The Impenitent Thief

Beginnings

Hey, Doc. Is this thing working? I guess it is. I can see the words after I say them.

You can continue talking for as long as you want. Just tell me when you want to rest.

Thanks, Doc. All this newfangled technology, right? Hell, I'm just amazed at indoor plumbing. Of all the things I have experienced, getting splashed by shit is the least pleasant. Or so I tell myself.

In any case, what should I talk about right now?

Begin at the beginning.

Beginning, right. I love beginnings, always filled with such promise. Okay, the beginning: my name, or at least the name I call myself, is Gestas. If you look that up in your internet or whatever, you'll find that that's also the name of the so-called 'impenitent thief' that was crucified next to Jesus.

Now, I've never met Jesus. I was in the area at the time and I did happen to be crucified at Calvary, but I never met anyone who claimed to be the Son of God. Hell, if I had, I would have just gone along with it. It's a bad idea to argue with crazy people.

Is this the beginning, Gestas?

Nah. I'm getting around to that. See, I got the name Gestas back then, but I had a different name before. Actually, I've had a hundred different names.

My memory is patchy, filled with holes. Let me think about my first memory and I'll get back to you.

The First Memory

I don't remember anything from before I was broken, from when We was I. The first memory I have is of a woman's face.

There is ash falling all around us. She is looking at me with such despair. There is blood pouring from her eyes and mouth. The world is burning. I am chocking on ash. The woman looks at me and opens her mouth. She is trying to tell me something. She is holding out her hands, pointing away from here. She wants me to run away.

I look up. There is a mountain in the distance. Fire is erupting from the mountain, fire and ash. The mountain is like a gigantic match and the world is made of gasoline.

The woman is begging me to go. Blood is still pouring from her face. Go, she whispers to me. Run away, my child.

Her child? Are you saying that you inhabited the body of her child?

I'm not sure. It was either that or she was my real mother.

Your real mother? What do you mean by that?

Nothing. In any case, I ran like she told me. And when it was too much, when I choked on the ash, I felt myself slip out of one shell and into another and I kept running. I ran until I was far away from that mountain.

When I was far enough away, I sat down and watched the sky run black.

Back and Forth

So my memory is spotty after that, but I do know that I wandered around the area for a while. I palled around with the Heracleidae, participated in a few invasions, and then we went our separate ways. I distinctly remember going to the Olympic Games once and found them supremely boring. Participated in the Peloponnesian War (although we just called it The War, you know?) and lost my body several hundred times. I just kept hopping from body to body and they all kept getting killed.

Finally, I managed to get out of there. Next thing I remember, I'm a trader on the Silk Road. That seemed like it would be good and boring, but then war breaks out again. Goddamn Rome has to fuck everything up, am I right?

In any case, I move around until I find myself in Jerusalem and I get caught stealing some food. A guys gotta eat, right? Well, it might have been more than food. I don't remember exactly. In any case, the Romans do to me what they did to every other thief they caught: crucifixion. Hurts like Hell. But after that body died, I slipped away and became a Roman soldier, so no harm, no foul, right?

Wrong. A couple of years after that, Caligula becomes Emperor and then Claudius and then Nero. Nero likes burning Christians, which, I'll admit, was funny at first. Except for all the goddamn backstabbing, which means I was switching bodies every few months, which isn't that fun.

So I decide to get out of there. And where do I end up, you ask?

That's right: Pompeii.

Pompeii

So, Pompeii. My second volcanic eruption. I mean, after the first one, I pretty much tried to avoid being near them, but Pompeii seemed like a nice place.

And then one morning, boom. As I looked up at the billowing smoke and ash, my first memory came back to me and I wondered who the woman was. Why was she bleeding like that? Why didn't I remember anything before that? Where had I come from?

You don't know where you came from?

I have some vague feeling of being a part of something bigger. I know I was Broken. I just don't know where or when or why.

So I walked out of Pompeii with a new body and a new sense of purpose: find out where I came from. Find out what I was. And, if possible, cherchez la femme. Find the woman.

Surely she would have been dead by then.

That's what I was thinking, but you never know. I wasn't dead. And don't call me Shirley.

Did you ever find her then?

You want me to skip ahead? No, not yet. But I found out what I was.

The Plague Year

I wasn't at the Sack of Rome, but I heard it was pretty wild after that. I moved around a lot, trying to find the woman, trying to find someone who could tell me what I was.

Finally, I found myself in Spain, 1348. I was trying to find a trader who had been telling strange stories of shadow men. I was also trying to get as far away from Italy as possible, because that place was filled to the brim with the Black fucking Death.

Just my luck, Spain got the plague as well and I was basically trapped in a town where everyone was dying. I would slip out of one body and into another and it would just die on me again and again. I went through a hundred bodies in a week.

Finally, I found someone that the plague hadn't touched. They were a doctor and had basically covered themselves up and put on a mask so they wouldn't breath in the foul air. It was complete bullshit, but it worked anyway.

And then, when I was walking down the corpse-strewn street, I met another like me. He was taller than I was and his mask was bone-white and curved, ending in a beak so sharp it could cut. I took off my mask and look up at him and I asked him what I was.

He didn't say anything to me. He just looked at me as if I was a curiosity. I guess I had committed some supreme faux pas by talking to him or something. In any case, he left me alone and went into the city, while I was going out of it, so that was the last I saw of him.

But at least I knew there were more like me. At least I knew I wasn't alone.

The Fall

Finally, I got an answer to one of my questions. It was in 1453, at the Fall of Constantinople.

The Turks were shooting cannonballs at the city all day and everyone inside was just waiting for them to come over the walls. We all knew it was coming. Nothing could keep them out. Finally, they built that big fucking tower and brought that up to the wall and then it was all over. They came streaming over the wall and everyone either fought and died or surrendered.

Eventually, I surrendered. I thought about maybe killing myself and becoming one of the Muslim soldiers, but then one of them caught my eye. He gestured to me to come over and I thought perhaps he wanted some sort of sexual favor, but when I went over, he said, "It's good to meet another one of us. I haven't met another in a while."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"You don't know?" he said. "We're alike, you and I. We were once I, before we were Broken."

I looked at him and said, "You don't die?"

"Always dying, never dead," he said and I knew he was like me. We talked about our experiences, what we had lived through. I told him about my search for the woman and he said, "Good luck. My own first memory isn't nearly as exciting: I'm face deep in water staring up at the sky. When I get up, there's nobody around for miles."

We talked some more and then parted ways. He said that we are solitary creatures and, though there are many versions of us, that always stays the same.

The Time of Troubles

I spent the next few hundred years in France. You would think the French would know how to have some fun, but pretty soon that whole place erupted in war. The worst of it was in Paris when someone tried to assassinate Coligny. The Catholics went crazy after that -- no Calvinist was safe. I'll admit, I had some fun at that point, but soon it got too much even for me.

So I decided to move on, go to a place I had never been before: Russia. If France was too hot, then Russia was too cold. I froze my ass off so many times there, I lost count. Still, it was, if anything, quiet.

Until the last Tsar died, that is. Then everything went to shit. They called it the Time of Troubles afterwards, but nobody put it that lightly at the time. They all thought everything was fucked and they were right. Uprising, usurpers, imposters, and the fucking famine, too. I did have a bit of fun then, though: I pretended to be Tsarevich Dmitry Ivanovich for a little bit, before those fuckers cut off my head.

After that, I left Russia and traveled around a bit. I participated in a little of the Thirty Years War -- I think I threw someone out a window during the Defenestration of Prague, actually, but I don't remember. Then I found myself on the wrong side of Cromwell's war.

I did stick around England before another plague and then a fire drove me away. So I went to the only place I could think of: America.

America

So I missed the whole Glorious Revolution, so sue me. But then, that wasn't really my type of revolution anyway: bloodless.

In any case, America ended up being interesting. I fought in Queen Anne's War on the side of New England. I was at the Siege of Port-Royal -- all three of them -- and I was at the Conquest of Acadia. It wasn't all fun and games, though: I was also at the Battle of Bloody Creek, which was a fucking nightmare.

Finally, Queen Anne's War came to an end...and then, a few years later, came the French and Indian Wars. Apparently, the French and British really fucking hate each other.

And then, after all that fighting has died down, someone has the bright idea to declare independence from England. That went down as well as a shit pie. But hell, I was always up for a fight and I didn't particularly care who I was killing, so I fought on both sides.

I decided America was a good fit for me, so I stayed there for a spell. Fought in the Barbary Wars and then the War of 1812. I got bored fighting, though, so I stuck around New York for a while just waiting for something to happen.

And something did happen. I didn't know it, but another volcano erupted, a big one, and that meant volcanic winter. That was my first meeting with, heh, what do you call him?

Fossil-Type ICEFALL?

Yeah. Icefall. That was when I first saw him. That was the Year Without a Summer. It was Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death and I was right there.

On Identity

It was around 1850 that I first met, uh.. Hades?

Fossil-Type HADES, the dead man.

That's him. We're quite a pair-- the dead man and the dying man. He's not one for conversation, though. Everyone else was, around that time. There was this big East War going on, and now all of a sudden everyone in Europe's got to have their opinion on it. And of course, with technology being the way it was at the time-- hell, the way it still is-- everyone's opinion now had the capability to spread. That's a funny thing about information, isn't it? When technology evolves, information spreads.

How are you feeling?

I've already had my fifth health examination for the day, doc. You have the results, don't you? Can't you let a fading voice sing?

Go on.

Maybe I want to ramble, y'know? Maybe my time here in captivity-- my apologies, under examination-- has helped me meditate on certain subjects.

Such as?

You know. Things like identity, the circle of life, stuff that was in vogue throughout all history but that people seem to associate much more heavily with the discussions and books of the time. The 1850s, I mean. Not sure why that is.

My opinion is that we associate such subjects with that general time because, due to the development of technology, we have more records from that time than before.

Yeah, but that's just your opinion, see what I mean? Everyone wants an opinion. Everyone has an opinion. An opinion is like one of the many types of building-block behind an identity. And, like, my memory may be spotty but I seem to recall around that time period was when I started to really understand-- or believe-- that "what I am" is an identity.

You are an identity?

A recurring identity throughout history, yeah. Maybe all of my brothers and sisters are also identities too, ones that pop up among people until they die, at which point we inexplicably pass on through a medium science hasn't properly figured out how to observe yet-- the medium of culture, thought, influence.

But that would imply that one's identity is what kills them.

Not necessarily. Everyone dies. I should know, right? I've only done it a few billion times by now. So maybe it's not the identity, it's not me, that kills the body; maybe it's people like you who have taken that assumption and ran with it, accepting all evidence through a heavy and evolving filter of confirmation bias, I'm talking pure processed bullshit. Take a look at your own results. Every cell in my body, what's different about them from the cells in your own body?

According to the results and the equipment, nothing.

Nothing, that's right. So maybe that's a suggestion of a crooked theory, do you get me? Am I making sense or am I just a raving lunatic who wants to hear his own voice before he kicks the bucket?

So what you're saying is that you think you are only correlated with the advanced rates of mortality in the bodies you inhabit and not the direct cause.

No. What? No, look doc, what I'm saying is that my body isn't dying any faster than yours; it only looks that way because some armchair Fossilosophist came up with the total whackjob hypothesis and you guys took him at his word because you're too scared to outright say anything is definite when it has to do with us "eldritch" folk.

I don't believe I am a parasite or some virus that invades a human host. I believe I am the culmination of a vast web of complex ideas and understandings that anybody is capable of coming to terms with, and due to humanity's life rate-- we've got longevity as a species, not individually-- it just so happens that the average person who reaches this big web of ideas and accepts it as part of their beliefs, their identity, their personality, tends to on average be not too far from death.

Does that make sense?

You believe you are human.

I believe I'm an identity. A self-aware identity.

And what does this have to do with meeting Fossil-Type HADES during the... Crimean War?

That's all correlation. Maybe not. Maybe there's a thread to it all. Hey, maybe Hades planted these thoughts in my head and I'm only remembering them because the thought of him triggered it. Who knows?

Bottom line is that war was mean.

Fragmented

The results of today's examination suggest we don't have long. Do you still want to work on your memoirs?

I'd may as well finish what I started. Where was I? The East War? Right.

There was a lot of death then, which I suppose is a bit of a redundant thing to say, so I got around. The rotary press was the hot new thing, allowing me to catch up on a lot of overdue reading and.. aw, shit. Do you mind another topic-jump?

I'm obliged to have no opinion on the matter, Gestas. It's your blog.

I'm just thinking about that press. I remember reading something in the last century-ish about how the book might have popularized, or helped establish in our cultural minds, the notion of individuality. Or -ism. Something. It was the printing press, most notably during the industrial revolution so we're talking specifically the rotary press and other steam-powered things like that, it was this newfound convenient ability to produce upwards of thousands of books that were absolutely identical thanks to the wonders of machines, that paradoxically spread this idea that each person has a right to their own thoughts.

Where is the paradox in that?

Machines making waves of identical books, identically printed, identically type-set, identical in every way, and hundreds of them, convincing humanity that we are all individual. Subconsciously. Because books are now a thing that anyone can have, right? You can have your copy. You don't have to share it collectively with your nearest scriptorium so monks can slowly copy out the information by hand. The days of the scriptorium died, giving birth to the days of industry, to the days where nothing is personalized but it's because of that that mankind's individualism can flourish. Isn't that a little funny to you?

This sounds like media philosophy.

Hey, yeah, that's it. Something in the 1960s, '70s, that's where I read this from. Because at that time, with the rise in electronic media, the book was dying and being replaced with a new form of collective media-- television, radio, movie theatres, everything was being broadcast now so the average person couldn't have their own copy, couldn't use media to help them feel like an individual quite as much as in the past.

And then came the internet.

Tell me about it. The internet wasn't even a thing back then, was it? Am I thinking of the '60s?

Do you want to just skip ahead in your narrative to those decades? Would that be easier for you?

Are you kidding? And miss both World Wars? Miss the Spanish Civil War? Miss the Anti-French Resistance?

..having said that, I can't say that I recall any of those wars. I thought I did, but thinking back, I just remember reading about them.

Really? You were none of the bodies that fought in any of those conflicts?

I wouldn't say that. Just that, when I try to remember anything between 1880 and 1960, I.. huh.

You draw a blank?

No. I.. just remember dying. The occasional thought or image. A lot of blood in the outskirts of those years, but the further and further in I get, it's... god, this is gonna bug me for hours, I just know it.

"The annihilation of the atom," was it?

Nuclear fission?

Something like that. That's at the core of this blind spot, or near it. There was a lot of development in, uh.. nuclear shit around that time, wasn't there?

Do you think you have a strong connection or reaction to nuclear physics?

If I'm gonna stick with my beliefs, I'll have to say I think we all have a strong reaction to nuclear physics. We learned a lot about life's real building blocks, but I can't help but imagine we learned a lot about our imaginary building blocks too. And it's all connected.

What are?

The micro sciences and thought. I think. More than just atomic bombs were dropped, and I guess I spent more time dying than living, and I mean me dying, dying in identity.

Recent Goals

My knowledge of the Genera, as it exists today, started before you guys had gone public. I believe it was yours, the paper that circulated? The one about Fossil particles and Rainbow Gravity?

That was my work, yes.

We were impressed. You preached some pretty radical things, even for the late 2000's.

I did no preaching. I only discussed the results of an experiment I was fortunate enough to get the chance to conduct.

Call it what you want. But the Genera wouldn't exist without your findings.

This institution was already in place well before they took me on, and the open discussion of unnatural beings such as your classification was already becoming widespread. My credit, which still I dispute, is merely in using some numbers to link a few fields together.

You provided the basis for a unified theory, doc. A unified theory of everything, of all things.

Regardless. This was your view at the time, so your interest in the Topography Genera Center was directly proportionate to your interest in me?

You could say that. We had some.. shall we say, managerial disagreements that I am not at liberty to discuss.

"We" being you and an unspecified number of other Fossils?

"We" being a group I founded along with she, the bleeding woman of my dreams. There are some others, yes, but it is mostly me and her, infiltrating the ranks in order to settle some disputes with your higher-ups.

I'm afraid you're losing me again.

We called ourselves the Family Territory. We were so underground in this place that I bet you anything this post will be the first time anyone has consciously heard the name.

And.. I'm sorry, what was your goal, again?

I told you. To infiltrate the ranks and settle some disputes. This was what some call a "covert-op." Shrouded in secrecy, as our way of offering a critique on the way this business is run.

What about the "bleeding woman of--" you mean the figure from your earliest memory?

I do.

You found her in the end?

Fascinating choice of words. Not entirely inappropriate, either. Yeah, I found her. I can tell you of that memory another time. For now, before this body passes, I want to finish answering your question. I feel like I owe you.

We, the blood-letting strix and I, have been trying to get into the Genera for years now. Some deep mistake inside this place needs to be corrected. Some disseminating factor needs to be familiarized.

You need to learn about the Night Owl, Doctor.

I thought Striga was the Night Owl?

Of course not. That was our little red herring, a family joke. We made it all up. Enough of it.

Welcome to the Familia Territorio. Welcome to familiar territory.

...so you and Striga--

She is my mother, my sister, my daughter. She is the body and I am the spirit.

What do you want?

What does everyone want? Existence. Life.

And you think the Genera will give it to you?

No, we think you will.