed on-mass when I die (their faces are not especially memorable) – the violence of my endings.    I hate them more than him.  (I think he is a he.)  He, the despoiler the lurker, the one who is laughing at me as I lurch through my clown-like lives.   They expect the process to take, one of us to survive, they did not think (I believe) that there would be this effect, this sequence, this enfolding of memory; they believed they had eight  (many be more?) separate children, twelve clones of their leader all viable.  They also did not expect our shared intelligence.  Oh, the great one is bright enough, powerful enough, he has these people running despite their flabby chins and weak knees.  He comes sometimes  (I think once a week, I have not seen him with these eyes yet).  I remember only a huge beard, and a roaring laugh, a manly burly figure.  I imagine him with a cigar in his hand, or slapping other men on the back roguishly.   My father, if you want to put it that way.

                There is a lot of gossip (between me and my memories) some frankly woven out of old scare stories that seem ancient even to me who has lived at most forty-two days, and at least two of my own allotted five depending on how you look at it.  I do not for instance believe that the deaths are faked and that we are simply being groomed for some nassissistic sexual indulgence.   I’ve considered that we might be organ parts, harvested at thirteen – the period of real-world growth some kind of stabilizing or checking time in which any hideous flaws in our genetic codes might run rampant, that eventually, our dying father might pull on any one of us as a coat to shield him from the death sun, to keep night’s long immortal cold from out of his bones.  Even so, I am not a self-killer.  I will wait, take time trust nothing, prepare.