The New Mystique, A Student Reader, fifth ed.

Chapter 8, Part 5: Why Regenerate Myself?

As we learn in elementary genetics, our DNA is not a static code. Rather, it changes in response to our environment and behaviors throughout our lives. Moreover, as related in the seminal paper "Maybe She’s Born With It, Maybe It’s Methylation," (Franklin, et. al., 2216 AD/102 LS), published in the founding issue of the journal Nurture, we can pass on not only some of these physiological changes to our children, but also deep-rooted memories and even proclivities.

Thus, by building on her previous letter stage rather than reusing the original genetic information, each iteration of a family line has the chance to do more than simply continue the alpha sequence; they can build on it.

For thousands of years, families raised their offspring to prolong their businesses or special interests. The knowledge they passed on over generations served to refine their children’s skills and allow them to achieve greater success than might have been possible if starting from scratch. We now know that even more was passed on from parents to offspring than previously confirmed by science, which points to the delicate interplay of nature and nurture in determining one’s path through life.

Consider now your line and your unique talents. With twenty-four opportunities to grow and hone them, your omega stands to become the best possible version of you. If you are an alpha, you are in the unbounded position to test out many proclivities and set the direction of your ultimate development. If you are an omega, you have the privilege of twenty-three prior versions of yourself within you, each of whom may have deepened her proclivity beyond that of her mother. If you are in the middle, you benefit from both worlds: you have direction, a leg up in your endeavors, and the chance to recalibrate your line’s steering towards your highest expression of proclivity.

Who will you be?

#

I’ve been holding a glass in my hand since our argument started, just waiting for the right moment to throw it at the wall. As happens often, once an action strikes me as possible, I feel compelled to see it through and make it so. The alternative—that what I imagine I can do lies beyond my actual capabilities—is terrifying.

Still, I’ve picked out a plain glass from a set that predates both my mother and I and which we didn’t even pack carefully but jammed into a moving box with the utensils. It won’t be missed.

Etalice—my mother—seems too focused on ranting; she’s not even looking at me directly. I raise the glass to catch her attention and her gaze darts between it and my face, while she says, "… clearly need an environment with more structure— Haze, what are you doing? Are you going to throw that?"

I find myself starting to form the word "yes," but catch it and grin at her instead. Then I pull my arm back and toss the glass at the wall.

My aim is off. It hits the frame of the sliding door to the back patio—we both inhale sharply and identically at the near miss—and doesn’t even shatter. Instead, it bounces away and into a different box with barely a thud.

I step over and pick up the glass while Etalice spurts out half-words she can’t seem to settle on.

Not even a chip. Good Gaia, can a girl get a break?

Etalice collects herself and takes it from my hands. "Well, that was lucky," she says. I sigh so long I’m still going while she walks to the counter and fills it from one of the spigots in the row. The gin dispenser, I hope.

"Have some water and calm down," she says, handing it back to me.

I sigh again and gesture so the ceiling switches from a cheerful, evenly spread apricot illumination to a dim blue tone that’s darker at the edges. If I can’t actually be in a bar right now, or start a brawl or drink, at least I can set the mood. What I think it might be, anyway. I’ve only drunk in a real bar once but was kicked out before finishing the my-tie my more knowledgeable friend ordered. Etalice had overridden my ID chip from afar. What I remember most is darkness, cloying fruit juice, and sticky seats.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The water goes down cold and crisp, distressingly refreshing.

She’s waiting for me to speak, I realize. And since I have nowhere else to be, since my stuff’s already packed for move-in day tomorrow, and I don’t know anyone other than her in this town, I speak. "I'll never understand where you got this absolute obsession with me setting a proclivity when we’ve made it this far without direction. Maybe our proclivity is having no talents, have you considered that?"

"Everyone has talents, Haze. I’m good at cooking, fixing things, inventing mechanical devices."

That last one’s a stretch, although she does regularly use her homemade drill-beater and its scrubber attachment for both kitchen and furniture restoration tasks.

She continues, "You’re mathematical and witty, with a… unique ability to find a means to achieve your goals no matter what obstacles stand in the way."

I raise an eyebrow. She’s no doubt referencing my rap sheet, filled with trespassing and commandeering of construction machinery, which a judge once referred to as "asinine and reckless delinquency." Possibly also the time I convinced a group of friends to sneak into the closest incubation center after hours and swim in the birthing pools, though I’d push back on that being reckless since no fetuses were ripe and we made sure to bring Betricia, who is a lifeguard.

I could counterargue with Etalice and point out how this so-called positive trait of mine is also the reason she moved us from Chicago to this ridiculous suburb of mystique fundamentalists—named Witchniss, of all things—so I can attend a boarding school—by definition, a place not necessitating a primary residence move—but her set up is too good not to jump on.

"Exactly: obstacles such as being born into a line for which I see no value in continuing. It’s my life, I can end us here if I want to. We don’t need an inspirational culmination."

Etalice drags her palms down her face, pulling the skin. I resist the urge to let my hands make the same gesture. This particular back-and-forth we’re having is well overplayed. She thinks I can’t see the bigger picture, that by refusing to follow the path set by our prior stages—whatever it may be—I’m being selfish. But I don’t see how she can live feeling that her whole point of existence is to be just one twenty-fourth of a larger life story, that her expression and understanding of self is determined by so many people she’s never met and never will.

It’s not that I have another plan for my life, but I at least want to be able to define it myself. I don’t buy the argument that I’m somehow less valuable, or worthy, by my lonesome—which no one says about the lines, but is the obvious implication.

I am large, I contain multitudes. (As a man once said. Hah!)

And there's more—what I haven't been able to express to Etalice, or clearly to myself. A sense of dread. Is it even possible to be more than a cog in the larger machine of womenkind? Because my stomach knots at the idea, which may be a suspicion, that being an Alice doesn't actually contribute to anything other than maintaining us all in a holding pattern. Where do we think our omega will actually arrive?

We stand in silence long enough that I debate going up to my room or reaching for another box of kitchenware to unload. Then Etalice surprises me with a sudden clear word: "Fine."

"What?"

"You can end the line."

My heartbeat seems to have spread to my fingertips, my neck, my eardrums. Did she really just say she’d be okay with me not regenerating?

She clears her throat and adds, "Under one condition. Before you throw it all away, you need to learn about your line. Know what you’re giving up."

I resist the urge to roll my eyes at "throw it all away," as this is too good to be true. "Okay…" I say.

"I’m going to give you a copy of the current Herstory of the Line of Alice. You’re going to read it and make notes. Then you’re going to plan a trip visiting some site of significance for each of the Alices before us."

I’m the eighth, and my previous two stages—mother Etalice and grandmother Zetalice—are both living, so that’s only five stops. Easy.

"Done. When is the trip?"

"Autumn break. We’ll bring Zetalice."

"And after that you won’t give me any more shit about ending the line?"

"No more shit."

Good Gaia hallelujah amen!

I can handle a sentimental family trip and learning some herstory for the ultimate freedom, more than I’ll get even by graduating out of Witchniss Secondary. I can be not just a theta, but an alpha and an omega too, the beginning and end of my own story. My persistence has found a way around my maternal obstacle.

Maybe she was right about my proclivity.