Remy on Merlin

The siren emerged from a distal source, as the shout-tower was located a few hundred metres from the main station. "Remy, the tracks bend away too soon," it called. Remy shook his head. He didn't like this train station. It was too big and too populous to be associated with the tracks he was familiar with. His life - his only life that counted - had begun on the hills of Nere, and there it had ended as abruptly as it had begun. Frozen and preserved at the back of his mind, his time in Nere remained to taunt him. I have been through everything that matters; my remaining time alive is just a bonus. Only the steam from a noisy engine could begin to mimic his time jumping tracks, with her watchful eyes smiling at him as he clumsily tried to stand one-legged on a rail.

The train he boarded was crowded, and his cramped seat between two fat tula merchants afforded him no glimpses of the disappearing platform. The seven hour journey was draining, and Remy kept himself hydrated with cans of crystal soda. He sighed. Manfried would be twice as crowded as this train and, being planetary capital, it would never shut up. This would be the second time Remy would set foot in the metropolis, the first time was when he alighted from a spaceship after an even longer and exceedingly more painful journey to almost literally the end of the galaxy.

His first time in Manfried was not a pleasant experience. Merlin was a newly settled planet, with Manfried being the first outpost established only eighty years ago. Hardly a million people populated the planet since then, with ninety-five percent of those people located in Manfried. His visit to Merlin, unfortunately, had taken place during the mass influx of labourers, technicians and the usual cults, which would one day be known as the first step in the "true" colonization of the Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, et cetera. Remy had had to trudge his way through a mass of dysfunctional security robots hopelessly trying to maintain order amongst the incoming visitors, pilgrims and workers. He'd then needed to explain, in length, to the power-blinded and lonesome tourism officials the purpose of his visit. He'd lost a lot of money on mandatory bribes and sodas, and had then tried to make his way to one of the swelling motels in the main city. Failing to do so, he'd had to commute for three hours to the suburbs of Manfried for accommodation offered by a grocer to anyone who could carry a message to Vern. After eighteen more hours of travel and pointless delays, he'd made his way to Vern and its loud railway sirens.

It was true, though. The biota placed on Merlin eighty years ago had made itself comfortable in the valleys and undulating plains that spanned most of the two primary continents. Manfried itself has boulevards now; lined by trees and shrubs whose hues betray their extra-planetary origin. Merlin was part of the small minority of planets which had breathable air and non-toxic soil, so the Merlin Terraforming Agency was, in practice, an outpost for some company to dig its tendrils into the compact culture of Merlin before it even has a formal currency. Yet, there was something naturally unnerving about the way horses on Merlin were still tame enough to be saddled by a random visitor from off-planet. Indeed, Remy had travelled several hundred kilometres on the back of a wild horse while on his way to the dig site beyond Vern.

The dig was not of the archaeological kind, but was instead engineered by biologists. Seventy years ago, when Vern had first been established as a sort of secondary capital in the southern hemisphere of Merlin, some biologists (many of them great-grandparents of the biologists he’d met himself) had added some Escherichia veni to a hollow portion of the soil, rich with the excessive faecal matter of planet Nappa which the E. veni so often feasted on. These initial E. veni had been subject to directional, non-mutagenic radiation, so that they would all cluster onto one side of the hollow so as to avoid decimation. Two hundred thousand generations of these bacteria had past, and the radiation had ceased to penetrate into the hollow some fifty years ago, yet the E. veni tried to cluster to that one side.

Genetic memory was the term that had been decided upon by the Vern biologists. Genetic memory is the reason why every single person stemming from Earth’s Israel still felt uneasy while looking at a holoform of the Concentration Camps, they stipulated. “DNA is the most protected and valuable resource in this universe. The fraction of objects that possesses this compound is so small that all the gold on Goldrush wouldn’t be able to buy a microgram of DNA, if DNA would be thus suitably priced. But it isn’t, and herein lays the very instability of humanity – we place a higher value on things that do not truly belong to us. DNA is us. And DNA remembers. If my soul could have a material form, it would be not my DNA, but rather the DNA of all my forefathers. As such, the soul is continuously evolving with the birth of every new generation.” So said the lord philosopher-biologist Reswyn Peck, and so bowed all of his follower-biologists and pursuer-biologists, without even gathering the implications behind his words.

Remy scowled. When the respect for a man precedes his teachings, the respect for the man becomes his teachings. Remy knew that only too well. Nice new that, and Nice bowed and surrendered herself gracefully to the Fleet. “Remy, you aren’t from here. You can go back home.” But she was home. She will forever remain home, and when I am done blasting a hole through the genetic memories of my lords and ladies, I will return to her.

Reswyn Peck knew that DNA was upgrading itself with the rise of every new generation, and that nothing from the past was truly lost. Reswyn Peck knew that DNA was the ultimate weapon and torture device. Being an independent group, the Vern biologists shared their observations with the rest of the scientific world only after much deliberation and review. The Vern biologists were now rotting inside a pit with E. veni feeding on them to fulfil their last rites. Reswyn Peck had died when ancestral pain had seeped through his gouty knuckles to his gouty heart. Assistant-biologist Beatrice Salomon too had writhed and succumbed, with her frothing mouth still wrapped around gouty little Peck.

If only you had accompanied me. We’d have found a place far away, even farther than Merlin, where we’d raise hills out of the horizon and lay down railway lines through twisting valleys. Remy knew he had to get off planet as soon as he could. The “inflammable” DNA they’d extracted from the bacteria in the pit couldn’t survive long in the blanks (microorganisms devoid of genetic material). The genetic memory was active in this DNA, and using it, he’d managed to trigger the same in the DNA of the Vern biologists.

Remy Raoveti - celebrated biologist, anthropologist and soon-to-be heretic. He’d have cults forming around him by the time he’d be halfway through teaching humanity a lesson. Youngest winner of the Deutschenwaldow Prize, number one on the ’89’s Top Ten Rising Stars, and Mass Murderer of the Century, I give you… Remy Raoveti!

Remy could see the Angled Spire of Manfried rise out towards the setting sun, in a bid to touch it at its coolest. The smells of the city reached out to him, but they were different; they were warped due to the steadily rising inflow of off-planet visitors with their queer, off-planet smells. This, too, angered him, although he knew not why.

DNA apparently had some kind of ‘field’ which stored genetic memory. Activating this required some changes in the current state of the DNA, both conformational and totally virtual. Remy did not care what exactly went about when this happened, all he knew was that humans would DIE on exposure to their genetic memory, simply because their mind was evolved enough to decipher exactly the contents of these memories, but not quite evolved enough to absorb such knowledge. Maybe that was the original purpose of DNA and evolution, for a certain being to evolve until a point wherein it could digest its genetic memories safely and thus transition into some kind of “singularity” being or something. Remy did not care – much. He did care enough to make sure that this “singularity” would remember Nice and her affable ways.

The train stopped, and Remy descended onto the platform in a hurry. The sooner he’d get off this planet the better, as authorities would soon realise that the Vern biologists were missing and would maybe somehow stumble upon the dig site. The burial site, Remy reminded himself. Was he halting the growth of science by this act? This gave him some pause, but a passing engine drove an image of Nere on a beautiful summer day into his mind. Nere, with the pretty house and the dipping-pond, with the smiling faces of Rory and Neville, Ava and her grandmother. Would this pain be imprinted into his genetic memory? Would his descendants be forced to watch him rip himself apart from the inside with every waking breath? Then this was his curse to them. Descendants. Children. Nice and I had once talked about having children, children who would jump onto me every time I returned home from a long day at work, uncaring that I’d be soaked with perspiration. If there are children without Nice, then may they be cursed.

He made his way to the spaceport with, surprisingly, very little delay. His reputation permitted him to carry the biological samples on board, and soon he was off. The earliest flight to Assez was five days from then, so he’d decided to hop on a long flight to Vaha, in the system of Canopus many thousand light years away. The journey was superluminal, but would still take him several years. By then the mishap on the secluded planet of Merlin would be forgotten, with “incorrect safety measures while dealing with the deadly Escherichia veni” recorded as the cause of the deaths of fourteen biologists.

Five hours into the flight, Remy started to feel the breezy upliftment that he often associated with superluminal travel. He knew that this would soon transition into a mind-numbing hurricane of illusory wind, so he decided to strap himself into the fugue pod adjacent to his seat. Superluminal travel couldn’t even technically be called a form of transportation, as it mainly involve the spaceship, or, rather, individual fugue pods of the spaceship linked within a primary matrix, disappearing from existence here and materializing there.

This was largely due to a modification of classical quantum tunnelling – a large distance impossible for even light to cover in a few minutes was somehow traversed through by the spaceship-matrix. In essence, the “large distance” acted as a limiting energy state which could be breached by the tunnelling. Remy did not know the details, and he doubted that he ever would. His activities in the past few days would certainly curtail his freedom to explore unknown territories of life, let alone science.

After reading projected magazines in his pod for an hour, Remy decided to get some sleep. Within the pod, it was eerily silent, something often attributed to for the scarring of weak human psyches. Remy took a while to get accustomed to this enforced silence, and as he drifted into that plane of thought which is suspended between the conscious and the unconscious, steam from an engine clouded his mind. Long after the noiseless engine faded from view, the smoke finally dissipated.

When the sunlight glinted off her teeth and the cool midday breeze ruffled her hair, he was in heaven. Tears welled in his eyes, and he smiled. The crook of her elbow found its way around his neck, and she turned, taking him with her. The unprecocious naiveté in her eyes beckoned in the direction of the hills far away, fencing the horizon. Railway tracks meandered and were lost, out of sight, at the summit of one hillock. Her head bobbed up, and she caught him staring at her, his eyes full of tears. She was to be left behind today, as he went on to greater adventures. Yet he was the one crying.

She said, “Remy, the tracks bend away too soon.” Swallowing the sorrow in his throat, he replied, “but they go on forever.”

“Does that mean they will never bring you back?”

“No, that means they will always be there to bring me back to you.” He smiled. How cheesy that had sounded, how cheesy it still did.

“Take me with you.” Was that a question or a command? He’d never know.

“I… You know I can’t. How I wish that I could, but you can’t move like this.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” She smiled, and played with his hair. “But I will be with you wherever you go, won’t I?”

“Of course you will.” Remy smiled, and finally wiped off the tears streaming down his face. He kissed her once, twice. He then turned and left, leaving her behind; she with her mechanical body rooted to the ground and the wind ruffling her hair and the cables that connected her to the soil. Once more an engine passed, and took him away with it.