The days go by. Then weeks. The tests and exercises continue. Still no temporal jump. We switch bodies but remain aboard this space station. Yesterday, we carried out a trial run known as “the Titanic!” The four of us were placed in a room mounted on actuators. The decor was pure early twentieth century. The woodwork was in the Art Nouveau style (or do I mean Art Deco? I always get the two mixed up). James must have felt at home. Uhh, no, actually, he’s even older than that. The previous generation, at the very least! This “Titanic room,” it had only one door, massive and made of oak. Very solid. Then they (and when I say “they” I mean Bob, of course) told us we had only ten minutes to locate the key that would open it. The portholes were all sealed with big bolts, so there was no hope of escaping through them. And to make things even more of a challenge, the room started to fill with water. It had a blue-green tint and it was cold. Perhaps not as cold as the North Atlantic on the evening of 14 April 1912, but I wouldn’t want to be splashing around in it for hours on end… All of this reminded me of my experience in the sinking Mercedes. Not one of the more pleasant memories from my previous life… I said, “Don’t panic. We should divide the room into four, and each of us will search their sector.” The others agreed. Everyone except James, that is, who made a face. He didn’t like it too much when any of us encroached on his leadership role. “It’s me who should be giving the orders,” he complained. “I’m the Time Captain for this team.” This assertion failed to impress the rest of us. In fact, I would say it even seemed completely ridiculous, coming from the mouth of a boy of ten or eleven with a high-pitched, prepubescent voice. Our so-called leader was having difficulty imposing his authority from within a receptacle wearing short pants. “That’s right,” I replied. “But we’ll deal with the chain of command issue later. In the meantime, take your little pail and little shovel, and go play somewhere else!” Dominika and the Ganymedian were already opening drawers and cupboards before looking under the bed… James started searching as well, grudgingly. I looked through a wardrobe filled with old clothes that smelled of mothballs. Lots of frills and lace… James discovered a safe, hidden behind a painting (classic). Dominika found a drawer filled with sets of keys. Trying them one by one would have taken us an hour, at the very least, and by now the water was up to our thighs. Rr’naal was freaking out. Water seemed to terrify him, or more precisely, it terrified his receptacle, a small man wearing glasses who looked like a timid civil servant. If this guy was aquaphobic, Rr’naal was going to have a hard time keeping control. For my part, I was also wearing the body of an adult male (the same obese man that Rr’naal had tried out during our first transfer). After several trials, I was now used to the change of sex, but at the beginning it was bizarre. Very bizarre. Not simply because of the alterations in body build or vocal pitch. The first time I pissed in a urinal I found it impossible to aim; at least now I understand why guys make such a mess! Anyway, end of trivial digression. The fat man who served as my receptacle during this Titanic trial had been a Jesuit priest, in another life. This guy’s faith in God was so dominant, so intense, that it almost made a believer out of a hopeless atheist like me. Almost. During the final stages of this test, I had to struggle with a part of “me” to keep from joining my hands in prayer. Mental arm-wrestling while the room continued to fill up with water. It soon reached the level of our chins, and that was the moment when Rr’naal completely lost command of his receptacle. He waved his arms about, hysterical, screaming that he didn’t want to die. We were in a bad situation, really. Even though, deep down inside, I was thinking: They’re not going to let these training receptacles die. It costs them a bundle to bring these people into the future. So, they won’t allow us to drown them during a stupid training exercise, will they? Except that Bob and co. seemed determined to let the experience play out to the bitter end. Just before the water reached the ceiling, we all took big, final breaths, and there we were, looking at one another with inflated cheeks and wide eyes. Dominika (in the guise of a well-to-do lady wearing delicate silks, embroidery, and the whole nine yards) was frantically trying to open the door, with both hands on the knob. But it was hopeless. The door remained obstinately shut. Rr’naal was the first to crack. He screamed. A string of bubbles escaped from his wide-open mouth. Perhaps we (when I say “we” I mean our receptacles, of course) were going to die, after all. Fade to black, the end, curtains, game over!
But just then, without any warning, a section of wall pivoted, like an entry to a secret passage, and we found ourselves ejected into a hallway along with thousands of gallons of water. We were spitting and coughing. The water ran out through a metallic grate and pretty soon the four of us were all that remained, washed up pitifully on top of this deck. Rr’naal continued to scream, panic stricken, and we had to slap him several times before his receptacle recovered some degree of self-control.
A door at the far end of the hallway opened to reveal Bob, hands behind his back, with a smug little smile on his face, as if he had just played an excellent prank.
“That was a setup, and you fell into it headfirst,” he said mockingly.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You needed to use muscles this time, brute force rather than your brains. There was no key to open that door, but if you had cooperated from the very beginning, you might have been able to batter your way through…”
“That would have been cheating!” protested James, looking more infantile than ever.
“Let that be a lesson to you,” Bob simply replied.
It was at moments like these that we all wanted to wipe that sadistic smile off his face, the expression that said, “You had it coming!” But it was also one of those moments that helped the group to bond further… I wouldn’t go so far as saying we became BFFs, but as we talked things over and traded confidences, we gradually got to know one another better.
Dominika had not had an easy life from what I gathered. She had grown up near the city of Smolensk. Her father was a railway worker, and her mother had died when she was a child. She had to take care of the household and her younger sister, Olga, almost on her own, since her father worked long hours every day. One evening when she had drunk several Endurances (still her favourite cocktail), she told us about the invasion of Russia by the Germans, in June 1941. I can reconstitute what she told us from memory. It’s not word for word, but here’s the gist:
“The wheat was ripening. Our troops were retreating everywhere. They left behind lots of tanks. The Germans were advancing rapidly. They were masters of the sky. They bombed the bridges and the stations… Then their foot soldiers came. They occupied everything and imposed their law on us. They did not allow anyone to leave their homes or travel more than a few miles without a special pass. They killed people, hanging them from the trees. There was a whole lane lined with all the young partisans they had executed; sometimes there were two hanging from the same branch. To make an example of them. Everyone in the village went to see and was horrified. My father was working at the railway station. When trains passed through, sometimes there was straw left behind, on the platform. My father would gather it up as fodder for our cow. One day, the Germans arrived by train and decided that my father looked like a Jew, because his beard and hair were black and wavy. They beat him up, kicking and punching him with their feet and fists. They broke his teeth. He had to remain in bed for two weeks and, after that, he was always frightened. But despite that, he went back to work. He had to feed us and he had no choice. But he was very afraid, and so were we. It was a time when death prowled everywhere. Later, other Germans came, and they took my father along with all the other men in our village. They raped many of the women. My sister was too young, but I was not able to escape that. Then they set fire to the houses. They took our only cow and they killed our dog, because it barked at them. I never saw my father again. I entrusted my sister to a family, some neighbours whom I knew well. Kind people. Then I joined a resistance group in the forest. They taught me how to survive and use a rifle. I killed lots of Germans. My heart was filled with hatred… One day, a man came to see me. He claimed to be appointed by the government. He said he wanted to train intelligence agents… He took me to a special camp, a training camp, where they made me take strange tests. At the beginning, I didn’t understand at all what it was about… But you can guess the rest…”
This tale had a sobering effect on us all. My life with my wacky mother and her collection of oddball boyfriends seemed almost like a fairy tale, next to that. As for James, he always refused to talk about his past when we questioned him. Rr’naal told me what he had managed to find out about our British comrade from his personnel file. Apparently, he was from an aristocratic family. Gentry, even lords… He grew up in a manor, with servants and everything. But he suffered from an inferiority complex with respect to his elder brother, the sort who succeeded at everything, top of his class, and so forth… James was the ugly duckling, in comparison. He was expelled from several schools, notably Eton with all its prestige, and he failed the entry exam to the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst. In a fit of spite, he went off to South Africa and enlisted as a British soldier in the First Boer War. According to his file, he would not have survived the Battle of Majuba Hill, in 1881. The agency recruited him just before that fatal date, saving his life in the process. He had plenty of things to prove, James did. To himself, and to others.
And then there was our favourite lizard-man. Rr’naal. A strange character, that’s for sure. He told us a little bit about his world. There were many castes on Ganymede, and apparently, our friend belonged to the lowest caste of all. If I understood correctly, he was Fey’ol, a genetically modified race raised in special incubators and created to carry out hard labour in particularly hostile environments. They weren’t considered individuals, but units. These creatures suffered from accelerated ageing and had no choice about their future. Their fate was determined from birth. A Ganymedian version of Brave New World, so to speak! The slaves lived in funnel-shaped cities built on vast arid plateaus. There was an ocean, but it was underground. The Fey’ols worked in mines where seismic quakes were frequent. I don’t know what they mined there, exactly. Some kind of gas, I think… Rr’naal formed part of a special program. An artificial intelligence was grafted to the brains of a dozen newborn Fey’ols. Our pal wasn’t raised on a battery farm like most members of his caste. He developed a certain talent for anything to do with computers and was assigned to administrative tasks in a mining city, where he was recruited by the agency. The city exploded shortly after his departure for the Sculptor Galaxy. A gigantic gas leak. It was quite a fireworks display, it seems. Rr’naal lost all his “hatchery siblings.” I told him the story of Superman, an orphan from the planet Krypton, which fascinated him. “I’ll look it up on the Infosphere,” he said. Unfortunately, there aren’t many vestiges of twentieth century pop culture still around. The Great Upheaval swept most of it away. I frequently recall the words of my recruiter, Rusk, as well as those of Bob: “Few or no attachments.” In a way, we’re all Clark Kent: people uprooted from the worlds they originated from.
What else can I tell you about the Fey’ols of Ganymede? They worship a single god, N’galooc. Their food is disgusting (roots, larvae, that kind of thing)… And oh yes: they’re hermaphrodites. Don’t ask me for the details. Rr’naal was about to tell me all about their mode of reproduction before they enter the incubators, their mating season, and so forth, but I stopped him dead. “Not interested,” I said. Just thinking about it made me want to puke.
Between exercises, I have sessions with Eva, the neuro-shrink assigned to me, a woman who never ever smiles. Compared to her, Bob is a barrel of laughs. She always has a mournful expression on her face when she asks me questions. Maybe she finds her job depressing, I don’t know. “What’s the hardest part for you, during the integration phase with a receptacle?” she asked me last week. The hardest part? Not changing sex, you get used to that. It can even be amusing, in a way. The other day, I experienced desire in a male body for the first time! Very kinky…
The hardest part, to be frank, is dealing with all the emotional baggage of the receptacle: unresolved griefs, traumas, and phobias… Try crawling through an air duct when your host is claustrophobic, for example. You have the feeling that you’re suffocating, of being buried alive. It’s horrible. Experiencing racist urges is also pretty shitty, when you’re not used to it. Once (I was in the body of a guy of the skinhead persuasion, which should have tipped me off), I was surprised to feel a wave of repulsion whenever I looked at Bob, who I actually like a lot. At moments like that, you want to scrub your brain just like washing your hands. You feel… I don’t know… soiled. I hope I never find myself stuck in the body of a receptacle with paedophile tendencies, because I’m not sure I could tolerate that.
My neuro-shrink gave me a guide, actually an app, along the lines of “Everything you ever wanted to know about the psychological consequences of tachyonic transfer but were too afraid to ask.” The titles of the different chapters take the form of questions: “How do you simplify the most difficult moral questions?” “How should you manage the physiological needs of your hosts?” Or even: “How can you use telepathy without problems?” There’s a special course on that subject, involving some sort of futuristic New Age-yoga-relaxation bullshit sessions. But it’s not very complicated, finally. You just need to compartmentalize your thoughts. You associate a certain mental image, or a colour, say green, to “public” thoughts, and another, say red, to thoughts you want to remain private. And that allows you to regulate the different thought flows. Obviously, it’s harder when you’re stressed and under pressure, like during a mission or an exercise. But with a little training, you should be able to police yourself. I’m the best in my group at that little game, even if I still let some things slip through involuntarily, from time to time. The one who has the most difficulty with it is Rr’naal. I guess his grafted AI complicates things, by creating a kind of mental “threesome.” We pick up everything he thinks, poor guy!
In the guide, there’s a chapter devoted to possible disorders linked to the prolonged practice of transfers. There’s a whole catalogue of neuroses… They range from guilt over letting your host die to the fear of becoming a host yourself, a receptacle possessed by another party. There’s also temporal loop syndrome (you have a constant sensation of déjà-vu) and a host of others… Essentially, I may be out of the asylum, but my mental health could experience some turbulence in the weeks to come…
For now, things are OK. I feel fine. Or at least, as fine as possible if I ignore this nagging sense of paranoia. Dominika has succeeded in making me have doubts. I think she’s right. The agency is hiding stuff from us… but what, exactly? A very big question.
I haven’t seen the old guy who approached me in the Red Light again. I can’t stop thinking about what he told me. Why would I be so important? What’s so special about me? And most of all, where and how did this guy meet my mother? I’d really like to talk to Bob about all this, but I somehow sense that it would be a mistake.
“Wait and see,” as James would say.