"Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. Now when He saw that He did not prevail against him, He touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him. And He said, 'Let Me go, for the day breaks.' But he said, 'I will not let You go unless You bless me!' So He said to him, 'What is your name?' He said, 'Jacob.' And He said, 'Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.'"
— Genesis 32:24-28, KJV
Rose disembarked the coach at the foot of the mountain. She hadn’t learned much about this place beforehand, not like it mattered much. She was on New Tokyo, of course, but the place felt further away from Sirius than anything that she had experienced before. The people who lived here, in the rural prefectures, had very little to do with the rest of Sirius. She wondered how many of them had ever set foot on board of a spaceship and if even a single one had left their House. The green parts of the capital world of Kusari — sparse, as the oceanic world lacked habitable land — was mesmerizingly detached from the day-to-day of the rest of the universe. Away from the wars, politics and brigandage, it lay secluded in the shadow of New Tokyo’s “tower cities,” serving as a valuable point of retreat for aristocrats of the Empire.
Consequently, she noticed, there was little wilderness in this park. The branches were pruned, the old leaves were swept, the flowers were composed in beautiful arrangements and the cobblestone of the path leading up the mountain upon closer inspection revealed signs of skilful masonry. Everything touched up to make up a façade of natural beauty.
She knelt to tie her shoes and adjusted the straps of her backpack, then started making her way up the mountain, its name a forgettable string of Japanese characters and syllables that she had not bothered to remember. A Christmas break in a pleasant place — although something in the back of her head told her that it would not be as pleasant.
Once her mind was off the stock charts and balance sheets, the memories started flowing. She remembered that it had been the same for Haze, substituting scheming and survival plans for finance, not like either of them ever had much time for it.
She reminisced about Haze. At that point, it had been over three months since her death. She mourned and grieved over the death of her dear friend, purposefully staying oblivious to the fact that the friend was actually herself.
While all humans want to believe themselves to be good, honest and ethical beings, few actually manage, and those that do are typically worse off for it. Those that did genuinely believe and act in such fashion had been invaded, enslaved and eradicated aeons ago, in the ancient eras of the ancient Earth. But it was not just that humans evolved to lie, they evolved to lie to themselves, because there is no better liar than one who believes her own deceptions.
To survive, she had to deceive herself. It was not just enough to remember — she had to believe, to clearly separate the identity of Mel Rose from the identity of Jennifer Haze, with a clean, cold cut of the scalpel of focused will. The process wasn't nearly as difficult as she had thought. It was almost as if she had done it before.
First John Wellington, now Jennifer Haze. There was something strikingly similar about these two people. It was difficult to pin down, especially because Haze hadn’t told her much about him, she probably hadn’t remembered him well herself. So the memories were faded, doubly so. For Rose, because she tried to avoid thinking about it, and for Haze because of some kind of mental blockade that she could never overcome.
She walked past a sign post. Each wooden arrow was labelled with a different set of Japanese characters. She understood nothing of it. She looked back downhill. She thought she saw Haze. Her purple eyes and a black hood. What she had been doing here — Rose had no idea. She blinked reflexively. The figure had disappeared.
By coming to the mountains she intended to get away from it all, meditate and empty her head, but it had been becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible. The two spectres haunted her even here, even though Rose was absolutely certain that neither John Wellington nor Haze had ever been here. But to omit them now would be to run from something that should not be run from.
She tried to piece together a story that she heard from Haze about Wellington. About who he had been as an individual.
It was obvious from the early lives of the both of them that he was extremely intelligent, capable of cold and logical analysis in almost every circumstance and very systematic. But to say he acted and thought like a machine was to misunderstand the nature of his thought and behaviour. It was not coordinated and orderly, like clockwork, but rather focused, like a laser beam. A single point of light of such energy and in such concentration that it could be shot through the void, across Sirius and back, and still felt. He had the misfortune of being born into minor Bretonian bourgeoisie, though, where his wit had been more of a liability than an asset.
For his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There was no record of him having any close friends — except one Anne Ashgrove, a childhood friend and partner in mischief, the woman who would later assume the nom de guerre of Jennifer Haze. But, as Haze had said, even in her presence he felt completely alone. Other people around them felt rejected, and Wellington’s disdain for others would rub off on Haze just by association with the odd prodigy. But their dislike wasn’t important to either of them.
No one really knew him. That was evidently the way he wanted it, and that was the way it was. Perhaps his solitude was the result of his intelligence, perhaps it had been the cause. But they had always been together — creating a kind of solitary brilliance.
That was much unlike Haze in her childhood. The pair complimented each other perfectly, as Haze was hot and emotional. In pursuit of their goals she was a fanatic hunter with unrivalled tenacity. It was only years later that she managed to reforge this passion into a kind of controlled, slow burning drive.
Rose’s next step slipped on a piece of cobblestone. She paused her climb, and crouched. The first dent in the otherwise perfect landscape, a single stone that was set unevenly in the mortar and wobbled as she poked it with her foot. It was, in its own way, beautiful, precisely because it stood out. It would not have been if everything else wasn’t so perfect.
She knew that both Haze and Wellington had spent time in prison, but her idea of why the pair had ended up there was faint. It had something to do with an attempted murder but it was not clear what had specifically led up to it.
The general reason, though, was known to her. Wellington progressed through education and, finding himself having to cope with the daily stress of an heir to a substantial estate, ended up developing a distinct flavour of mental illness. Indeed, it seemed that it was his dedication to reason and logic that led to his insanity. He grew up insulated from most of society, having been instead left to his own devices and the mental map that he constructed for himself, and upon his first encounter with the outside world he found himself unable to reconcile the two. Unable to find flaws in the model he had developed, he rejected society.
His argument was internally consistent and fortified with years of analysis by an exceptional mind. Drawing from the empirical school of thought he found it obvious that everything he had known, he had known in terms of its properties. The irrefutable truth seemed to suggest that the only things that could be known about the material world were the shapes, sizes, temperatures, and colours of objects, all measurable with senses and instruments. The qualities that he had to work with outside the classroom and the laboratory were completely different than what he had observed. He had known himself to be a pretty sharp logician and dialectician, and in terms of material qualities of objects and the propositions that could be analytically derived from them he was on solid ground.
However, having ventured out outside the world of analytical inquiry, during his first encounter with the typical rhetoric of Bretonian nobility, he was forced to contend with qualities such as “excellence,” “goodness,” or “worth.” These weren’t the physical properties of objects and people that he had been accustomed to, and they weren’t measurable. He was thrown off by the ambiguity. Initially he thought that these words were just synonyms of “correct,” much like in the lab, but his experience contradicted it. He asked them — aren’t these qualities just what one likes? None of the answers given were satisfactory to him.
That stumped him. It was angering, most of all because he could not see any immediate way to cut it up logically. He studied this premise carefully, in the same reflective way he had studied the physical objects of the world. But all for naught.
Eventually, with his analytical laser he cut out one word out of that statement: “just.” Why should excellence not be “just” what one liked? Why should “what one liked” be “just”? What did “just” mean in that case? It became apparent that “just” in that case meant nothing — it was a purely pejorative term that he had inserted there. Now with that word removed, the sentence became “excellence, goodness, worth is what one likes,” and its meaning changed entirely. In a way, it became an innocuous truism, but to him it meant everything.
He had told all of this to Haze, and she’d agreed. That was where her story started to lose focus. She remembered they had got involved in the Bretonian anarchist underground, and Wellington, with his sharp rhetoric and ironclad logic had quickly gained notoriety and respect. First, it was innocuous, with some loose ties to the Gaians, then, a bit more serious. Due to his rejection of society he flaunted the laws and conventions with prejudice, and thanks to his old money background, they both managed to avoid more serious repercussions. Eventually, though, it got out of hand and his family reputation wasn’t enough to save them from his more serious ideas and actions. The pair ended up in jail.
The trees that had surrounded her before suddenly ended and the path led her to a large clearing. A flock of blackbirds flew up from the grass and disappeared somewhere in the valley. She paused for a moment in the sun, then looked around, hoping to find a place to sit down and rest for a bit.
Haze’s account of her relationship to Wellington was otherworldly. Everything that she had remembered was reconstructed and inferred, post hoc, from scraps of individual memories, after she had left the prison. Not even scraps — faint scents, traces. All of the people involved had already either died, or would never entertain the thought of meeting face-to-face with an anarchist might-have-been murderer. She’d been on her own.
One Christmas Day, the prison guards left them a few bottles of poor Bretonian gin. The party went for a few hours, they all — Haze, Wellington, and three other female inmates — talked late into the night, sang and stayed up almost until daybreak. Having drunk way too much, Haze decided to lie down for a while.
When she awoke, she realised that she had slept the whole day through. She realised she didn’t remember the names of the other inmates, and wondered what kind of embarrassment that was going to lead to. The room didn’t look like the cell she had lain down in.
She got up and saw that her clothes were changed. These were not the prison clothes that she wore the night before. She walked out the door and into a corridor, which to her surprise was not lined with other cell doors but what looked like offices or rooms. The people there did not wear inmate jumpsuits or guard uniforms but lab coats and scrubs. As she walked down the corridor, she got the impression that everyone was looking at her. Two different times strangers stopped her and asked how she felt. Thinking that they were referring to her drunken condition, she replied that she didn’t even have a hangover, which led one of the strangers to laugh.
Eventually she reached the end of the corridor. She went through the door and walked into a waiting room of sorts. Everyone looked at her as she entered. Here the lab coat-wearers constituted a minority, the rest of the people in what she would more associate with regular office attire. She walked up to a window and one of the clerks, and asked about the first thing that came to her mind, which was the whereabouts of John Wellington. The clerk had no idea what she was talking about.
Eventually a man dressed in white approached her and asked her if she knew his name. She denied. They sat down together. She said the place looked like a hospital. He agreed. She asked how she had got there, thinking about the drunken party. The man said nothing and looked down. After a pause, he informed her that she was now free and could walk out any time she liked. The man stayed with her for the next ten minutes while she was silent.
It took her the ten minutes to deduce that everything from before the drunken Christmas party in a jail cell was a dream, and everything afterwards reality. The man had placed a slip of paper on her lap from the court certifying admission of some person into the facility as insane. The name of the person was scribbled out.
He finally explained to her that she had a “new personality now.” That statement had been no explanation at all — after all Haze was not aware of any “old personality.” She thought they had made a mistake. She was still the same pile of bones and flesh, the same collection of legal statistics, the same name and insurance number. The bones and flesh, legal statistics, name and number are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
That was her first inkling of the existence of John Wellington.
A jolt of electricity went through Rose. She had fallen asleep on the rock that she sat on. Now she was awake. The same jolt that used to wake up Haze. It seemed that she could not lie her way out of some things. And now Rose understood what Haze could not for all these years. It took detachment. Haze had looked back, but too far back. What had actually happened, happened when she could not know it. Haze hadn’t known what name was written on the slip of paper. Rose was certain.
John Wellington was dead. Destroyed by the order of the court, enforced by the transmission of 120 volts of alternating current through the lobes of the brain, resulting in approximately 800 milliamperes, thirty-seven times, at durations between 100 milliseconds to 6 seconds. A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace. She had never met him. Never would.
He and Haze had been one, and his lost personality later influenced hers, two souls stuck in one person. The court had thought that the eradication of one would be enough to make the other a productive member of society, but not knowing how to do it, it employed the most barbaric means possible — electroconvulsive therapy, which hadn’t been used for ages. She could only wonder how much of a threat Haze had posed.
Having left prison, Haze had been like a child, lost in the world. The moral framework that Wellington had built on the grounds of extreme empiricism died with him, and while it almost certainly subconsciously influenced her thinking and process of discovery, it remained inaccessible directly. In the twenty-five-year hindsight, though, it was obvious that whenever Haze attempted to reconcile the words “excellence, worth, good,” with what she saw with her eyes, the demon of Wellington spoke to her, rejecting the arbitrarity of these words and making her seek tangible, measurable qualities.
She took up various jobs, under her old family name, spending longest as an escort to Bowex transports hauling ores and supplies through the Taus. She practised her skill as a pilot and quickly proved herself as an effective fighter. That was surprising especially because she eschewed the leased Bretonian fighters in favour of the rugged CTE and Border Worlds ships, and she worked on them on her own, fine tuning everything, down to the tiniest screw, to achieve the best results.
During her training at Bowex she slowly started to approach a definition of excellence that did not cause Wellington’s spirit to unconsciously throw her off. She perfected her skill as a pilot and measured her results, eventually reaching the absolutely highest ranks on the simulators. That, to her, started to approximate excellence.
The mountain’s summit was in sight. Rose took a few deep breaths and started to run uphill.
What turned the Bowex escort pilot Anne Ashgrove into the fearsome assassin Jennifer Haze was not entirely clear. Rose supposed it was a combination of a few things — the beginning of the Gallic war and the realisation that with an increase in her skill did not come an increase in credits. A shift in her thinking occurred — the simulator ranks were not a good measure of excellence anymore for the spirit of Wellington and she instead began to value credits more. Fundamentally, her pursuit of excellence became a pursuit of credits, as a measurable metric. The yearning for knowledge was replaced by greed, and the radiance reflected off gold coins became her guiding light.
The memories of the Christmas drunkenness in Pendleton never let her go, though, and she refused to take any kind of psychoactive drugs from then on. Even upon her enlistment in the ranks of the Lane Hacker Assassins, she managed to evade the mandatory Cardamine initiation.
Rose wondered why Haze had never become a Rogue, or a pirate in general. Perhaps because she respected these poor transport pilots, of the same kind she defended while at Bowex, who earned their meagre salaries hoping for a peaceful return home. They were, for her, out of the game. She shot those who signed up for it: soldiers, policemen, mercenaries, bounty hunters. Her bounty slips became a measure of excellence. She had finally found her worth. The ones whom she killed died heroically, in circumstances they had signed up for. In her mind, everything about that was as it should be.
Catching her breath Rose leaned against the obelisk on top of the mountain. She looked down into the valley and a river below. Haze was dead, indeed, but that kind of death meant there was something her consciousness had planned. Rose might have vanquished Wellington for good, but that was merely an exchange of one devil for another.
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