Lost Time: Part 1 [Second Skyn]

by Boyes, Damien

  My first pet?

  “Where the hell am I?” I demand. “Where is my wife?”

  She repeats her questions and continues to ignore mine for two more rounds, then shakes her head, swipes twice at her tablet and taps it once, hard.

  My breathing stops.

  There’s a gaping hole in my chest, a nothingness where my lungs should be. I concentrate on forcing my diaphragm to respond but it’s like my respiratory system has been shut down.

  She turned off my lungs.

  I grit my teeth as my throat burns but it’s a contest I won’t win. I hold out for as long as I can but even knowing the plastic in my head doesn’t care whether it gets oxygen isn’t enough to override the instinctive need to inhale. She lets me struggle until I’m within sight of clawing my throat out before she relents.

  She glowers at me and says, “I’m going to give you your breath. Use it for anything other than to answer my questions, I turn it off and go for tea.”

  I acquiesce with a frantic nod and gasp when my lungs kick back in.

  “Now, your hometown, mother’s maiden name, first grade teacher and your first pet?”

  I answer her.

  “Work history.”

  I tell her.

  She shows me her tab with three cyrillic words on it, waits for me to read it then takes it away.

  She hands me a tab. “Write a sentence.”

  Fuck you, I scrawl on the surface with a shaky finger.

  She smirks when she reads it but I get to keep breathing. “What were the words I showed you?”

  I recite them for her.

  “Good,” she says. “Now, last chance. What is your name?”

  I open my mouth to say ‘Finsbury Gage,’ but I know she won’t take that for an answer. What could have happened that I’d be restored under a different name? And if not Finsbury Gage, what could it possibly be?

  There’s only one name I can think of: GibZ0n, the alt ID I levelled to keep my primary StatUS-ID linktivity clean when I was a kid. Everybody has an alt, some people way more: each one a set of credentials and a Social Faith score and a usage history tied to an aspect of your personality you want to keep hidden. An alternate version of yourself, one with interests and desires the real you doesn’t want forever tied to a public link record that one day might run for office. Or need a job.

  I was fourteen. I didn’t want Mom knowing what I was doing on my computer in my bedroom at night, so I created Gage Gibson. I haven’t used it in years, but it’s still valid, probably still has a decent rep.

  “Gibson,” I answer, my mouth dry. “Gage Gibson.”

  She nods, drums her tab, shoves up off the stool and strides out of the room.

  I’d named it after my Mother’s Mother’s last name and an author I had been obsessed with at the time. I used it through school, dusted it off and ground the reputation score back up in the intense month between discharge and Redguard. Opened it once or twice over the years to keep the rep active, but not since SinoPharm. Hadn’t even thought of it since I got married.

  Why would I have abandoned my life and taken this one instead?

  I ball my hands into fists. I must have done something.

  Flex my knees. Something bad.

  The possibilities race through my head—a shyft habit, a Service investigation, a murder spree—but none of them seems likely or even probable. I can’t imagine a scenario in which I’d willingly give up my identity. Especially in favour of a porn-alt.

  But what if—

  I look down at my new body. It’s long and lean and athletic. My midsection looks like a topographical map, hills and valleys in muscled relief. I’ve got the arm-span of a pro-baller.

  It’s absurd.

  Why would I pick such an ostentatious body?

  By the time the woman comes back, I’m sitting up, pretty sure this time my legs will hold me, and brimming with questions.

  “Your pattern is registered with Standards and your skyn’s bio/kin is now associated with your rep,” she says in clear, unaccented English, and then throws something at me. It bounces off my chest and flops in my lap: a new StatUS-ID—the Union’s all-in-one pass card—in the name of Gage Gibson. “Clothes in the bin by the door. See yourself out.”

  “Where’s my wife?” I ask. The first of many questions.

  “Dead,” she states, and everything else I want to know sags out of me. The woman brushes out through the curtain and disappears through the door.

  It’s quiet. The medpod has run through its maintenance cycle and shut down, but the single syllable peals in my head.

  Connie’s dead and I’m someone else. Some happily ever after.

  I want to curl up in a ball and cry, to open up this rising well of grief, but I can’t do that here. I need to keep it together.

  I need to get home.

  I push myself up on wobbly legs that this time keep me upright, shuffle over to the clothes bin, dig out a rough, long-sleeve shirt and charity-store pants, slip on a mismatched pair of running shoes and climb the stairs to the landing.

  I don’t even know what month it is.

  There’s a steel door ahead of me. A weak cylinder of light shines through a peephole. Behind me, another security door blocks the top of another flight of stairs. Heavy duty locks, no window. Only one way out.

  I force my legs forward, grasp the handle and push the door open into a shock of cold winter air that takes my breath away.

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [11:14:05. Wednesday, April 10, 2058]

  I’m stretched on the Second Skyn bed, tablet spread on my lap, trying to access my link account on the wall to get at my messages and find out what’s happened in my life since I left it, but even my IMP doesn’t think I look or sound like myself. I spend ten minutes arguing with it until I’m forced to trial-and-error decades old security challenges.

  When I finally get the thing to accept who I am, it greets me in Connie's voice.

  “It better be me that’s keeping you so busy,” it says.

  The sound of her voice pops something in my head, makes my ears ring. It's teasing, projecting her tone perfectly—the winking inflection, the underlying squint of a smile. I'd forgotten it'd be there. I talked to her only yesterday, but it feels like a lifetime ago.

  Anger and grief shoot through my stomach, race up my chest and pierce the roof of my mouth. My skin burns. My eyes shudder and I squeeze them tight.

  I bark out something unintelligible at the wall.

  “What was that?” Connie’s says from the wall. Her voice is pain in Tru-D. A sharp ache laced with hate. “Are you drunk? At eleven fifteen in the morning?”

  “Mute,” I yell, my roaring in the small room. “Turn off the damn sound!”

  It doesn’t answer. But the wall stays quiet.

  I inhale, let it out through clenched lips. Blink my eyes clear.

  Two years ago, as a surprise for my birthday, Connie customized a sprite for my IMP. Spent the whole day under an hrfMRI helmet reading through pages of text to capture the cadence of her voice and chatting with a series of personality-mimicking algorithms. She hammed it up too, Connie at her Conniest. The process wasn’t as detailed or invasive as Second Skyn's cortical mapping procedure, but as close as you could get this side of having a web of bioreactive nanowires plunged into your brain stem. She thought it was hilarious, used to play Scrabble against it to see if she could catch it cheating—

  Green text shimmies on the wall. 'I await your orders.'

  Constance Gage won’t be denied.

  “Access sprite control,” I say. The sprite reference menu appears on the wall.

  “Delete.” It asks me if I'm sure. Deletion is permanent, why not archive—

  “I’m sure,” I say and the second I do, I regret it, but it’s better this way. I know won’t be able to live with her in my ear, reminding me about appointments and reading me my messages, each
word a sharp stick stabbing my grief. It’ll drive me mad.

  With Connie’s sprite gone, I randomize a replacement, end up with a male with a brusque accent somewhere between South African and Klingon. I turn off the wall, pact the tab closed and sit in silence until the food arrives.

  Lunch—all of it, including the orange juice—tastes like paste.

  I'm not hungry anyway.

  I just want to go home.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [17:01:26. Wednesday, January 15, 2059]

  I steel myself against the sudden cold and step out of the basement clinic into a murky urban laneway, take two fumbling steps on rough ground before I realise I don’t know where I am or how I got here. The heavy door slams shut behind me, and I start at the finality of the noise.

  It’s night but I can see. Cloud cover reflecting the silvery city light back down on us.

  There’s a slur of traffic noise in the distance.

  At least I’m in the right city.

  I start to shiver. It’s fucking cold. I wrap my hands around my shoulders but that makes the trembling worse. Five seconds later I’m shuddering like an unbalanced washing machine in a spin cycle. It must be twenty below, far too cold for two-percent body fat and the light shirt and threadbare pants I picked from the bin. The wind stabs at my skin and I flash back to the frozen eternity in storage, reliving Connie’s death over and over.

  The thought of her hurts more than the cold. The sight of her being torn apart, mutilated while I could only watch, helpless, as my entire life was ripped away from me—

  No. Not now. I clamp down on the rising surge of grief before it overwhelms me and I collapse into a ball and sob in the snow until the winter takes the pain away forever.

  I can tear my heart out later. First, I have to get out of this cold. But where?

  It’s warm in the clinic—

  I spin around to the metal door but there’s no external handle, nothing to grab. Only a dented seam where the door meets the jamb. I ball my fists and pound, calling for help, for someone to let me back in, but no one answers. They’re going to let me freeze to death out here.

  It’s getting colder by the second. My toes and fingers are numb. My ears are shrieking. In temperatures like this, frostbite is minutes away, and hypothermia close on its heels.

  I’ve got to move.

  The laneway’s wide enough to drive a car down. Two-storey brick and tar-paper row houses on one side, a other a long, graffiti-swept brick wall on the other. Snow’s piled ankle deep.

  Two stories of cinderblock block the laneway to my right, but on the left a narrow alley looks like it’ll take me out to a street.

  Left it is.

  I pick my way along the icy ground on feet losing feeling by the second, my hands cupped to my mouth. I’ll get out of this alley and find a shop to warm up in, figure out what’s going on, what to do next.

  I round the corner into the alley and run face-first into man waiting there. I stumble back, surprised, rubbing my nose. He’s massive, blocking the passage entirely. In the gloom of the alley, I can’t make out his features. This can’t be good.

  I’m shifting my weight to my back foot when he hits me in the stomach hard enough to lift me off my feet. I throw a left in response but I'm off balance, there’s nothing behind it. He intercepts my swinging fist before it connects and steps past, spins me back the way I came and cracks my head against the wall of graffiti. I fall forward, hit the ground in a heap. A knee plants on my back as a massive hand presses me face first into the jagged snow. Shards of ice stab at my cheeks.

  I can’t see. Melting snow floods my mouth. Something warm presses to my neck and a half-second later a neat row of white text appears in the dark.

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCESS THIS DEVICE?

  Green and red balls hover underneath the question.

  “Think green,” the man growls above me. His knee digs further into my back, squeezing my chest into the ground. With my arms pinned underneath me, I can’t get leverage to push up, can barely breathe. At least the shivering has stopped. Adrenaline’s taken care of that, and sharpened my thoughts in the process.

  Someone’s got a cuff on me, trying to force a shyft into my head.

  This is a mindjack.

  The Service held a briefing on mindjacking—an up-and-coming new crime in the Reszo community—malicious code hidden in off-market shyfts. The victim has to allow the code in, but then their psychorithm is wide open and ripe for the plucking. Snatch memories and rifle through, use the details to pick the victim’s life clean. Or hold it for ransom. Or torture it for kicks in a virtual dungeon unconstrained by the limits of sanity.

  This is the perfect place for it too. An opportunistic low-life could make a good living waiting outside a shady restoration clinic for someone like me to emerge, dazed and distracted. An easy target.

  Not going to happen.

  I think red and the message evaporates. There’s a grunt above me and I’m lifted by my collar and the seat of my thin pants. I have enough time to suck in a mouthful of liquid air and I’m slammed back down with a force that knocks the wind out of me.

  Warm plastic on my neck.

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCESS THIS DEVICE?

  “Look at the green dot,” he commands. Pain explodes in my side. Fist like a sledgehammer. I think I hear a rib crack.

  I’m choking. Suffocating in a slushie.

  I think red.

  “Shit,” he mutters, rusty gears in his throat. “Accept it and this’ll all be over.”

  I’m lifted, and driven down once again.

  “Do it, Finsbury, or I take a detour to your parent’s house before I come back and ask again.”

  Finsbury? He knows me. Knows Mom and Dad. This isn’t random. How could anyone know I’d be here?

  Ribbons of colour swirl in the darkness. I’ve only been alive for an hour and I’m about to die again.

  Shortest restoration ever.

  Fuck it. I think red.

  The weight lifts from my back and air floods into my lungs. I blink my eyes clear as I’m lifted again and tossed upside down against the wall. I land on my head and roll down over my body.

  “Shit, Finsbury,” the man says. “Can’t make anything easy, can you?”

  I’m able to flop my legs sideways, get my head up, get my eyes on him. He’s a giant in mahogany skin. Shaved head. Brown eyes. Indigo photoos glowing with cold light. He doesn’t look mad, more frustrated than anything. He’s wearing a tight shirt and workout pants. Mist rises from his skin like he’s fresh from a hot shower.

  He strides across the narrow alley and hauls me up by the throat with an industrial-sized mitt, slugs me in the stomach with the other while I flail at his rigid forearm.

  “This is as much for you as it is me. Ack the goddamn shyft.” He screws up his face, wrenches my head around and presses the device to my skull. The message reappears.

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCESS THIS DEVICE?

  His hand is hot around my neck, fingers choking me, his giant pupils searching mine, looking for a sign I’m about to break.

  He isn’t going to find one.

  The white text fades, replaced by another in a more alarming shade of orange.

  YOUR SKYN IS EXPERIENCING TRAUMA. WOULD YOU LIKE TO RETREAT TO YOUR HEADSPACE AND WAIT FOR EMERGENCY SERVICES TO ARRIVE?

  Red and green balls hover below.

  I use what little air remains in my lungs to wheeze, “No.”

  The warning dissolves.

  My assailant sucks air through massive nostrils and grits his teeth, squints around the corner to the busy street. People and cameras only twenty-five meters away.

  “I’m going to put you down, and you’re going to walk with me,” he says. “You give me even a whiff of trouble, and I’ll rip your head off your body. Either way, I get what I need. Got it?”

  I cough in the affirmative. He drops me and whe
n my legs sag he clamps a fist around my left bicep and hauls me back to my feet. “Don’t test me,” he says, but I don’t think he means it. This isn’t a random mindjack. He could have beat me bloody, but he didn’t. He knows me. And not the name I was restored under, either. Me. He wants something. All I have to do is let him think he might get it and wait for my chance.

  I shuffle my feet down the alley, through the multi-hued gloom of faded luminescent graffiti, him dragging me more than I’m walking on my own. By the time we’re nearing the sidewalk, my strength has returned and the pain in my side receded, but I continue to play along.

  Before we emerge from the alley he stops, leans close, his skin baking off heat, and presses his lips to my ear. “I know you’re figuring to make a break, Finsbury. But know that if you do, it’s your parents that will suffer. Got it?”

  I nod and he steps us into public. Passing pedestrians stream around us like a river around a sudden boulder. We’re in Kensington Market. The Skywalk is down the street, its multi-storey plaza rising above the squat brick buildings around us.

  The giant scans above the sea of heads, waves at a hirecar idling up the street. It glides forward and stops at the curb, slides back it’s door and offers a wide empty cab.

  “Move,” he says, and pushes me toward the open door, loosens his grip to usher me in.

  Rule number one of kidnapping: never get in the car.

  I duck as though co-operating but at the last second spin out of his grip, plant my feet, and throw myself in a roll over the front end of the car. I land with the vehicle between us, amazed I got so far in one jump.

  The giant rolls his eyes in a combination of disappointment and irritation, and moves to retrieve me. But the car’s between us. And his skyn isn’t built for speed.

  I push off, dart through the light traffic and sprint down a cross street, headed toward the Skywalk and the maze of stalls inside. I’ll be able to lose him there.

  I go full-out for ten seconds before I risk a glance over my shoulder and realize I’ve covered what would have been a world-record distance when I was a kid. The giant isn’t even close. He’s two hundred meters away, already given up. An island of muscle in the crowd watching me escape, despair pulling on his face.