Mixing Your Own Apotheosis
by Brian Hugenbruch
You read through the ingredient’s list one more time, just to be certain. You’re not the sort of person who normally does mise-en-place for cocktails, but this was never just about intoxication. Quite the opposite; this was about revelation. And if you have any care left in your body, now seems like a damn good time to use it.
Ingredients:
- 33 milliliters vodka
While conventional wisdom says you don’t need high-end vodka for something you’re mixing, especially with synaptic nanites, online reviews suggest the burn of bottom-shelf vodka can distract from the act of Becoming.
- 33 milliliters raspberry liqueur
In this case, don’t go for the cheap stuff. The flavor for this part is more important than you’d think.
- One (1) vial of Michael’s Own(tm) Synaptic Nanites, fresh
Michael’s Own(tm) Nanites should be used day of arrival. While refrigeration does help to sustain the nanorobotic components, they’re designed to disintegrate over time. The time for change is now. Don’t wait!
- 33 milliliters lemon-lime soda
Mixer’s choice.
Instructions:
- Combine vodka and nanites in a tumbler with three ice cubes. Shake vigorously for thirty seconds; the nanites are activated by the combination of motion and temperature shift. Shaking also bruises the vodka. The latter isn’t strictly necessary for the recipe, but you take your cocktails like your lifestyle choices: like a punch to the back of the head. That’s also why you’ve opted for the cheapest vodka you could find—change is painful. It’s not salvation if it doesn’t burn on the way down.
- Set down the tumbler. Set a timer for five minutes. Pace nervously. Wonder how you talked yourself into this. Reflect on the tumbler itself—one of the last remaining pieces of glassware from your late parents. They were disappointed in you while they were alive. So far as you know, their opinion hasn’t improved.
- Strain nanite-vodka mixture over the back of a spoon into a glass. Consider your worn, weary reflection in the curve of the spoon: the way the quicksilver glaze hides the bloodshot eyes and the haggard expression. You avoid mirrors for that exact reason. But in a cocktail? Why, you’re someone else when you’re inside one of these! Someone with prospects, and family, and a bank account that has some heft to it. In a cocktail, you can pretend to belong. In a cocktail, you might even be happy.
- Discard the ice cubes. Ignore the fact they’re turning to blood.
- Using the spoon, layer the raspberry liqueur into the glass atop the nanite-vodka mixture. This level of patience and care is often beyond you; but just this once, try not to mess this up, would you? This is the one thing left you need to get right, damn it. The one thing you’ve got left. You have to fix yourself, and you’re out of other options.
- Tell yourself the only way to go is up.
- Say it again; this time, mean it.
- Repeat the layering process with the lemon-lime soda. Take a moment to appreciate the sound of the fizzing both as the battered can opens, and as the carbonated fluid slides down the spoon. Think about all those vanilla phosphates you had as a child. It’s hard to appreciate them now, with the diabetes; but it’s not bad to remember that there was a time, so long ago that it might as well have been inscribed in cuneiform, where there was joy in life. And you almost smile.
- Discard the spoon. Seriously: throw it into the trash bin. Under no circumstances may you lick the spoon.
- Put some extra food and water out for the cats. Neither is in the kitchen for this process, having found smoke-tinged sunbeams in which to wallow. And that’s fine; the cats would judge. You know how cats are. But the food and water is still a vital part of the process—turning yourself into a brand new person may take a while, and Life After Salvation will be strange enough without the calico eating your face halfway through.
- Place a cocktail straw into the bottom of the glass. The concoction you’ve made, with its shimmering rainbow nanites and its fizzy lemon-line scent, looks like a hole in time: the raw material of a universe between dimensions. Part of you wonders if the cocktail straw is really necessary—maybe you can just reach backward and slap your high school self for skipping classes, or your older self for drinking on the job, or…
- …or you’re wasting time. Again. Besides—it’s not like time travel fixes anything. You tried that first. (Also, third.) And while your memories of your own history are now a lot more convoluted, you learned two things very quickly. First, don’t use bargain-basement time travel services. And second: wherever you go, there you are. Ain’t no place far enough away that you can run from yourself.
- So take a deep breath, okay? This is it. And remember, drink to completion, and do not stop to breathe.
- Place your lips on the straw and inhale the Apotheosis as fast as you can. The nanite-vodka mixture will burn the inside of your mouth as it passes by. The first nanite is far too small to catch on the back of your throat, but you gag anyways, as though the bitter pill of your own inadequacies were making one last-ditch effort to save itself from dissolution. Rather than stop, you choke it down and force yourself onward. The recipe said your old self wouldn’t go without a fight.
- The raspberry liqueur hits next and, like so many of the weapons-grade cough syrups you and your friends drank in the parking lot back in high school, it coats and soothes as well as heals. The burn of the vodka, and the odd nacho salad flavor of the nanites, evaporate as the cloying liquid sloshes about.
- The lemon-lime soda then washes the rest away. This is the one area where you honestly just grabbed what you’d had tucked in the back of a nearly empty fridge. Fortunately for you, the pets, and the nanites, it hadn’t gone flat with age. Instead, it effervesces its way past your teeth, rinsing away the universe. Wait… why is the world dissolving?
- Set the tumbler down on the counter. Miss.
- Collapse on the floor as the nanites rewrite your neural synapses. This is what they’re programmed to do, of course—follow the flood of alcohol into an uninhibited bit of brain chemistry and shake the natural order down to its foundations. Fix the decades of glitches and twitches that life has beaten into you. Correct the mistakes and bad habits you’ve instilled in yourself like life hacks or koans. Give you the confidence you never had; the memory you always deserved; and the ability to grow into a new and better you.
- It still feels like dropping napalm against the inside of your own skull. You can feel yourself—the old you, the you made entirely of mistakes and regrets—screaming so loudly that the neighbors have to be calling the police.
- Watch the ceiling change color. Watch your hands drip lemon slurry. Someone else dropped a glass against the tile floor. You’re pretty sure you’re bleeding. But if the Michael’s Own advertising is to be believed, all your cuts and bruises will heal when the transformation’s complete.
- Phase in and out of consciousness. Wonder if you’re supposed to see a corporate logo like that when your eyes are about to open. Hallucination, or residual effect of the nanites? You’ll know for sure the next time you wake up, you suppose.
- Push yourself up from the ground. This takes some doing; your hand is still twitching.
- Stagger past your confused cats into the bathroom. Discard soiled clothing, stem your nosebleed, and step into the shower.
- As the tepid water falls from your rattling shower head, take a deep breath and wonder, exactly, what’s changed. Because you still feel like you you’d always known. You set aside the external cues—the frigid air on clammy skin, the greying hairs in the shower drain visible just past your paunch. You can fix those with time and money, you suppose. But something intangible is left. Something indelibly you. Which defeats the whole point, doesn’t it?
- Look at yourself when the mirror unfogs, though: the way you still look as though you’re about to cry, like you haven’t slept in weeks. Lines like quarries have strip-mined the youth from your face. Your mind may or may not be different; you’re suddenly thinking in German, a language you previously couldn’t understand, so clearly the nanites have done something up there. Perhaps you’ve been given a sense of order, a sense of purpose.
- Except… besides fixing the mess that is your person, you have no idea what your purpose is. You never have. You simply exist: you live, you breathe, you drink at the bar, you listen to shitty music. Sometimes you have a job. You date, badly. None of that is purpose. Right?
- Your mind, inasmuch as it’s either “a mind” or “yours” anymore, tells you that you’ve wasted too much time already. If you don’t pull yourself together and make something of yourself, all of this will have been for nothing. And in a sudden bit of clarity uncharacteristic of you, you realize what’s changed—your need for achievement, for external validation, for actualization that satiates a mummified ego, has awakened and demands to be fed.
- Even for someone realizing more newfound skills, this is a daunting prospect. You’re starting so low on the damn ladder that you can’t even see the bottom rung. And yet there’s a progress bar near everywhere you turn. No matter where you go, there’s a coldly quantitative assessment that tells you: zero percent. Your newly logical, brutal mind sees no paths that lead anywhere beyond zero percent. Self-actualization isn’t meant for someone like you.
There’s only one solution.
- Go online and order another vial of Michael’s Own(tm) Synaptic Nanites.
Your order history cheerfully informs you that this is your ninth vial, and you can save 25% if you subscribe to a monthly service.
- Return to the top of these instructions and repeat. The recipe said your old self wouldn’t go without a fight, and it was right—all that rewiring your brain from the outside has done is throw the ways you’ve failed into sharper and sharper relief. You can hear the voices of ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends both, telling you that change and wanting to change were not at all the same thing. That there was nothing she, or he, or they could do to fix you. It all had to come from within. It always did.
- So… you try again to want to change, to find a means of being better, and different. You don’t know what better looks like, you never have, but you believe you can be a better you. You have to be a better you. One way or another. You want to change. You need to change. So you pour another drink and you try again.
- And again.
- And again. For as long as it takes.
_______________
Brian Hugenbruch is the author of more than sixty speculative fiction stories and poems; he’s appeared in Analog, Diabolical Plots, and Escape Pod (for fiction), and in Dreams & Nightmares, Abyss & Apex, and Apparition Literary (for poetry). He lives in Upstate New York with his wife and their daughter. He enjoys fishing (but only in video games); Scotch (but only in real life); and he spends his days trying to explain quantum cryptography to other nerds. No, he’s not sure how to say his last name either.