MACHINE
Apex Publications
www.apexbookcompany.com
This novel is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
MACHINE
Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Pelland
Cover Art “Machine” © 2011 by Katja Faith
Cover design by Mekenzie Larsen
Interior design by Jason Sizemore
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Published Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
www.apexbookcompany.com
www.jenniferpelland.com
Smashwords Edition
ISBN13: 978-1937009137
Find Jennifer Pelland’s work in the following Apex titles:
Unwelcome Bodies
Dark Faith
Close Encounters of the Urban Kind
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
When Celia opened her eyes, Rivka wasn’t there.
A white-spectacled technician looked down at her and said, “Sorry about the company.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and she followed the gesture with her gaze and saw a pair of hospital security guards flanking the room’s closed door. “There was another incident this week.”
She struggled up onto her elbows. “Can you tell them to please let my wife in?”
He winced. “I’m really sorry, ma’am, but she’s not here.”
The chill in her bones felt so real that it took her a moment to remember they were now fake.
“I need you to stand for a couple of tests.”
She couldn’t feel any difference in her body as she sat up and planted her bare feet on the cold tile floor. Her muscles felt the same, her weight felt the same, her center of gravity felt the same. If she didn’t know better, she’d think the hospital had done nothing at all and that she’d just awoken from a light nap.
Either way, Rivka should have been there.
The tech put her through a battery of physical and mental tests to make sure that her mind had integrated properly with her new body, then he gestured toward a curtained-off corner of the room where a pile of clothes awaited her. Once she was dressed, the security guards delivered her to the office of Dr. Kenneth McElvoy, the patient relations administrator for the program. “It’s good to see you again, Ms. Krajewski,” he said, smiling at her through an orange beard that had seemingly gotten fluffier over the past week. “How are you feeling?”
“What happened?” she asked.
His smile vanished. “The Hartford clinic was firebombed. There haven’t been any threats against our facility, but we’ve stepped up security anyway, just as a precaution. Don’t worry — patient safety is very important to us.”
She’d meant what had happened with Rivka, but she couldn’t bear to ask again.
Dr. McElvoy adjusted his glasses. “So, like I asked, how are you feeling?”
Celia looked down at her hands, hands that looked just like her old ones, all the way down to the small scar on her palm from a childhood fence-climbing incident. She’d known the reproduction would be exact, but still, it startled her to see how perfectly they’d recreated every little flaw. “Everything feels the same.”
The smile came back. “Just like we promised.”
“Just like you promised.”
Why wasn’t Rivka here? It wasn’t like her to be late, and now of all times...
Celia worried at her lower lip with fingers that felt just as warm as before. Maybe the hospital had asked her to stay home for her safety, what with the Hartford attack. No, someone would have said so if that were the case.
“Here’s your glasses,” Dr. McElvoy said, handing her the copper half-frames. “Let’s give your new biometrics a quick test.”
She put them on and made sure the bone conduction pads were tucked behind her ears. She felt the light sting behind one ear as the frames attempted to verify her identity by sampling this body’s unique chemical signature, now that she no longer had DNA. She then pressed the tips of her thumb and index finger together to activate the microscopic fingerdots just below her skin and turn on the glasses. The holographic lenses sheeted down at half-opacity and showed her home screen. In the upper right corner, her private message box had the Commonwealth of Massachusetts symbol flashing over it. That meant an official court document was waiting for her.
She didn’t dare open it.
“Everything seems to be working,” she said.
“Good. Now... “ Dr. McElvoy leaned forward, elbows propped on his desk. “During your intake interview, we discussed how crucial it was to have a strong support system in place, especially during these first few difficult days. I’m concerned that your support system seems to have, well, vanished.”
“But, Rivka...”
Dr. McElvoy frowned at her through his beard. “She’s not here, Ms. Krajewski.”
The message box seemed to flash even brighter. Celia felt her body go cold, and pressed her fingers together again to shut down her lenses.
“Do you have any close friends to stay with?”
“My friend Trini’s out of the country. She’s it, really.”
“You shouldn’t be alone right now, Ms. Krajewski.”
She wouldn’t be, because everything was going to be fine with Rivka. Maybe she was having another heart-to-heart with her rabbi. Or it could have been work. With the money they’d paid for this procedure, she couldn’t blame Rivka for feeling the need to try to rake in a big bonus this quarter.
“Tell you what. I’ll see about getting a security officer sent home with you, just to be safe—”
“No,” Celia blurted. “I don’t want a stranger in my house.”
“I’m not trying to scare you, but you and I both know that this isn’t the safest time to be one of our patients. Hartford took us all by surprise, but really, it shouldn’t have. In other parts of the country—”
“My townhouse shares walls with the neighbors on both sides. I’ll be safe. Honestly, the walls are so thin that you can hear—”
“You shouldn’t be — “
“Please, don’t make me spend the night with a stranger.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then softened. “If you insist. But I’m going to have a private security detail drive by your house for the next few days. Don’t worry — they’ll be discreet. We’d never do anything that would publicly connect you to the program.”
“Fine,” she whispered.
“So, who else knows about your procedure?”
“I told Trini, and Rivka told her rabbi. And I had to tell my boss and the HR department. Taking a week off at this time of year—”
Dr. McElvoy held his hand up. “Of course. And I’m sure they understand the importance of keeping your new status confidential. So, I’ve got you set up for daily check-in sessions this week. Call my office if you need anything tonight, and if not, I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning at eight.” He stood up and held out his hand, and Celia took it reluctantly, submitting herself to the handshake out of sheer politeness. “Congratulations on the successful procedure. We’ll have you back in your own body in no time.”
Celia had the sinking suspicion that for Rivka, it was already too late.
The security guards had her wait a moment before escorting her out of the bioandroid wing and into an empty hallway. “It’s better if no one sees you leave,” one of them explained. When they hit a more populated part of the hospital, the two men faded back into the crowd. She let the hospital computer guide her to her car, climbed into the sky blue two-seater, pressed her thumb against the ignition pad, and let out a pent-up breath as the car started. There was no visible difference between this body and her old one. None at all. The car couldn’t tell the difference, the tiny DNA metrics pads on her glasses couldn’t tell the difference, not even Celia could tell the difference.
So why wasn’t Rivka here?
No, she was just stuck working on a particularly tricky account. All Celia had to do was open her mail and she’d see that. The legal message was just...
She’d feel better once she was home and saw that everything was okay.
She put the car into gear, and her glasses flashed a message from the hospital suggesting that she mirror her windows before leaving the garage, as the protesters might be filming people entering and leaving the building. So she did. She exited the garage and stopped at the base of the ramp to stare at them as they knelt in prayer on the sidewalk next to their “Souls Cannot Be Replicated” banner.
That’s what the protests in Hartford had looked like only a week ago.
Her glasses helpfully offered links to more information on the aftermath of the Hartford incident, the latest manifestos issued by radicals in the bioandroid protest movement, and the fastest route from Cambridge to Waltham given current traffic conditions, but she waved them all away.
The message icon taunted her.
She turned her glasses to drive mode to clear the lenses, and drove home.
Celia knew the truth even before she entered the house.
She turned into the driveway, her townhouse’s garage door opening automatically for her car, and as she looked up, she saw that the plants were gone from the kitchen window.
Their two-car garage was empty.
Celia took a deep breath and stepped out of the car. If she stayed in the garage, she could pretend that Rivka had gone out to run an errand. That she’d pulled the plants onto the kitchen table so she could do a little pruning. That the procedure hadn’t changed anything between them. That everything was going to be all right.
If only she could stay here forever.
No.
She squared her shoulders and forced herself to walk through the door. As she stepped into the laundry area, she saw that the litter box was gone.
She stared up the stairs in trepidation. There was a hollow where her heart had been, and a small part of her brain marveled that this body was so perfect that even grief felt the same. She swallowed down the lump of fear that was swelling in her throat and started up the stairs. At the top, she hesitated, one hand on the cold metal knob, before forcing herself to open the door and get it over with.
The photo wall was peppered with gaps. One of the matched easy chairs was gone. The artwork that Rivka’s brother had painted as his wedding gift was missing, leaving a bright white rectangle on the wall where it once had been.
On the mantelpiece directly below that rectangle was a note. A paper note.
She crossed the room in slow-motion, as if the air had turned to molasses, and saw herself reaching out to pick the note up.
“I’m so sorry. I can’t cheat on my wife by living with her machine copy. - Rivka.”
The numbness fled and was replaced by pain. With shaking hands, Celia put the little yellow note back where she’d found it and made her way up to the bedroom, trying to ignore all the things that were missing along the way: the plants, the linen dining table runner, Rivka’s bureau. The hope chest at the foot of the bed was gone, and in its place was a small stack of sheets and blankets. Celia pulled her childhood afghan out of the pile, climbed onto the bed, and curled up under the blanket to cry.
She should never have looked her father up in the genebanks. If she hadn’t, she’d still be married.
Of course, if she hadn’t, by the time they’d discovered and diagnosed the genetic time-bomb lurking inside of her, it would have been too late to do anything about it. It was a particularly nasty mutation of early-onset Alzheimer’s, one that only two people in the genebanks were recorded as having: her, and her father.
But she had looked him up. Less than a week after her mother’s funeral, Celia had petitioned the genebanks to identify her biological father — the father who had never known that she existed, the father who her mother had steadfastly refused to name. All Celia knew was that she was the deliberate souvenir of her mother’s affair with a married man. “He has a wife, and by now, a family,” her mother would say. “It’s best not to trouble him.”
The genebanks identified him as Warren Dunlop. He’d died less than a month after Celia had been conceived, just three days after his strange memory lapses had been officially diagnosed. The doctors had said they wouldn’t be able to find a cure for him until after even more irreversible brain damage had set in, so he had shot himself in the head. Since the mutation was unique to him, and since he was registered as having no progeny, the case was closed on his disease.
And then Celia’s records were legally tied to his, and the case was opened again.
There was still no cure, because there’d been no reason to try to find one, and the diagnosis was the same — in the time it would take to come up with the gene therapy to correct the condition, Celia would suffer irreparable brain damage. But thirty-seven years after her father received his diagnosis, Celia had two advantages that he didn’t.
First, the disease hadn’t yet struck her brain.
Second, there was now a stopgap available.
An android duplicate was created of Celia’s body, a duplicate that looked and felt identical to the original, even for the wearer. The contents of her brain were transferred to this new body and her biological body was put in stasis. When the cure was finally developed, it would be applied to her biological body, then her new memories would be reintegrated into it and the android body retired.
Celia had had to petition a judge for a special waiver to get into the program. Dunlop-Krajewski’s Alzheimer’s, as her condition had been dubbed, wasn’t technically deadly. Access to replacement bodies was strictly controlled, and they were only doled out to those suffering from terminal, incurable diseases. Celia’s neurologist had argued that while Celia’s body wasn’t in any mortal danger from her disease, her mind certainly was. The waiver had been granted quickly.
The replacement body and the program to support it weren’t cheap. Insurance paid for some of it, but due to the controversy of the program, the bulk of the funds came out of Celia and Rivka’s house fund. For the entire seven years of their marriage, they’d been saving up to buy a real house out in the suburbs, somewhere where entire city blocks weren’t taken up with rows upon rows of townhouses and apartments.
And if Celia had just gone into stasis and not insisted on a replacement body, then she might have woken up in that house. But how could she have willingly walked away from her marriage for years to lie unconscious in a stasis tube, waiting to be revived, when there was this miraculous alternative? And how could Rivka have expected her to?
Oh, Rivka had brought up plenty of tough questions about the procedure, sure, but Celia had assumed that she’d simply been trying to make sure that they really understood what they were getting into.
“What if the brain transfer is buggy?”
“What happens if the new body breaks?”
“What if the protesters find out what you are?”
“Do you think you’ll be able to handle living with the knowledge that you’re only a copy of the real you?”
Rivka only played devil’s advocate when she didn’t like something. Celia should have known. She should have —
Celia pressed her lips in a tight line and touched her index finger and thumb together to activate her lenses and all ten of her fingerdots. She tapped her index finger on the holographic projection to produce a cursor, and froze with it just under the flashing message icon. She closed her eyes, then flicked her finger up. There, at the top of the list, was a message with a legal flag.
A tap of her finger opened it.
The divorce was already final. Pursuant to the divorce laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Rivka Nomi Ben-Ur had been granted a unilateral divorce from Celia Isoke Krajewski on the grounds that by having more than 51 percent of her body medically altered or replaced, she was no longer the same person her spouse had married.
Celia pressed her fingertips together to shut off her glasses and placed the frames on the one remaining bedside table. She pulled the tatty afghan tightly around her, let out a long breath, and walked across the room to the full-length mirror.
The face that stared back at her looked exactly like her own. Same warm beige skin, same honey-colored eyes and dark tan spiral curled hair that was always just a little too springy to manage. Same lips that were halfway between her mother’s skinny Polish/Irish lips and the full African lips from her father’s picture. The same lips that Rivka used to trace with her finger—
No, not the same lips.
Machine lips.
She looked the same. She even felt the same. But she was just a machine copy of the woman Rivka loved.
And she was alone.
Chapter 2
Celia moved slowly through the house, looking at all the empty spaces where Rivka used to be. Rivka’s home office was as empty as they day they’d moved in. The only indication that she’d once been there were the indentations in the carpet where her furniture had been. The china set she’d inherited from her grandmother was gone from the hutch. All that was left in her closet were a few stray hangers.
The medicine cabinet was mostly empty, all of Rivka’s many jars and bottles of skin creams gone. She’d loved collecting those little bottles. It had practically been a hobby for her. She’d never been able to resist downloading skin care ads, and each download invariably ended up with a purchase of some little trial sized container. Never once had Celia seen her finish a bottle, but she wouldn’t throw them away, either, and they crowded the shelves until Celia would threaten to clean them out herself. And then Rivka would move them under the sink—
Celia fell to her knees and opened the cabinet below the sink. There, huddled in the back corner, was a cityscape of tiny bottles.
She burst into tears.
Celia reached under the sink to grab a green glass bottle with a pale stone cap, then stood and placed it in the middle of the empty space in the medicine cabinet. She closed the mirrored cabinet door and stared at her reflection again. Her eyes were red and puffy with tears, and she could barely control the trembling of her lower lip. She took in a deep, wet sniff, and wondered why they even bothered to have her new body manufacture mucus.
But she knew the answers to those questions already. They were the same answers the doctors had parroted to her from the moment of her diagnosis to the moment of her discharge. “Your new body will look, feel, and behave exactly like the old one, so you won’t go through any cognitive disruption after the transfer procedure.” Eating, sleeping, urinating — she still did them all. Her mucus was recycled biomaterial from the food she ate, her fecal matter the leftovers, her urine the waste product of the hydrogen fuel cell lodged in her abdomen.
Mechanical processes, all of them, but they seemed so real. The tears, the runny nose, the way her pulse fluttered in her throat and her stomach caved in on itself when she tried to imagine life without Rivka. There was no difference. No difference at all.
When Rivka saw this for herself, she’d realize she’d made a mistake.
Celia went back into the bedroom, put on her glasses, turned them up to half opacity, waved off a political ad and an e-card from Trini, and placed a call to Rivka’s IP.
She got an autoresponse, in text: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
Celia crashed down on the bed. Rivka was blocking her IP. She’d just leave a message and—
Messaging was also blocked, as was positioning. She couldn’t even determine where Rivka was.
But Rivka’s friends would know. She’d start with Tyrone. He’d been close friends with Rivka since high school. Surely he’d know how to find her. She typed his name into the shortcut window.
He accepted the connection and opened a vocal channel. “Celia. Hi.”
The microphone on Celia’s glasses activated as she opened the vocal channel on her end. “Have you spoken to Rivka?”
He sighed.
“Tyrone, please. I need to talk to her.”
“Look, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but she’s pretty adamant that she doesn’t want to see you anymore.”
“She didn’t say?”
“No. Whatever it was, she’s pretty broken up about it. I don’t know what you did to her—”
“What I — ?
“Look, I know how crazy she was about you. The only way I can figure her leaving you is you doing something egregiously wretched. Why she’s protecting you, I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she mumbled, and shut the connection down.
At least Rivka was keeping her secret safe.
She still couldn’t understand why it had to be so secret. She didn’t understand what Americans thought the big deal was. The program had been operating in Europe for a little over a decade with scarcely an issue. But Americans had a pathological need to be intolerant of someone, and bioandroids were the current punching bag.
It didn’t help that America had been getting progressively more religious over the past decade, falling into what had been dubbed a “New Puritanism” by the media. Religious leaders had wasted no time in voicing their concerns over what copying one’s self did to one’s immortal soul.
As usual, New England was something of an oasis in this regard. The “respect your neighbors by minding your own business” ethic was still strong there. The protests were smaller, less frequent, and largely peaceful. Individuals were rarely outed, and those that were weren’t harassed as badly as in other places. It even had multiple program centers in operation — Cambridge, Worcester, Hartford... well, not Hartford anymore.
Was New England becoming like the rest of the country, after so many decades apart?
She stared at the nearest window and felt a sting of fear.
Damn it, how could Rivka leave her here to face this alone?
She messaged Tyrone, typing on the keyboard her glasses projected under her fingers. “If you see Rivka, please tell her that I need to talk to her. I need a chance to make things right with her. Please help me.”
That was all she dared say. Tyrone went to Mass every Sunday, and the Archbishop of Boston wasn’t what one would call a supporter of her new body.
Celia squeezed her fingertips together to shut the glasses off entirely.
She looked down at the backs of her hands, at the large veins rising gently above the otherwise flat surface, and felt tears in her eyes again.
It hurt so much.
Why had they had to make her so authentic? Machines weren’t supposed to feel pain.
If only she were more like a machine.
Celia sat alone at the kitchen table, staring at her slowly cooling bowl of lentil soup. She knew she didn’t really need to eat. This body was programmed to respond like a biological body when it was deprived of food, but it was just programming. She couldn’t have low blood sugar, couldn’t starve. In a way, she could dehydrate, but the worst that would happen would be that she couldn’t manufacture tears, or saliva, or mucus. She hardly needed those anymore.
If only it were legal to get the need to eat programmed back out of her. But that was just one of many strict controls on the bioandroid replacement program: no reprogramming, no upgrades. The only changes allowed came during the yearly maintenance appointments, and those were only to subtly age the bodies of people who had to wear them long-term. Their own flesh bodies would be aged through plastic surgery to match when they finally came out of stasis.
She looked back at the soup and felt her stomach rumble.
Machines didn’t need food.
Why did Trini have to be in the field this month? Talking to her over her glasses just wasn’t the same.
Oh, but she had sent a card.
Celia turned her glasses on and opened it.
Trini’s smiling face filled Celia’s lenses, with digital confetti showering down on either side of her. “Congratulations!” she said, and beamed even brighter. Her normally cafe au lait skin was tanned a deep brown, which made her pale blue eyes stand out all the more. “And greetings from Turkey, where gene hunting season is in full swing. I’m so glad I’m not losing you to stasis. It would really stink to have to visit a freezer whenever I was in town.” She laughed. “Seriously, I’m glad for you. I can’t imagine not having my best friend around. Ring me as soon as you get a chance. I want to know everything, absolutely everything, okay?”
Celia stared through her semi-opaqued lenses to her rapidly cooling soup and switched the bowl on to warm it back up. Talking to Trini long-distance was better than doing nothing. She called up Trini’s IP and waited for her to pick up.
And waited.
The messaging screen came up. Right. Turkey. It was the middle of the night there. Trini was likely fast asleep, and the quiet chirp of powered-down glasses had never been enough to wake her.
“Sorry, hi,” Celia said. “I completely forgot the time difference. Um... I’m home, and... Well, call if you’re not too busy.”
She closed the connection before she got even more incoherent.
Machines shouldn’t need company. What a terrible design flaw, making her able to be so lonely.
She went into her stored files and opened up the info packet from Mount Auburn Hospital, waving away news links offering to tell her about the program’s combined origins in NASA space exploration, artificial limb creation, and recreational robotics. Rivka had used her considerable powers of persuasion to bully the program into giving them a more complete packet than most patients received, including detailed schematics of the body that Celia now inhabited. At the time, it had seemed remarkably thorough of her, but in retrospect, Celia should have realized that it was a sign of Rivka’s discomfort with what Celia was going to become.
Panning to the schematics of the arm , she scaled it to match her own and looked down at the overlay of holoschematic over flesh. Beneath the layers of artificial skin and muscle tissue lay a ceramic and metal alloy skeleton.
She tapped a knuckle with a fingertip. So close to the surface, this partly-metal bone.
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the construct inside of her, the mechanical framework holding her artificial body together. She tried to tap into the coldness of the metal to see if she could spread that same coldness through her replicated soul.
Her stomach rumbled again.
Well, that was one thing they’d gotten wrong. She never used to be hungry when she was upset.
She held up her hand and stared intently at her knuckle. Maybe if she could see the metal for herself...
She cast a quick glance across the kitchen. The knives were still there.
“This is crazy,” she whispered, and closed her eyes.
She forced her shaking hands into her lap, taking deep breaths until she felt them still, then picked up her bowl of soup and choked it down.
She wasn’t going to think that way. She wouldn’t let herself.
The problem was, she didn’t know what else to think.
Celia was sitting on the bathroom floor, staring at the tiny bottles under the sink and debating whether to spread them throughout the house, when a call came in on her glasses. Her breath froze in her chest. Rivka? She flicked her finger to check who the call was from and felt her breath rush back out of her as she saw it was only her boss. “Hello, Mansour.”
“Celia! How did it go?”
It took her a second to realize he meant the procedure and not the divorce. “It went well, thank you.”
“Good, good. Look, will you be able to work tomorrow? We’ve had to move up the schedule on the Benton textbook. Topsfield’s going to a new edition in March and we stand to lose all of our summer and fall adoptions unless we can do the same.”
Celia closed her eyes and dug her fingers into the bridge of her nose, trying to figure out how they could possibly get a new edition out that quickly. “Did you get Benton to agree to turn in copy faster?”
“He’s agreed to an accelerated schedule, but you know him. He’ll agree to anything, toe the line for a month or two, then start dragging again. But we do have the first batch of files.”
“Good. How extensive are the changes?” She opened up a connection to the MacArthur and Myers employee hub. She felt a sudden moment’s panic as she wondered if her new metrics would work there, but it quickly passed as she was admitted to her work folder without challenge. Chapters one through five were priority highlighted, and she ran one of her preset workbots to get a comparison between this manuscript and the last edition.
“It’s a pretty big revision so far,” Mansour said. “Chapter two was completely rewritten.”
The bot confirmed the extensiveness of the chapter revision and let her know that chapters one and four were more than 50 percent changed as well. “What about the El-Amrani book? I’m nowhere near done with it.”
“I’ve given it to Ramón. You’re my best development editor. I need you to work on this one personally. The schedule’s too tight to trust anyone else.”
She made a copy of the files and set the fact-checker bots loose on them, shunting them behind her holographic desktop so she didn’t have to see them in action. “Okay. I’ll be in tomorrow.”
“You don’t mean ‘in,’ in, right?”
“Well, I haven’t actually come in to the physical office in a while—”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“For a big product launch like this, shouldn’t I be on site?”
“No. It’d be better if you weren’t.”
Celia struggled to keep her voice from cracking, “Why?”
“Word got out. You know how office gossip spreads.”
“But... you weren’t supposed to tell anyone.”
“People asked why you were gone. I had to say something. Don’t worry, they won’t tell anyone else. I explained how important it was to keep this confidential. You know, Hartford and all. Weird, huh, how something like that could happen around here? Although Hartford’s practically a suburb of New York City nowadays, so I guess it makes a kind of sense. Eh, what can you do?”
Celia’s breath felt like lead in her artificial lungs. A voice in the back of her head railed that she should scream at Mansour, should demand to know why he’d broken her confidence, and quite possibly put her in danger, but that voice never reached her lips. Rivka was the one who confronted people, not Celia. Never Celia.
She finally collected herself enough to say, “I’ll get to work on it tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Celia. You’re a machi — Oh. Sorry.”
Celia mumbled her goodbyes and shut the connection down. A text message from HR flashed for attention. It must have been piggybacked on her boss’s call. She tapped it open.
“Your health benefits have been adjusted to replace medical with mechanical care, and you have been dropped from the gym membership reimbursement plan. Effective immediately, your benefits reflect your new status as a single person.”
Single person.
The words stabbed her in the gut with a pain so bright she could see it.
She shut off her glasses, looked across the living room, opaqued every window in the house, then got up and walked to the kitchen, stopping in front of the knives.
Machines didn’t feel pain.
She needed the pain to stop.
Celia picked up the boning knife, stared at her warped reflection in the metal blade, then looked back down at her knuckles.
The artificial bone was so close to the surface.
Maybe if she saw it, she’d finally realize she was a machine. Maybe then the pain would go away.
She froze, staring wide-eyed at the first joint of her left index finger. Just a nick. No, a slice. She needed to see the full joint, not just a tiny sliver of bone.
She experimentally tapped her fingertip on the point of the knife.
It hurt.
Celia closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. Before she could stop herself, she opened her eyes and quickly sliced through the skin of her knuckle.
She cried out, dropped the knife, and clasped her hand around her finger. The sharp pain swelled into something larger as she squeezed the ragged skin. But slowly, her rational mind slipped past the pain and she remembered that she didn’t need to do that. She wasn’t bleeding. She’d never bleed again so long as she had this replacement body.
Swallowing back all-too-real-seeming nausea, she opened her hand and stared down at the ruin of skin over her knuckle.
No blood. Just skin hanging open, and a dully-gleaming white bone underneath.
She reached out and tapped it lightly with a fingernail. It clicked. She gently rubbed her fingertip on the exposed bit of skeleton, trying to avoid the sliced, raw skin. It felt smooth. Ceramic.
Not like bone.
She could see with her own eyes that she was not human. She was hardware, artificial muscle, bloodless skin. Programming wired into a mechanical construct. Her body had been built to specification on an assembly line. There was nothing natural about her. Nothing human.
So artificial. So untouchable. So needless.
The bare white square over the mantle caught the corner of her eye, jarring her from her reverie, and the emptiness all came flooding back.
Damn it.
It wasn’t enough.
But for a short moment, it had been.
A tiny flare of hope swelled inside her at that thought.
Her doorbell rang, and her glasses flashed with the Mount Auburn Hospital seal. How had they — Oh, right, Dr. McElvoy had told her he’d have a security person in the neighborhood.
Damn.
She grabbed a dishtowel, wrapped her hand in it, and opened the door.
A broad-shouldered woman in a business suit surreptitiously flashed a badge. Celia’s glasses identified her as Officer Bazile from the hospital. “May I come in?”
Celia shook her head. “I’m fine.”
In a low voice, Bazile said, “Let’s not talk about this out here.”
Celia stepped back and let her in, her heart hammering. Even panic felt the same in this body.
“Are you all right? The hospital sent a message that you’d been injured.”
“I... I was cleaning the knives. I accidentally cut myself. That’s all. Just an accident.” She could only hope that the woman wasn’t running lie detection programs on her glasses. Then again, who knew what her autonomic responses were saying in this body? God, this made her head hurt.
Officer Bazile walked into the kitchen, studied the knife block, then turned back to Celia. “You’re alone in the house?”
“I am.”
Bazile did a slow sweep of the room with her gaze, and Celia found herself wondering if she were doing a heat scan. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“No one did this to you?”
“No. Honest. It was just me. Why do they have to make these bodies as clumsy as the originals?” She tried to laugh, but she was so nervous that she sounded like she was having an asthma attack.
The woman pointed at Celia’s dishcloth-covered hand and said, “May I see it?”
Celia cradled the hand to her bosom. “Why?”
“I’ve never... “ The woman’s pale cheeks flushed red. “I mean, the hospital wants me to send an image so they can make sure you’re okay.”
Celia didn’t need lie detection software to catch that one. Alarm bells started screaming in her head, and she found herself staggering back against the closest wall. “I’ll send one.”
“No, I really need to—” Bazile stopped, cocking her head as she received instructions over her glasses, and scowled. “They say you can send the image if you want to.”
“I will. Right now. Honest.”
Officer Bazile took off her glasses and held them in one fist, covering the tiny microphone with her hand. “Just let me take a look. Just a quick peek.”
“Let... let me just send that picture to the hospital now,” Celia stammered. She opened a connection to their main hub with her good hand, a hand she tried and failed to keep from shaking.
Bazile stepped forward, one hand reaching for the dishtowel. Celia clutched it tightly and inched along the living room wall, making her way toward the back door. “Hello? Yes, I’m going to send you that picture you asked for.” The hospital hadn’t picked up yet, but there was no way for the woman in her living room to know that.
Officer Bazile tightened her other hand into a matching fist. “I just wanted to look,” she whispered. She stared at Celia for a long moment, then put on her glasses again and let herself out the front door.
Once the door closed behind Bazile, Celia ran over and locked it tight.
Before her panic had a chance to blossom into full hysteria, the program receptionist picked up and connected her with the maintenance department. She took a picture of her knuckle with her glasses camera and sent it to them. “That’s not too bad. Be sure to come in to get that fixed in the next seventy-two hours so you don’t void your contract. If you can’t make it to the hospital, we can have someone come out to your home to take care of it there.”
“I’ll come in tomorrow.”
“Good. In the meantime, you should put a bandage over it, just to be safe.”
Too late. “I can do that.”
“Do you need to speak to your counselor now?”
“No, I can wait. Thank you.”
“We’ll see you tomorrow.”
She closed the connection and looked back down at the bloodless wound.
It had almost been enough. At least, for a few seconds, it had.
And then it had made things worse. Much worse.
She put the knife back in the block, then went to the mostly empty medicine cabinet to get a bandage.
It had been a one-time thing. Nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all.
Chapter 3
The house felt even emptier at night.
Celia lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, without even the cat to keep her company. So many nights she’d awoken to find that he’d stolen all her leg room, and she’d had to contort like a pretzel to sleep in even moderate comfort without disturbing him. The next morning, Rivka would chide her for not nudging him out of the way, but Celia could never bring herself to do that.
She pulled up the book she’d been reading on her glasses before the procedure, read a page, realized she couldn’t remember who half the characters were and how they’d gotten to this particular place, and set it aside. She’d only been reading The Lord of the Rings for the book club she and Rivka belonged to.
Maybe she should look up the details on the Hartford incident.
Did she really need to read about patients having their transfer procedures interrupted mid-stream and being awoken to be told that their cases were being transferred to another hospital? Or about the terrified clients calling in to make sure the stasis chambers housing their flesh bodies hadn’t been destroyed? Did she really need to read whatever screed this particular group had posted after committing the act? And did she want to see the latest statistics telling her just how many people hated her, versus just how many people simply tolerated her?
She hated herself for it, but she sent the searchbots out anyway.
The results were just as bad as she’d expected. After five minutes, she gave up and took off her glasses.
She reached over and turned off the bedside light, plunging the room into utter darkness. Normally, she’d leave the windows semi-opaqued to let in a little light from the streetlight outside the bedroom window, but tonight, her fear of prying eyes outweighed her fear of the dark.
Why did she need to even do this? Machines didn’t sleep.
She stared at the formless dark until her programming proved her wrong.
Her alarm went off at 6:00, the lights coming on low with it, and Celia climbed out of bed and started sliding into her running gear before remembering that she didn’t need to do that anymore. Her replacement body wouldn’t change shape no matter how lazy she got. Even if it did, what did it matter? She didn’t have anybody to see her naked anymore.
Or maybe Tyrone had actually passed her message on to Rivka.
She sighed. Probably not.
Still, she put on her glasses and checked to see if he’d left a message overnight. No. Just another message from Trini saying that she was going to be in the field for a few days and would try to call back when she got some free time.
Celia walked down to the kitchen, opened the cabinets, stared at the boxes of healthy cereal, and shook her head. Why bother? She could eat a cup of raw flour to satisfy her body’s programmed needs.
So she went back upstairs, pulled on loose brown pants and a rust-colored caftan, and went down to the car. Might as well get her knuckle patched up now. She connected to the hospital node to let them know she was coming, then called up the Donut Hole and put in an order for a powdered doughnut with chocolate filling. She might as well enjoy one perk of this body — its wonderful inability to get fat. The doughnut was warm and gooey when they handed it to her at the drive-through, filling the car with the unmistakable aroma of fried dough and sugar.
She kept her bandaged hand on the steering pad while she ate the messy treat with the other. But even as her taste buds reveled in the rich sweetness, her brain couldn’t see the point of it. There was no illicit thrill to eating fatty food anymore. Any comfort she felt from it was pure programming.
In the end, she put the last quarter of the doughnut back in the bag.
She got to the hospital just as the protestors did, and tried not to stare as they set up their banner. She felt a nearly-overwhelming urge to de-mirror her windows and flip them the bird, but fought it back. Like her, they were all wearing cameras on their faces, and she didn’t want to end up in their online database of troublemakers. The last thing her life needed was extra scrutiny from the people who hated her kind.
“Her kind.” God, when had she started thinking that way?
As a patient, she was approved for a free parking and was directed to an empty spot in the garage. She dumped the remains of the doughnut in the trash, and her glasses instructed her to go to radiology, giving her directions on how to find it. Radiology? She went to reception instead, and said, “There must be some mistake, I—”
“No mistake,” the man behind the counter snapped. “Can I help the next person in line?”
“But—”
“Next?”
Oh, she got it now.
Celia dutifully went to the radiology department, where a staff member called her into an examination room. Two security guards were waiting inside, and they took her out the back door of the room and into a service corridor, then down a flight of stairs, through another corridor, and finally into the Bioandroid Body Replacement Center. She was ushered to room 204, where her glasses told her a technician named Nigel Berube was waiting for her.
“Sorry about the runaround, but I’m sure you understand the necessity.” His British accent was no surprise considering his beardless face and slim, tailored pants. The Brits seemed to pick their fashions to be in direct contradiction to what was in vogue in the States. “So, let’s see it.”
Celia gingerly pulled off the bandage and held the knuckle out.
“Nasty slice,” he said, his face pulled into an odd grimace. “How’d you do this?”
“Kitchen accident.”
“Uh huh.” His craggy face fell into lines of clear disbelief.
“So, you’re from the UK?” Why did they program her heart to race like this?
“Ah, nothing gets past you Yanks. Yes, they imported me when your country’s program finally got approved so they’d have a few old hands on staff.” He took Celia’s hand and stared down at the slice. “So how did it feel to see your new innards?”
She tugged it away and cradled it against her chest. “I told you, it was an accident.”
“Try not to have any more accidents.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out a thin metal instrument. “Let me see it again.”
Hesitantly, Celia offered him her hand. His touch was gentle as he pressed the skin together and started sealing the tear.
“They downplay the risks, you know, both here and in the EU,” he said. “The phrase ‘statistically insignificant’ should be banned from medicine.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He looked up and fixed her with a quick, sharp stare before turning back to his work. “Not everyone adjusts well to the transfer. Some people stop treating their bodies like flesh and start treating them like mechanical things.”
Celia shivered and tried to pull her hand away, but Berube had a grip like a vice. He stared into her eyes through his pale green frames and said, “Don’t ever treat your body like a machine. Once you start down that road, there’s no coming back.”
She found herself gaping, and snapped her mouth shut.
He finished fixing her hand, then let it go. “There, good as new.”
Celia whispered, “It was an accident.”
He shot her a sympathetic smile. “I know.”
“I want to leave.”
He gestured to the door. The security guards were waiting for her just outside. Mercifully, they didn’t try to talk to her as they led her to the radiology department through the back passages once more. She exited the examination room alone and had the hospital guide her to the nearest exit, where she stepped out into the cold October air, her hair springing wildly as a burst of wind whipped through the open-air garage. What did he mean, they downplayed the risks? Did other people cut themselves too? What happened to them? What else did they do?
No, she didn’t want to know. She was fine. This had been a one-time thing. It was never going to happen again. It hadn’t helped enough to be worth repeating.
Before she could start her car, she was messaged by the hospital. Dr. McElvoy. “Ms. Krajewski, I heard about your accident. I’m reading Mr. Berube’s report now.”
“It was nothing, really,” she said, nervously fingering her wind-blown curls back into place. “I’m all fixed now.”
“Was it really an accident?”
“Of course. I was alone last night — surely that horrible woman you had come to my house told you so.”
The connection fell silent, and Celia’s heart started pounding again. What weren’t they telling her? She called up her searchbots, then put them right back away again. She didn’t want to know. Knowing would make it real.
“As a therapist, I’m concerned about you suddenly displaying self-destructive behavior.”
“I thought you were just an administrator.”
“My title is ‘patient administrator’ but I’m a licensed counselor, and sometimes, when our new clients need help, I put on that hat for them. So, back to this self-destructiveness—”
“I’m just a klutz, that’s all.”
“You just found out that your wife divorced you when you were unconscious because she didn’t like what you were becoming. That can’t be easy to handle.”
Celia clutched her hands to her bosom and froze, the shock still surprisingly new and raw.
“Ms. Krajewski?”
“I’m here,” she whispered.
“Look, I’m still at home, but let’s have our check-in now. If you go back into the hospital, they’ll set you up in my office so we can talk privately.”
The thought of going back into that building, of traveling back passageways to keep anyone from figuring out what she was, filled her with dread. “I’m in my car. Can I stay here? It’s private.”
“Sure. Just set your camera up so I can see you and I’ll do the same.”
She mirrored the windows, pulled the little camera from her frames and stuck it to the windshield, and then flicked open the video connection. On the other end, a sleep-rumpled Dr. McElvoy gazed back at her.
“I’m sorry they woke you,” Celia said.
“Don’t be.” He tugged on his beard and did a halfway decent job of straightening it. “It’s my job to make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m fine. Really. The technician did a wonderful job of fixing me.”
“I’m not talking about the cut.”
Celia stared down at her knuckle and ran the tip of her thumb over the fully-healed skin.
“I think we should talk about your divorce.”
“That’s personal.”
“But I’m your counselor.”
“You’re my program administrator.”
“Yes, and if things go poorly, I also become your social worker. I really think you should try to let me help you before it goes that far.”
She called up the searchbots again and typed in “bioandroid” and “social worker” before setting them loose.
“Tell me, was your wife particularly religious?”
Her bots came back with their information, and after waving off a Donut Hole ad, she took a quick peek. Buried in the legal code for the bioandroid program was a clause that would let the hospital petition a judge for legal custody of a client whose actions constituted a threat to her own wellbeing.
“Ms. Krajewski?”
It was bad enough having him as a counselor, but having him as a social worker would be far worse. She tried not to let resignation show on her face. “Her faith was important to her, yes, but her rabbi supported what I was doing.”
Dr. McElvoy’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? Well that’s a pleasant change.”
She nodded and looked down at her lap. “He said that even though this body wasn’t the same one she’d married, it carried the memories of our life together and would help us build new ones while we waited for a cure.”
“It doesn’t sound like that was enough for her.”
Celia twisted her hands in her lap.
“I’d ask how it makes you feel, but...”
She peeked up at him, and he shot her a stiff smile that she suspected he thought looked kind. “So, other than yesterday’s accident, how have you been coping? Has your friend been any help?”
Celia shook her head. “I haven’t been able to get in touch with Trini. We’ve been playing message tag.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone who was so hard to contact.”
“She’s a gene hunter. She goes to countries that aren’t genebanked and collects swabs of DNA in exchange for money. They’re not supposed to pick up calls when they’re working. Most of the people they’re dealing with aren’t on glasses networks, so they consider it rude to be interrupted like that.”
“Well, is there anyone else you can talk to? Any other friends who you could trust with your news?”
“I don’t really have any friends anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rivka took them with her.”
“Oh. One of those divorces.” He winced. “Perhaps you could find a sympathetic coworker to talk to. They wouldn’t need to know about the procedure. In fact, it’s better if they don’t.”
“My boss told everyone at work. They all know.” The words tumbled out, shocking even her.
Dr. McElvoy leaned closer to the camera. “That’s illegal, you know. Your physical status is protected just like all other medical information. This is serious, Ms. Krajewski. You should have told us as soon as you found out. We can initiate legal proceedings on your behalf immediately—”
“Please don’t. It’s... it’s too late. Besides, I don’t want to have the trial make it to the news. I don’t want to be another Simon Parker.” When his case had hit the nets, he’d had to move to Sweden to keep himself and his family safe.
Dr. McElvoy sighed. “I can’t say I blame you. Still, you might instead become another Donal Lawson.”
“Oh, I’m no activist.”
“He wasn’t either until the news leaked.”
“You mean until he was outed by his born-again brother.”
“The result was the same.”
“Donal Lawson is a billionaire and his wife still loves him. It’s easy for him to be an activist. If nothing else, he can afford the security.”
“I’m sure it’s not as easy as it looks. The LawSpecs boycott hasn’t helped his company’s bottom line.”
Celia flung her hands up. “Please, can we not talk about this?”
“I’m sorry.” He rubbed the corners of his eyes. “I get a little too excited about him. I’m glad there’s someone out there who doesn’t have to hide his bioandroid status.”
“Aren’t you forgetting Chelsea Slaughter?”
Dr. McElvoy shuddered. “Yes, actually, I was doing a very good job of forgetting her until you reminded me. We really should do something about your work situation. Maybe the hospital attorney can have gag orders imposed on the people in your department, or—” His gaze flicked upward, and he sucked a breath in through his teeth. “Damn, I have to cut this short. I have an intake appointment at the hospital in thirty minutes and I haven’t even had a shower yet. I’ve had to take on some of the caseload from Hartford, and it’s shot my schedule to hell.”
Celia wasn’t sure she managed to keep the relief from showing on her face.
“Realistically, there’s probably nothing to be done about the leak, but I’ll see what my colleagues and the attorney have to say. If at any point you feel unsafe, please call. We can send security out there to protect you.”
“Please don’t send the same woman as last time,” Celia said.
McElvoy turned on his lenses. “Hold on, let me see...” His eyes darted back and forth as he scanned the record. “Hold on, what happened when she took her glasses off?”
“No. If I get her in trouble, she knows where I live.”
“Shit.” He shook his head. “Sorry for the language. We’ll keep her off of bioandroid detail from now on. Did she — Ugh, I really do have to go. I’m sorry about this. If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to call. My schedule’s pretty tight for the next couple of weeks, what with the extra caseload, but I’ll do my best to fit you in.”
“Okay.”
“And no more knives.”
“It was an accident.” Celia fixed him with a pained stare, hoping he would believe her. Rivka had always said that her eyes gave everything away. But maybe her fake eyes knew how to lie.
He stared back at her. “Don’t have another accident.”
“I’ll be more careful.”
“All right. We’ll talk again tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you.”
The connection went dead, and Celia rested her head against the steering pad for a long moment before clipping her camera back onto her frames, clearing the windows, and heading back to her empty house.
The fact checker bots had a field day with chapter two. Celia was picking through their knotty report in her home office when the hospital called. Dr. McElvoy again? She shunted the report aside with a flick of her finger and opened his video channel. “Yes?”
“We’ve had an... unusual request. I didn’t want to come to you with it, but I really don’t have any right keeping it from you.”
Celia shook her head, not remembering that she hadn’t bothered to switch on her own camera.
“It’s your ex-wife. She’d like permission to visit your biological body in stasis.”
“Rivka,” Celia whispered, and clasped her wedding band to her chest.
“Normally, we discourage people from visiting themselves or their loved ones in stasis. However, just last year I was working with another couple that was having post-procedure difficulties, and stasis visits helped them work them out.”
“It did?”
“Yes. After a few weeks, the husband decided that he vastly preferred the company of his unfrozen wife over visits to a stasis tube. Mind you, he hadn’t gone so far as to divorce her, so I wouldn’t expect such dramatic results in your case. But it might be worth a try. It’s up to you.”
A bold thought formed in Celia’s mind, and she caught herself before dismissing it automatically. She wasn’t used to voicing bold thoughts. That had been Rivka’s forte. But maybe to get Rivka back, she had to think like her. “Tell her that she has to ask me in person. If she does that, I’ll give her permission.”
“I’ll do that. Let me know how it goes, all right?”
“I will.”
She shut off the connection, all thoughts of work banished, and waited for Rivka to call. Once Rivka saw her face to face, she’d have to realize she’d made a mistake. She’d have to.