Lost Time: Part 1 [Second Skyn]
Page 6
This, though—I’ve never experienced anything close to this. There’s a sudden emptiness in me, and I’m perched on the edge of it. It’s deep, insidious. I almost want to let myself fall in, be done with it. I wait, staring at the flowered bedspread Connie had made me pick out, but nothing comes. Nothing but more simmering anger. Anger stoked by a core of incandescent hate.
I can't stay here. The people who used to live here are dead.
I open the closet, grab a small suitcase from the top shelf and realise I don’t have to stretch at all to reach it. I wriggle out of the Second Skyn one-piece, kick it into the corner, and as I’m opening the drawer for a pair of underwear I catch sight of my new body in the mirror. It takes up less space than I remember, and except for my head, eyebrows and eyelashes, it’s completely hairless. Completely. Not even the faint scratch of whiskers on my chin. Normally I’ve got five o’clock shadow by lunchtime.
My chest is high, pecs squared off. My taut abdomen slopes down in a deep V that points to my naked groin. I look ridiculous. Like an action figure.
I pick a pair of underwear and pull them over my hips. They cling to my buttocks for a second before slipping back down my legs to pool at my ankles. I step out of them and yank a shirt from the closet, drag it over my arms. It won’t close at the front—it’s too tight at the shoulders, too short at the cuffs. I don’t even bother with the pants. None of it will fit me. I’m not that man anymore.
I pull the one-piece back on and as I’m leaving grab the sheet metal-potted snake plant Mom had bought for me before deployment. I leave without stopping to take a last look.
The only other thing of I need is Grandpa’s ’67 Triumph in the garage. Grandpa gave it to me the day I turned 15. Thirty years earlier he’d stripped it down to a Bopper, two wheels on a frame with a small leather set in-between. Dad and I spent the next year converting the parallel-twin gas engine to electric and installing a keyless start-up process, a secret way of turning it on only he and I knew. It was the last real time we ever spent together and I’ve kept it running since. It’s under a tarp in the garage.
I’ll take that too. I need a way to get around and no way in hell I’ll ever trust an autonav again.
On the way down the elevator I call up my IMP, instruct it to book me a suite at an extended-stay hotel, then put the apartment up for sale, and find an estate liquidator to dispose of the contents. I don’t need any of it anymore.
That life is over.
StatUS-ID
[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]
SysDate
[17:57:12. Wednesday, January 15, 2059]
Turns out home isn’t where I left it.
I argue with my condo building for ten minutes while it continues to assure me the unit sold in May of last year, the contents disposed of wholesale three weeks later. My former neighbours exit while I’m standing outside, trying to get the building to understand that it wasn’t possible, that there’d been a mistake. They don’t recognize me and hurry past the crazy bickering with their building in wet, third-hand clothes. Probably to call the cops.
It doesn’t make sense. Who sold the condo? Maybe somehow Connie’s dad got involved, sold it out from under us. Maybe there was a legal mix-up and our wills triggered. Or maybe I died in the accident and this is Hell.
But I don’t believe it.
There’s only two people who could have put the condo up for sale, and I watched one of them die.
My head spins. The numbness sizzles to dread.
There has to be another answer. No way I’d do all this. But the only way to be sure is to get into my account, Finsbury’s account, and check the history. See what actually happened. There’s no use standing in the cold, fighting a battle I’d already given up on. Besides, people are starting to stare.
It isn’t until I think to ask that the building gives me a forwarding address: an extended-stay micro-residence in River City, just south of Reszlieville. I flag another Sküte and ride in a cacophony of blaring ads all the way across the city to the stacks of downsized condos near the lake, densely packed living spaces perfect for people starting from nothing or headed back in that direction.
Once I convince this new building I am who I say I am, providing all the proper credentials and a password I didn’t know but guess on the first try, it lets me into the elevator and shows me to my room.
It’s a disaster. Like a family of racoons sub-let in my absence.
An efficiency kitchen is off the entrance. Empty tomato soup cans litter the L-shaped counter, a half-full case dumped into the sink. Glossy white cupboard doors are all open, plastic dishes scattered over the floor. The small refrigerator is standing open, light off, having long since powered down. Good thing it was empty. The other side of the entranceway is lined by closets, with what few items were in there—clothes, blankets, an extra pillow—strewn about.
Around the corner from the kitchen, a half-open sliding door obscures the bathroom. The rest of the apartment is a single open space. Four walls, no window. Most of the room is occupied by the hide-a-bed, mattress askew and sliced open. Yellow-green padding erupts from the fissures.
I drag the mattress back into place and flip the bed back up into the wall, revealing a ripped-up couch.
Someone ransacked the place. Who knows what they were looking for. Or what happened to the person who sold my house and rented this crappy windowless box.
I flop down on the couch and call for my IMP and one of the walls lights up, requests my StatUS-ID Gibson's IMP appears: a redheaded woman with a narrow face and full lips. I’d created the account before the mediating programs existed and never bothered to reset it from the default personality when I upgraded.
“How can I help?” it asks, its familiar female tone gentle but subtly flirtatious. Like it’s seen stuff I could only dream of. Something the fourteen-year old me had loved.
“Logout and access StatUS-ID Finsbury Gage,” I say.
I have to go through another round of Convince Me before my link account accepts who I am, but when it does my IMP welcomes me back in a guttural accent I don’t recognize.
I’m about to ask what happened to me when I realise there’s something different. Someone changed my IMP’s personality.
It used to sound like Connie.
My guts seize up with a sudden, overwhelming recognition. She’s gone.
Forever.
Everything we’d hoped for. The planning. The preparations. All for nothing.
Even Connie’s personality sprite is gone.
The one thing I want more than anything else in the world is to hear her voice. I don’t want to know how I ended up here. I don’t even want to know who it was who killed us. I’ll live forever in ignorance if I can just hear her say my name once more.
I call up the IMP menu and search for her sprite. I’ll just restore it and at least I’ll be able to talk to her. It won’t be the same as her being here, but better than nothing.
It’s not there.
I double check then ask the IMP for help, but the voice like a South African with a speech impediment tells me the sprite has been deleted and cannot be recovered.
Who would have deleted it? Who could have?
That’s an easy answer. Only one person. It’s exactly what I’d feared.
Me.
No one else could have sold our home. No one else could have accessed my IMP.
My breath is heavy in my nose, sawing in and out.
I walked away from everything we had built. Deleted the one shred of her that remained.
I had.
But I didn’t.
Which means—
I call my account summary with a trembling voice and it’s all there, spelled out for me.
My bank accounts are frozen.
My rep is trashed. Point four-four. It had been a healthy point eight-nine the day of the accident.
There are messages. Pages of link activity.
A whole history of things I
’ve never done and people I’ve never met. A life I’ve never lived.
My Service re-cert date, posted to the Psychorithm Crime Unit.
This isn’t my first restoration.
I’ve done all this before.
It’s all too much. Panic swallows me. My vision blurs. My chest grows tight.
How the hell am I supposed to handle this? How am I supposed to just pick up and continue knowing I’d already come back once and fucked my life up so completely I had to try again as a different person?
And how do I know it won’t happen again?
I clench my fists, press them into my eyes until colours erupt on my eyelids.
What did I do?
I drop my hands and consider my knuckles. The skin is soft, barely lined. Factory fresh. I flip them open, study the palms. They’re smooth, no trace of the callus that had formed under my wedding ring.
My wedding ring.
Where’s my wedding ring?
I stand and search the immediate area, tear the couch back apart.
I need to find that ring. It won’t bring Connie back. It won’t put my life back together, but it’ll be something. One thing. One constant from the life I left.
I pull the bed back down, yank off the mattress, toss the green stuffing everywhere. Search the bedside drawers but they’re empty even of dust.
I sweep the soup cans to the floor, check the cupboards.
I slide the bathroom door all the way open, scan the sink, the small shelf above the toilet.
Nothing.
There’s a towel draped over the medicine cabinet. I pull it off and reach up to swing the mirror open and catch sight of myself. My new face.
No wonder my former neighbours didn’t recognize me. I don’t recognize me.
I’m…handsome. My face is narrow, cheekbones pronounced, forehead long and smooth leading up to a head of hair thicker than I’ve had since I was twelve. I look vaguely like I used to, but only in the most general sense. I’m young. But not like I was when I was young. Young like someone took an image of the aged me, ran it through a Teenage Feed Star filter and brought the result to life.
I blink and the stranger in the mirror blinks back.
I open the mirrored door and find nothing in the cabinet inside. The ring isn’t here.
It’s gone. Everything’s gone.
I slam the mirror and it cracks in its frame.
I wouldn’t have done this. Chosen this body. This life.
Someone did this to me.
If I’d already restored once and don’t remember a single thing that happened after the accident, it means I never once synced my pattern. A different me lived my life for months, and didn’t bother to back-up his rithm.
Then something happened to that me and then someone else authorized this restoration. Or I did, and didn’t leave myself a note.
If I fucked my life up enough to ruin my rep and get my bank account frozen, why would I bother to come back?
But it explains why I’m Gage Gibson now. With Finsbury Gage’s rep, I couldn’t so much as order a cup of coffee from a bus-station vending machine.
I reach over and crank the shower on full blast, set just shy of scalding, step into the hard spray fully clothed and stand there, my head spinning with the self-doubt of an amnesiac, until the building cuts the water off.
StatUS-ID
[a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]
SysDate
[19:36:51. Wednesday, April 10, 2058]
I need a drink.
I glide the silent motorcycle up and out of the garage and make a quick stop at the Somalian deli across the street. Inside, I fumble a few cans of tomato soup off the shelf, grab some crackers. Nadif’s behind the counter today. He doesn’t recognize me when I ask him for a seven-fifty of Ibogaine and sixteen generic Memoraze. I wait as they print, pay with a wave of my tab.
After the Bukarti School Massacre a couple of the Infantry guys and I had run the Ibo for a yard: downed an Army-issue Memoraze with a few swallows of the local Bugbane and for the next thirty-six hours tripped through the panic and horror in a warm bliss as the trauma-laden neural connections faded away, only stopping to re-up every two hours when reality started to creep back in. It wasn’t much fun but it kept the PTSD at bay. I’ve got enough Ibo and Memoraze for a day and a half. Figure the dry heaves should end just in time to start back to work.
The new apartment the IMP found is in River City, thirty stories of sleek white tissue boxes randomly stacked into the shape of a building. Walking through the entrance checks me in and I’m directed to my room without having to convince anyone I am who I say I am.
I drop the groceries in the efficiency kitchen, take the Ibo and Memoraze across to the small living area, position them side-by-side on the coffee table and drop on the couch, exhausted, like I just finished a day-long hump under full load.
I fumble the Ibo bottle as I try to pick it up, can barely work my fingers around the cap, listening to each plastic click as the lid unseals, and place it upside down to the right of the bottle. This is a ritual. These are its steps.
Unlike the paper bags of greyish pills we had to scrounge back on base, consumer Memoraze is sold in a neat pink and yellow square pill, the blister-pack adorned with cycling images of smiling, worry-free faces.
I start at the upper left, squeeze a square from the foil, drop it on my tongue and hold it there, let it dissolve at the edges, savouring the familiar acrid tang, at once herbal and metallic, then struggle the bottle to my lips, take two big pulls, replace it in position, lean back, and settle myself in, anticipating the bloom of euphoria that’ll counter the bitter fire in my throat and quell my racing mind. The liquid burns all the way down but leaves none of the comforting warmth. I give it a ten-count and grab the bottle and let half of it pour into my stomach.
By now I should be drifting in an entheogenic bliss, halfway to psychosis, my body lost somewhere in time and space, but still only feel the hollow anger that's been with me since I woke up. A slight fog has gathered around my thoughts, but it's not what I need, not nearly enough.
I finish the rest of the orange-tinged liquid in a stutter of breathless gulps and let the empty bottle fall to the floor.
It isn’t working. Nothing but fuzziness around the edges of my vision, a slight vertigo when I turn my head. My Cortex recognized the alcohol coursing through my bloodstream and tried to replicate the physical effects, but it's doing a shitty job. Not even close.
Hopefully, my new liver can keep up.
In all that talk about living forever when we’d signed up for the insurance, I hadn’t much considered the realities of restoration. Not that they spent much time discussing them. They just wanted us to sign and transfer payment.
My brain isn’t my brain anymore. Plastic doesn’t get drunk.
The closest I’ll ever get is through an alcohol shyft. And for that I’ll need a cuff.
That’s how they get you.
Fuck, I need a drink.
***
SysDate
[14:05:22. Thursday, April 11, 2058]
I'm bent double on the sofa, chest on my thighs, examining my hairless toes by the half-light of the wallscreen, trying to force my brain to show me anything but those last, agonizing moments of my previous life, when the screen flashes a reminder so bright I hear my irises contract. The Service Admin’s on the way up.
“Detective Gage?” she asks when I open the door. She glances at her tab, back up at me.
I know her, Constable Yellowbird. Karin, I think, but she doesn’t seem to recognize me. She’d been the responding officer at the Mathewson homicide in the spring and I’d seen her at HQ a few times, said hello in passing. Seemed like a good kid, if a little on the odd side. Her short purple hair is tucked into a Service-issue ball cap, and she's wearing a grey, short-sleeve non-combat uniform with the top button undone instead of her constable blues.
“So they tell me,” I say, and step back to let her in.
“You’ve sure changed,” she says, scowls into the room and squeezes past me, angles to the small dark living area beyond.
I shut the door and swing around to see the livewall radiating a lazy afternoon on a tropical beach. We’re looking out to a shock of palms, their frayed fronds swaying on a breeze I can almost smell. Past a smear of shade lies glowing sand, crashing surf and squint-blue sky. Plus the slick naked backsides of four bronzed sunbathing Adonises. I have to shade my eyes.
“Your IMP told me where you were staying,” she says, staring out at the beach. The sudden light reminds me I'm still wearing the soup-stained Second Skyn jumpsuit. My hands have gotten steadier, but I’m still having trouble lifting a spoon to my mouth without slopping.
She walks back across the room and extends her hand. If she notices I need a shower, she doesn't show it. I clasp her hand and an electric jolt blazes up my arm, forks to slam me at the base of my skull and my groin all at once. I feel her pulse throbbing through her fingers, scrape the tiny wisps hair on the back of her hand with the ridges and whorls on my fingertips. She squeezes again and the moist warmth of her skin rubs over mine in the greatest sexual experience I’ve ever had.
I jerk away from her, sick with betrayal and pleasure. My knees buckle and I can't stop myself from hitting the carpet. She's trying not to laugh.
“What was—” I examine my hand as though someone has grafted an octopus to the end of my arm.
“Hot, cold and painful, all at once?”
I nod, still staring at my hand.
“But good at the same time?” she asks, with a lopsided grin.
Yeah. Like an orgasm in each one of my fingers. I nod again.
“Nerve surge.”
“A what?” I ask as she bends and cups my elbow, helps me over to the couch.
“Nerve surge—happens to all you Reszos. Something to do with your brain and body levelling out. They’ll fade.”