The Lives of Tao Page 11

  Antonio trailed after him, opening the fridge and pointing inside. “Look at what you’re eating now too. I came in last week to grab a pot pie, and there weren’t any! In the three years that we’ve lived together, there hasn’t been one moment where we didn’t have enough sodas and pot pies to last through a nuclear winter. I used to be comforted by the fact that if we were ever trapped in our apartment, all we needed was the food in the freezer and an oven to survive. Now, all we have is a bunch of raw veggies and brown rice! Where’s the frozen pizza? Where’s the ice cream?”

  Roen sighed. A pizza would really hit the spot right about now. He’d been behaving well this past month. Was it wrong to treat himself?

  Stay on the bandwagon. Avoid temptation.

  “But... it’s been so long! Don’t I get a reward for being good?”

  Fitness is its own reward.

  “That’s easy for you to say. Argh! Now I can’t stop thinking about pizza.”

  Tao and the lack of pizza had been gnawing at Roen for weeks now. His alien secret and his angry neglected stomach were itches that just wouldn’t stop. He decided then and there to scratch both itches at the same time. He had behaved well, and by golly, he was going to eat that well-deserved pizza, Tao be damned! Besides, it was good to bond with his roommate. He’d been so busy that the two had barely spoken.

  “All right, let’s go to Lou’s for dinner and grab some deep dish. We can talk about it then.” Roen closed the fridge.

  Wait... talk about what? About me? This is a bad idea, Roen.

  “That’s what I’m talking about.” Antonio whooped. “Hang on. Let me get my jacket. I’ll drive, then?”

  Roen twirled his keys around his fingers. “Look who got a new car!” Antonio grinned and ran into his room.

  Do not say anything to your friend!

  After knowing he was getting deep dish pizza, Roen became more and more excited. His taste buds sprang to life and his mouth watered at the very thought of cheese, pepperoni, and butter crust. The two almost raced down to the garage in glee and moments later were driving downtown to their favorite pizza joint for some Chicago deep dish. Soon, they were waiting for their order in one of the booths, the aroma of marinara and pepperoni filling their nostrils. Roen had to keep reminding himself that this was only for a special occasion.

  “First of all, what’s the deal with Sonya? I mean, come on, buddy, I didn’t know you had it in you.” Antonio squinted at Roen. “Wait, she’s not a professional, is she?”

  “Professional what?”

  Antonio laughed. “Get your mind out of the gutter. Professional trainer, dummy. Well, if she is, I don’t blame you. You look like half of you already. Literally. So if she is, she’s worth it.” He paused. “Is she?”

  “No.”

  “Then who is she and how did this miraculous transformation come about?” Antonio made circular gestures at Roen’s slimmer body.

  Roen did not feel comfortable talking about Tao, having promised to never reveal their secret. But Sonya’s mother had told Sonya, and it wasn’t like Antonio would ever betray him. They were best friends! There was no harm telling one person, was there? It might even help put things in perspective. Finally he decided to just spill it and see what happened.

  Do not go down this path. It is dangerous for you and your friend. If the Genjix ever find out where you live, they could get to you through Antonio. And I promise you it will not be pleasant for him. For both your sakes, do not tell him anything.

  “Tao, I know what I’m doing. He won’t give me away. Besides, I need to tell someone. Even Bruce Wayne had Alfred to cover for him. I need an Alfred.”

  You need to shut your mouth if you know what is good for you.

  “Antonio, do you believe in aliens?” he said in a low voice.

  Damn you, Roen.

  Antonio’s brow bunched up. “Aliens: like the movie Aliens, Star Trek aliens, Invasion of the Body Snatchers aliens, or do you mean illegal aliens?”

  “The Body Snatcher variety,” Roen replied.

  “Good movie and no, I don’t believe in aliens, especially those that come all the way over here from another galaxy to take over someone, unless they’re here to steal our women. That I’d understand, and even then I think they’d have hotter women over there anyway. There’s no need to steal ours.” Antonio laughed half-heartedly. His laughter died when he noticed Roen’s face darken. “Are you implying you’re acting weird because you were body-snatched and you’re not the real Roen, but a fake clone Roen, and the real Roen is in a cocoon on some mother ship where they plan to suck his blood?”

  Roen shook his head. “You’re getting Invasion of the Body Snatchers mixed up with Killer Klowns from Outer Space. They’re the ones that wrap you up in cotton candy and drink your blood.”

  “Close enough. So what about them? You saying you have some alien in you?”

  Roen looked both ways over his shoulder and leaned in, his voice reduced to a whisper. “What if I told you that for the past few months, I’ve had an alien life force living in me named Tao?”

  You just do not know when to shut up.

  “Tao is a Quasing,” he continued. “His kind is involved in some civil war. These aliens are powerless to do anything on Earth due to our atmosphere, but they can inhabit humans and speak to us. Tao came to me when his previous host died on a mission. He’s a being that’s been around for millions of years. He’s inhabited all sorts of people and used to be in Lafayette and San-Feng.”

  “What the heck is a San-Feng?”

  “Beats me. Someone important, I guess.”

  “Hmm.” Antonio looked worried. “And what does Tao want with you?”

  Roen sighed. “He wants to train me to be a field operative so I can carry out Prophus missions. That’s why I’ve been getting in shape. I’m being deployed in the field soon.”

  Antonio frowned. “You know, I’d swear you’re trying to pull a fast one on me if I didn’t know your lousy poker face. Is Tao with us right now?”

  “He’s always with me.”

  “Can I say hi?”

  Roen shrugged. “I guess. He can hear everything we say.”

  Antonio leaned forward and raised his voice. “Hi, Mr Tao. How are you? How does it feel being in Roen? I bet you’re not used to that much space.”

  “Not funny.” Roen scowled. “Come on, I’m serious.”

  “You want me to take you seriously?” Antonio looked exasperated. “All right, I’m sorry. Does Tao want to say hi to me?”

  “Do you have anything to say, Tao?”

  Go to hell, Roen.

  “Tao says hi,” Roen replied.

  Antonio leaned back and took a sip of his drink. The waiter brought the pizza and the two took a break from their discussion to help themselves to a few slices. Roen passed Antonio the grated cheese and grabbed the crushed pepper. His stomach groaned with anticipation at the piping hot pizza with the generous heaping of marinara sauce spread over the thick crust. Each slice was two inches thick stuffed with pepperoni, olives, spinach, and onions. Roen cut the cheese strings that stuck to his slice and took a large bite. It tasted like heaven.

  “So is Sonya one of them body snatchers?” Antonio asked, his voice muffled by the food in his mouth.

  Roen nodded.

  Antonio shook his head. “I don’t know, buddy. Look, you’re my boy, but this is nuts. I think you’re going crazy.”

  Roen scowled again. “I’m not crazy, Antonio; don’t say that. It took me a long time to come to grips with this.”

  Antonio shook his head. “Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Some need a heart attack to decide to hit the gym, while others just wake up one day and think it’s time. Maybe your motivation is interstellar war, but I think your type of motivation is borderline schizophrenic.”

  Roen slammed a fist onto the table, earning him looks from those around them. “Look, for the last time, I’m not crazy; this is serious! You wanted to know, and I trust
you enough to tell you. You have to promise to keep this a secret.”

  For the first time, Antonio looked uncomfortable. “Who am I going to tell? What am I going to tell them? My roommate thinks he’s possessed by an alien that’s training him to be James Bond?”

  Roen shook his head. “Tao was right. This was a mistake. You know, forget it.”

  “Come on, Roen, what did you expect me to think? I mean, show me some proof. Show me some alien technology or superpowers or something. Bend metal or fly or grow a tentacle. You can’t expect me to believe you on blind faith.”

  “I have no powers. It doesn’t work that way. The Prophus can only act through their hosts.”

  “Right. That’s awfully convenient,” Antonio didn’t bother hiding his disbelief. “Like Kyle Reese not being able to bring a weapon back from the future.”

  “But in Terminator, he was right. They should have believed him,” Roen countered.

  Antonio shook his head. “That’s why it’s a movie.” He stood up and put some money on the table. “Look, I’m going. You should think about getting help. It’s cool that you’re losing weight and working out, but it’s not healthy how you’re going about doing it.” He patted Roen on the shoulder and left him sitting alone at the booth.

  Roen brooded for several minutes. Antonio’s words stung, and at the same time, made sense. Could he be using this story of aliens and wars as a way to subconsciously force himself out of his rut? He could imagine doing something like that. The idea of being a cog in something important appealed to his ego. His own unhappiness might not be enough to make him want to change, but a covert war with the balance of humanity at stake certainly would.

  Great, are we back to this again? Talk about two steps forward and ten steps back. Is your sense of self so weak that anyone can convince you of anything? If you were ever captured, you would crack under interrogation before they even ask the questions.

  “Well, he does make a valid point. What if you’re my subconscious trying to motivate me after everything else has failed?”

  What do you want? Proof? Is Sonya not enough proof? What about the Genjix that tried to kill you? Do beautiful strange women come knocking on your door in the morning to go running with you?

  “Good point,” Roen conceded. “I didn’t think of that.”

  And that is the crux of your problem. You do not think. I warned you. No good could have come from telling your friend. Do not bring it up again. It will pass, and if we are lucky, he will forget all about it. We have bigger things to worry about, anyway.

  “Like what?”

  Like converting you to the metric system and figuring out what to do with your infant-like hand-eye coordination.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TRAINING WHEELS

  Temujin was an old man when I finally gave up on him. Our last words together were not pleasant. He accused me of betrayal. And in a way, he was right. I had betrayed us many years ago by being weak. One day, I stopped speaking to him. The next, he died in a skirmish. He was my greatest triumph and my greatest failure. At that moment in time, the potential for a great civilization was within his grasp, and it slipped through his fingers, and I was to blame.

  Roen’s glorious career as a Prophus agent began rather ingloriously, scouting the harbor before settling down on a spot next to the Adler Planetarium, where for the next several nights, he watched birds splash around a patch of black waters off the coast of Lake Michigan with a pair of night vision goggles he purchased at a sports store. It was like watching television static for the first four days.

  Roen realized during those long, dull hours what Tao meant about the drudgery of covert work. By the third night, he wanted to cut himself to stop the numbness. It didn’t help that there was literally nothing there, not a person, a boat, not even stinking fish. Still, he tried to do the job diligently, though he felt free to complain to Tao every step of the way.

  “This is a complete waste of time, Tao. I’m observing open water, for God’s sake. Can’t we just put a satellite here instead of me wasting precious sleep twiddling my thumbs? If I wanted to be bored out of my mind, I’d just go to work, which I have to be at in four hours, I might add.”

  Satellites are expensive to use. You are much cheaper. I tried to warn you. Agent work is all boredom mixed with a few seconds of excitement that makes you wish you were bored. You will learn to appreciate this peace. Excitement in this line of work usually means someone is trying to put a bullet in you.

  “I’m so cheap I’m working for free. I even had to pay for my own stuff here.”

  The fifth night, a small craft appeared and several dark forms jumped into the water. Roen took a few pictures of the boat and recorded the longitude and latitude using a GPS, before calling the mission a success. He never found out what any of it meant.

  Over the course of the next few weeks, he received a dozen more assignments through his new network email. The first few were more reconnaissance missions: a house on South Cicero Avenue near the airport, a diner in Little Italy, a coffee shop in the Lincoln Park area, a public mailbox – yes, a stinking mailbox! – on Diversey and Clark.

  Most of those experiences were even worse than the first assignment. And all these were done as he worked around his regular job. Roen ended up taking more vacation and sick days over the next month than he had over the past five years. Once, he had to call in sick two days in a row while sitting in a van for thirty hours. Any excitement of being a bona fide secret agent evaporated along with his dreams of becoming Dirk Pitt or James Bond.

  He began dreading the emails that popped up in his inbox. It became so bad that he actually started looking forward to the days at the office. But no matter how mundane and boring those assignments were, he carried them out the best he could.

  The only saving grace was the time he spent with Tao. During those long stretches of boredom, Tao would go over the dreams he imprinted into Roen, explaining the reasoning behind many of his decisions. Roen always awoke from those dreams seeking explanations. He remembered fragments, but had difficulties understanding the complete picture. Between the dreams, Tao’s stories, and the images that Tao flashed into his head, he began to grasp the magnitude of the Quasing and how much they influenced human history.

  Tao’s lives soon became one of Roen’s favorite pastimes. He learned about all the previous hosts that Tao inhabited, and began to respect the wisdom of his Quasing. Tao told stories of his previous hosts, starting from his time as a Babylonian to the many Romans he inhabited, then to the Gauls and the Egyptians, and then to the Far East as a golden wolf to Genghis Khan; how he invented t’ai chi in China, how he started the White Lotus society, and then how he started the Ming Dynasty. While Roen had always known Tao had survived through thousands of years of humans, listening to the breadth and depth of each host’s experience was overwhelming and humbling.

  It was then that he realized a few things. First of all, those previous hosts started out just like himself, initially scared and unsure of the Quasing. Many of them became great and capable men that changed the face of the world, others tried to follow Tao’s guidance, and a few outright rebelled against him. The second thing he realized about Tao’s hosts was that from the African warlord to the Chinese emperor to the Spanish assassin and many others, they all lived dangerous, violent lives. He wondered if he would become like them, and the possibility disturbed him.

  “So, if you kept trying to create these civilizations and kept failing, why didn’t you just find a genius pacifist who couldn’t be coaxed to violence?”

  It is not like pacifism is in their DNA. You never know what the nature of a host will be. Part of it is nurture, yes, but you have to realize that the world was less civilized back then.

  “I don’t know, Tao. Seems to me all your hosts were pretty violent. The only common denominator I see is you.”

  I will not apologize for my hand in guiding humanity. I do what I believe is right.

  Slowly, his
view on life changed as he settled into his new role. Roen couldn’t quite put his finger on it. His priorities were shifting and all the annoyances that used to drive him into conniptions didn’t seem to matter anymore. The four-dollar coffees, crowded lunch lines, and long red lights all became background noise. When he just missed the bus or forgot his wallet, he just shrugged it off. The changes were apparent that things felt different and it bothered him. He was settling into this new foreign life, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  When he was not running asinine missions or working, he trained with Sonya. His usual daily schedule consisted of: getting up in the morning, training with Sonya, going to work, training with Sonya again, doing an asinine mission, and then getting a few hours of rest. The few nights he was not on assignment, Sonya added in extra workouts.

  By the time June rolled around, Roen saw real progress in his fitness. He was now in the best shape of his life, though that historically didn’t amount to much, but the hard work was paying off. He even swore he saw a stomach muscle somewhere in his belly region. His stamina had improved by leaps and bounds as well. Sonya and he often went on long ten-kilometer jogs (she always measured in metrics, which was fine by him since it was shorter) that were impossible for him just two months ago.

  With Roen becoming more autonomous with his physical conditioning, Sonya shifted the direction of their training from basic conditioning to combat exercises. And while Roen took to fitness training and even grew to enjoy it, hand-to-hand combat became his new arch-nemesis. Though Tao and Sonya spent a fair portion of his training on it, they were having little success.

  He was hopelessly uncoordinated. His reflexes were still poor, his fighting instincts were non-existent, and he had a laughably low pain tolerance. Though he outweighed her by nearly double, Sonya was able to hit harder and faster, and manhandled him in every sparring session. And on one beautiful but terrible morning, his training really took a turn for the worse. They started fighting with weapons.

  Tao’s groan inside Roen’s head matched his own out loud as the staff struck him across the face. He grunted in pain, dropped his own staff, and turned away. That was a mistake as another blow caught him in the gut, doubling him over, followed by a sweep that took out his legs. Roen crumpled to the floor in a heap. Tao’s groan, however, was not from pain; but one born from frustration. At this point, Roen couldn’t care less how frustrated Tao was as he lay on the floor rubbing his chin. It wasn’t like the Prophus could feel pain anyway.