Interview with Rome I - Part 4 of 17

As Steve Fisch and I get the scripts ready to sell Rome's Revolution as a streaming series, he asked me for a lot of background information that I did not have. So I took some time out to interview Rome and Rei. Rome was very talkative so I had to break up the interview into two parts. Rei was a bit more concise. So here is the first Rome interview, part 4 of 178.
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Rome: OK, let’s say that the soul exists. And if it does, then it’s a part of the continuum of being self-aware. To that degree, my mother and father became Asborodi Cimponeti, in English, companion spirits or perhaps soul mates. And that was that. They never left each other’s side again, so to speak. I was born not even a year later.
Perry: What did the Overmind think of this?
Rome: From what my mother told me; it was furious. It wanted me back in I-cimaci for training. Really bait when you think about it. But my mother is a very strong woman. After I was born, the Overmind finally struck a deal with my mother after months of pleading. My father really only needed to be in Havei four times a year for about a week at a time. The rest of the time was charting and analysis which he could do from anywhere. So the deal they struck was that my parents would move back to I-cimaci and my father given all the resources he needed to do his work. Twice a year, he would go by himself back to Havei. The other two times a year, my mother and I would accompany him and spend the week with my relatives on my father’s side. One trip was always right around my birthday and I enjoyed that.
Perry: Well, that sounds nice.
Rome: You would think. But at that point in my life, I was a quote good Vuduri. And good Vuduri don’t enjoy anything. I was not allowed to show it on the outside. My cousins always made fun of me and called me grumpy. But I had these feelings and I had to bury them down so deep that nobody, not the Overmind, not other Vuduri, ever knew they were there. I was barely aware of them myself.
Perry: So what changed?
Rome: When we were on Tabit, when I first met Rei, the Overmind there wanted me to use my Espansor bands with him to ferret out the truth. To find out if Rei and his group were really Erklirte, Ark Lords. But the Overmind there was very prissy. It didn’t want to be “soiled” by contact with an Essessoni mind so it had me use a T-suppressor along with my band. Since I already had a genetic predisposition toward what my mother experienced, I suppose it was inevitable given the right circumstances. I mean, Rei is a wonderful man but if he was not the right one, it wouldn’t have happened. Ask yourself what are the chances that I would meet him 26 light years from Earth and 14 centuries after he was born? The odds are so infinitesimal, the only way it could happen would have been if he and I were meant to be Asborodi Cimpaneti as well.
Perry: And that changed you?
Rome: My goodness, yes. For one thing, I was ejected from the Overmind more or less instantaneously. It’s called Cesdiud in Vuduri. In a very real way, I was reborn on that day and like all newborns, I wasn’t very happy to be thrust into the world. I screamed and I cried. It took me a while to calm down.
Perry: I’ve only known you this way, it seems like this is really you.
Rome: Yes. This is the real me. And this should have been the real me all along. It took Rei and that happy accident to liberate me and leave me to start thinking for myself. As a side benefit, all the memories that I had suppressed for all those years came flooding back and it was like my childhood had been restored.
Perry: What was your childhood like?

Tomorrow, part 5