by Erik Wecks
Soren frowned and thought for a moment. “I guess I can’t say that it would never happen.” Now she looked at Jo. “But I’m pretty careful who I let on our crew. I don’t just pick up every stray I meet. They have to be the right fit. Jo, I know that it’s been a while since you felt like you had a home—if you ever had one since you left Aetna all those years ago—but I think you could find a place if you’d give us a chance.” Soren held up her hands again. “No pressure.”
Jo shrugged. “I’m not sure I really have a choice. No matter what I do here, it seems a good idea for me to disappear, for a while at least. I guess I can try. No promises, though.”
“No promises needed, Jo. Just keep reminding yourself that on the Clarion, we’re family. It’s not about being good enough. And, yes, you are going to have to disappear for a while. Actually, probably forever. My ship is registered and legal with the Unity, so I can’t exactly have the name Josephine Lutnear on the registry.”
Jo gave Soren a wry smile. “That’s okay. I’m not that fond of her anyway.”
Soren looked surprisingly sad. “Really? I am.”
15
New Skin
Jo stepped bleary-eyed into the small bathroom attached to her shared quarters on the Clarion. For the third day in a row, her reflection in the mirror startled her. Today at least she didn’t jump. She took a deep breath and gave the mirror a smile. The stranger in the mirror smiled back. As she had already done a hundred times or more, she turned her face to the side and inspected the prominent cheekbones under her new light-brown skin.
The Clarion departed Tortuga only two hours after Jo finished editing Chapman’s memories. Having no other choices ready at hand, Jo had come aboard with a permanent position as the ship’s medical officer. Her run-in with Chapman had made a home on Tortuga too hot for her comfort, but with any luck, Chapman was still desperately searching for the red-headed woman who kidnapped him with a drug in his drink and then got his rocks off before stealing his wallet. If Jo had done her job right—and that was a big if—he also associated this woman with the description of the woman the Timcree had discussed with the information broker. Best case, Jo had been totally forgotten by Chapman.
To be on the safe side, Soren was taking a long trip away from Tortuga with contracts that would lead the Clarion deep into the Unity heartland. If something went wrong with their plan for Chapman, Soren thought that such a route would look the least suspicious.
Jo pulled down on the skin under her eye, examining the new brown irises that had replaced her blue ones.
Since departure, Jo had been working to create the transformation she now saw in the mirror. She’d started prepping her cells and immune system within an hour. Thirty-six hours later, the auto-doc started a series of complex and expensive reconstructive surgeries on a patient it believed to be gravely burned in an engineering-room accident. What followed was eight days of cosmetic operations, accompanied by a series of complex nanite-based interventions. She only retained a few flashes of memory from that time.
It wasn’t a bad face—in fact, just the opposite. She had designed the new short brown hair and olive skin herself. She’d modeled the look on Anna—her surrogate father’s spouse. She and Anna hadn’t been especially close, but they hadn’t been distant either, and Jack and Anna had been the two adults who did the most to raise her, so it made sense. Besides, she’d always thought Anna, with her olive skin and wavy dark hair, to be incredibly beautiful, and that was part of the difficulty.
It all felt a little vain. If she’d been thinking straight, hiding from the Unity might have been a little easier if she’d picked a much plainer face and figure. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever see the face in the mirror as her own.
In the natural order of things, Josephine Lutnear was now only a genetic seed, suppressed and hidden inside a husk created by a complex interaction of nanites. In her place stood a woman who looked nothing like Jo. Jo was finding it most difficult to adjust to her new name, Katrina Paige.
Still looking in the mirror, she sighed.
From the toilet, Vi interrupted Jo’s thoughts. “I kind of like it.”
Jo about jumped out of her new brown skin. She blushed. “I didn’t see you there. I’m so sorry.”
Vi laughed and shrugged. “Yeah, well, I didn’t lock the door, so that would be on me.”
Jo’s roommate cleaned herself and then stood up, unabashed, before pulling up her panties and jumpsuit.
Jo cringed a little inside and looked back to the mirror, starting her morning routine. Most people thought that being a doctor would have made Jo impervious to privacy issues, but it didn’t work that way for Jo. When she was in doctor mode, almost anything could be thrown her way, and she would take it in stride, but when she wasn’t practicing medicine, Jo found her personal privacy to be an important value.
Vi stepped up next to Jo in the cramped bathroom. After washing her hands, she made a show of looking over her hair. Jo was suspicious that she just wanted to talk. “So what made you want to stay on the Clarion? When we got to Tortuga you couldn’t wait to leave.”
“You mean besides not having any other options?”
Vi shrugged. “You didn’t have to take the position. The captain offered to drop you off somewhere else if you wanted.”
“True.” Jo pulled out her acoustic teeth-cleaning system and then stopped before she inserted the mold in her mouth. “But where would I have gone? I don’t know anyone, and I don’t have any papers. It seemed like the only good option I had left.”
Vi picked up her makeup tablet and lazily adjusted the dials while the bio-responsive coverup adjusted the color on her face. Jo noticed her half grin. “I’ll take that.”
Jo furrowed her brow. “Take what?”
“You called it a good option. That’s a start. I’ll take it.”
Jo laughed and went back to styling her new hair. That was her least favorite part of the change. She had never liked short hair, at least on her. She couldn’t wait to let her new brown locks grow.
Vi nodded. “What happened to all the talk about tiredness?”
Jo smirked. “I’m still tired, and I guess I still would rather be on Tortuga where I felt like I was doing something on my own, but I had a lot of time to think about Korg Haran while I was getting my surgeries, and I think that Soren is right. I did a good job there. It’s not my fault if they couldn’t see that. It gave me a little peace about the whole thing.”
Vi stared pointedly in the mirror as she said in a kind of throwaway manner, “You’re really lucky, you know.”
Jo frowned a little. “How’s that? I’m hunted by the Unity, and possibly the Maximus Syndicate, and you think I’m lucky?”
Vi shrugged. “Everybody’s got shit in their past, but not everybody gets to put on a new skin and just start over as someone new. Most everybody has to live with their shit, you know?”
Jo shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You’re such a glass-half-full person.”
Vi either missed or chose to ignore the sarcasm. “I know, and I’ve been wondering why you aren’t.”
“I have my reasons. Things happened. Things I don’t want to talk about. But I’m trying to make a fresh start. I’m just scared, you know? Things haven’t gone so well for me when I’ve had to work as part of a team.”
Vi nodded her understanding. After a pause, she spoke with just a touch of sadness. “Yeah, I understand. You know, we all have things we don’t want to talk about. Most of us are Omitted.”
“Omitted? How’s that possible?”
“Same way as you. Brought on board because the captain took a shine to us and then slipped us backward into the system. Most of us owe our own identity and ability to find work to her. It makes for a loyal crew. That said, I think you’re the only person who had to change appearance. The codes for that must have been expensive. I think you owe the captain a pretty big debt of thanks.”
“Yeah, I do, but I brought my own medical code
s with me, so I don’t owe her as much as you might think.”
Vi looked sideways, surprised. “You knew how to program a full synthetic protocol?”
It was Jo’s turn to smile. “There are some perks of learning military medicine outside the Unity system in a fleet that does nothing but train. We learn how to do some interesting things.”
Within fifteen minutes of opening her first onboard clinic later that day, Jo had the misfortune to find herself gently squeezing a testicle. Hoping to hide her discomfort, she said, “Turn your head and cough for me.”
The ship’s cook, one of the six men on the twenty-eight-person crew, had wandered sheepishly into her clinic, almost too embarrassed to speak as soon as she opened the door. One question had led to the next, and Jo soon found herself doing the second most awkward examination she could on a male patient. Gratefully, everything felt normal, and nothing moved when he coughed.
Jo’s cheeks felt hot enough to be flame red. She wondered if her darker skin would cover some of her discomfort. In fact, she found herself more irritated with her embarrassment than the exam itself. She was a professional after all, and this was part of the job. It’s not like I haven’t done this before, she thought.
She let go and scooted her stool away from the patient, pointedly not looking at her patient’s junk. “Well, the good news is you feel normal. Your nanites haven’t missed any hidden cancer or a hernia.
The man, Todd Gartner, sounded surprised. “Does that happen?”
Jo shrugged and kept her voice matter-of-fact. “Theoretically, yes, but I’ve never seen it.” Realizing that she hadn’t heard the guy move, she added in her most doctor-like tone, “You can pull up your jumpsuit.”
She removed her gloves with a snap and turned to look at her scanner sitting on her desk while the patient adjusted himself. She tucked the gloves inside one another and carefully set them on the counter, not in the trash.
She knew what she would find on the scanner before she even picked it up. When a male patient of a certain age came to a doctor complaining of pain urinating, you could almost always predict what you would find. If he had been a bit older, her first thought might have been a kidney stone. Jo picked up her tablet, still refusing to look at her patient. Before she had even started the exam, she had sent the medical nanites in his body to hunt down and identify the exact offender. It took only another couple of seconds to get the expected outcome.
Hearing the zip of his ship-issued jumpsuit, Jo risked looking. Todd had loose curly brown hair, an average height, and a broad build. In a moment of unusual honesty, Jo told herself she could see how women could be attracted to him, and that observation put her in an even more prickly mood.
She was further irritated with herself when she remembered that Todd’s means of dealing with his nerves about the exam had been a particularly off-color joke. If she had a type of guy, Todd wasn’t supposed to be it.
She tried to sound completely non-judgmental. She even smiled a little. “Well, the good news is that you don’t have a kidney stone. Instead, you’ve got an STI, and quite a healthy one at that.”
It was the spacer’s turn to blush. He didn’t say anything.
Jo couldn’t help but feel a little schadenfreude at the turn. You deserve a little embarrassment for making me poke around your balls. Maintaining the momentum, she plunged forward. “Have you slept with anyone on the ship?”
Todd looked positively mortified, but his eyes flickered off to the side when he shook his head just a moment too quickly and said, “No, of course not.”
Jo continued, satisfied at her decision not to throw away her gloves. A quick DNA scan of those should tell me how many of the hens have been infected by this cock. Jo almost laughed at the double entendre but managed to control herself. It was never good form for a doctor to laugh at a patient’s illness, no matter how irritated it made her.
Todd continued. “Look, doc. It’s been going on for a while. We haven’t had anyone on board to look at things like this, so I mean …”
Jo tried a different tack. She nodded and tried not to sound condescending. “I understand.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows, saying in an almost offhand way, “Are you sleeping with anyone now?”
Todd shook his head a little too vigorously and answered a hair too brightly for Jo’s tastes. “No, I’m not.”
“Well, if you intend to, you’re going to wait a week, okay? And for the next three days, you’re going to take the pill the auto-doc dispenses to you before your sleep period, agreed? So no messing around in meatspace for a while, especially not without a condom.”
On hearing her pronouncement of a cure, Todd looked relieved and smiled the mischievous smile he usually displayed when she ran into him around the ship. “Whatever you say, doc. I just want it to stop hurting when I pee.”
Jo willed herself to return the smile. She only hoped that he hadn’t noticed that her eyes had stayed behind. “It will.”
She stood up and shook Todd’s hand, sending him on his way.
When the pressure door to the med bay clanged shut, she sat down at her desk and frowned. She tried to sit up straight, but only a few seconds later, her shoulders resumed their slump. STIs. Way to make a difference, Jo. Not sleeping with anyone, my ass.
Jo picked up her tablet and flipped to the global view of personnel health. A series of bars spread out across the screen, showing the pulse and heartbeat of everyone on board. She opened the ship-wide broadcast screen and told the medical nanites in all crew members to keep a special lookout for a broad spectrum of STIs and to flag her if they found any. She put resources into finding the specific bug that had infected Todd. Then, thinking back to Todd’s nervous joke, she increased the settings for the female crew another ten percent.
Satisfied, she slumped back in her chair and rubbed her forehead. It’s my first command, and I’m not losing my first campaign to an STI.
After her awkward beginning, Jo spent a quiet day getting acquainted with the health of her patients. Sorting through all the data had the added benefit of letting her learn the obsolete charting system used on the ship. In general, everyone on board had the run-of-the-mill stuff—radiation-related diseases and tissue damage, all of it within manageable limits. A repaired knee here and suppressed cancer there, nothing that she hadn’t seen before either in training or in meatspace. The ship’s engineer seemed to be the only person with anything chronic. Freddi carried the holy trinity of an overly jumpy immune system—allergies, skin issues, and even a bit of asthma—all of which were being managed by nanite suppressants rather than with a proper gene therapy. At some point, Jo would make an effort to find out why, but for now everything seemed to be under control, so that could wait.
Jo was just about to close up shop when Soren padded in. She smiled easily, but Jo thought she saw a note of something, maybe concern, or maybe just amusement. “So how was your first day, Katy, or is it Katrina?”
Surprised by the question, Jo rubbed her cheek gently. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess I’ve been pretty busy adjusting to my new skin.” In truth, Jo found the adjustment to a new name far more emotionally difficult than the changes to her body. As a doctor, Jo knew that bodies were by definition malleable—they lived in a constant state of flux—so new skin color or eyes, those were just extensions of what the body did every day when it recreated its own cells. However, your name was your identity. It carried with it a whole host of ideas and experiences that no other person in the galaxy had shared.
To give up on Jo Lutnear and become Katrina Paige meant losing something, and the loss tore her in two, because some part of her was eager to make a change, eager to make a clean, fresh start on life. Another part of her hated herself for even thinking such a thought, let alone feeling excitement at the prospect. It felt incredibly disloyal to her parents.
Looking up, Jo realized that Soren was expecting an answer and that this conversation might have been the whole reason for Soren’s visit.
Unsure, Jo shrugged. “I don’t know, what do you think of Katy?”
Soren’s smiled grew a little, but she shook her head. Her tone was gentle. “Katy’s fine, but that’s not my call. It’s not my name.”
Jo pinched her mouth. “Well, Katrina’s too formal, and I’m kind of tired of a single syllable, so Kate is out. I guess it’s Katy.” She looked up at Soren.
Soren’s voice remained neutral. “That’s as good a reason as any, Katy.”
It had been hard enough for Jo to contemplate using a new name herself. It turned out to be infinitely more difficult to hear someone else use it. It felt like a small but significant betrayal of her identity, a dismissal of every event that made her what she was.
Jo changed the topic. “So how’s it going with the identity insertion?”
Jo thought she saw just a twinkle of something in Soren’s offhand expression. “It’s coming along. I’ll know more shortly, and as soon as I know, I’ll tell you.”
The older woman shifted in her chair, adopting a more serious tone. “So I saw that you have nanites out hunting STIs. What’s happened?”
Now it was Jo’s turn to become uncomfortable. “You know I can’t discuss that—patient privilege and all.”
Soren held up her hands. “Of course not. I don’t want to know the specifics. All I want to know is if I have a problem that will affect the day-to-day operations of my ship.”
“No, it’s not that bad. I had a patient in here earlier this morning with a pretty good … who tested positive, and with a small vessel like this, it seemed prudent to look at the rest of the crew to make sure that the patient hadn’t infected anyone else.”
“And?” Soren leaned forward.
“I have one secondary case, and that’s all.”
Soren’s eyes narrowed. “And how will you be handling that secondary case?”
