FICTION - The Journal's Alchemists

Leo's eleventh birthday party was not as disenchanting as he expected it to be. At first, his anxiety was driven by his father's uplifting promise of a mysterious gift:

"I will give it to you after the party." Those words stuck with him for a while, but he unexpectedly forgot about the matter throughout the day.

He and his close group of friends from school played in his unkept backyard for a couple of hours. They started playing catch, but it grew into something more complex involving made-up powers and detailed descriptions of what each one did. These vivid elucidations could last longer than the actual playing time, but they were fine with it. They would grab withered planks and wield them as the mythical weapons they envisioned in their minds.

His parents were watching them through the vinyl double-hung window positioned above the kitchen sink. Leo's mother joked with wit about those leftover planks' broken dream of becoming a humble greenhouse, which was forgotten by the man of the house.

"...That man left them to erode and be battered by children's play." she remarked to her husband as if he were just a mere spectator in this conundrum she was describing. Her vexation was exacerbated by the fact that he had spent months building a huge bookshelf for a basement he would not set foot in to hold random books that, judging by his pace, he would never read. Books about math, history, chemistry, music, and such, immaculate and untarnished, were waiting for someone to wear the pages so that they would not stack so neatly when closed. The remaining ones did experience some interaction, but only that of a ten-year-old, who would not be able to fully comprehend these complex concepts until later in life.

"Maybe now that he is eleven, he would be able to understand Introduction to Electrodynamics by David J. Griffiths and justify the bookshelf." She thought, sighing inwardly.

Veronica had already relinquished the greenhouse idea, and she appreciated the fact that her son was able to socialize with kids his age. Still, she would not miss an opportunity to reprimand her husband for breaking ancient promises.

Nick's sole reply was a silent hug. That was a good enough answer. He was not there with her in the kitchen. He was thinking of Leo. He was old enough to know. Veronica did not want him to know so early, but he had promised this would happen by now… He remembered his words:

"Nick, you must make sure he has the journal, lest you favor my kind going extinct …"
Veronica accepted the hug, but she still would have liked an explicit response. They met each other for the first time when they were about Leo's age, and being chatty was never a quality of his. He fancied spending hours building anything, except for her greenhouse, yet still, he was a good man. She wondered about having a second child. They were not that old. As an adoptive mother, she was still somewhat scared of childbirth, but she thought Leo could use a little brother.

Leo started to overcome the awkwardness with other children and began enjoying their company. The fun soon stopped after the first overprotective mother arrived way too early and ruined any sense of pace they had built up. From then on, they unconsciously migrated their playing session to the living room, but all the momentum they had was lost, and now they were back in awkward territory. They started indulging themselves in discussions about random subjects.

It is not that he disliked the other kids; he enjoyed playing with them, but he couldn't care less about what they had to say or what was on their minds. At a young age, Leo noticed how differently he thought compared to his peers; not only was he smarter than them, but he realized how much of their focus was devoted to topics he deemed meaningless. They talked about what other people did in a video game, how much money they spent on a GPU for their computer, and they argued about which character from the Marvel movies could actually lift Thor's hammer. They were kids… just like him. But he rarely found anything interesting in their discussions. There was one time where he brought his brand new Rubik's cube to school to see if they could figure out a way to decipher it. They were thrilled at first, but by the second school break, some kid was able to solve it by memorizing some algorithm he found on the internet.

The bell for the third break rang, and everyone had lost interest in the puzzle. In Leo's eyes, they all missed the point.

"Anyone could make the sides of the cube turn by following instructions. The real challenge was understanding how these were to be rotated in order to achieve order in the configuration of the smaller cubelets".

That was the pompous speech Leo recited in his head while spending hours trying to solve the damn puzzle. After two unsuccessful nights consumed by the mechanical cube, his dad chose to intervene. He showed him how the solution involved orienting two pieces at a time.

"...What you are really doing is taking one piece at a time, putting it back, switching to another on the top layer, and then applying the same moves in reverse. This way, you are always affecting two pieces at a time, whether it's an edge or a corner." 

"I see… But doesn't the bottom get all messed up anyway?"

"Using that method, you can orient all pieces on the top layer without messing up your work on your bottom two layers." His father announced triumphantly. "But you shouldn't stress about it. I wasn't born knowing this. I read about it because your mother was worried."

"Isn't that cheating?" Leo asked with reproach.

"Maybe, but I already ruined the solution for you so you can go to sleep... You could say I am standing on the shoulders of giants." He stood like a statue of a Greek god by the end of the sentence and made Leo smirk.

"Giants that play with toys and post about them on the internet…"

"Still."

Leo was cunning, but he aspired to be even more so. He wanted to be as intelligent as his father and felt consternated by the idea of being inconsequential in life. What would happen when he died? What would he leave behind?... Maybe not something an eleven-year-old should think about, or so he was told. His father understood Leo better than himself, but not in a cliche way. As well as knowing his interests, he was also able to predict Leo's reaction to certain conversations and events. He would often start conversations with a cheeky "Have I ever told you about…?" when Leo was certain about never speaking about that topic with him. He contemplated the notion that his father was some sort of time traveler. Maybe he could travel back to breakfast every time he burned his bacon, thus explaining why his mother always forgot about it but his father did not and told him the same things every time… but he discarded that notion despite it being a fitting explanation, at least narratively speaking. Leo decided that the best possible explanation was that he had the best father in the entire world.

Leo pretended to listen to his friends' conversation, but just like his father, he was somewhere else. He was speculating about his father and their next project together. It was highly likely that that was his surprise after all.

They would always start something ambitious after his birthday. Last year, they spent the entirety of the summer programming a MIPS computer processor that had no chance of competing with its modern contemporaries, but Leo could proudly say it was his effort. Whenever his father committed to something, he did not give up. When they stumbled upon a problem, he would find a way to make things work. And Leo was starting to learn his ways. I guess that's the whole reason they occasionally did stuff his father did not necessarily like that much. He was trying to teach him, and Leo had a rapacious itch for learning.

Leo peeked through the kitchen door, trying to steal a glimpse of his father in search of some clue as to what was coming after all the guests left. He saw him eating cake. When Nick noticed his son looking at him, he silently lifted the piece of cake he was holding barehanded as if that were good enough for a toast and saluted him. There was something in the way he looked at Leo. He recognized that he was not being looked at by a fatherly figure; he was being looked at by an old friend. Leo replied with a military salute in conjunction with a poker face. He thought that was funny, and his dad agreed with a slight grin without forgetting that his mouth was still full.

Back to the birthday party... Or what remained of it. The last guest had left, and her mother already had dinner ready. She was an early bird and had trouble sleeping, so that meant they would often race to dine as early as possible whenever they could. Birthdays, gatherings, and similar events disrupted their regular schedule, so she made sure to have everything almost ready before Leo's classmates left. Not-so-warm steak and vegetables as ornaments. His mother would actually eat the green decorative plants for some reason that Leo and his father did not really understand, but they paid no heed and let her be. She was secretly waging war against her husband by trying to make her son eat some vegetables, but she was losing on all fronts. Breakfast, lunch, and now dinner. She accepted defeat silently and would end up attending to the figuratively wounded (untouched) vegetables by storing them for the next day.

Leo was underwhelmed by how hushed his father was. After all that cake, he ate his way through dinner without saying a word. Much of the talking was done by her mother, and it involved which distant relatives called to say happy birthday while he was outside. While he did not remember these people all that well, he was appropriately thankful for their courtesy. Dinner was over, and he was starting to contemplate the possibility of his father forgetting about the surprise. Leo excused himself for not eating his vegetables and went to his room, somewhat disappointed by his unresponsive father.

"Perhaps tomorrow…"

He was ending the day with a WWI book he borrowed from the basement. He used to have a thing for fantasy and science fiction, but knowing more about past events excited him more than any epic novel recently. He felt more adult by doing so.

Knock Knock

"Come in"

"Hey there"

"Hey"

"You thought I had forgotten, right?"

Leo's eyes were filled with joy. "Yeah, I almost certainly did."

Leo's father had something behind his back. Due to his physical complexion, this object had to be narrower than 40 centimeters, and judging by his shorter-than-average height, not so big unless it was a slightly smaller version of his dad, perfectly aligned with Leo's eyes in a total "fake dad" eclipse.
Leo did not have much time to speculate because his father revealed that the object in question was an old book. Old would have been an understatement since the leather cover had deep cracks older than Leo. In addition, moisture exposure had made the oils in the leather bind to the water molecules. When water dried and evaporated, it drew the oils with it and this process had taken place several times since the book had been bound.

"This is for you." His father declared in a ceremonious manner, as if he were an old king giving the crown to his heir and thus all the lands and power that were attached to his name. He never feared acting clownishly in front of Leo to provoke a reaction from him, but this performance was disregarded.

Before he could grab it, his father recoiled and said:

"You must promise you won't tell your mother. She doesn't want you to have this yet."

"Ok, I promise." He responded with a curious tone of indifference.

Leo received the huge tome with his hands facing upwards to gently assess the strength of the binding before opening it. He discerned a heavily abraded engraving on the now obvious front cover. What he could not recognize was the archaic language it was written in. The barely visible markings on the cover resembled the Egyptian pictographic characters that he had seen in an anthropology book he had borrowed from the basement, but there was something off about it. These seemed much simpler in their traces. The structure of the first 20 or so pages was suggestive of a thorough procedure with unknown goals. No pictures or drawings were provided. The rest of the pages looked like entries in a journal to Leo. These were written in different languages that seemed more accessible to him.

"What exactly is this?"

"...A legacy."

"I like the theatrical undertone, but could you expand on it?"

"This book is special… magical, you could say… You know I am not your biological father, but it's not like I simply adopted a random child…You see, I am not sure how it works, but I like to believe that you have lived many lives before this one… You wrote an entry every time, and by some mystical alchemy that only the first alchemist could understand, you are here… And you will be forever as long as you follow suit." It appeared that it was not an elaborate trick but he seemed quite nervous about it and took his time to find the right words. This seemed of utter importance to him. Nick went on while pointing at the cover of the book:

"See this? This stands for “The journal's alchemists” My best friend was the last one and he trusted me with the book before … before he became you… Check these out…"

Leo renounced the book timidly as Nick took it and turned the pages to show him specific sections of the journal. Each of the entries in the journal followed the same pattern, but this one shook Leo.

Charles Darwin

1859

On the origins of species

WHEN ON BOARD H.M.S. ‘BEAGLE,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent…

It went on for a couple of pages, but not for long. It seemed like he just included the introduction as a mere reference to his work. When Nick considered he had given him enough time to examine the entry, he showed him another one, several pages back:

Isaac Newton

1687

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

…

From then on, it was Latin and just like Darwin's section, it spanned a couple pages.

"... So are they all… me?" Leo muttered 

"You are all of them. You share the same traits and interests. You want to know everything. You want to build great things. You aspire for meaning above pleasure and even happiness…" This last word hurt Nick a bit when he said it.

What should have been an awkward silence between the two of them just became an opportunity for Leo to ponder what he just heard. He trusted his father. The timing for a highly intricate joke on him was totally off.

"Wh-What should I do then? They were all geniuses; I am not a genius at anything..."

"You are only eleven. I am certain they all felt the same way when they were your age. You will have to work hard, but every entry in that journal has had an impact on humankind, and I know that you are capable of that. You want to leave your mark here. He was just like you when I first met him.

"You mean… the previous alchemist?"

"Yes… Every time I look into your eyes, I see him, albeit you do not share the same physical appearance. He only told me about this when he was about to die, but he had the same doubts as you do now."

Leo gestured with his hands, indicating his intention of grabbing the journal, and looked for the latest page that was not blank. There. He got it three-quarters of the way to the back cover. There was a decent chunk of vacant space left. The last entry was quite short and read:

Satoshi Nakamoto

2009

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

…

Leo was speechless. He realized the implications of this and asked what was, ostensibly, the most intriguing question in his mind.

"Are we secretly rich? Was I rich?"

"If we ever find your private keys, yes, but I wouldn't worry all that much about that. He never told me anything about his bitcoins before dying, so I suspect he might have lost them on purpose…" 

They kept talking for an hour or so. By the end of it, the idea had started to grow on Leo. He did not know it, but after that day, he started living his life to the fullest, knowing that his destiny was to maintain this legacy of brilliance. He would not let it go to waste by being lazy or avoiding struggle. Nonetheless, he also followed his father's teachings by staying humble throughout.

Nick was about to leave the room when Leo asked him:

"...Can I still call you dad?"

"Of course, bud." He said looking straight into his eyes with a nostalgic gaze of someone who is reliving past memories of past memories. Those that date back to the original events through the remembrance of a memory itself.