Regeneration X (34 page)

Inez has been a rock through all this, but she can’t empathize, “Sorry, somehow I was born without the romantic love gene,” she joked. “Or maybe my GM procedure mutated, causing a resistance to the love virus, I can’t seem to catch it.”

“I should see if I can get the same GM procedure done. Although, for me the memory implant Jess has would be handier. It would be hard to decide, though, which memories I’d want to keep—I’d be wiping my mind clean.”

“I think all these newfangled procedures are like getting a tattoo—you can’t stop once you’ve gotten one. I’m going to have to check to see if there is one that lets me channel through emotions I haven’t felt by flipping a remote.”

“I know, the world is moving in this direction. Eventually the majority of the population will be enhanced super humans and the rest of us will become obsolete software,” I say revealing a latent fear I have about the direction the world was moving.

“You really think it’s that common?”

“It’s becoming more so, little by little. We used to cover android procedures and topics a lot in
POV
, but I see it more and more at school in the current generation of students. There’s Jess with the memory storage implant, Adam with the photographic memory, Philip has an infrared eye, Josh can speed read, Lily can surf the web, Mica is able to compose and send text messages in his head, Ross can mentally download text and images, and last but not least, Rupert has prosthetic robotic arms. And those are just the students I know.”

“Wow, this is frightening,” Inez replied solemnly. “I wonder how all of us middle-agers are going to fare in our unaltered old age? I’m still hoping Renovation becomes possible for the likes of me.”

“Someday it will be. Considering how fast technology is changing, it will probably be very soon. Still, I don’t want you going all batty over it again. Be patient.”

“I won’t go crazy, promise,” she said, gesturing a cross over her heart. “I am patient. For now, my eyes are on the guinea pig.”

・ ・ ・

It’s been roughly four months since Michael first delivered his blow. The only way I can remain composed most days is to immerse myself in distractions and try to forget he even exists; the same with Becks. The only trace I had from my old life is Inez.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought, I should never have compared her to social media and that I didn’t really know her. My journals have become suspiciously foretelling. I wrote that perhaps it might be healthier for her to return to Canada. Lo and behold, when she revealed she was leaving me, too, I nearly collapsed. I thought I was safe, at least there, because I never brought it up. She also said this past summer she wouldn’t move again; she wouldn’t leave London, but no one has to tell me—everything has a cause and effect.

Inez’s mom, Isabelle, was recently diagnosed with late-stage terminal cancer and Inez is returning to Halifax. Her mom has a few months to live, sadly, this is at most, but Inez has decided to return to Canada indefinitely. Something like this makes it impossible for me to plead my selfish case and ask her to stay. She will either sell her shop here or just shut it down. Regardless, she is arranging to move by the end of the month. So fast.

My fears and dreams have caught up with me. I wished my choices were my own to make and didn’t affect others, but I relied heavily on those same people for support and comfort, even though they were few in number. One by one, they have exited my life, never to return.

My past-learned life lessons have come back around. So much of life is beyond any one person’s control; we can control our own lives only so much, there are too many external factors to know anything for certain. Moreover, as I am not an island, no one is, it is quite impossible to control anyone else’s life. Dr. Baum’s words come back to both haunt and reassure me, “Influence is the best any of us can do.” So, I think, have I influenced? I hold fast to the comfort that memory of me is my legacy and the memories I have of Michael, Miles, Becks and Inez are their legacy to me, even as we live.

Thus, two years after my Renovation and over one year after I’ve started school, I will actually get to experience youth and college the same as every other student leaving her home for the first time— independent and alone. With each of their departures from my life, I came to realize I had done very little to lay a secure foundation of friendship in my new life. Point of fact we all need other people, so I made a mental list of the relationships that I needed to solidify.

This goal of committing on my part led me to ask Annabelle and Sima to be my roommates. Still, we have one more room to spare and I’ve asked Loren. I hope that in one fell swoop I am accomplishing several goals, namely friendship, companionship and financial necessity. You see, without Inez, I cannot afford the rent on my own and it looks like I will need to find a job—at least until Michael sends me my share of the sale of the house. Considering we had an offer for the house when it wasn’t even on the market, I don’t think selling it will be a problem (if it hasn’t sold already). I haven’t had the courage to call him and ask. I still trust he will not wrong me and he would call or notify me somehow.

Again, amidst all the turmoil, the best I can do is plunge myself into the trenches of my studies. It’s just a matter of time—the amount of drama in life will surely die down or become less draining and serious.

At least school is finally going well and according to the plan. I intend to stay on track this time, so I have no worries on this score. I’m still resistant to take the online route and I’ll hold out as long as there are real classrooms and professor-bodies to teach them. Unfortunately, with the direction the world is moving, by the time I am done with my schooling and am ready to dive into teaching, the brick-and-mortar environment I would be aspiring to may be a distant memory. This is the one regret, which plagues me. Any control I have over my own life could be negated if the environment, in even a decade, cannot accommodate my desires. I hope by then I will have accepted and adjusted to this. I believe, at some point, all actors will be CGI characters as well; I hope to be dead and buried by then.

・ ・ ・

Before I forget to mention the latest (almost) debacle, Parker and I now have an understanding. I will not be professing my love for anyone so long as I remain attached to someone else, despite it being only on paper, along with a few other binding strings. However, to Parker, I did profess my honest care and respect and promised not to hold back anything that might affect him. I, therefore, just recently divulged the traumatic events, which took place several months ago with Michael and Becks. I felt he needed the background in order to understand fully my hesitancy in moving too fast. With all of the heavy topics laid out on the table, we have decided to run to the hills (of Bavaria) for the weekend, just for fun. Of course, when I suggested visiting Edinburgh he informed me he had been there a hundred times, but it’s not scratched off the list of places when we are planning future adventures.

Chapter Thirty-one

And thus the whirligig of time

brings in his revenges.

—William Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night (5.1)

・
・
・

LOOKING BACK ON EVERYTHING I HAD: A home I’d come to love, a supportive and accepting family, security and respect with a career that paid the bills, a loyal and caring lifelong companion, invaluable friends, and my furry children. I gave it all up to find passion in employment. Sounds like a bad decision and quite a bit to give up for the tradeoff. In my defense, everything I had then was mediocre, as seen through the eyes of boredom and mid-life crises. Besides, I calculated the amount of time one spends working, and this total outweighed the time spent on all other things combined. YOLO (You only live once) and then it was
presto change-o
. So it really amounts to this: what choice do I have but to accept what I have created and make the best of it?

You might ask, “Is your life extraordinary now? Was all the sacrifice worth it?” With a long pause and, if you can imagine, an audible exhale of breath, I’d answer these loaded questions with a too straightforward answer, “Yes.” This might be enough if you’ve read the longer preceding account of my adventures as a PTT. However, if the answer needs some clarification, then I submit to you the following: (Taken one at a time, my sacrifices came with new promises of things to come).

A home: while not one I made comfortable and individual over several years, I gained a new environment full of eventual familiarity.

A supportive family: my blood relations remains as they always were, but I acquired stand-in support from new friends.

A career: only when you have something can you know if security and respect is enough. For me it wasn’t and it became my primary reason for regeneration. However, I am thankful for my past professional life now, since I gained so much by it, including the economics to make CR even possible.

A lifelong companion: again, I have few regrets, but I experienced the slow death of that relationship even before my procedure, so it was probably fated anyway. There is so much more I could say about Michael. He is a phenomenal man, and of course, my heart aches forevermore with eruptions of would-of, should-of, could-ofs, but it’s done. As my reward, I received new affections and the chance to be noticed, cherished and desired again.

Friends: I was lucky to have strong friendships in my husband and close gal pals. The gifts I received here were respect and consideration. I trust those friends will be mine until my dying day, if not in reality than in my mind and heart. As I mentioned before, it is the legacy of their memories that they have left me.

Children: although I have no kids, for now I am rewarded with the thought that my furry kids were adopted by another caring mom. Ask me again in 20 years or so.

The biggest promise of them all, which makes it all so amazing, is I have my youth. I have years ahead of me now to have the fun my old body didn’t allow me to have before. Where once I felt self-conscious and insecure, I’m no longer ashamed to admit it: I am as unfairly advantaged as my androidian friends are. I have a 56-year-old’s brain filled with nearly a lifetime of experience and knowledge inside this wonderfully youthful body. Ironically, when you’re an aged adult it is unacceptable to act like a teenager. But when you’re a teenager, no one holds it against you for being mature. Now, I have the excuse of youth to act the fool whenever I want and can still settle down to the comforts of knowing better, too.

Going back to the initial question of life being extraordinary, my day-to-day isn’t so much fantastically happy, but I rather feel like a seer now. Somehow, although CR did not alter my mind, I can somewhat foresee the results of each choice as I make it. This makes me feel super-powered in wisdom.

・ ・ ・

It’s been two years for me and my story is nowhere near over, since every day, I find the repercussions of Renovation are oncoming and endless. It gets easier, but I wish there had been just one person to be my guide during my baby steps. Firstly—let me just get this out—there are some things you have to learn on your own, but I hope my story provides the guidance I didn’t have. To summarize, I offer the following insights I’ve gained through my experience:

Early on, I was caught up with the idea that all I would have to deal with were other people’s perceptions of me and my reasons for undergoing the procedure in the first place. No matter how wise this was, since self-awareness comes with age, it was an inconsequential fact when compared to other things. It’s only a matter of time when those other things, one by one and sometimes two by three, come at you and you begin to realize how hard you’ve made it on yourself. The primary concept to realize is no one else cares that much—what you look like, how you act, what you feel. I’m not saying people are heartless. All I’m saying is, it’s not personal. No one is going through exactly what you are; they can’t possibly understand, so you have to chalk it up to individuality. As Dr. Baum once told me, “Human minds are individual; there is no right way to feel.” But they have a right to feel and think whatever they want. You cannot control it, you cannot control them and therefore it is quite impossible to control what they think of you. This fact makes life after CR a lonely endeavor.

Ever ask a second language speaker which language they think in? If you don’t speak a second language, or the country you live in uses your native tongue then it doesn’t occur to you that thinking and speaking requires separate mental processes. Inez’s native tongue is French, for example, but living in the other parts of Canada, United States or Great Britain, she spoke English. When she first moved to Halifax, she consciously translated from French to English before speaking. Conversely, spoken English needed to be mentally translated into French for better comprehension. Later, she explained, the process was the same, but over time, it became subconscious; she didn’t need to make an effort. It takes many years for the primarily used language to take the mental place of the native tongue. I bring this up because memories are similar when you are the same age twice. After a while, there are two images of yourself inside your head. I found myself translating my youth into two separate
languages
.

If only for this dual existence in your own mind, I almost think, post-regeneration should require psychological counseling. You don’t realize it at the time, but identity becomes convoluted when you are repeating your existence relative to passage of time and environment changes. I would not be surprised if a person developed a type of multiple personality disorder if they did not traverse the aftereffects of the procedure conscientiously. I’ve teetered on the brink many times. Therefore, I strongly advise either maintaining an arrangement with your pre-op therapist or establishing another post-op, at least for a year afterward.

The most difficult thing I realized when I started afresh was I felt fresh and new, in more ways than I imagined; but it’s tricky because I didn’t start from the beginning of anything at all. For example, you don’t know when you take on something like cellular regeneration that much of life depends upon, and is shaped by, the people around you at the time. When you do it all over, the memories of people you had those first-life experiences with become even more distant—almost as if your old friends have died—especially if those friends were present only for a certain time in your life. You may mourn for them when you feel nostalgic, but they are gone. This part of your life is finished as well. At times, this can become confusing and also make you feel quite sad. Old memories and the people in them fade. As a result, a kind-of reshaping of yourself occurs which you may not have expected or wanted, and which will taint you later. There are gradients in the newness. Even the pristine first is tinted by a tiny fleck of what came before.