Revenance Furlough
You're nervous every time you do this and you never really acknowledge the reason why.
It's the same every year.
At the beginning of October, you remember the date is getting closer, and at first, you’re excited to remember. Then…Each. Day. Passes. And there’s a lurking anxiety. A dread that builds day after day like bricks being laid to build a wall…
And it’s a wall you don’t think you’ll be able to climb over. Not again. Not this year. It just hurts too much to do it and every year it hurts just a little more because you know it isn't forever but you convince yourself it's worth it because it’s real. It’s really Jaxel…but deep down, you know it really isn’t.
Everyone waiting for a meeting on Revenant Eve knows deep down that the Husk delivered to the meeting site, wherever that may be, is not the person they’ve lost…but you wonder whether or not you believe that you actually believe that.
Jaxel may be gone, but the download…the download is Jaxel.
So even though it isn’t him…
Isn’t it him?
They copied everything. Everything.
There hasn’t been a single Furlough Night in so many years of doing this that you’ve noticed any part of him that should’ve been there and it just wasn’t.
It knows everything he knew. It remembers you. It remembers how you met. It remembers everything, year after year. It even remembers this barn. It remembers your wedding here.
No Zayan! Stop doing that. Not ‘it.’
He.
It’s Jaxel. You've done this ten times now, and ten times he's come back whole. Not once has there been a gap in his memory or other hole where some piece of him should've been. It’s entirely Jaxel. Every part.
Sort of.
You look down at the pamphlet you've been nervously twisting in your hands. It's the same pamphlet they give you every year. Sometimes there are small design changes but this one looks like the same one that they gave you 365 days ago although you notice they may have changed the heading typeface.
The appearance of the document itself may have changed slightly but the words printed on it haven't changed. Not even once in a decade.
REVENANCE FURLOUGH
Limitations, Fidelity, Inquiries & Answers
This is printed big and bold near the top and you think about the first time this pamphlet was handed to you when you visited the Neural Archivation Bureau for the first time as a bereaved spouse. A widower. The amount of visits you'd made to this building before this initial furlough requisition were one visit short of a dozen. Your eyes glaze over looking at the pamphlet. Remembering that day. Your first visit in almost six years of visits and this was the first time the man at the front hadn't directed you to the elevators but instead through a set of double doors on the first floor.
That seemed so strange to you that day to have visited this building almost twelve times and never once had you been directed anywhere but the elevators.
The first-floor waiting room was bright and white, lit overhead by long rows of LED tubes that washed everything in an artificial daylight so cold the entire room seemed faintly blue. Between the lights overhead and the relentless air conditioning pouring from the ceiling vents, the place felt less like an office than somewhere designed to refrigerate grief. Everything was spaced with mathematical precision. Exactly where it belonged, and it induced an irrational level of irritation that vibrated like an itch lurking beneath the layers of your skin for reasons you couldn't immediately explain.
The chairs sat in perfect rows. Those rows somehow
The ceiling and its patterned exactitude. There was so much about the room to hate but this alignment, this pattern of blinding artificial light tube, ventilation grid pumping its sustained icy breath, light tube, ventilation grid, light tube…on and on and on it went. This, without knowing the exact reasoning behind it, you realized was the aspect of the room you hated most of all.
Pristinely clean. Dust free. Nauseating, meticulous spacing. Instinctually you decided it wasn't measured and built in this supreme, faultless way by a talented, abundantly skilled craftsman over days and days.
No.
Packaged. Shipped. Unboxed. Snapped perfectly together and with fit into place overhead with minimal effort in mere minutes.
You found it nauseating in only the way that things built by conveyor assemblies of machine after machine were nauseating.
A sickness in your stomach, but instead of the urge to vomit, the only thing you found inside was a fist-sized rock of solid ice; pressurized, compressed and hazy. Gray with impurity.
The whole entire room filled with row upon row of chairs, so many of them, nearly all of them filled. Dotted here and there, a few empty seats, but you didn't look for a place to sit. Instead staring at the ceiling with something that felt like a massive rock knotting your stomach; a frigid solid fist of ice cast away from the tail of a comet hurtling inevitably, willingly from the depths of space and into the oblivion of the sun.
You recall an automaton, vaguely humanoid, statuesque and yet it moved. It stood at the end of a scansion leading you into the frozen room. As you approached it, perching on it's frail too-thin-to-keep-it-upright legs, it bowed and handed you a small frame of black plastic encapsulating a tiny screen that you remember with every movement of your fingers, even the involuntary ones, flickered and shuddered as though the number the screen displayed could potentially flicker out completely at any moment and if it did, it was going to happen only because you moved and that movement was wrong. It was wrong and the numbers on the screen would disappear at any moment whether you meant to move your fingers or you fidgeted unintentionally.
In either case, the fault would be entirely yours and you would lose your place in line and you'd have to return to the robot that still had not fallen this way or that with imbalance on its inexplicable toothpick legs to rejoin the queue.
out each time you moved you towards and bright sunglassessomehow violently bright and yet somehow the brilliance of the excessively overhead was casting single
arctic
when you sat in this barn nervously waiting for a conversation that you had been anticipating for the last 364 days since you had it last.
Jaxel has stopped meeting your eyes. He's starting instead at the barn owl that has just flown in through the open shutters of the loft. You can't help but gasp. It's just as big as he said. It must have a wingspan of 75 or 80 inches. Neither of you has ever seen an owl this size. Of that you're certain without even asking him the question. It might be that no one has. An owl this size could eat bobcats.
"Jaxel?" Your voice sounds distant and fearful but you don't know why and Jaxel doesn't look down from the massive bird in the loft.
You wonder if he's heard you at all and you're about to say his name again when his eyes lock with yours and he speaks to you but his voice is so low the whisper sounds like a rustling in the hay.
You think he says: 'I got karma to collect. I dig my grave."
"What's that?" You ask.
His grave was dug a decade ago. Everything about that. Who he is. What he is. He's supposed to remember.
He looks back up at the bird in the loft and you look down at the pamphlet from the Authoritas Uniterra. It's colorful and somehow sterile all at once. In small print, but bold and red so it stands out but without giving the printed words an undue call for alarm, the government phamplet outlining the evening of Revenant Furlough reads: "Repetitious Revival Exceeding A Decade Is Strongly Discouraged."
The this pamphlet reads: "Revenants Recalled Further Typically Experience Marked Memory Degredation. This is Particularly Noted In Those Recalled In Excess of Thirteen Instances."
Every word in the sentences you read begins with a capital letter. It feels emphasized but the print is small enough you'd quickly glanced over it as though it weren't there without a second thought before now.
Jaxel still stares at the massive animal in the rafters as the wind outside begins to rise, howling like a wounded animal.
The wall behind the two of you flexes and the flex is audible enough that you look away for a moment. Just one fleeting moment. You watch as a support beam breaks away, falling over onto a crate in the opposite corner of the room from where you and Jaxel sit.
The crate bursts from the impact and a lone rat runs directionless from the kindling that remains. And then another. And then another.
You think that Jaxel mumbled something about a dozen before.
You only count seven.
The owl's eyes dart from one to the next.
Jaxel's eyes dart from a rat fleeing left. Up to the owl's eyes in its spinning head above in the loft. Down to one headed off to the right.
Jaxel says: "I'm here waiting."
"Waiting for what my love?" You ask. You wonder, morbidly if he waits for the remainder of the rats he mentioned earlier.
"...for some kind of check." You think he says, but that can't be what he's said. That doesn't make sense.
The owl spreads its impressive wingspan quietly. Slowly.
"Terminal continuity event imminent. Failsafe seven engaged. Directum Primus."
