[REND] 14.1 - Human Rights of the Non-Humans

It was a rainy Wednesday morning. Rainy and humid. Heavy droplets tapped the windshield while we were waiting for the traffic lights to turn green.

Deen and I were on our way to Eloyce University. Having my personal chauffeur was such a godsend since I was no longer human.

Most bioscanners installed in public places, like subway stations, were made to detect the bizarre brainwaves of Adumbrae—the more progressed the infection, the higher the chance of detection. Myra assured us that it wouldn’t pick up the artificial Cores; she had personally tested it before with Johann. It was the scanners that checked the physical aspects of the body that we should be wary of, she told us. These types were rarely used because they took several seconds to test a person, causing lines at the stations or wherever.

But in my case, I’d be detected by all kinds of scanners… I think. I wasn’t sure if I’d set off the brainwave type of bioscanner.

Where could I safely test something like this? If a bioscanner picked up an Adumbrae, it’d silently alert the police station. It wouldn’t blare an alarm or anything because that might just provoke the Adumbrae into killing other people. I couldn’t ask Johann to help me. Maybe Ramello? What would I tell him?

Best to avoid bioscanners. Riding with Deen saved me a whole lot of taxi fare. They weren’t cheap in La Esperanza. Higher compared to New Los Angeles. I was hesitant to use ride-sharing apps because they’d leave a record of my whereabouts.

“What else can we use?” I scrolled through an online store. “Hmmm, these are just regular cameras. Our ghost hunting equipment has a temperature thingy and night vision whatever, but I still can’t see your Guardian Angel.”

“Why are you so interested in seeing Gabe’s appearance?” Deen asked. “I’ve already told you what it looks like. It’s not that exciting to see once the initial surprise wears off. I’ve gotten used to its presence, actually.”

“Just curious about your Guardian Angel. You’re not pulling our legs by making up this invisible entity no one else can see, are you?”

“And why would I do that?”

I shrugged. “For laughs? Or to hide your real powers? Sounds like a plausible reason.”

“Erind, I trust you a hundred percent.” Deen’s eerie gray eyes honed in on me with intensity. “I wouldn’t lie to you. If I wanted to hide my powers, I could’ve come up with a way better fake story than Gabe.”

“Well… that’s true. I still want to see it, though. Also, I’m going to insist that we call it Garg-Owl. Guardian Angel. Angel Gabriel. Gabe. Those names are so… uninspired. So uncreative.”

“When did you become a critic of names? I’m not going to call it Garg-Owl, no matter what. Help me think of my codename instead. Oh, cancel that. You’ll suggest something weird.” Deen stuck out her tongue at me before facing forward and driving as traffic resumed its flow.

“Is that a challenge? I’ll think of a codename for you while in Property class. I’m not going to get called today.”

“How sure are you? Do you have prescient powers like mine?” Deen asked in an exaggeratedly haughty tone. Then, she laughed as we merged onto a highway.

I raised a brow. Despite our not-so-ideal situation, with all the Corebring and Adumbrae nonsense, plus being no longer human, Deen seemed happier over the past couple of days. She wasn’t thinking of killing herself, was she? I had heard that people planning to commit suicide would become unnaturally happy leading up to it because they had found a way out of their situation. Supposedly. I couldn’t understand that explanation.

As for me, I’d never ever consider offing myself because that would mean letting the world win. No way I’d allow that. If the world super bothered me, I was going to bother it back and have fun doing so.

“Professor Holtz calls people in alphabetical order,” I said. “Since I got called during the previous session, I don’t need to worry for the next couple of classes or so.”

“We need to study,” Deen said, her tone abruptly turning stern. “You might envision our futures destroyed by what happened to us, but we’re going to fight to keep our normal lives. We’ll get out of this alive, graduate, and become lawyers.”

“Don’t be so serious,” I said. “I’m not going to abandon my studies, Mom.”

“This is for your own—oh, I do sound like a mother. Not my mother, though. She never bothered to—”

“Do you think Myra’s story is true?” I asked, parrying Deen’s attempts to insert her family issues into everything. When would this woman take the hint that I didn’t care about her family? To be fair, she didn’t have anyone else to confide in other than my bestie-Erind face. Some other time, I’d muster a hint of care about her family.

We had looked into the Heart’s Divine Unity cult, and it turned out that they did exist. But the news articles didn’t mention Myra and Kelsey, or anything about the Fletchers. Not too surprising since they were kids; their identities would’ve been protected back then. Being associated with an Adumbrae cult would’ve ruined their futures. I doubted if Eloyce University would accept both of them if their past were revealed.

“Whether she was telling the truth isn’t the point,” Deen said. “Why would she tell us about a past like that? Even among friends, a normal person would hesitate to reveal they used to be part of an Adumbrae cult. I vote not to trust her. We barely know her.”

“We do know that her sister is an Adumbrae,” I pointed out, intent on probing Deen’s stance on the matter. So far, she seemed to be a bit on the moderate side, not passing immediate judgment on a person who had turned into an Adumbrae. If she simply wanted to be viewed as such, or if it was her actual belief, I couldn’t tell yet.

“I can understand Myra’s desire to find a cure for her sister,” was Deen’s only reply. She was hiding some of her leanings from me.

“What about those pills, huh? The ones the Professor gave to Kelsey? It’s amazing that they’ve found a way to stop the infection.”

“Myra said that she’s not sure if they worked.”

“Oh, um, I hope they do find a cure someday…”

“Cure?” Deen paused for a few seconds. “No offense to Kelsey—she’s an exception—but most people are to blame for their Adumbrae infection. Calling it a cure makes it sound like an illness they had no control over.”

Oho! I finally got Deen to reveal her thoughts on the matter. There was a high chance she’d be sympathetic to my infection. After all, I was in a death-or-freaking-death situation. My only way out was accepting Spooky Erind’s offer of power. But even if Deen wouldn’t judge me a monster, the most she might do is not to report me to the authorities. It was an altogether different matter helping me find a cure.

Just like how Deen didn’t trust Myra, I couldn’t trust Deen either.  

Our leisurely morning drive was disturbed by shouting and honking horns as we entered Eloyce. Students gathered by the main parking lot for a demonstration of some sort.

This wasn’t the first time I had witnessed this on the campus. Eloyce students were quite vocal and would fight against policies they deemed too intrusive, like that random Adumbrae testing bullshit the admin wanted to implement last semester. I found all the racket super annoying back then, but thank the Mother Core that the protesters managed to make the university president back down. I’d probably need to leave Cresthorne if that policy were in place.

“What’s their problem?” I asked, struggling to make myself heard over the noise. I squinted to read the signs the students carried as our car crawled by. “Mandatory bioscanners?”

“To be installed in each building,” Deen explained. “Did you not read the posts on Snippet? Eloyce group pages were flooded with posts about it.”

“I’m barely on social media, Deen. My introverted self isn’t paid to interact with people on the internet.” Plus, I didn’t want to leave any trace on the internet of a face that might contradict a future face.

“Good for you—we should all aspire to your level of freedom from society. Anyway, the university president had this idea to have bioscanners in every building, given what happened during the Adumbrae attack. I’ve heard that a group of parents was pushing for it. The policy was in the planning stages, but the memo got leaked last night. The student council was quick to organize the protests. They even invited me to speak, but I made up some excuse. My family would raise hell if they saw me protesting anything.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Install bioscanners in every building? That’ll be a whole lot of scanners!” Just when I thought my inhuman life was stabilizing, a major hassle got dumped on me. It was as if the world couldn’t let my day be peaceful.

“I believe that they planned to restrict the entry points per building,” Deen said. “Two or three each. Close other entrances. But I agree that it’ll be a significant number of units.”

“How will this affect us? What kind of scanners are they using?” It’d affect me no matter what bioscanner they’d use.

“I don’t know, is my answer to both your questions. Rumors float that the family of one of the deans has a stake in a bioscanner manufacturing company. Add that controversy to the pushback from the student body, and I highly doubt this policy will pass.”

“Oh… that’s good to hear then.” I was already thinking of making a secret tunnel into Cresthorne to bypass scanners. How would that even work? That’s the secret.

Maybe I should join the protest? Have some activism while in Eloyce. I chuckled when I read a particularly interesting placard.

“What is it?” Deen asked.

I pointed at the placard that said, ‘SCANNERS ARE USELESS!’

“I mean, it’s sort of true,” I said. “Bioscanners aren’t really for catching Adumbrae but to keep them away. Like, if the bioscanners worked during the Adumbrae attack last week, the whole thing would’ve played out the same way. Well, I guess the police would’ve come sooner or something.”

“I agree with you that a bioscanner won’t stop an attack,” Deen said. “An Adumbrae that would pass a bioscanner is either a CM that wants to kill people despite the scanner or a UM that’s too far gone to recognize it. But it makes people feel better if there’s a scanner supposedly protecting a location—a security blanket for everyone.”

“Like how you highlight your notes even though it’s not really helpful? That’s your security blanket, isn’t it? There are studies that highlighting makes you—”

“Lah, lah, lah!” Deen sang in a loud voice. “I can’t hear your sensible advice because I’m stuck in my ways!”

International Law class was surprisingly chill. Professor Gallagher called only three people for recitation. Majority of the period was eaten by his yapping about the growing Madagascar crisis. The professor proudly spoke about his buddies at the Free Will Initiative, advising the ‘boots on the ground, ’ as he put it. From the way he talked, you’d think he personally protected the refugees riding on the boats headed for mainland Africa.

Boys will be boys. They’d always think that fighting monsters was cool. As for us girls, we were the monsters.

Oops, that was only me.

I hadn’t watched the news lately because there was nothing about Red Hood. It turned out that the Madagascar mess was still ongoing. Spreading. The Purple Bloom continued to spew monsters, slowly taking over the island.

“I’m certain that some… most of you are unaware,” Professor Gallagher said, “that the state of California is smaller than Madagascar. I doubt geography is the strong suit of anyone here. Picture, if you can, the size of the battlefield, with Adumbrae popping out everywhere. We are none the wiser of the location of the Purple Bloom.”

Do Corebrings have seers as Dario guessed? I thought they would’ve cleaned this up by now. Did the Purple Bloom have a way to block the future sight of the Hive? Or did the Corebrings already know of its location but just couldn’t get to it?

… or don’t want to kill the Purple Bloom just yet.

“I shouldn’t have stayed up all night to study,” Deen grumbled after Professor Gallagher left the room. “I didn’t know he wouldn’t discuss any of the material on the syllabus.”

“Too bad your future sight doesn’t reach that far.”

Deen squeezed my arm. “Shush, you. People might hear us.”

“Even if someone would overhear us,” I whispered, “they wouldn’t think anything is suspicious if you don’t act suspiciously.”

“Whatever. Let’s meet later. Don’t forget our training session.”

A good thing about Real Property Law, my next subject, was that I wasn’t classmates with Deen or Ramello here. A bad thing was that some of my classmates were very opinionated and in love with the sounds of their voices—the worst of law students. They’d engage in debates over the off-tangent topics and waste everyone’s time.

Professor Holtz often allowed this nonsense, explaining that it was part of the training to be a lawyer. Many upperclassmen have told us that it would be a miracle for Professor Holtz to finish half of the syllabus, given all the side trips the discussions would take.

“Our topic for today is the right to exclude,” said the professor, adjusting his square glasses that sat on top of his hooked nose. “Now, I’m not talking about the right to exclude your friends. Don’t do that, alright?”

A few forced chuckles were the answer. This was the other bad thing about this class. Not only did Professor Holtz’s jokes always fall flat, but we couldn’t even tell if he was joking or not.

“What is the right to exclude?” Professor Holtz mimed a circle around him. “Let us say that this is my property. I have the right to exclude anyone of you from entering it, understand? It is one of the essential rights attached to property. We can go further and say that it is the essence of property. If you do not have an exclusion right over something… then it is not your property.

“All other property rights stem from it. The right to consume your property, to sell it, to subdivide it, to bequeath it to your heirs, and so on. Of course, as with most things in law, it is not absolute. It is subject to legal limitations and exceptions, such as—Yes, Marty?”

Professor Holtz liked to call students by their first names. It was probably an effort to look cool, but it wasn’t working.

“Sir, I have a question,” said Marty Something-I-can’t-remember-and-don’t-care-to-remember. “Would an Adumbrae have the right to exclude? It’s established by a long line of cases that the Bill of Rights does not apply to Adumbrae. But what about other legal rights, such as those relating to property?”

Here we go. I rolled my eyes. Time for Tangent City.

(Author's Notes: Taking a break from the training, let's return to school and discuss serious topics like these. We rarely have them because Erind doesn't care. She prefers her shenanigans. But I think that worldbuilding these aspects, even if sparingly, would help shape REND. Thanks for the support!)