Shorts
Happy Rebirthday — An Incarnal Short
Happy Rebirthday.
Those are the first words that pierce the fog of my dissipating sleep.
My wife still snores softly beside me, an endearing purr, her body picturesque between our silk sheets and quilt, elegantly posed with just enough unveiled skin to call the tableau a tasteful nude. Everything about her Is perfect, unblemished by time or stress, or responsibility. Three centuries later, I’m still wondering how I ever got lucky enough she consented to be mine.
But today is Rebirthday Eve, the one time of the century we’re supposed to muse about our pasts, and I slept through damn near all of it. Most of us probably did. Nobody leaves their lair on The Quietest Night.
I leave the bed without effort, fully refreshed after the best night’s sleep of my life—the same sleep I’ve had every night for the past two hundred and twelve years. Every night but the two like today’s.
From an engineering standpoint, or maybe just an infrastructural one, Rebirthday resets time in the Incarna. It’s how nothing degrades. Why only spells, the “coding” of it all, are even remotely permanent. It’s how the gliya runs on entropy instead of getting broken down by it.
But to me? To every Incarnal waiting for this day to end, it’s the one time distractions fade, purpose dissolves and our illusions, our delusions, reveal themselves for what they are.
My perfect wife. My perfect life. Memories made flesh.
This isn’t even my Carnalair, just the dreamscape I retreat to when my body isn’t needed. I’ve long come to terms with how I deal with life here. If the CarnIsles are the outside world, and this dreamscape, this virtual world, is my true home then Carnalairs are our vestibules, porches for friends and visitors to lounge in. Even the gliya-constructs that make it my home are only what I want others to see. Everyone has their own private world within. Not a physical place, but a private fantasy where the social mask can drop. The self behind every self.
~
My wife understood that about me back when I was human. For forty years, she never once entered uninvited to the little mancave I built in our shed. She always got me.
Maybe that understanding was why we bonded. She was attractive, upper middle class, and bored. I was probably part of her fantasy—a stand-in Jack Dawson or Aladdin. Her manic pixie dream boy willing to push boundaries, break laws and social mores, and let her do everything a down-to-earth, well-raised daughter of a God-fearing household secretly craved. If her parents had ever found out what we got up to as a couple, they would’ve staged an intervention.
Turns out a lot of women have fantasies society tells them they can’t admit, and I never agree with society for the most part. She wanted someone to give permission to let loose. I took her by the hand and led her straight to her first three way. After that she escalated fast, and I was damn proud to be her’s. We even dated another couple, as a couple, during a mellow phase.
But when she was done, she was done. It was out of her system when she felt that call to settle down. I give her chaos and freedom and blissful hedonism, and in turn she gave me what I never knew I craved. Family. Home. Stability.
Well, we had our kids, and they had theirs, lived a long, full life and all that jazz. She passed a good ten years before my last night, but as I lay there, kids and grandkids already resigned to never seeing me wake again, that’s when I saw the door.
A dim light shimmered in the hallway at midnight. Despite my failing heart and clacking knees, I never could resist satisfying curiosity. Maybe all the reflection I’d done over my wife and our glory days roused enough of the old me—the younger me—to one last adventure.
With the help of a walking stick and a copious range of medications, I toddled out to the hallway and found the portal. An Incarnal portal, looking exactly like any old hospital door. Would’ve fit right in if not for that one part Incarnals never seem to grasp. The damn frame was twice as wide, translucent and full of bubbles shaped into glowing bas-reliefs. Well, that and the door hadn’t been there the day before.
So I did what any centennial on his deathbed would. I didn’t give a fuck and walked right in. And just like then, I did so now.
~
Closing my mind’s eye, I step out of my dreamscape and respawn through the floor, from the floor, the mass of gliya sprouting and molding into my shape.
Like the first time, I’m greeted by the floating sky-lantern parade of bubble worlds, each drifting and dancing around some undefined point in a gently shifting matrix. Only a vague, invisible shape pushes some aside to break the pattern. The Carnalairs sweep aside and roll down the edge of the shape – a turtle? – and return to their original positions as it moves on, an Iconstelloid, a swimming constellation made of the removal of stars, not their participation.
Not that the Carnalairs are really stars. Each is a private island in its own little bubble, both figuratively and literal. And the sole inhabitant of every single one of them is probably doing as I am, too.
Starting at the top, the center of my personal world, I take one final tour. A deliberate walk through it all, knowing the plasmic structures that stood for ninety-nine years are about to melt away.
And me with them.
Sure, I can backup my memories as close to the end as possible. But in that final minute or seconds after I do, the thoughts swirling through the head of this version of me will vanish. I’m going to die and most of me will respawn. But that me won’t know what I was thinking at the end.
I step onto the beach beside the surrounding waters of my island, a swimming pool in all but name, and stand at the edge of my little cliff of contemplation, staring through the evenly spaced worlds before catching the faint reflection of me face in my bubble’s curved inner skin.
My body reflects who I am inside, not the man everyone thought I was. Even my wife never truly knew my inner me. People are so visual, they make judgements on how you appear. We have names for most of the ways human beings can present, but I never stuck with any label other than hedonist. That’s what this body is: vaguely androgynous with a tomboyish face in some ways. I love to move and the strength and speed of my muscles are only outpaced by its flexibility and agility, all aspects that defined me before middle age and a life of work transformed my human body wholly into dad bod. And that was before old age crippled it completely.
But my Incarnal body? It’s me. A body that attracts the kind of eyes in the kind of heads I want to know, who don’t mind I have pecs instead of tits to aid my more adventurous activities. But I’m not trans and I’m not nonbinary. Truth be told, I never gave damn what gender I was. Yes, this Incarnal body of mine has a vagina, but I’m a pansexual hedonist and vaginas have more pleasure nerves than a cock ever could. Besides, who wants just one orgasm?
And it’s not as if Incarnals need to pee.
A mental alarm flashes through my skull, snapping me back to the present before it all melts away.
Ten minutes.
Ten Earth minutes. Damn Incarnals. They’re just cosmic pirates, really, stealing everything mortals dream up. Or at least the spirit of it. Physical matter dissolves here, but a scan? A sculpture? Those can be reconstructed in gliya.
I step away from the edge and mosey over to the hut where I keep an arcade cabinet. One last game to see out the new era and the new me. Maybe I’ll pick a resolution to fail at in the first month. After all, humans live and die by traditions and this is the closest I have in a world that doesn’t die.
It’ll just shift a little in seven and a half minutes.
Seven and half minutes. That decides it. I send a mental command to back up my memories and boot up a game of Shanghai Pocket, a cutesy GameBoy version of mahjong. The goal’s simple: match all the tiles in seven minutes—roughly the length of one of my favorite songs. The me that awakens in a couple of hours won’t know I’ve done this. Hell, maybe it’s what I did the last two times.
As my universe ticks down to its final seconds, maybe I can finish one level. It’s a small victory before I go, not one that matters, but right now not mattering is the point. I choose the Monkey Set and match the tiles, singing along with the song and reaching the third chorus just as I beat the game. The Monkey’s face turns into a starred orb on the level select screen and I whistle that iconic tune:
“Always look on the bright side of death…
Just before you draw your terminal breath…”
The world melts and I go with it, the level select screen fading into white light as the echoes of the song fade to silence.
……
……
Happy Rebirthday.
I’m standing in front of my arcade cabinet, Shanghai Pocket loaded up. Yeah, that’s right. I was gonna play a round, but none of the levels have been played yet. I select the Monkey Set and start matching tiles. I haven’t played it yet, but my fingers already know what to do.