[ 🫧 ] sᴇᴠᴇɴ 𝘢𝘯𝘥 ᴄᴏᴜɴᴛɪɴɢ

iv. heiyaoshi

Heiyaoshi lived with his father for fourteen years, yet he knew little about him. He didn’t find out he was a biomedical engineer until a month after he was taken away, when he found his ID card hidden in his room. He didn’t know what his father’s favorite food, favorite pastime, what kind of friends he had—he couldn’t even search him up on the internet because everything about him on the web had been deleted or kept secret. He didn’t know why his father kept him locked away in their little home and why he left the house every single day for twelve hours. And he didn’t know why strangers broke down their door when he was fourteen and dragged Thái away, he didn’t know why he was told to stay in his room and never go out until the strangers left, and he didn’t know why he listened and let them take his father away.

Heiyaoshi could hardly hold in his tears when he finally got home, chest aching from both running and the ache in his heart.

He was too late. And who knows how long he’d been too late for; he had five years to find his father and bring him back home, five long, agonizing years he could’ve spent looking for his father instead of hiding in his room and crying like a human. A coward. A disgrace, a sin, a thing—a thing that shouldn’t have ever existed.

Don’t think like that. Bàba doesn’t like it when I think like that.

The noise and the shout he heard in the warehouse—that shout belonged to a human. No other being Heiyaoshi knew could shout a single word with so much. . . energy. It wasn’t dull or monotone in the slightest, and Heiyaoshi knew he could shout with that much fury—well, if he wasn’t so small and weak.

But wasn’t he the only human who was raised away from the outside world, hidden from The Seven his entire life? Wasn’t he the only one who didn’t have a device installed in his head that blocked all thoughts and emotions and stopped him from having free will?

That voice in the warehouse. . . who did it belong to?

Heiyaoshi shut the door and locked it with the four different locks that had been installed on it; fingerprint, passcode, face ID, and a pattern. The windows were locked as well; that way Heiyaoshi couldn’t accidentally open them and reveal everything inside to the outside. The walls of his home were a safe little border, like a dam stopping all the water from flooding in.
Heiyaoshi stepped carefully over all the boxes he had stacked on the floor and headed upstairs to his father’s room. This particular room was always slightly colder than the rest of the house. Maybe it was because the room hadn’t felt the warm electromagnetic radiation of a human for a while, or because it was bigger, or because it was emptier. But either way, a chill ran through Heiyaoshi’s spine every time he stepped in like an ice-cold hand slowly trailing its nails down his back.

There were no boxes on the floor of this room, compared to the rest of the house. There was a large shelf with an abundant amount of thick, heavy books about medicine, biology, biomechanics, molecular biology, biotechnology, and the like. That was probably the oddest thing in the entire house; these days, books were digital, and every single word ‘printed’ on billboards, signs, posters, etc. were just pixels on a screen. But none of those could match the feeling of opening a real, physical book and feeling the smooth pages slide underneath his fingers as he turned them.

These books, as Heiyaoshi’s father said, were from his college days. Back when humans went to school and learned things from a professor and not from chips installed in their brains. His father learned almost everything he knew from these books, and everything Heiyaoshi was taught was from these books to his father.

Heiyaoshi carefully slid a book about surgery and the human body off the shelf. He turned around and exited the room, making sure to close the door all the way, then took a few steps down the hall to his room.

His room was probably the messiest part of the house. Boxes were piled all around the edges and corners, filled with so many old documents and printed pictures, literally all the information about his father or anything related to his father Heiyaoshi was able to find in his five years of isolation. And even after all of his research, it took him five years to find the location of a place where his father possibly used to work at.

Heiyaoshi gently moved two open textbooks off his desk onto his bed and placed the new one on it. He flipped his desk lamp on and then pulled out the napkin from his pocket, carefully unfolding it and taking out the tiny metal scalpel inside.

Heiyaoshi’s heart pounded as he placed it on a clean paper towel on the desk. With shaky hands, he opened the thick textbook to the index and traced his finger down the letter E, until he stopped at the words extracting DNA from blood samples. Page 298.

Heiyaoshi inhaled shakily. You memorized the whole periodic table and put an AI hologram in your glasses. You self-taught yourself trigonometry and logarithms. You've memorized more than half of the periodic table. Extracting DNA and sequencing genomes aren’t any different. . . if a machine can do it. . . then. . . nevermind.

Heiyaoshi squinted at the tiny print on the textbook, brushing his hand over it to flatten it out.

“‘Lysis solution was added into small pieces of dried blood spots and incubated at room temperature for five minutes’. . .” Heiyaoshi mumbled. “Lysis solution—does Bà have that?”
He quickly rushed to the bathroom downstairs and opened the large medicine cabinet. So many little bottles and boxes were stacked and placed snugly together that Heiyaoshi was convinced he could open a pharmacy (if pharmacies still existed) with what they had in their cabinet. Paroxetine, escitalopram, melatonin—what am I thinking? Of course he doesn’t have cell buffers. He doesn’t need to know that I’m the only human other than him in this place.

A tight knot formed in Heiyaoshi’s stomach, as if someone had just punched him in the chest. Maybe I should’ve taken some escitalopram as well.

His hands shook. He rubbed them together. And then I have to bind the DNA and then sequence it and then. . . and then. . .

I don’t think we have a centrifuge. And the sample I have is old and probably won’t yield anything—if I really want to find out who this blood belongs to, I might have to find another research facility and do it there.

What am I thinking? Extracting DNA isn’t easy. . . I have no medical experience other than my father. . . the least I’ve ever done was have bad handwriting and the ability to pronounce the names of medicines correctly.

Heiyaoshi had lived with only his father for fourteen years and and himself for five, all years in the same old house, hidden away from everything and everyone. And not once had he ever felt lonely. Alone, yes, but. . .

Bà. . . I’m tired of being alone. . .