Forever and Eva

If walls could talk, and I can, you would probably beg me to shut up already. I would tell you about the marvelous Eva. The last time I saw Eva Theophilus, she hugged me and whispered, “Keep my secrets safe. Conceal and reveal. Reveal and conceal. We can’t let them know.” Even though Eva had done unspeakable things to walls by filling every spare inch with random writing and photographs, we still loved her. She recognized that we were sentient, and we were her dearest friends. We admired her too. At one time, she had been quite brilliant. Her madness had allowed her dare to do the impossible, and her brilliance accomplished it.

“They are going to take me away, but you are my memory.” She said surveying her work. “When I come back, I won’t know who I am, so you must help me remember. The fate of the world depends on us.” Not so oddly enough, they did come to take her away. Eva slit her wrists, rather than be taken lest she reveal her secrets.

The scientific community preserved the house. Researchers used to come in to study the walls trying to decipher these messages. They were pretty much convinced it was rubbish but not sure enough to destroy it. They kept it as an homage to a woman who had changed the world in her prime. So, I suppose she saved our lives as well.

Then sixty years later, to our great shock, she returned. She was as beautiful as in her youth. It was Anastasia Theophilus, though, not Eva. Dr. Anthony Roncalli of the bioengineering unit brought her to the house. “There is something you really need to see.” He spoke. “You must be a related as you are a dead ringer for Eva.”

“Sweet, beautiful mind, this is insane.” She muttered as she looked around. When she checked out the photographs, her jaw dropped. “You weren’t kidding, these photos could be of me.”

Dr. Roncalli asked her if she would like to study the walls. “You might be able to unravel the mysteries that have stumped us for decades. At a minimum, you should find out some of your family history. I’ll answer what questions that I can.”

“I’m both terrified and fascinated at the same time.” She touched the walls and said, “Okay walls, it is time to reveal what is concealed.” An electric shock passed from me to her. She laughed and said, “I must have built up some static electricity!”.

“Oh, look there is a Disney cel from the Lion King. It is where Simba is seeing Mufasa in the clouds. “Remember who you are," she said in a deep voice with beautiful laugh. We were silently willing her to keep looking. Eva was back and just like she said, she didn’t know who she was. The solemn charge she had laid on them to help her remember was about to be discharged.

“I’ll start with the photos; it looks like some are missing. I see the pinholes but not the photo. I see one of her standing by a grave. The one string takes me to a bathroom, another string goes a razor and the last string goes to a saying, I will not fear the graveyard of my loved ones, for their souls will rise up to defend me. The tombstone is inscribed Anastasia Theophilus.” She cupped her hand over her mouth and took a deep breath. “This is getting weird, very weird. The woman who looks like me is standing over a grave with my name. The messages says that I’m not supposed to fear it because their souls will defend me. Sorry message, I am officially freaked out.”

Anastasia asked, “Dr. Roncalli, what can you tell me about this? What is the connection between this grave, a bathroom, and a razor. "

He replied, “First, please call me Tony. That was one of the easier parts of the puzzle if you know her history. She was a brilliant student with a very strict father who was intent upon her success. She ended up pregnant, and her father beat her until she lost the little girl. That was when she went mad. She named her Anastasia and cut her with razors to save her blood. She hid the razors in the razor slot found in old houses. I can show it to you in the next room. She wanted to be able to resurrect her from her DNA one day. She pioneered cloning and self-repairing DNA so that people would not have to die of terrible diseases. The world owes her a great debt.”

Anastasia drew a deep breath and leaned against the photo wall, pushing away unwanted questions percolating in up from her subconscious. She stared at the wall covered with letters and numbers in every which way. I responded by putting a slight glow on certain letters so she could start to decode the cypher. The Greek letters scattered over me stood out to her. This time she screamed and said, “The Greek letters say, ‘I am Anastasia and life whoever believes in me will live, even though they die.’”

Dr. Roncalli said, “Calm down, calm down and congratulations you’ve found something new. That makes a certain level of sense. Anastasia means resurrection in Greek. It is a verse from the Bible. John, I believe. That was what Jesus said when he raised Lazarus from the dead. So, the verse is actually 'I am the Resurrection and the Life…' That was what she viewed as her God appointed mission to raise the dead, specifically her daughter. She had a religious bent. "

“Was she ever able to do that?” Anastasia asked afraid of the answer.

“No, but scientists were later able to. She would have been very distressed to realize that the first person, we were able to recreate was her father. His blood has been on some razors. The children were not viable for long, but the medical knowledge gained from these experiments were extraordinary. It led to the cloning that we have now. She also used the existing mRNA technology of the time to target and repair problems even in the womb.”

Anastasia went back shakily to looking at the photo wall once more. There was a picture of Eva with a trophy for chess club. There were three strings, one led to a 3D chess board, another to a missing picture and the last to a tree. There was a saying written that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. She asked, “What is up with the missing pictures?”

Dr. Roncalli said, “The best hypothesis is that they were pictures of her father that she ripped up, but it could have been pictures of the father of her child or anybody or anything. A DNA test on the child’s blood showed that she was of Mediterranean descent with them being of Greek ancestry that is hardly surprising. Eva’s father was mad in his own way, so maybe he was also the father of the child. It would explain the phrase about the nut not falling far from the tree, but it is all speculation.”

This statement struck Anastasia as being untrue. They had the father’s DNA; they easily could have done a paternity test and rule him out. They should have been able to track down the father. She pondered what he could be hiding. Her unease was growing. She said, “I’ve really had enough for today and will probably have months of nightmares as well. I have to be going.”

“Certainly,” said Dr. Roncalli, “but I hope you will come back to work on this. You’ve made excellent progress. Eva had said before she died that the fate of the world depended on these walls. It was probably her madness but just in case. I’d like to know.” We, the walls, echoed his sentiment if she could only hear us.

The spark that I shared with Anastasia would continue to enlighten her until we could begin to share thoughts like I had with Eva. That night Anastasia dreamed not of souls in graveyards but of 3D chess. She woke up with a start. She was immediately hit with a sickening feeling. She would have to go back to that room and interact with Dr. Roncalli. He had done well by taking down his pictures from that wall, but I would make sure she learned the truth. Already she was uneasy around him.

When Anastasia re-entered the room. Dr. Roncalli was all smiles and welcomed her with open arms. “I was afraid that you were too unsettled to ever set foot in here again. Instead you come back with fresh ideas on how to crack this room. Welcome, welcome.”

Anastasia replied. “I was very unsettled and never wanted to come back, but I had this dream and I want to test it out. In my dream, the 3D chess boards came apart and placed themselves on each of the writing walls. The walls are a grid. I need to look at each section of that grid. I’ll start with that wall over there. It is almost like we have connection. It speaks to me,” she laughed.

Using removable markers, she sectioned off each square being careful not to disturb anything. She was much more considerate than Eva who did this monstrosity. But I will always love Eva for giving us the ability to speak, with the vast array of letters and numbers of various languages. I can speak whatever I please by highlighting them to a perceptive mind. We often speak to each other as well.

Anastasia asked Dr. Roncalli if c7 c6 meant anything to him. He responded, “If this is chess board than means the white pawn on c7 moves to c6. I take it you are not serious chess player, or you would know this. Write down as many of these notations as you see. How can you pick out those particular letters and numbers out of all of this mess?”

“I honestly can’t tell you. They seem to stand out somehow at least in my mind. It’s like the wall is talking to me.” Anastasia responded. He stared at her intently and not kindly. She dutifully wrote down the chess notations off the walls and handed it to Dr. Roncalli.

Dr. Roncalli blushed to his roots and said, “I remember this game like it was yesterday. Eva seduced my mind and then I seduced her body. We never finished that game. It looks like Eva finished it on the walls.”

Anastasia’s mouth dropped. “How old are you? This woman died sixty years ago, and you don’t look a day over 30.”

Dr. Roncalli laughed. “You got me Eva. Well played, well played! The answer is tricky. It depends on what part of me that you are talking about. My consciousness is 145 years old. My latest clone is 32. I uploaded my consciousness into a vast network with other intellectuals of the time. The human race was failing to reproduce so we developed clones so that the best of us could continue to live. Hopefully we would be able to solve the worlds problems and restore life as it was.”

“Were you Anastasia’s father? Am I Anastasia?” she asked in a horrified voice.

“Yes and no. I am Anastasia’s father, but I would never want to reproduce her,” he said vehemently. "She was defective. Like her mother she held genetic traits for autism. When the testing came back, I begged her to abort the girl, but she refused. How could I, a genetic biologist, have a defective daughter? I’m not proud of this but I beat her until she miscarried. She scrambled to save some of her blood but I made sure every child died.”

Anastasia was a puddle of tears. “Then it wasn’t her father, it was you.”

“Her father,” he scoffed, “was a religious nut who kept telling her about the sacredness of life. He didn’t like me at all. He thought my views on perfecting humanity and removing defects and defectives was inhumane. I made sure his clone died too.”

“Who am I? Am I a clone of Eva? If I am why don’t I remember anything?”

“You are a clone of her body only. On the day, I was coming to take Eva to get her consciousness uploaded. She killed herself. All of her I could save was some of her blood. I tried several times to upload my consciousness into her clone but the room would shock them every time and they would die. So I decided to use the last of her blood to try to trick the room into believing it was really Eva and give up its secrets. You have no idea how happy I was when you were shocked and lived. Eva is not going to best me this time,” he said bitterly. “That stupid wall has killed me several times, but I am immortal as long as my consciousness survives," he raged at me. "There is always another body to enter.”

I spelled out for Anastasia to trust me. She nodded her head in a dazed fashion. “I’m not Eva,” she said hoping that his anger towards Eva might not spill out onto her. “I don’t know chess.” She said stupidly.

“No, you are not but you have given me the code to crack into Eva’s secret computer files.” He started entering in the chess game into the hard drive of her old computer. He had managed to create an interface for it with the new modern global electronic cloud as the old technology was long obsolete. As he entered different things started to happen. At one point a door opened up in the picture wall. “That must be her lab.” He looked down and said, “it’s a secret stair to the basement.”

I spelled out that “You must finish the game. Your life depends upon it. Do not go down there yet.”

“Don’t you think we should finish the game first?” said Anastasia. “It might be boobytrapped or other things might need to be turned on.”

“Good thinking, but I’ll make sure you go first.” As he entered each chess move something else would happen including the basement area lighting up. On the second to last move a video of Eva played.

“Hello Tony and I guess 'me'. Death is good thing and all things need to die to let new life takeover. Tony, when I first met you, I loved you and you swept me off my feet. After you killed my daughter, I was afraid of the ruthlessness I saw in your heart. Your hatred of imperfection was its own gross imperfection. How many imperfects died as you experimented upon them to 'correct' them? You and your fellow scientists planned to manipulate fertility levels so that people would be forced to come to your cloning labs for perfect children. But it would be their clones or even your clones that they would bear with your consciousness imbedded in them. You are the epitome of perfect. Right?

“Dear 'me', I hope you are named Anastasia after my daughter,” she said as tears spilled down her cheeks. “I deliberately chose to lay down my life, so that you might have your own life with your own consciousness. I don’t need to live forever in this world. I am not afraid of the graveyard of my friends. Their souls will rise to greet me and hopefully defend you. Do not fear death, fear the judgment of your life.”

I flashed to Anastasia to finish the game quickly. She started typing feverishly, Qxh7 and then he grabbed her and threw her down the stairs and I slammed the door behind her blocking his path. Tony spun around just in time to see the ceiling dropped a crumb of plaster on the #. “Checkmate Tony!” The global cloud started collapsing. Tony’s connection to his consciousness was severed as with all his compatriots’ clones. I then gave him the shock of his life. “No new clones for you! You’ll stay dead this time. "

When Anastasia came to, she saw a cel from Disney’s Pinocchio where the Blue Fairy made him a real boy. There was also a room with emergency rations and water for 40 days. I would protect her until the world settled out. Our bond was already strong enough that we could communicate through thought. I tried to teach her everything she would need to know. At the end, I would sever our connection because Eva was right. She needed to live her own life.

Up above after a brief struggle, the clones of the “perfects” died as they had no minds of their own. The clones whose consciousness was overruled by the cloud began to think for themselves. The true humans in hiding came out. After 40 days, I opened a door that led to whole new old world.