The Eidolon Shift

Demetrius was a family man, if ever the subtitle applied to anyone. He lived in the tiny village of Alexandria, a very long time ago. He was born in Athens, to a shipbuilder named Phantos. Phantos moved his family to Alexandria when Demetrius was only five years old. There are many things one could say about the life of Demetrius, son of Phantos, but I only want to draw our attention to a strange occurrence that took place on the evening of his sixth birthday, and the strange divergence of paths later on.

Early on the day of his sixth birthday, there had been a celebration. Several of Demetrius’s friends had been invited, and each one brought a toy, a set of clay dice, or a musical instrument. It was the best birthday Demetrius had ever had. He and his friends, including some cousins, played until they were too exhausted to play any longer.

Demetrius’s mother, Casandra, set a cup of water beside her son's bed, blew out the oil lantern, and kissed him on the forehead. A full moon shone through the open window, and the room was almost as bright as it had been before Casandra had extinguished the lesser light.

As Demetrius began to fade, he blinked his heavy eyelids. He thought he saw movement, but was not sure. With the window open, he also knew it might have been Patches, the shy family cat.

Then there was a stir. It almost seemed as though a chair had moved. His eyes opened wide. In the bright moonlight, one corner of the room was getting brighter and brighter. It was the same corner where the chair sat, and it was the same corner where the sounds came from. And then there was no mistake; a shadow moved very near the chair, but it was something small. It was very real, but something that later folklorists would refer to as a fictional character: a Gnome.

Demetrius stood and walked slowly toward this mysteriously small, manlike creature. He wore a straw hat and a red shirt with cutoff denim pants. His feet were invisible from where Demetrius stood; if the creature had any, they were behind a long, white beard that almost touched the floor. The tiny man looked at Demetrius, his eyes widening as he made the sound of an “Ffff.”

“Hello,” said Demetrius, taking another careful step toward the Gnome.

“Ffff,” he repeated, and moved the chair to reveal a hole in the wall. Only, he hadn’t moved the chair enough, and darting headfirst into the opening, he found himself stuck about the waist—halfway in and halfway out. Demetrius now saw that the thing had feet: bare feet, much too large for the rest of his body, but with five toes on each foot, he did appear to be even more like a human from this point of view.

The creature struggled and grunted several short grunts, obviously very much afraid of Demetrius. The little man’s fear had the effect of making Demetrius feel somehow braver, and he stepped closer to the chair, the feet, and the little man in the hole.

Remembering that the little man had a very established beard, Demetrius thought he should respect the stranger as he would any older person. “Sir,” said Demetrius, “Sir, are you alright?”

Instead of answering the boy, the little man put much more effort into moving forward with his earlier plan of getting into the wall. His feet, acting as ratchets on the hardwood floor, became very excited and were moving with such force and friction that the wood began to smoke. Then, with a sudden, popping sound, the gnome was gone, obviously tumbling inside the wall.

“Ffff,” said the gnome, and with that, his footsteps faded, as if there were a long hallway on the other side of the hole. Striking a small ember to light a splinter of wood, Demetrius shone the flickering light into the opening. He could see that the hole was just one end of a corridor that went beyond the reach of his flame. He raised his head to look out the window just above the hole, and the corridor seemed to be in line with a covered stone walkway that went from the house to a small workshop. The tunnel would have been on the far left, with most of the walkway being more in line with the kitchen door, which happened to be the room beside Demetrius’s room.

The rest of the house was quiet and dark, and everyone had gone to bed. Demetrius tiptoed to his leather sandals and slipped them on. He cracked his bedroom door and then, seeing the coast was clear, he opened it wide and went to the kitchen next door as stealthily as possible. He opened the outer door leading out to the walkway and stepped out slowly. He looked down to the area where the tunnel must have been, and he began to wonder if he’d been dreaming.

A light could be seen moving quickly through the workshop window. Suddenly, there was a sound; if one were guessing, it would likely be the sound of some small creature running into a bronze wash-basin, knocking the heavy lid upside down onto the stone floor, where it spun like a top. Demetrius opened the door quickly. All fear had now yielded to pure adrenaline, and this mystery had to be solved.

Thomas Hobbes sat on the floor beside an overturned lantern that had managed to stay lit during the aforementioned crash. It was, in fact, a small creature that had crashed into the side of the basin and knocked the lid off. Demetrius still held the handle of the workshop door and thought about closing it, perhaps trapping the strange little man inside, but instead, he stood in the open doorway and stared.

Mr. Hobbes shook his head, put his straw hat back on, and turned his lantern upright, raising the wick calmly and deliberately, as if nothing unusual was going on.

“Who are you?” shouted Demetrius, forgetting everyone else was fast asleep—or had been fast asleep. “Who are you?” he whispered, hoping to encourage whispering going forward.

In a quiet, deep, resonant voice, completely unbecoming a man who stood only eight inches tall to the top of his hat, the little man spoke. “Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes, Bioinformationist, National Creature Genome Research Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA. Sorry if I scared you, Demetrius.”

“You could never scare me,” said Demetrius. “But how do you know my name? And what is USA?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Hobbes. “I do need to explain that. It just happens to be your line I am assigned to. I traced you from your grandson. His name is Demetrius, too.”

“My grandson?” said Demetrius in his regular voice. “My grandson?” he then whispered.

“Yes,” said Hobbes. “Very nice man.”

“I am six,” said Demetrius. “I only turned six today. How could I… who are you? What are you doing here? What is a genome?”

Hobbes tried to explain genomes using math and maps, pointing to a hand-drawn map Demetrius had pinned to his wall. “It’s like this, in a way. You see this red X here,” he said, pointing to the X on a treasure map Demetrius had gotten from a storybook about buried treasure. “This is the kind of thing I look for, but I do this by mapping the genomes of creatures like yourself.”

Demetrius neither nodded nor spoke. It seemed he was listening, but it also felt as though he needed more of an explanation.

“DNA,” said Hobbes. “Your, uh… the double… um. There is a map of you, and I study that map. You see?”

“So you are a genome gnome?” asked Demetrius.

“Oh,” said Hobbes. “So you’re a sizest, are you?”

“I am a boy,” said Demetrius.

Ignoring the explanation, Hobbes continued, "I will have you know, I got my PhD in Bioinformation at The Apex Biologics Institute in 2096. I thought gnomophobia was behind me; I had forgotten that your people thought it was okay to be that way."

Demetrius stared at the strange little man.

“Never mind,” said Hobbes. “I am only here to gather somatic relicts, and then I will be gone for now.”

“Somatic what?” asked Demetrius.

“I wish I had time to explain this more completely,” replied Hobbes. “But your body is always in a state of flux. Your cells, follicles, fluids, and all. My team has been tasked with… well… we are trying to put you back together in the year 2111.”

“Me?” asked Demetrius. “But I am here right now, in one piece. Why do I need putting back together in the future? And how are you here now, if you are there then?”

Hobbes looked away and toward one corner of the ceiling, trying to decide whether he should run away as fast as possible or try to explain time travel to someone born in antiquity. “I know this does not make much sense to you, Demetrius, but I can move through time the way you could move from, say, this workshop back to your bedroom. Time is like space, and space is like time.”

“So,” said Demetrius, “where are the somatic rejects now?”

“Relicts,” said Hobbes. “Relicts are remnants that your body is forever casting off and regenerating. Parts of you, if you will.”

“And where are they?” asked Demetrius.

“Oh,” said Hobbes. “Of course. They are in the cryo-matrix valise.”

“The?” began Demetrius.

“It’s like a lunch box with temporal anchoring… it’s like a lunch box,” stammered Hobbes.

“Show me,” demanded Demetrius.

With the box opened in a corner of the building where it had been hidden behind other crates, Demetrius noticed some hair, some dust, and a few smudges between small pieces of glass, stood carefully in foam that appeared to be cut out for those slides. “This is my stuff?” asked Demetrius.

“It was,” replied Hobbes. “You have new stuff growing where this stuff had been… it’s all like baby teeth, you see.”

“So you gather everything I lose?” asked Demetrius.

“All of it,” said Hobbes. “We need it all if we are going to reconstitute you.”

---

Demetrius was thirty-five years old, watching his own younger son playing in the courtyard. He sat on a stone bench, feeling the deep, settled weight of fatherhood—a maturity he certainly hadn't possessed a decade ago. He reflected on his rowdy twenties, back when his entire universe had centered solely on the fierce, consuming love he had for his young wife, Mary-Margaret, before the years had tempered him into a patient father. He smiled, his thoughts drifting even further back to the strange encounter he’d had at six years old with that mysterious gnome. For almost three decades, he had been assuming it was a vivid dream. It seemed so real. He wondered if the Genome Gnome was still out there in the shadows, gathering his Somatic Relicts.

Back in the lab, Thomas Hobbes, the researcher at NCGR, sat and stared at the complete form of a man named Demetrius, who had lived and died centuries ago. He wondered if the time had come. Should he aliven the creature now? If he did so, it would only have the memories of the life lived by the contributor up into his twenties, with the later memories still, as yet, unremembered by the original. Only forgotten memories can be collected and used in Regens.

Hobbes wondered, “Who is the real Demetrius? The one made of relicts and forgotten memories, or the one at the courtyard, with a son of his own and memories from more recent days?”

The suspense was too great. Hobbes raised the plastic lids and flipped the toggle switches one by one. Tesla-like bolts of electricity surrounded the man in the glass container. Large magnets swirled overhead and were slowly lowered like tubes around the subject’s body. The roar was intense. The man’s body appeared to glow. His hair stood out in every direction. A diaphragm slowly pushed air into the chamber and released, and then repeated this again. A ram-like plunger began to beat the chest of the lifeless creature, and a clear tube revealed blood going into an artery near the heart. Another tube seemed to be taking blood away.

This process was taking too long, and after about two minutes, Hobbes was beginning to have his doubts.

Demetrius II blinked.

On April 5, 2121, D2, as he was referred to by the research team at NCGR, was born again.

“Where am I?” asked Demetrius. “And who are… Hobbes?”

“So you do remember me?” asked Hobbes, smiling.

“Of course,” said Demetrius. “But I had assumed you were a dream.”

“I need to inform you,” began Hobbes, “the A-Y had a very complete life beyond your memories.”

“A-Y?” asked Demetrius.

“Oh,” said Hobbes. “The After-You. What you are is something like what you were and who you were when you last used all of the parts that we’ve collected to make you. Your memories included.”

“Where is Mary-Margaret?” asked Demetrius in an almost panicked voice.

“Right,” answered Hobbes. “You will have so many questions, but this will take time.”

“Where are my parents?” demanded Demetrius. “Where is my house, you damn gnome?”

“Still a sizest, I see,” answered Hobbes patiently.

“How do I get out of this place?” asked Demetrius.

“I’m afraid that living RSAs cannot leave the institute,” answered Hobbes.

“RSA?” shouted Demetrius. “What the hell are you talking about, you damn elf? My wife is waiting for me! I was just with her!”

“No, you weren't,” Hobbes said, his deep voice cutting through the panic. “Think about it, Demetrius. I only harvest what your body casts off. I collect somatic relicts—the shed hair, the dead skin, the forgotten pieces. Memories work the same way. A memory has to be spent, discarded, or entirely forgotten by your brain before it settles into the dust for me to sweep up.”

Demetrius stared at him, the breath catching in his throat.

“Your After-You—the original version of you—is thirty-five years old right now, sitting on a bench in a courtyard,” Hobbes explained, adjusting his glasses. “He is actively using his current memories. They aren't spent cells yet; they are alive in his head. You only possess the memories he threw away or left behind in his youth. To you, Mary-Margaret is everything, because your timeline stops where his active updates begin.”

“Take me back to my life,” demanded Demetrius, though his voice lacked its earlier fire.

“I am afraid that won’t be possible,” said Hobbes. “Even if it were possible, your After-You would be there, living that life already. He has a son now. You don't even remember the boy, do you? Because the original hasn't forgotten him yet.”

“What have you done to me, you hobbit?” asked Demetrius, a cold dread settling in.

“Calm down, Demetrius 2,” said Hobbes. “Your entire life story ended 1,760 years ago. Everyone you think you knew is dead. They’ve been dead for centuries.”

“I know,” said Demetrius. “I am just having another weird gnome-dream. I’ll wake up.”