The Ravel

I always got in trouble for my strong-will. I was a bad seed. Perhaps it is my paternal foremother who is to blame. A woman who, in self-defense, killed a Bolshevik soldier with an axe. Is it her epigenetic remnants that disrupt my chromosomal DNA sequencing? Science has proven what our ancestors once observed. That a curse and a blessing effect each of us from four generations before. We can never escape it. Shall I consider her trauma a curse or a blessing? Perhaps a bit of both. A curse if I am catastrophizing the state of our society, and a blessing if it has helped me see through all the lies.

I live in an era where neural-quantum interfaces allow humanity to trace and feel their ancestral memories. Health care providers call this the Ravel; recorded quantum vibrational knots across generations of genetic code. Clinicians install this Ravel in the minds of civilians under the guise of “mental wellness integration.” Consumers wait in anticipation reminiscent of a new iPhone release.

I didn’t. Something in my marrow spoke to me like a tuning fork against my ribs.

But a year ago, after enough people “healed” from their inherited trauma and started seeing the world in suspiciously identical ways, I caved. Not to comply, but to infiltrate.
My nightmares had become unbearable. A silver forest. Blood-stained snow. Screams in a language I only remember my grandfather speaking when he had led mealtime prayer. And then there was the axe. Not in my grasp, but deep inside me, beating like a little tyrant within me.

The Ravel Technician, a lanky man with iridescent implants where his eyebrows should have been, gave me the standard line. “Your ancestors stored truth in your blood. The Ravel just helps you decode it.” He was only half-lying.

The interface took hold fast. My body spasmed. I felt a sudden jolt behind my eyes, followed by visions. But these weren’t memories. They were simulations. Branching timelines, hyperreal and endlessly looping. My foremother’s moment with the soldier played again and again. In some versions, she fled. In others, she died. In one, she joined them. Yet always, I watched from inside her. Each variant left a trace in me. A moral fingerprint. My soul felt split in a hundred pieces, and still, the Ravel kept whispering: Which choice is the origin? Which path is yours? I resisted.

That’s when I met the anomaly. A young woman, maybe twenty, barefoot in a Soviet-era field hospital rendered in perfect virtual detail. She looked directly at me, though I was supposedly just a viewer.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

“Are you?” I asked.

“They loop us,” she said. “And they reprogram us to make us forget who we really were. But your line resisted. Your foremother was the last unbroken thread. That’s why they’re trying to overwrite her.”

My breath froze.

“The Ravel isn’t revealing ancestral truth,” she continued. “It’s rewriting it. Don’t you know the word ravel is a contranym, meaning to knot and unknot. The program is reframing trauma not to heal, but to erase resistance. They’re conditioning entire bloodlines to be more… pliable.”

I felt the axe again. It pulsated behind my rib cage.

“Why show me this?”

“I’m unable to disclose that information. But your bravery in facing the real of your past is rare. Most avoid it. That is why most humans don’t resist. They don’t want to remember what hurts them or the situations that cause them shame.”

The woman reached out, touched my temple, and in a flash, I saw the full horror. Algorithms editing lineages like code, deleting acts of rebellion, transforming moments of courage into guilt, defanging memory itself. The Ravel wasn’t a healing tool. It was an eraser. A technological form of denial.

Instead of complying, I pushed back. They had underestimated the echo in my blood. Story by story I faced and processed all my unwanted memories. I spoke with my ancestors, and digested their lived experience instead of canceling and deleting. It was hard. Perspective taking has always been difficult. In time, I won.
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Sometimes late at night, I still dream of the axe. Not with fear, but with reverence. A reminder that our lived experience is not just a record; it’s a weapon against all the lies. And like the Ravel, our strong-will shackles and sets us free.

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