Diary of a Pod Person
The first body to slide out on one of Lab-14-H’s morgue slabs was a chimp, and seeing its slack and frozen face startled me more than anything had since the accident. I jumped, and my new heart dropped a beat like a person stumbling off a curb. It was a giddily familiar sensation, so as soon as the shock wore off I smiled with genuine happiness—I’d been scared, physically scared. I acknowledged the feeling with joy.
I pushed the chimp back into the fridge, and opened the next drawer more gingerly. After a few more chimps—failed Kokos, I assumed—I found the corpse I was looking for.
If you’ve never looked at your own dead body on a slab, nothing I say about it can fully convey the feeling. I looked at the body for a long time without moving, without thinking, without feeling. I refused to think of it as my body.
The woman in the drawer had suffered a trauma; that much was obvious. Her long black hair was matted on the left against a skull dented out of round. Blood had been cleaned out of the abrasions and lacerations on her face, and they hung whitely open like dead mouths. But it wasn’t just the violence that rendered the woman’s countenance eerie.
“There’s identical, and then there’s identical,” one of the other techs had told me on my first day at ExtraLives. “So we make chimps, and they look like Koko, right? But all chimps look the same, pretty much, anyway. So how can we tell?”
The body I was in now was printed from the same blueprint as this woman’s, using the same DNA. But there’s identical and there’s identical. The blueprint was more of a sketch, with the details left to the builder. I’d noticed it immediately, of course. My new muscles hadn’t been jogging for twenty years, so though the incubator had toned them to almost the right level, these legs tripped just walking down the hall. This body hadn’t indulged in sea-salt potato chips a little too often; it was skinny. The lines on these fingers weren’t the same as hers, were in fact barely lines at all, and these new retinas held divergent patterns. I’d had to convince a passing colleague to let me into this room, since the security door no longer recognized those signatures. Even our irises looked different: the color was the same, but the specific interplay of dark and light varied.
I spent what felt like hours with the other body, measuring and comparing and tallying up the differences. Some were quantifiable, like a half-inch difference in our heights, and my almost freakishly long pinky toes. Most were more subjective: both faces looked uncanny to me, the new and the old. But I knew enough about perception and mirror images to let that go.
There’s identical, and then there’s identical.
There was also the disturbing fact of the other woman’s injuries. In addition to the skull fracture, there was a broken leg, a shoulder that would never again fit into its socket, and a number of smaller wounds. One bruise, on her back, looked almost like a handprint. It was hard to tell through the pooled blood under her skin. Overall she appeared as though she’d tumbled down a rocky slope, or fallen under a bus.
Or been pushed.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d been murdered. But the thought held no terror, not even anger. If I felt anything it was relief that the other me was actually dead. I didn’t want two of us running around, and though I acknowledged that she had the better claim on our life, my loyalty was to me.
I am still not sure how to feel about that. I’m pretty sure the old me would be horrified.
My personal effects were in a pouch in the back of the drawer. The clothes were trash, but my shoes were okay and my purse was just as I remembered it. Keys, credit cards, sunglasses. Phone, with seven voice messages, thirty-one texts, and eighty-eight emails. Obviously ExtraLives hadn’t told my family anything. They must be frantic with worry.
I tried to slip on the shoes, but they didn’t fit anymore. My new feet were bigger in every dimension.
The only other thing was the necklace I’d been wearing, a plastic pendant with a tiny dried flower inside. A gift from Lucy. It felt smooth in my fingers; I would have recognized the object, even with these new fingers and their new lines, by touch alone. I tied it around my neck and the pendant hung in the same place against my sternum, and I remembered that my fingers used to find their way here all the time, an unconscious gesture that I supposed must have given me comfort. But it didn’t anymore. I dropped my fingers and they hung at my side, purposeless.
A few months back, my Wellness Director had told me I’d smother Lucy if I didn’t go back to work. I’d laughed, a little too fast, and joked about the situation. “You mean metaphorically, right?” I’d clutched the pendant that I always wore, a tiny pressed flower in plastic resin that Lucy had made in arts and crafts group.
I remember joking. I even remember what I felt then: anxiety and frustration and a kind of aimlessness that, if I’d been a word lover, I might have described as ennui.
The woman had scads of pictures up on her walls. Two children, two parents, dozens of perfect white smiles so huge they seemed unreal. White-water rafting trips and tropical vistas and artistic family portraits. Each one looked normal enough, but their sheer volume pointed toward some inner madness. I believed her without hesitation.
But I’d cashed in my workforce rotation when I had Lucy, and there was a long wait list for work. Even under Wellness Director’s orders, and with my degree in animal behavior, my hopes were slim. You couldn’t even volunteer at a soup kitchen more than once a week without using up your work vouchers, and I couldn’t chance losing benefits.
I was watching Lucy run like a crazy monkey around a playground when ExtraLives called me. My daughter wore star-shaped sunglasses even though it was cloudy, and her hair was a tangled mess, and with every step I was sure she’d trip and there’d be blood and tears. Despite everything I know about cognitive development and learned helplessness, my fingers twitched toward her all the time. I wanted to keep her safe. I wanted to hold her to me, and comfort her and ohmygod, I was going to smother her. I remember that.
So I didn’t hesitate when ExtraLives offered me an interview and then a position. I didn’t even ask what ExtraLives did. I just called my mother and Lucy’s father and my best friend and my brother and arranged a care schedule for Lucy. I just dusted off my old lab coat and went to work.
Not wanting to seem crazy, I decorated my desk with only one photograph of Lucy, a shot of her splashing her big red boots in gentle ocean waves. Against a backdrop of water and seagulls, she peers intently into the foam, poised with one foot ready to stomp.
On my first day at ExtraLives, after signing about a million documents I barely skimmed, I met Koko. Koko was a chimpanzee named by someone who was both uncreative and apparently unaware that the original Koko had been a gorilla. Like the original, though, Koko was a whiz at American Sign Language. Better than I was. Since Lucy had learned to speak, I’d been letting my ASL rust, and when I met Koko I told her so, haltingly. “You talk okay,” she told me, and we shook hands. I longed to bring Lucy in to meet Koko; I wondered what they’d talk about and how they’d play. I could just imagine the two of them signing back and forth, both in star-shaped sunglasses. My hand fluttered to the pendant at my throat. I still remember it all.
Koko lived in a lab that looked like a nursery, along with her pet cat, a big black tomcat with white paws that Koko had named Feet. Koko was mellow for a chimp, but I was warned not to mess with Feet, not even to touch him if possible, lest I incur her wrath. The place smelled a little like cat and monkey, and two entire walls were one-way mirror, but overall it was a homey room, filled with toys and gadgets for Koko to play with.
There were many more like it, furnished but empty of primate and feline life.
After introducing me to Koko, my supervisor, Caleb, took me down a long dark hallway lined with nondescript doors. Each had a stenciled-on number and a door lock with a keypad, thumbprint sensor, and retinal scanner. My credentials had been established that morning, in a baffling ordeal of scans and medical procedures. But before Caleb let me try them out on Lab 14-C, he stopped me. He was grinning like a new dad on Christmas morning, like someone who’s in on a fabulous secret.
“Are you ready to see what’s behind the curtain? Are you ready for the red pill? And also do you remember that you signed an NDA?”
“Which one was the red pill?” I asked, as Caleb stepped aside.
I punched in my code, pressed my thumb to the plate above the keypad, and, pushing my glasses up into my hair, ducked down slightly to stare into the retinal scanner. A red flash stunned my left eye and then the door clicked and I hurried to paw the handle. I’d always been bad at opening those hotel doors with the credit-card-type keys, but this door swung right open, revealing a room full of machinery and tubes and vats and computer screens. In the center of the space was a raised platform with what looked like a large but shallow aquarium. It was empty now, and I could see that the sides were made to come apart and fold down. It also had a lid that could be lowered onto it but which currently hung suspended from the ceiling. All the tubes and wires and hoses terminated in that lid.
Caleb was right beside me, watching my confusion. I guess I wasn’t seeing the lab’s potential, because his face fell. I admit, I was slow. My first thought had been to wonder what they were doing to fish.
“I guess you really do have to see it in action to understand. Come on, I’ll show you on one of our smaller models.”
He led me down the hall to Lab 6-A, where the whole setup was repeated with an aquarium the size of a shoebox on a counter-height table. He went to a console and keyed in a series of commands too quick to follow. The machines whirred to life, LED lights blinking on and off. Coiled tubes jumped as something flowed through them into the little glass box. Soon it was filled with a thick clear liquid, and then I watched in awe as needles inside the box started moving like the jets of a printer and structures appeared.
It was a skeleton. A rodent, by the looks of it, and I guessed rat.
When its skull was only half built, another set of tiny fingers went to work laying down brain and eyes seemingly one cell at a time. This part took longer than any other step.
And then the skeleton was obscured by muscle and tendon and blood vessels and a thin layer of fat and then skin. It was definitely a rat, hairless and motionless, floating in the tank’s goop.
“You made a rat,” I said, intelligently.
The lid pulled away from the tank with a loud unclamping sound, and cables pulled it out of the way. Caleb stepped toward the tank and pulled the naked rodent out. He wore thick rubbery gloves, the type my mother had once worn to do dishes. And he was grinning from ear to ear. “Copied a rat, actually. Her name is Stella, and if this has gone right she’s an exact copy of the original Stella, complete with the memories up to her last upload.”
I remember the physical sensations of my stunned reaction. My pulse felt loud; my mouth went dry.
The rat hadn’t so much as twitched a whisker. Or rather, twitched its nose. It had only the barest of stubble for whiskers. Caleb took it over to a small incubator box, where it was swaddled in circuit-printed canvas. “Is it alive?” I asked. My mind was boggling already, working out the implications and designing mazes to run Stella through.
“Sort of,” he responded, setting some dials on the incubator and closing the door.
ExtraLives already had hundreds of clients who had signed up for immortal life. I could understand the appeal. To have a backup, to know that I’d always be around to love my Lucy; that was a powerful pull.
Caleb told me that the company had perfected the upload process. It was simple, non-intrusive, and accurate: an implant no bigger than the RFID chips in everyone’s pets and children. Whenever the chip neared its base station, a tiny device that most people kept under their pillows, it sent the data to ExtraLives’ storage facility. Clients uploaded themselves every night, in case they died in their sleep.
Of course, if they did die in their sleep that night, they were probably going to stay dead. The process of putting a person into his or her shiny new body hadn’t been tested. The memory files couldn’t even be verified; without a brain to read them the data were meaningless.
“Obviously human trials are a legal issue,” Caleb said, eyes flicking in the general direction of a bowling trophy he kept on his desk. “The process hasn’t yet been tested on anything more human-like than a cat.” But that was where I came in.
I spent a few weeks getting to know Koko. Dr. Kim, the trainer I was replacing, had exhaustively catalogued Koko’s vocabulary. There were endless hours of video documenting conversations they’d had and every other aspect of Koko’s life: how she played with her toys, the way she petted Feet, how she laughed when tickled, when and where she usually slept.
Dr. Kim had also kept a kind of journal, which I was only partially able to decipher. It seemed to cover experiments she’d overseen, but parts of it were in a shorthand that reminded me of one of those vowel-hating Eastern European languages. More than once I wished I could call her up and ask about it, but Caleb made it clear she was not going to return. I couldn’t even contact her on my own; her name was too common to google.
Copying Koko felt anti-climactic after all the buildup. We printed her in the first lab I’d visited, then she was swaddled by a large incubator for a few days while it toned her muscles, and then she was deposited, stubbly and a bit dazed, into one of the identical Koko habitats.
My job was to determine, in my expert opinion, whether the new Koko was identical to the first.
She was different in some trivial aspects: her hair and claws were still growing in, and her teeth were bright white. At first she was clumsy, but that wore off within a week.
She was the same in more ways than I could count. When introduced to her quarters she gave everything a solid sniffing but otherwise reacted to it with familiarity. She knew my name. I tested her over the following weeks and found that her vocabulary was intact, and seemingly so were her memories. I pestered her with questions about her life until she grew bored with me, and she knew the answer to every one. When she tired of these sessions, she puffed out her lips and lolled her head just like the first Koko had done.
This was good enough for Caleb and the rest of ExtraLives’ executives. By the time Koko2’s fur had fully grown in, they were uncorking champagne. No one but me was troubled by the fact that the new Koko hadn’t so much as asked about Feet the cat. Curious what would happen, I snuck him away from Koko1 while she slept and brought him into Koko2’s enclosure. She groomed him and stroked his head once, twice, just the same as the other Koko. Feet sniffed her in return, and then seemed to decide that all was well. Koko2 turned away and poked listlessly at the goofy felt teeth of a stuffed shark, and at Koko1’s insistence I returned Feet to her room. She snuggled him for an hour straight, him purring all the while. Koko2 didn’t seem to mind his absence. Certainly, there was no wrath.
ExtraLives rewarded my success with a week’s vacation on a tropical island I’d never heard of, at a resort with a three-year waiting list. Lucy and I spent every minute on the beach, all bare feet and sunglasses. I jogged each morning on the wet sand. She brought me every shell and ocean-smooth pebble for inspection, and even splashed around in the shallow reef with a snorkel, frightening off all the pretty fish with her childish enthusiasm. We walked in tide pools and I rambled about barnacles and starfish and hermit crabs. She loved the idea of a crab changing clothes, and collected all the shells she could find into a chic crustacean boutique. I tried to tell her it was more like an RV dealership than a shopping mall, but she didn’t care. She just shook her head and squealed and lined up more shells.
I remember the feeling of the sun on my skin and the smell of water and wind and suntan lotion. I know that I was happy then, that I was full up with love and satisfaction.
Even though I knew better, I let Lucy bring a pocketful of beach findings home with her. On my first day back to work she pressed a pearl-pink shell into my hand and told me my office needed it, “so you can have a home with you.” I put the shell next to her picture on my desk and smiled whenever I saw it, feeling at home with that little piece of her.
I do not remember the accident.
I woke in a hospital bed feeling weak and disoriented. The light stung my eyes, but the first thing I noticed as I stared up at the acoustic-tiled ceiling was how clear it seemed. I raised one hand to my face, but my glasses weren’t on. My hand felt heavy. Feeling too weak to sit up and get a better look around, I stared at my hand. My fingernails were shorter than I remembered, and the tan I’d earned on vacation had faded to a pasty shade that seemed paler than ever. How long have I been asleep? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. In fact, I felt calm and little more than mildly curious.
Presently a doctor came in to check on me, and I managed to sit up in the bed. I could see him clearly from across the room. “What happened?” I asked. I looked down at my body, clad in its hospital gown, and it finally occurred to me to look for injuries. I turned my arms over and didn’t see anything. Both my legs moved under the blanket.
“You’ve been in an accident,” the doctor said.
And yet no part of me felt particularly painful. But perhaps I was heavily medicated. I felt my face again, and then up to my head.
I froze, realization setting in. Where my long hair had been there was only peach fuzz, perhaps a quarter-inch long.
“Have I?” I looked at my arms again, my hands. And this time I realized what had seemed off before: there was nothing there. The long white scar where I’d caught my arm on a jagged screen door, gone. The bumpy red knuckle I’d mangled with a cheese grater, smooth as a baby’s. The half-brown, half-pink mole that had been just above my left elbow, gone. I still had a few moles on my arms, but like looking at the night sky on an alien planet, these constellations were unfamiliar.
“What happened to my body—my other body?” I asked, still feeling remarkably calm. It occurred to me that I ought to be upset. My heart should be racing. The little hairs that had barely grown in on my arms should be standing up in recognition of the eerie thing that had happened.
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying,” the doctor said. He babbled a lot of medical jargon and injected something into my IV. It made me sleepy, but after he left and before I drifted off I pulled up my hospital gown to check the skin of my new belly. As I suspected, I had no belly button. But what struck me even more was the absence of the pearly pink curves of my stretchmarks, leaving my skin clean and featureless as a beach under a receding wave.
I knew this loss should’ve hit me like a punch to the chest. I wanted to weep for it, but my new tear ducts wouldn’t comply.
As it turned out, I wasn’t in a hospital at all. My hospital-like room was in a wing of ExtraLives that hadn’t been on the tour.
As soon as the doctor cleared me to go, I went straight to Caleb’s office. My clothes and purse weren’t with me, but someone dug me up a pair of crisp blue scrubs to wear and I padded up and down hallways in my bare feet. I half expected to find my shoes and other effects in Caleb’s office. I half expected to find my whole self waiting there, or working at my little desk.
But it was just him. “You know, you could have taken the rest of the day off. You’re still recovering from your accident.”
“I can’t remember the accident,” I told him. “Can you tell me what happened?” He’d lied to me, he’d violated my privacy in about twenty different ways, and maybe he’d even killed me, the first me. I tried to put some anger into my voice. “What sort of accident can erase all a person’s scars, fix her myopia, and not involve any actual physical injury?”
Caleb’s mouth performed a complicated dance of smile and smirk and guilt.
“Seriously, though. What happened to me? To the original me.”
He climbed around his big desk, laden with trinkets and trophies, and found a spot on the front of it to lean on. His face was very close to mine now, but I saw no reason to back away. The excited look had returned, only now he wasn’t a dad on Christmas morning; he was a kid. “What’s the last thing you do remember?”
I sighed. “I remember sitting at my desk working on a report.”
“Yes.” He nodded, still staring at me creepily. “That’s where your base station was set up. My god, you really do look just the same. Better, maybe.”
“You must be very proud,” I said. Was I being sarcastic? It sounded sarcastic, but I felt no venom, only annoyance with the way Caleb was staring at me. I looked past him, around the room, and noticed for the first time his bare walls. They were sponge-painted in red and gold, but held no art, no photographs. No photos on his desk either, only a menagerie of crystal and metal objects that all looked like they’d make terrific blunt weapons.
Caleb was still looking at me like a lab specimen. I swatted at his face, and he took the hint and backed up a bit. “You never told me you were uploading me. I didn’t agree to it, and I don’t remember getting an implant.”
He shrugged. “You should have read your paperwork more carefully.”
All the papers he’d shoved in front of me on my first day, when I was so grateful for employment that I would have signed anything. The intrusive scans they’d done ostensibly to get my retina and other biometrics on file. I still didn’t remember being injected with anything, but the implants were very small.
What I did remember, suddenly, was that I’d taken this job so I could be a better mother to Lucy. Lucy, who I hadn’t seen in—how long? That was the moment I recognized that something had gone wrong. I thought of Koko2’s indifference to Feet, and saw it paralleled in my own new self’s behavior. I knew I should want to rush home and wrap Lucy in my arms. But I felt no urgency. Sure, I wondered if she was all right. I hoped she was. I thought I would be sad if anything had happened to her.
“Where is my body?” I asked.
Caleb sighed. “Lab 14-H. I’ll go with you.” He stood to lead me from the room, but I waved him off.
“I’ll go myself, thank you.”
But I ended up needing help after all; my thumbprint and retina didn’t match the ones on file and wouldn’t open the door.
I stood staring at my dead body for a long while, my brain running through a complicated and somewhat recursive chain of thoughts. I was dead. I had possibly been murdered. But I was alive; I’d been copied. I was a copy, but I felt real. But I didn’t feel with the intensity I had before.
I thought I should feel angry at Caleb for murdering me, but I really didn’t. I guess it’s hard to be upset about your own murder when you’re alive. Or anyway, part of me figured that. The other part worried I was missing something, the same something as Koko2, the loss of which made me less than I’d been. But even my worried side wasn’t too concerned. There was no urgency to the feeling of loss; in fact there was no feeling to it. I didn’t feel wrong, but that was just more evidence that I was wrong, because I was unable to feel it.
I tried to think of all the things that had been important to me before. It was a short list, with Lucy at the top. So I asked myself if I still loved Lucy. I wanted to say that of course I did; it was like a reflex. But I wasn’t sure. The only thing for it was to go right home and find out.
I got all the way there before realizing Lucy wasn’t at my home. None of her other caretakers would have left her there alone.
It had become springtime while I slept (for that is how I thought of it, despite knowing the more complicated truth), so I agreed to meet my Mom at Sunlight Beach Park to get Lucy from her. Mom was relieved to hear from me, but not as relieved as I expected. “I was so worried when I couldn’t reach you last night,” she said.
Last night? I thought. It had been almost three weeks since the last day I could remember.
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” I replied. Because I still wasn’t sure how to explain my absence, or my new shaved-head look, I offered no excuse. I just put on a sunhat and headed for the beach.
Mom and Lucy were sitting side-by-side on a beach blanket when I arrived. Mom stared straight out over the water, running sand through her fingers absently. Lucy was nominally building a sandcastle—she held her little shovel in one hand, with the pail set next to it—but she seemed preoccupied and kept looking around her. Still, she didn’t see me until I was almost on top of them. I blame the sunhat.
When she did notice me, Lucy jumped right through her sandcastle and hugged me around the thighs as hard as her little arms could. I didn’t even have time to kneel down to hug her properly. I settled for placing one hand on her head. Her hair was warm from the sun, but tangled and a little crunchy, as if she’d wet it with seawater and let it dry. My hand didn’t linger.
Mom rose more slowly, and hugged me awkwardly over Lucy’s head. “Where were you? I’ve been trying to reach you since Tuesday.” And then she seemed to actually see me, and her eyes widened. “What happened to your hair?”
Lucy let me go and I stumbled. A breeze caught my stupid sunhat and tilted it back, revealing more of my baldness. “OMG!” Lucy exclaimed. “What did happen to your hair? Mommy? Where were you? I missed you!” And on and on in a sort of mantra of hyperactive need.
“Um,” I began, more to Mom than Lucy. “Can we just call it an accident? They had to shave my head.”
Mom leaned in close to look at it, humphed, and, still looking questioningly into my eyes, shrugged. I guessed we’d talk later.
Meanwhile, Lucy’s excitement continued unabated. Now it was, “Mommy, look! Look what I learned in school today!” in-between flailing maneuvers that I guessed were cartwheels. The soft sand seemed to trip her, and she fell more often than not. Sand clung to her cheeks and elbows and curly, matting hair. I thought of the time I’d spend bathing her, combing out her tresses, and sweeping up the whole apartment after the sand got everywhere, and it all seemed like a chore. She did a cartwheel she was particularly proud of, then looked up at me, beaming, from a sandy crouch. “Mommy! Did you see?”
“Mmmm,” I said.
And Lucy, who’d always been a sensitive child, tried for a moment to pretend she wasn’t hurt. She wiped a lock of hair away from her forehead with her arm, turned toward the water—and started bawling. Her cheeks scrunched up and reddened, she wailed, and big hot tears welled up in her eyes. They streaked down her face, washing sand away with them like tiny flash floods.
“Oh, Lucy,” I said. I knelt beside her and placed a hand on her back, but she squirmed away and kept crying. I sat next to Mom on the blanket, brushing sand away.
“What’s wrong with you?” she hissed at me, then Mom knee-walked toward Lucy. Lucy turned to her and collapsed into a hug, burying her weeping face in her Gramma’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” she told Lucy, until the girl seemed to believe it.
Finally her crying subsided into breathless gulps and she sat between us on the blanket, underneath the glares Mom was throwing me. I could sense Lucy’s ambivalence toward me, as clear as day. When she remembered that I’d made her cry, that she was mad at me, she leaned toward Gramma. But the rest of the time she seemed pulled to me like a plant to sunlight. I knew she wanted my attention. I also knew that she’d never had to beg for it before. Wasn’t this Lucy, the love of my life? Wasn’t this little creature the reason I woke in the mornings and most of what I thought of in-between? Why hadn’t I run to her like a cheetah after prey, swept her up and hugged her, spinning, with all my might? That’s what the old me would have done. I knew it, because I remembered it.
I just didn’t feel it.
I knew I should be bothered by that lack of feeling. Feeling had been important to me before. But now that it was gone, it wasn’t. Sort of by definition, I guess.
What I did feel was the warmth of the sun on my shoulders and the softness of fine sand between my toes. The water was sparkly, and though too bright for my new eyes—my old sunglasses were prescription, which meant they now blurred my vision—it was a beautiful view. I knew my mom and daughter were irked with me, but that didn’t really upset me. I felt glad to be alive. Content.
Well, not completely. It bothered me a little that I’d made Lucy sad. I turned to her, putting a smile on my face that I hoped didn’t look too awkward. “What do you say we get some ice cream?” I asked.
Lucy’s smile was immediate.
And you know what? The ice cream tasted amazing. When I thought that the battered body in Lab 14-H could have been the only me, I felt nothing but gratitude to ExtraLives for giving me a second chance.
“How do you like the new you?” Caleb asked. Ever since I’d first stumbled into his office, he’d been looking at me the way all the techs looked at Koko2, with an evaluating, appraising eye. I understood that I had replaced chimpanzees as the company’s primary object of study. I’d been through a seemingly endless battery of physicals, during which all the differences I’d noted, plus more, were discovered and measured. And just like Koko2, I’d been grilled on my own life history to check for holes in my memory. ExtraLives wanted to go public with what they’d done. But no matter how many doctors and psychologists declared the experiment a success, they still needed my endorsement.
Caleb waited until the MDs and PsyDs had finished with me. For the first time in over a month, I returned to my office, sat down, and logged into my computer. I was mindful of the fact that—assuming they had re-implanted me with a recorder chip, which seemed probable—I was now being uploaded. But I didn’t have time to dwell on it before he came bursting in without knocking.
“Well?”
“It’s weird,” I answered. My new body was in almost all ways superior to the original. Though I wasn’t quite as strong as I’d been, and my hair would take a year or two to grow all the way back out, every cell in my body was new and healthy. I was flexible and thin and my skin was unlined. “People will love getting a new body,” I told him, for all the obvious reasons. “Especially people who were sick or injured. It truly is a fresh start.”
Caleb beamed. I could see him writing marketing copy in his head.
“But it’s still weird. All my scars are gone.”
“Isn’t that good?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I remember being fond of some of them. But overall . . . ” I trailed off, because my eyes drifted to the photograph on my desk. Lucy in her big red boots. Lucy against the waves. The seashell she’d given me sat in front of it, and these were the only decorations in my office. That felt significant, but although I understood that these were treasures, I couldn’t comprehend why. The seashell looked dull and out of place, an ordinary trinket from the sea, and I felt keenly that I was missing something, something that had once made it seem to shine. And that was enough to give me pause.
“Overall . . . ” Caleb prompted, looking at me with a scary level of expectation.
“Overall it’s great,” I told him. “Way better than being dead.”
He laughed. “Is that all?”
“I wish I’d known,” I said.
It was clearly an unfinished statement, but Caleb didn’t ask me to elaborate. “No one knows when they’re going to die, Reva.”
I nodded, and he seemed satisfied—in a “for now” kind of way—and drifted out of my office. I turned back to my computer, switching it on.
A second later it prompted me for a password, a thing it had never done before. I stared at the screen for a moment, wondering if I should call Caleb back and get the password from him. But there was a password hint button, so I clicked it just to see. At my last workplace, the password and the hint had been the same.
It read Same as your bank pin, dummy, so I punched in the numbers and my desktop faded into view. And right in the center of it was a new Word file called “WelcomeBackReva.” Of course I opened it.
Unless you’re a total moron—and god, I hope you’re not—you’ve realized by now that you’re not the original. I mean, hello? No belly button?
I don’t know exactly when your memory stops, because I don’t know exactly when Caleb started building you. Do you remember deciphering any of Dr. Kim’s notes? We started on it shortly after coming back from vacation, when it was clear to everyone but us that Koko2 had been a complete success.
I did remember beginning on it. With nothing left to do in an official capacity, I’d turned to word games, seeking a cipher that would turn Dr. Kim’s gobbledegook into useful information. I hadn’t gotten very far. But I guess I’d eventually got further than I remembered.
Well, we did it. Those files are on this computer too, all decrypted for you. But here’s the summary: Koko2 is really Koko14. This technology didn’t come out of the box working perfectly, and by the time Koko13 rolled off the assembly line Dr. Kim was deeply troubled. She’d been saying since Koko3 just twitched and twitched that the project needed to slow down, but Caleb would have none of it.
One day Dr. Kim walked in on Caleb in his office, changing his shirt. He tugged it down immediately, turning away from the door, but Dr. Kim still saw his belly. With no belly button. At this point Dr. Kim’s notes, though still coded, verge on hysterical, with rantings about pod people.
She became frightened of him.
Koko13? She was almost perfect. Just like your Koko2. I don’t know what became of her because Dr. Kim never knew. I hope she’s in a zoo or another lab, and isn’t one of the chimps in 14-H. The last pages of Dr. Kim’s notes are musings about quitting and going public. But she didn’t get to. I found her in the freezer. Two of her. One is waif-thin and pale, scrawny but otherwise perfect-looking, except for the bruises around her throat. The other is Dr. Kim, a real body with a life behind it. That one looked like it put up a fight.
So I went a few doors down, and I was only a little surprised to see a body growing in the aquarium there. It was just bones and a little muscle, but I felt sure it was me. That was a few days ago already. I’m afraid of what I’d see if I looked now.
I’m afraid, Reva of the future. I think the technology will work this time, and you’ll be effectively me. And so I will continue, sort of. But I will die. I don’t know when or where or how, but once Caleb is satisfied that it worked, he’ll kill me.
So I’m not waiting around for it to happen. After I say goodbye to Kokos 1 and 14 I’m leaving, and I’m taking Lucy with me. I hope that that leaves a hole in your life. If it doesn’t, it will mean that you’re not really me after all. If it does, well, I guess I’ll see you again.
Sitting in my little office, I felt the old Reva’s presence strongly. I looked again at the framed photo that I knew used to mean the world to me. Big red boots on little feet. Waves. Rocks. A pearl-pink seashell. It didn’t mean anything now.
But I put it in my pocket anyway.
When I walked into the lab adjoining Koko’s habitat, my colleagues almost jumped out of their skins. I hadn’t been down there since my re-birth, and I guess they weren’t expecting me to come back. But after a moment of shock they crowded around me, mouths agape as they studied me like a specimen, throwing questions faster than I could answer. Behind the one-way glass, Koko shrieked.
“It’s nice to see you too,” I said, forcing a casual laugh. “If you like my face, you’ll love this.” And I pulled my shirt up, exposing my alien belly. Just like Caleb’s, I thought. I was dying to know how long Caleb had been a pod person, but since I’d never observed a change in him—and since Dr. Kim had discovered his secret—he must have died well before hiring me. I wondered what he’d been like before. Could this explain his almost psychopathic behavior? Could this explain why he’d murdered me and Dr. Kim? For I was now certain that he had.
The gathered techs seemed shamed by my mild exhibitionism, backing off sheepishly. “I’m here to visit Koko2,” I said.
And now all eyes were on me again, but it was silent. Even Koko had calmed down. A young tech named Scott broke the spell first. “Of course she doesn’t know,” he all but exclaimed, as if solving a riddle. Immediately he clamped a knuckly hand over his mouth, but it was too late.
“I don’t know what?” I asked.
They exchanged nervous, almost guilty looks, before seeming to elect Maria, a soft-spoken graduate student, to break it to me. “Koko2 is dead,” she began, using a tone reserved for the very worst of news. I almost laughed then, amused that they thought I’d be heartbroken over a chimp. But then she went on. “We had to put her down after she . . . killed, um, you.”
And if I’d hypothesized that this body was incapable of feeling emotions, my reaction then provided significant counter-evidence. My legs went wobbly and my heartbeat jumped, and I almost sat down right on the lab’s cold floor. I’d never felt that way hearing news before, always thought asking people to sit for shocking news was silly.
Still, it only took me a moment to pull myself together. I’m not sure the techs even noticed my near-swoon.
It took them longer to try, vainly, to prevent me from pulling up the footage and watching myself die.
The chimp lounges on a cushion, arm around a stuffed shark. She ignores Reva as she enters the enclosure, pretending to sleep. So Reva kneels next to the cushion and lightly tickles the chimp’s foot. But instead of laughing like the first chimp, this one just pulls her foot away.
Reva signs to her, trying to say goodbye, trying to wish her luck, using concepts that she must know are too advanced to do the chimp any good. Still, she tries to get the chimp’s attention. She reaches for the stuffed shark, and as soon as she touches it the chimp springs into furious action, pummeling Reva with her fists and anything else she can grab. Anything but the shark. In between blows, her hands form quick signs.
It goes on and on.
Even looking at the footage in slow motion I couldn’t make out what Koko2 had tried to tell me. The techs all avoided me while I watched the footage, but I pulled Scott in when he walked behind me on his way somewhere else. “What’s she saying?”
He shook his head. “We think she’s saying ‘teeth.’ The words, ‘no,’ ‘hurt,’ ‘touch,’ and ‘teeth’ come up a lot. Our best guess is that it was the shark. She got wicked pissed that you—she—touched her shark.”
And I laughed then, hysterically. I laughed like I remembered laughing at things that were genuinely funny. I laughed until tears leaked out of my new eyes and Scott scurried off, probably afraid I’d go berserk like Koko14 and murder him. Which only made it funnier.
I didn’t even care right then that Koko14 had killed me.
Koko14 had cared.
I was so excited about Koko14’s emotions that it took me a while to realize the other important factor: Caleb hadn’t murdered me. Sure, he’d copied me without my consent, but the first Reva would still be alive if it hadn’t been for a chimp’s love of her stuffed shark.
If Caleb wasn’t my killer, maybe he didn’t kill Dr. Kim either.
On my way out of the lab I cornered Maria. “What happened to Dr. Kim?”
She stuttered, then started to tell me that the woman had left.
“No, Maria. What really happened to her.” Behind her, I could see the other techs slinking about and eyeing me. I raised my voice. “Is there footage of her death? I know she was scared. I know she knew about—”
“Dr. Kim quit,” Scott said, his booming voice drowning out the name on my lips. “Now get out of here and stop harassing the interns.” But as he came toward me as if to muscle me out of the lab, I saw something conspiratorial in his eyes. I let him guide me into the hallway.
Instead of angling toward the exit, Scott led me to his office. “You know there are cameras everywhere, right?” he said under his breath. “I don’t think they pick up audio, but you can’t be too careful.”
Scott rummaged around in a drawer and eventually pulled out something that looked like a thumb drive. “A backup?” I asked. “Your backup?”
He rolled his eyes, clearly exasperated with me. “Dr. Kim was a friend of mine. I wish I could see her again.” He pressed the backup into my hand, and as I realized what it was, I tried hard not to let my face show anything for the cameras.
I left the office after that, but I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I just walked and walked for at least an hour. Caleb called me several times, but I ignored his calls. At best, he wanted to pressure me some more about going public. At worst, he saw my breakdown in the lab and wanted to “talk” about it.
I ended up collecting Lucy from her father’s apartment. It was his day to have her, but he didn’t protest when I suggested a trip to the park, and soon my walking was livened up by her excited prattle as we headed for the playground she thought was her favorite, the one with the biggest play structures and the zipline I’d never let her ride. The park wasn’t really her favorite, because she left in tears almost every time. We had a pattern going, in which she’d start out all excited to climb the big monkey bars, then she’d trip over her own feet before we even got to the playground, then I wouldn’t let her do any of the dangerous things she wanted to try, then she’d throw a tantrum and we’d leave.
We started out true to form. Lucy wanted to show me more of her cartwheels, and face-planted into the grass on maybe the fourth one. But she sprang right up, blades of grass stuck to her forehead, and thrust her arms up and pelvis forward just like every gymnast ever saluting the judges. I laughed, then gave her a round of applause. “A perfect ten,” I told her.
A blade of grass peeled off her face and drifted to the ground like a leaf. “Momma, can I go play?”
“Of course,” I said. “But stay low, okay?”
She rocketed off toward the play structure and I watched after her, wondering what Reva1 would be feeling. A love that made her chest tight, I thought. I didn’t feel that.
My phone buzzed, this time with a text message from Caleb. I still hadn’t listened to any of his voicemails. Press conference tomorrow, 10:00 a.m., it read. You’re the star.
The fingers of the hand not holding the phone curled into a fist and my heart beat faster. I felt rage, real physical anger. Without even thinking, I unflexed my fist and typed a reply: I never agreed to that.
But I remembered a thing or two about anger, so I paused before hitting “send” and took a deep breath. I looked around.
Over at the huge play structure, Lucy had her foot on the bar that I’d long ago set as her upper limit. She looked toward me as she did it, like a guilty kitten, testing to see if I’d let her get away with it. I knew the old Reva would have shaken her head, no. I knew because her old nightmare scenarios ran through my mind: Lucy’s foot slipping off the rung, her face slamming into a bar, teeth cutting through her lip, blood running down her chin, her wailing through broken teeth. But then I kept the what-if going. We’d go to the hospital, she’d get a few stitches. Her adult teeth would grow in fine, and her scar would fade with time. And she’d be okay.
I shook my head, but only to clear it.
Encountering no resistance from me, Lucy climbed tentatively higher. Another girl, much bigger than Lucy, approached her and they conversed with some gesticulating and the occasional sound shrill enough to carry to where I was. The other girl ran off, and Lucy ran toward me, obviously on a layover between the play structure and her next destination.
“MommycanIridethezipline?” She asked what she obviously considered a futile and perfunctory question as fast as she could, poised to explode either with joy or temper tantrum. I’d denied this request many times.
But today I really looked at the zipline, watching the kids play. It was a rubber swing dangling from a cable stretched between two posts. At the high end, kids had to pull the swing up onto a platform, then the bigger ones pulled it back as far as they could, running and jumping on at the last minute to collect as much momentum as possible. They zoomed down to the other end, where there was a stop in the cable, and the swing arced up before turning to its return journey. A kid could fall off, I figured. But the thing wasn’t very high, and it ran over a wide sand pit that looked soft enough. If a kid flew off the end, she might go some distance, but if she didn’t hit the well-padded end post she’d land in the sand. The most dangerous spot seemed to be the wooden platform at the high end. Some of the kids came back to it at a fairly high speed, and its edges had only minimal, crumbling padding. But, I told myself, I could stand watch at that end. I could catch Lucy if she came in too fast.
I looked down into her face, which was looking up at mine with so much hope it made me laugh out loud. “Okay,” I said, and before she could completely dissolve into hysterical happiness I hastened to add, “But hold on really, really tight, okay?”
Her head moved up and down at an incredible rate.
We went over to the zipline and waited in line while some other kids took their turns. None of them hit their heads on the platform and died, so I was somewhat comforted. But still I whispered in Lucy’s ear, “Are you scared? It’s not too late to change your mind.”
She squirmed a little, and I realized that she was scared. I patted her back. “You’ll be fine. Just don’t let go.”
She was too small to pull the swing back while climbing onto the platform, so I held it for her. She stared it down for a while before wiggling her butt onto the seat. “Are you sure it’s safe?” she asked, her face pale. I felt a pang then, not of doubt, but of guilt for how thoroughly I—the old me—had conditioned fear into this child.
“I’m sure,” I said.
Lucy gripped the chains with white knuckles. When she was secure, I pulled it a little farther back and let her go. She seemed to drop away from the platform fast, but when the swing came to the stop at the end it only made a gentle swoop before coming back. I needn’t have worried about the platform; Lucy barely made it halfway back before the swing started to head the other way again. It rocked a few times before coming to rest about three-quarters of the way down, and I jumped off the platform and lifted Lucy out of the swing.
“Can I go again?” she asked, before I’d even set her feet in the sand.
We took half a dozen more turns on the zipline—I even went a couple of times, to the surprise of the other kids, and it was fun!—so it was a while before I got back to my phone and Caleb’s text message. I deleted my angry reply unsent. I’ll be there, I replied instead, on one condition. The backup drive in my pocket felt like leverage: if Caleb wanted my endorsement, Scott would see his friend again.
But all that could wait. For the moment, I walked my ecstatic daughter home from her favorite park.
Lucy grabbed one of my hands and I shoved the other in my pocket. I was feeling for the thumb drive, but instead it brushed against something hard and round. I pulled it out: the seashell.
“Why do you have that?” Lucy asked.
I looked between the shell and my daughter, wondering the same thing myself. I knew I was supposed to feel something, but the shell still just seemed empty. I knelt in front of her, seashell in hand. “Do you remember what I told you about hermit crabs?”
She nodded. “They live in shells like pretty dresses.”
Close enough. “Well, I think we should take this back to the beach and throw it in the water. I think we should put it where someone like a hermit crab can use it for a home. Or a dress. What do you think?”
Lucy’s face fell, but only a little. “But I gave it to you,” she whined.
“I know you did, but it’s too small for me.” I mimed like I was trying to climb into the shell, and she giggled.
“Momma, you’re silly!” When she smiled, I felt something like happiness.
And you know what? That was good enough for me.
Story notes:
Some tropes are used so often and so unthinkingly in genre fiction that they are taken as a given. Putting a person into a new body is one of them. But surely things wouldn’t be as simple as all that.
One of the things that sparked this story was reading an article about how fingerprints are formed in utero. A body reproduced from DNA would never be exactly the same as the original, whether it’s a calico cat with new markings or a human with moles in new places.
How a person in a new body would feel is, of course, entirely my speculation.