Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  They reminded her of before.

  Unwelcome consciousness chased away the less welcome dream, and with it, the lingering shouts of the men that had found her on the street ten months ago. For weeks, the events of that day had repainted themselves upon the canvas of her nightmares. Again and again the scene unfolded before her sleeping eyes, leaving her a helpless spectator to Vincent’s death. In time, the dream had faded; it had not come to visit for four months. The similarity between that night and this one became impossible to ignore. Her present night of restless anxiety brought her back to that one.

  Tomorrow’s operation seemed routine, though. Perhaps the sound of Vincent’s voice emanating from her VidPhone that afternoon was what had brought the nightmare back. After an initial rush of hope, fear, and confusion faded, she realized it for what it was―a recorded vid call he placed to her the day before her last birthday. Some glitch in the system, or a hacker, tried to play games with her mind.

  Her fingers traced across her stomach as she stared at this body. Perfect in every detail like a Greek goddess sculpted from flesh-colored marble. They let her keep her sylph’s frame, but now the musculature held subtle definition. Gone were the soft curves of a spoiled porcelain doll. The engineers had outdone themselves in their effort to make her look as close as they could to the Nina that had been made of flesh. Even her own mother had not noticed until she stood up.

  She searched the blank ceiling for answers, the subconscious habit of an anxious mind. Her touch felt normal; so ordinary that she could close her eyes and forget the plastisteel coffin in which her brain lay trapped. Her hand slid from her hip, down between her legs. Her back arched; even that sensation felt the same. The touch brought Vincent to her mind, and her fingers retreated in joyless shame.

  She had never realized how loud the ventilation fan was before.

  As much as her body appeared the same, her personality had changed. In some way, she felt that she did die that night. Only once had levity crept into her thoughts since. Her mother, Camille, had been pivotal in keeping her sane since the attack. Nina felt like a black balloon, detached and floating above the rest of humanity. Her mother could pull on the string, bringing her closer.

  She made a suggestion that what had happened, albeit horrible, enabled Nina to become a true force for change in the world. Nina shot back that the only good thing to happen was that she no longer needed to shave her legs―or anywhere else. Her mother’s mortified reaction made Nina laugh for the first time in half a year.

  Father, on the other hand, he did not take it well.

  He had been cold with her ever since she rejected his decree that she become a useless socialite, a flower dangled on the arm of a boring man. Despite her central nervous system being very much alive inside a doll body, he treated her like an impostor to his already dead daughter. She regretted telling him the truth; she could have faked it for years without him noticing. Unfortunately, she could not lie to him, even if he was a pompous ass.

  Her internal loathing twisted the knife, reminding her that the creature upon her bed was a product of her own choice. If she accepted a life spent smiling at people she could not care less about while pretending to be interested in conversations about nothing, she would still be whole.

  A fate better in whose eyes?

  Nina abandoned that life to do something meaningful, but all she accomplished was what everyone feared she would do. She got someone killed; someone she loved. If it would save Vincent’s life, she would have wound back the clock so she never met him. Doubt about her decision had been rattling around her head since the night she spent wrapped in tape in the shower.

  With Vincent gone, she found guilt a far worse companion than regret.

  She got out of bed and sulked at the window. The pale ghost in the glass resembled her former self in all respects except standing five foot eight. She had gained four inches. The primary contrast between a cyborg and a doll was that they engineered the latter to look as human as possible. Cheap class 1 models, AI’s used for menial jobs, had human-like features but visibly mechanical joints and patches of exposed machinery. Even mid-grade Class 2 units were obvious in their artificiality. Division 9 gave her a class 3 military body that even mimicked the act of breathing and blushing, though she did not think the crying function worked. It was supposed to, but ever since that first day of knowing, nothing happened when she tried.

  Maybe it’s me that’s broken.

  She could eat, and she still had to use the bathroom. All her parts seemed intact, albeit made from synthetic tissue. Fingertips traced over her stomach. It felt so real, but the skin did not live in the truest sense. While artificial, and many times more resilient than genuine human skin, blood still flowed through it―the same blood that kept her brain alive. She felt pain when it was injured and pleasure when it was touched just right.

  Nina smirked through her reflection at the city. This body did not feel like hers, it was just a tool given to her like a badge or a gun. Her sense of modesty left with the tears that had fallen from her artificial eyes when they told her that Vincent did not make it.

  The mysterious voice from the light never had a face put to it, though she came to know him as Colonel Harper. He existed somewhere up the food chain where the line between Division 9 and C-Branch blurred. They had been interested in her since she took the entrance exam. Idealistic, motivated, stubborn, and she scored high on ethics. Not to mention, her family’s money made her close to immune to bribes. Her lackluster physicality and disinterest in front line work kept them from approaching sooner.

  The night of the attack, Harper arrived at the medical facility before she did. The augmented monster had done so much damage to her that her body was a lost cause; they hooked her brain to life support even before they got her to the operating suite. A computer connected her conscious mind to a holographic terminal. Had she declined his offer, she would be as dead as Vincent. At the time, she thought they asked if she wanted to live. Now that she knew, she could not say if she would make the same choice.

  She stood motionless for the better part of an hour, staring out over the vast cityscape as she pondered inhabiting a body that cost in excess of 14 million credits. They say sometimes one’s job owns people, but in her case, it went beyond metaphor. She could always quit, but they would keep the body. If she got lucky, they would give her a civilian model that was not too obvious in its artificiality. Her eyes changed focus; her reflection became sharp as the city blurred. This was not her body, and yet she thought death preferable to appearing fake. A little bit of Duchenne vanity peeked out from behind the curtain of sorrow.

  Tears welled in her eyes as she folded her arms and sank to the floor, curling against the cold glass window. It went beyond vanity; as long as she looked real, she could pretend she was.

  Sparse traffic passed at that hour, one or two every thirty seconds, then a burst of six, and nothing for two minutes. Distant cars and ad-bots reduced to shimmering specks of light moving about in silence. The city stretched off, a massive glowing carpet of contiguous metal. Urban sprawl completely covered the land from the ocean to a little bit eastward of the old California border―straight up into what used to be Canada. The great wall in the east protected everyone from the horrors of the Badlands in the interior of the continent.

  Officially, Division 9 existed to monitor foreign nationals and protect visiting dignitaries. Off the books, they dealt with individuals too powerful for normal legal channels to handle. The change came with a promotion to the rank of Lieutenant and a few months of training. For two weeks after she woke up in this thing, she could not get Vincent’s blood-soaked stare out of her mind. The absence of anger in his eyes hurt most; he did not scold her for being stupid and running like everyone said she would.

  The last expression his face would ever make was one of concern for her.

  Warm tears ran down her legs at the thought. She gasped, swiping her hand on her leg to capture one. On her finger
tip, it caught a gleam of a passing set of headlights. It was her that had broken, not this simulacra of a spoiled rich girl doing what she wanted to spite Daddy.

  Vincent, I’m sorry.

  Nina crushed the tear into her fist, before pressing both hands to her face. She wanted to burst, let it all out in a soul-crushing rain of tears, but all she could do was stare at the one line of wetness leading down her leg to her toes.

  Her mother had said that he would want her to be happy and alive. He had given his life trying to buy time for her to survive; and her mother begged her not to waste the sacrifice. After two weeks of not leaving her bed, the brass came close to pulling the plug. Her mother had convinced her. Nina lost herself in the training; without Vincent, and with a father who considered her dead, all she had left to care about was the job.

  Her first solo ops exceeded command’s expectations, and they gave her control of a small team for the operation that would start tomorrow. Her perfectionist nature earned her a reputation as a bit of a hardass; something she had never before imagined anyone accusing her of. That man had in fact killed a part of her, fear and weakness replaced with ambivalence about death. If any truth resided in the strange things Division 0 dealt with, her death would mean she could be with him again.

  Tomorrow’s operation sounded like an evaluation to see how she handled leading an event force. Someone must think she had potential, to give someone as new as her command, even of a small team on a “bullshit op” as her new partner Dale Abrams had called it.

  Two quick beeps preceded a neon blue box appearing in the corner of her vision. Dale’s face floated within, trying to smile through a veil of fatigue. At twenty-eight, he was older, but only by three years. Her father expected her to be a mother twice over by this age, but that was now something she could never be. The impassive virtual Nina glaring at Dale over the comm represented a vast departure from the body that shuddered as she held her hands against her gut, mourning the children she could not have.

  Dale’s forced grin did little to dispel the bags under his eyes. His dirty blond hair caught the azure luminescence of the hologram’s frame and took on a hue closer to green. She wondered if he would be able to grow facial hair by the time he hit forty. He was easy enough on the eyes, but rather than Vincent’s calm, assured, and self-deprecating grin, his face had the look of a dog that wanted to please its master.

  As always, she steeled herself against her regrets and hugged her knees to her chest. Her head turned, tracking a hovercar thirty feet below as it drifted out of its lane.

  TC88-12, failure to maintain hover lane. Seventeen hundred credit fine.

  Even dead, she could not get away from Division 1.

  Dale’s head hung static as the world moved wherever she turned her head. The novelty of getting vid calls right into her mind had worn off in a few days.

  “Guess you’re awake.” His dreary chuckle sounded like more of a grunt.

  Nina’s tone came flat, almost bored. “Did they hire you for how perceptive you are?”

  “Umm…” Dale hesitated, wondering if he got off on the wrong foot with his new boss. “I… Er… Sorry to bother you at this hour―”

  “What’s on your mind?” Her fingers still teased at her belly. “I hope it’s something worth calling over.”

  “Just can’t sleep.” He scratched the back of his head as he tried to smile at her.

  “I’m not asleep either now.”

  “Uhh, sorry.” He winced. “I keep reading over the dossier for this op and there’s some stuff that’s bothering me.”

  “Some stuff? The whole thing stinks.” She tried to tell her brain to stop expecting Vincent’s voice to reply. “Did you see this damn layout?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure why they are being so public about it.” Dale frowned. “Isn’t standard procedure to get a room or two in an inconspicuous place?”

  “For some reason, they created a cover operation at the Imperial hotel as a basket weaving convention. Amateurish.”

  “I guess that will work if they want us to have a lot of personnel―we are supposed to have a dozen Marines and an electronics team. Maybe they thought twenty trucks from Floyd’s bakery parked around the hotel would be too obvious?”

  “Did you catch the name of the presenter? Ira M. Boring.” Hologram Nina scowled.

  He lofted a nervous chuckle.

  “Initials, Dale. I.M. Boring. Who came up with this shit, are they trying to get us killed? Any professional will see it.” Nina continued, scowling and yelling from Dale’s NetMini, though in the real world she sat in zombie silence.

  Dale cringed under the verbal barrage. “Maybe they’ll think a hacker was horsing around. I can change it to something that will attract less attention. One minute.”

  Returning to the bed, she sat on the edge, marveling at how smooth the satin felt.

  The sound of Dale working on the mission data blurred away as her mind wandered. Her apartment had not changed much since the night before the attack, the only real difference being the black bedclothes. The white ones had Vincent’s scent on them, and she could not bring herself to wash them. Black seemed appropriate enough. Nix, the stuffed rabbit, got consigned to a box in the closet. She did not want her childhood companion to see her like this.

  For a time, she wondered about any of a thousand subtle ways she could have done something different. She could not help but dwell on the question of whether Vincent would have proposed to her by now had that day not taken such an unbearable turn. After these ten months, numbness settled in. The thought of his face only triggered resigned silence now. She pulled her heels up to the bed; her hands ran up and down her shins as she wondered if her father was right about her personality. Was she the walking dead or had she dammed a tsunami of grief behind a wall of indifference so she could function?

  The thought to seek out Lieutenant Oliver was tempting; though she worried it could go too far. With her promotion came unrestricted access to cyberspace, and she had found word that some Division 0 operatives reported seeing ghosts. Command had not placed them on administrative duty after that claim, which meant that someone high up believed it. She could ask Oliver to have one of them look for Vincent so she could talk to him one last time, fearing and wanting that in equal parts. The desire to hear his voice again, to know that he still existed in some form, warred with the emotional crash that would follow once his spirit departed. Seeing him, even if only for a moment, would be like watching him die all over again.

  A touch of cold struck her thigh, spreading into a tickle that ran down her leg. Silent tears fell over her stoic face at the thought of watching Vincent’s ghost wave farewell. Almost as bad as wanting him back, she wanted to let it all out and cry him gone. Neither wish came at the asking.

  Ghosts? Ugh. She rubbed her forehead, fingers through her hair. I’m losing it.

  Dale’s voice startled her. “That should do it. How does Robert Farmington sound?”

  “A little on the generic side, but an improvement nonetheless.” The voice Dale heard had no trace of her mood. “Try to get some sleep.”

  “Okay. See you in a few hours; I’ll be there at six.”

  “Oh, Dale?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You didn’t wake me up…”

  The floating window collapsed as she ended the call. Now alone with her thoughts, she pushed the idea of ghosts out of her head. Regardless of what Division 0 could or could not do, a part of her was happier not knowing.

  Nina sighed at the shifting glow of the Comforgel in the crumpled hollows of her satin sheets. Between thoughts of Vincent as a ghost and worry about the operation, sleep seemed a futile endeavor. The old standby of her treadmill offered little help―not like this body got tired.

  It could still enjoy a hot shower, but she had not allowed herself to take pleasure in anything since that night. Why should she be happy when her mistake got him killed? Her mother said he made the choice to go after her, and he made a t
actical failure with his assumption that one shot to the leg put the monster down. He should have controlled the situation before letting his guard relax. That was a heavy stone to heave at the memory; if she had not charged ahead like an idiot, Vincent never would have been in that position.

  She found some comfort in having saved a life, even if she had all but given up her own to do it. The prostitute, his intended victim, was only seventeen. At least that night had scared her into finding a new line of work. A confused mix of emotion swirled as she paced.

  Too many questions still lingered without an answer. If Captain Farris wanted her on a safe route, who altered it the night of the senator’s speech, and why not say anything in person?

  She fell into a chair by her terminal; the coldness of the simulated leather made her draw a breath through clenched teeth. The Division 5 report had a disappointing lack of detail. The aug ganger sustained heavy weapons fire from the arriving A3V. From the looks of it, he lost his still-normal arm in a spray of blood and ran away singing Beethoven, in German. A month after the attack, Division 2 Investigations Department got the case, but the detective working on it had no luck finding him either.

  Her nakedness glowed blue and green from the terminal panel as she batted at it, swatting files aside like a bored cat. A gleaming white and silver building appeared, bathing her in ivory light, and she paused.

  That same night, the now-famous hack of the Silver Building went down, a supposedly impregnable cyberspace fortress that sold secure data storage for any client that could afford it. Law enforcement failed to notice it as all eyes had been on an abandoned section of grey zone, where two police officers died. Someone had managed to sneak in and steal data that belonged to StarPoint Industries, a manufacturer of military vehicles, but they never found out who did it or what they took. The stolen data had been important enough for StarPoint to spend millions trying to track down who had done it, but they failed.