Anamnesis, Zorina Alliata [the dot read aloud TXT] 📗

ANAMNESIS

Zorina Alliata


Anamnesis
Copyright © 2009 Zorina Alliata
Publisher: Better Karma Publishing
www.BetterKarmaPublishing.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
ISBN 978-0-9824329-0-7


CANTO I


At 3:00 PM on Friday, the NASDAQ fell shamelessly to its lowest level in years. For no visible reason at all, it just lost hope and let itself down like a tired old woman who could not pretend she's forty anymore. The Dow immediately followed it downward like a hopeless lover. Everyone on CNN could catch a glimpse of the ugly, sagging, depleted reality that had crept out in the open. A deep-felt, hurtful sigh rose from Times Square and spread all the way to Gaithersburg, MD where it reached Dante's cubicle just as he was fiddling with his fingers.

Dante, who had been following the markets every minute of the day not out of interest but rather out of excruciating boredom, stood still and observed the moment. Somewhere in the dark labyrinth of cubicles and cabinets on the second floor, there was a record of his retirement fund; just as of 3:00PM on Friday, it had fallen to about $0.70 in value. By all and any standards, his financial future did not look too bright. And yet, Dante could not find it in himself to give a damn.

He had been working for the Company for what felt like about three hundred years now. An international and, who knows, maybe interplanetary conglomerate, the Company had no physical products to sell; instead, it was selling concepts, abstracts, paradigms, clichés, the Glass Bead Game series, various responses to life's challenges, and even en-gross singular, disparate thoughts on given themes. Some of the cheaper products came free with a bottle of Red Romance wine.

Dante was employed in the Non-Negations wing of the Company. His department was created to contribute to the Future, by the way of the Improbable and the Impossible - the names of its two main divisions. A natural-born computer geek and proud of it, Dante was toiling in the lowest ranks of the Improbable; his dream, modest like his ambition, was to be promoted to the Impossible.

In the realm of the Improbable, "working" was a relative term. Dante's work was insignificant and, most of the times, useless. If sometimes he actually wrote one line of code, there were several layers of configuration managers, testing managers, integration managers, business managers, lawyers, presidents and kings, who immediately took ownership of that line of code; corrected it; documented it; saved it in several secret databases; tracked it; labeled it; had long meetings about it; and most of the times decided it harms at least some subset of the Company's interests. Even when his work was hesitantly allowed go to the next, Probable level, by that time it was weak, dry-cleaned, castrated, stripped of any trace of innovation, creativity or quirkiness that might have shown that it originated specifically in Dante's brain.

He was feeling particularly numb that Friday. It had been an uneventful week in an uneventful month in an uneventful year in an uneventful lifetime. He would have called in sick, but his boss was onto him; Dante had taken all the possible sick days, personal days and floating vacation days he could take the whole year, and it was barely April. His boss, too afraid of people to provoke an open discussion about it, had sent him a memo stating the company policies regarding "abuse" of the company-paid free time. Dante did not want to lose his job. He didn't think that anyone else would have hired him.

Even the Company Eye corporate software had some sort of hardware hiccups and had been taken off-line for maintenance. Most days, Dante would at least take some guilty pleasure in over-using or straight hacking into the Company Eye; it was a monitoring program for employees and it sometimes offered some lame fun, exposing co-workers and their pathetic hobbies, passions or emotions. It also provided him with some kind of big-picture view of the Company's intrinsic structure, otherwise as hard to figure out as life itself. One time, for example, he had found out that the Extreme Genius and the Extreme Idiot departments had the same phone number and email address.

In the pile of deceptive norms, procedures, color codes and explanatory notes that the Company administrative machine was requiring lately, the Company Eye was a raw, honest program. It was meant to look you in the eye from a corner of your screen, record every keystroke and screen shot you used, and report it to your supervisor. There was no mercy, no exception and no disillusion about its purpose. As much as he hated the idea of being watched, Dante at least appreciated being watched openly.

"This surveillance is worse than communism", Anna had once told him, in that outraged low voice she used to get when talking about the regime she grew up in and hated. But Dante did not really mind the Company Eye. It came with the job, along with his long line of nameless supervisors and other things he could not control. Dante didn't feel he had much to hide anyway; being spied on at least lent him a fake sentiment of some importance and weight.

The sudden drop in the market, still there at 3:30 PM, prompted unusual activity levels on the Company's computers. Just in time, the Company Eye popped back up on the screen, fresh from having been repaired. It coldly recorded employees as they were scrambling to sell stock on E-Trade and contact their brokers. The email volume grew 400% and the work volume, lingering around 1% all week, hit a clean 0.

Dante stretched his legs under the uncomfortable desk. He gave some thought to another trip to the kitchen for yet another cup of coffee, but his backside had found quite a convenient position in the chair and it didn't feel like moving. Besides, since his former cubicle-mate Eric had left, Dante was trying to take his good advice and drink less coffee in the afternoons.

Not that he had nothing to do; in the last two months, after the new management took over the Company, the paperwork had increased ten times. He had to fill out reports every hour and send them to his supervisor, detailing exactly what he did since the last one. He had to fill out paper forms and then enter the same data manually into the electronic time sheet on his computer. He had to color-code a long, confusing Excel sheet he never quite understood. He had to sign his name on the Department sheet, the Company sheet, the Management sheet and the Engineering sheet. He had to take responsibilities for things he had never heard of, but which were mysteriously appearing as tasks assigned to him only to disappear in the next few minutes. There was no cheating possible either; his supervisor would immediately email him if he didn’t complete one of his Improbable duties.

At 4:00 PM, another memo from the senior management arrived with a crystalline sound in his Inbox. Since the new CEO had taken over, they were sending several urgent memos a day, mostly about the importance of saving 1 cent a minute by using a certain conference call option; about the absolute ban on Company-sponsored lunches during long meetings; about the strong reinforcement of a specific provision in the Company’s Code of Conduct – such as wearing see-through blouses at work; detailing with sadistic pleasure the punishments a bad worker had received; announcing at great lengths who got fired that day.

In the last few days, all the memos had been about the upcoming shareholders meeting, the first one the Company was to hold since it had started the process of becoming a public firm. The executives were all very excited about the soon-to-be IPO offering and Dante could understand why – they were all going to make millions of dollars in stock. With a sigh, Dante opened the email.

“Dear Shareholders”, it started. So now they’re calling us all shareholders, thought Dante with a sarcastic smile. It must be their way of getting the employees working even harder, in the hope that the IPO of the company will bring them a few shares too.

“The Speakers list has been changed by Mr. Rex, Vice-President of Voice and Sound. Please be informed that the following speakers will NOT be able to attend:”, continued the memo.

“Joachimo Bellincione”
“Jason Cacciaguida”
“Christian Portinari- -Guelph”

Dante’s mouth opened large, in shock. He remained in his chair, motionless. He did not know what to think. He was not even sure he was supposed to think. Just as he was trying to find justifications and explanations, Dante also felt a mix of anger and forgotten emotions hitting him like a fist in the gut; hot, cold, awakening and painful at the same time.

Right there, at the bottom of the speakers list, Dante had read his missing father's name.

*-*-*

My family's secret, heavy obsession is longevity. I believe it had started in 1600s, with my great-great-great-great uncle. He was an important man you might read about in today's history books, back home in Romania; he did some good things, and some silly things; he was brave and strong, and yet he couldn't resist a pretty lady's looks.

I am not sure how he began his discoveries; many stories are left untold in my family. We value secrecy and never let strangers see our real nature; we smile and we lie and we don't give answers; family gatherings are sheer displays of our newest conquests of non-truths and neat speech tricks to avoid and deceive. The only thing we give out openly, truthfully, proudly, is our age.

There hasn't been one death in my family since I was born, 33 years ago. Everybody is alive, grandparents, uncles and aunts. They all come together a couple of times a year and we take the same picture of the same smiling crowd. I am the last child born in the family; my parents are still holders of the honors and positions conferred by the miracle of my birth.

Long ago, my great-great-great-great uncle found a way to override Nature's cruel moods and blind strokes; to avoid being the "1 in 3" sick people - to avoid being a bad statistic. He was a passionate mathematician and he knew how to re-arrange the numbers; re-shuffle them to spell reversible paths; re-create and re-born new, strong numbers out of diseased and weak ones. I suspect that this is how he got started, by understanding the numbers; and then, by seeing them in broad day light all around him, controlling and confounding the Nature; and then, by illuminating his way slowly through their patterns, careful, sly, making mistakes and achieving knowledge.

He discovered the 2-2-9 combination when he was 42; a rare, hidden pattern he found in the dense, sudden fogs forming at the foot of the Carpathians. It was one of the few ancient spells left over in our world; very hard to see even with an experienced eye, it only lived in the shadow, in the dust, in the silent wind. Down in the cities, Nature was fighting with people; but there in the woods, in the fog, Nature was tender, timeless and undisturbed; it had a soft core, exposed and vulnerable, and it was willing to listen to a plea.

I don't know how