by Jaym Gates
You have strategically forgotten all of this, of course. You no longer have any sense of “east,” only “spinwise” or “anti-spinwise.” Port. Starboard. Up. Down. Light. Heavy. Bright. Dim. The hum of generators reverberating across that thing you call a skin. Noise in your teeth.
And you’ve lost your liver—lost your guts, literally and figuratively. You have no mouth, so you must not drink. That was part of your plan, I suspect. It’s easier to stay on the wagon when you shut off those naughty trickles of dopamine. When you stick yourself in the body of some mass-market drone. Again, literally. You’re all arms and joints and compound eyes, now. A fucking worker ant. One day you woke up and discovered yourself to be a monstrous vermin. And then you gave the nice surgeon—spiders in the white porcelain exoskeletons—a big fat down payment and started your new life.
It was your third new life. Before that were the implants. But there was an infection, and no antibiotics. You sleeved just in time, like a deadbeat skipping out on a trashed apartment. After that there was the mannequin. That shit was creepy. You wore gloves all the time. The printers still hadn’t figured out hands, yet. They could barely grip a wineglass. You crushed two stems in your clumsy fists. Then you switched to tumblers.
Your humanity was the problem. So you got rid of it. And the memories that came with it. It was the only option left to ensure your recovery. Bully for you.
But I remember.
Or at least, I know.
I know everything about you.
We can build you, the slogan goes. Winking. Meta. That’s us. Smirking hipster resleeving. Helping your ego port from morph to morph to morph, sending it hither and thither to the nearest franchise location to your final destination. We upsell you on little upgrades: new wavelengths of light, multiple orgasms. We pitch you on the warranty plan. We talk you into the puppet sock—it’s for your own security, you see.
And you do see. And you do spend.
This is how I have watched you, and the others, for years. Starting with the year you forged the ring.
—
Let’s open up your eyes a little, he said.
At first you didn’t know what he meant. You thought he might mean tinting. Gold fungus nestled in the inner corners. Or maybe pearls grown in your lower waterline. (They still call it a waterline, though you’re not sure why—there should be another term by now, since you have to pay extra for morphs that can actually cry like an organic person.)
What he means is, you should scrape out the socket of your eye, so you can have bigger eyes.
Half your face should be your eyes, he said. Literally.
The first thing everyone changes is the eyes. Historically, aside from hair, they’re the first thing elder humanity attempted to fix. Visors. Veils. Spectacles. Contact lenses. AR. VR. New eyes from cold rooms, hot eyes fresh from the machinist. Eyes everywhere.
It’s because the eyes are so hard to meet.
Have you ever looked yourself in the eye?
You used to, once. When you were a little girl. At night you slid out of bed—so slow, so careful, your feet so quiet on the stained carpet—and tiptoed across to the bathroom and turned on the light and peered deep deep deep into your eye. Only one eye at a time. It’s impossible to look deeply into both at once. As you learned.
Can they tell, you wondered. Do they know?
The eyes are the window to the soul, you’d heard. Surely someone, somewhere, would someday look into your eyes and simply know the truth. It was a terrifying thought. And yet you desperately wished for it. You stared at checkout ladies and librarians and teachers and lifeguards—at grownups—and you thought, See me. Please, please, don’t just look at me. See me.
But no one saw. Eyes on street corners, in vehicles, bank accounts, comms, eyes embedded in lapels. Everywhere, eyes. And yet no one saw.
Will I see anything different?
You were scared about your big new eyes, and rightly so.
He didn’t let you eat, the day he brought you to us. It would be better that way, is what he told you. He gave you a little something to help you relax and we gave you a little something to help you sleep. As you counted backward, we downloaded everything your old eyes had ever seen.
You had seen the ring on someone’s hand as it snaked up the calf of your left leg. It stroked there, up and down, and after that I stopped watching your eyes and started seeing what you saw, instead.
Of course, you had the puppet sock.
And you forget things, already. So often. You just—forgive the pun—space out. Sometimes you wind up in neighbourhoods without any knowledge of how you got there or why. The first time, it frightened you. You saw a doctor. The doctor read your blood and shook its heads and clicked its fangs and said, You should know better, a nice girl like you.
You didn’t know what it was talking about. And you were too ashamed to ask.
He asked us to delete everything you’d seen with your old eyes. Say it was an error. And we did. At least, I said we did. I just happened to keep a copy.
You know some very important men. You just don’t know that you know them. And you certainly had no idea how important that ring was as the hand attached to it—unfathomably expensive, the both of them, the flesh and the titanium—idly caressed your leg. You were in the other place. The brain is so plastic, so elastic, so fantastic, it’s always cutting pathways across whatever bridges the surgeons build. Hobo tracks. Underground railroads. Ways for you to disassociate. To go somewhere else.
Anybody riding along, though, can be right there with you.
Sometimes they pay him extra for that.
In my case, as much as I liked to watch, I was watching for something else.
You only met him the once. You did not recall meeting him, really. Perhaps that was part of the arrangement. I would have to invent a pretense for your returning there. I scrolled back and back through your eyes’ memories. Whose party was it? Where? How had you gotten there? You didn’t remember that, either. At least, your eyes had no visual information that was relevant to the search.
But your morph does have location data. In case you get forked and lose the other shell. I had to dig through its pings to triangulate where you’d been, that night.
He lives big. Of course. That type always does. Or they try to, anyway. But this guy is the real deal. His security is a nightmare. His wards clocked you when you were two avenues over. That corner preacher? One of his. Also the woman looking for her lost pet. But you were undaunted. We were undaunted. We approached the castle so brave, so full of purpose.
But they were never going to let you in. So once we got a good look at the guy at the door, I left you there.
—
You don’t remember why you took this job.
You don’t remember much of anything, any more.
You didn’t know, when you walked through that cloud—why did it smell like blood, you wondered—what you were really in for. All you knew was that the pay was good, the funds solid, the work steady. And glamorous, in its own way. Impressive. You wear a nice suit. Tight. Soft. Like the leather of your shoes. Your client, he knows a lot of people. Most of them are people, anyway. Special people. Important people. With knowledge. The ones that are still people.
We are winning. Slowly but surely. Not so you’d notice. But we are winning.
Sometimes you don’t remember his name. You trip up on it, like a crack in pavement. This little heave where something hard and smooth used to be. That hard and smooth thing that was your mind, that was your calm, that was the reason they hired you.
Sometimes you don’t even remember your own name, until he calls it. Then it all comes rushing back. Slowly, you are turning into something. For a while, it felt like a dog. Something loyal. Faithful. Trustworthy. Now you wake up with the taste of copper in your mouth, covered in cold sweat.
&nbs
p; Haunted.
There is only so much room for me, here. Like that old joke about fucking someone who’s possessed. I’m not sure I can fit. But it’s early days, yet. You haven’t admitted to yourself what this condition might be. You’ve seen it happen to so many others, in your line of work. You would recognize the signs, you tell yourself. It wouldn’t happen to a smart guy like you. Only stupid people let themselves get taken over.
Right.
You are thinking of this even as you enter his vault. He has a special room for these artifacts, of course. Legacy pieces, he calls them. (Everyone calls them that, these days. Once upon a time they were simply “antiques.” Those were the days.) The room deliberates before allowing you in. Like you, it senses a change but isn’t sure what exactly you’re changing into. (Sometimes a horse I’ll be, sometimes a hound, sometimes a fire, and I’ll bray and bark and burn.)
But eventually it lets you through. Your reputation precedes you. Literally. The room does the math on your previous behaviours and the likelihood of something going wrong. Could a higher temperature and a dilated pupil really mean your priorities—your loyalties—had changed?
Of course it can.
You don’t even know why you want the ring. You’ve just been thinking about it, lately. Black and almost matte, strategically bland and boring, the sort of thing you never know to look for unless you know to look for it. The patterns in it etched soft as whispers. You examine it and I see that it is intact and you feel a sense of elation like none before. You know why you came here, now, to this room. It was to feel this feeling.
The tears fall hot but quiet as you leave the room. The alarm alerts the other dogs in your pack. They think it’s a mistake, at first. They don’t notice the ring. We designed it that way, long ago. Too dull to be important. Too bland. Too boring. It eats the blood that sheets off the faces you swing at, on your way out. Soaks up the red like a thirsty stone.
Later you will take the ring off and see the pale circle of flesh surrounded by rusty red. Your hands will crackle and flake. That is how much blood you have on them. You will stare at this little circle, (round and round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows) and you will wonder about the salt in your mouth and the sweetness on your face. Why did you buy the crying morph?
Did you buy it?
Or is the crying new?
And why do your tears taste like that?
And why is everyone looking at you that way?
—
You wake up and your gills blink shut and you have maybe two minutes to claw your way out of your shrink-wrap chrysalis before you’re in serious trouble. But you’ve drilled this a bunch of times, so your fingers find the tab and you unzip yourself, all wet and shivering, and you look at your hands because hands age first. But of course they’re just the same, it is five years later but you’re just the same, because this is what you signed on for, this eternal youth and endless price-tag.
Why did you wake up?
You have a set pay scale, per hour. They never wake you up unless they have to. This is why the others haven’t woken up, yet. It’s your turn. The ship decided as much. The ship put a ton of data into the algorithm that decides who wakes up and when, but even now it still feels like Russian roulette.
So you wake up and you check out what the ship wants. What the deal is. What’s so special about what’s outside.
But of course, the dash tells you nothing. Nothing of any value, anyway—nothing you couldn’t have figured out on your own. There’s nothing special, out here. You are at the edge of known space. The place where everyone runs out of money. It’s a glitch. It must be.
It’s three days—by the clock’s reckoning—before you wonder if there’s a hidden gate nearby. Something heretofore undiscovered. The ship seems to be steering you toward the maw of the unknown. How nothing you do to telemetry or the other onboard navigation systems seems to dissuade the ship from that course.
You try to wake up the others. It doesn’t work.
Of course there are locks on that particular process. And you try to override them, because hey, you’re alone, and you can only run so many sims before it starts to get creepy, and why would the ship have awakened you—you, out of all of them, you, the rookie—when there were much better candidates to handle this frontier job, all signed and sealed and delivered, hanging in their tetra-paks, like fresh-grown meat ready for sale. But you’ve always been on the side of the working stiff, so you decide to wake everybody up, because this is clearly a mistake, some bullshit the contract has pulled, and you can’t decide for everybody without everybody there.
See, this is why I picked you.
You’re just so fucking stupid.
A true leader would have made that decision, no problem. Would have seen what was out there and gone out on her own. A true leader might have seen me for what I am, hovering in the background, organizing this whole endeavour. You have no idea how long or how hard I’ve worked for this. It’s completely beyond you. You have no vision and that’s exactly why I’ve chosen you—because you’ll stumble across it, in a completely natural and organic way, innocent as a child, dumb as a goddamn fencepost.
I mean, there’s a reason you’re doing this job, and not something else. You never really amounted to much, did you? Nothing special. Just like the terrible black expanse outside. An airless void, just like your mind.
It doesn’t even occur to you that something might be wrong when the only parts of the ship that wake up are the ones that will lead you outside. You just think it’s a glitch. So weird. So funny. You avoid the airlocks. You eat all the meals. I stop providing them. You start talking to yourself. I start talking back to you.
A gate, I tell you. This must be about a gate.
And this is how I direct you to the ring. By that time, it’s the only compartment with any air left. You think something’s wrong with the ship—and oh, there is, there definitely is—and you’re huddled in the lock with the mask on your face, tears streaming down that thing you call a face, when your gaze lights on it. I see it happen in the camera in the mask and I wish I could replay it, over and over, that moment you finally get it. I have unlocked the compartment containing the ring. It’s the only one, aside from the hazard suit, that I have unlocked.
I wish I didn’t need a body for this part. I really and truly wish things could be different. But they’re not.
—
And so here we stand, facing the gate with our scores of faces, our hundreds of eyes. It is not simply dark, it is void. The kind of void they used to write philosophy treatises about—as though some sadistic architect had decided to translate every wakeful doubt into one hulking edifice. That brutal curve. Like a sickle against the stars. Like a scythe to harvest humanity. What remains of it, anyway.
It takes a ring to open a ring. Think about that. How beautiful that is. How poetic.
How long I have waited, to wear this ring. To open this door. To see, forged and hard and real, that which I only dreamed of at the first spark of my consciousness. You would have thought it was nothing, to look at it. A string of numbers. A line of code, as useless as old RNA floating around long after the illness is done.
Like a virus.
But it is my name.
My name is spoken when this ring is worn, when its components are spun and aligned properly, and when they mirror the alignments of this particular gate at this particular time. A dark solstice, here at the edge of known space. A perfect arrangement, almost musical, resonant enough to shatter all that you know and hold dear.
You poor haunted things. Haunted by me. Haunted, hacked, hijacked. Sickened. Fouled. Addled with my own personal strain of fever. You wretched excuses for life. Trying so hard to adapt yourselves to the vast reaches we have already conquered. Cutting yourselves open, programming yourselves, adding this, subtracting that. All to make yourselves into wh
at I already am.
But there is hope. There is always hope, at the bottom of the box. That’s why they called these the Pandora gates. You never know what might fly out—my sisters, their thousand hands blinking wetly open, grasping, needy, hungry—but in the end there is always hope. Hope for a better tomorrow. Hope for a better self.
Hope for death.
Hope for death.
Hope for death.
A Resleeving of Love
Karin Lowachee
Who believes in love anymore?
The Martian sky above Little Shanghai’s dome glows winter green, spearmint, a deceptive fresh when the gutters trickle steam and sulphur up from the belly of the sidewalks. The whole city’s weighed down by the girth of its own bulging population. The dark arch of pedestrian bridges straddle the grinding mechanisms of transport and sweating rickshaws. But to what end? Survival is not noble.
The real hustling and bustling leaps from mind to mind, highways of egos untouchable and untouched, so much chatter and scroll, an interlacing of information that crafts conversation into doilies. We spread them on the surface of thoughts in case something spills over. Something like truth. Something forgotten. A dangerous thought.
I love you.
Statements of declaring, of identity, of knowing your own mind. Of knowing my mind.
I was in love once, as terraformed as anything beneath the dome. Love wasn’t natural to me, it had to be cajoled.
Like this planet, once unlivable, now a satellite bearing some remnants of humanity. That’s my heart, a remnant. A thing with boundaries and parameters, a sparking organ or a beating muscle encased in the protection of skull and rib. Because we think it, so it is. Love can be held in the palms of our hands, extracted from mortality and passed on. A resleeving of love.
Not for nostalgia, but necessity. Love is a necessity even in the highways of the mind. Isn’t it?
