Lost Time: Part 1 [Second Skyn]

  Lost Time: Part One

  Second Skyn

  Damien Boyes

  Late Afternoon. October 8, 2057.

  I’ve been here before.

  This is how I died.

  I’m back in the car, Connie beside me. We’re taking the long way home from Mom and Dad’s, chasing the fading autumn light. I told the autonav to find a scenic route back to the city and it charted a lazy, zig-zag path along densely treed side roads that’ll add an extra hour to our trip, but we don’t mind. We’re in no hurry.

  Connie, her passenger seat partially reclined and pushed all the way back, has slipped off her sandals and absently drums the toes of her right foot on the dash, each tap launching rainbow pulses from the depths of her nails. Her face is turned away from me, lost in the passing blur of leaves, the violet beech, the tawny maple, the luminous yellow birch. Only a hint of her nose and the curve of one freckle-kissed cheekbone peek out from behind the loose twists of auburn hair that cascade to her shoulders.

  The hem of her blue and white orchid-patterned dress—the one she bought beach-side the morning after we hopped to Cuba and married in the all-night chapel just outside the Havana airport's security duct—is bunched midway up her pale thighs, and rising.

  She's swinging her left knee back-and-forth, slowly back-and-forth, tapping my leg at the apex of each arc, following some lazy rhythm only she can hear, and as she does, the fabric of her dress keeps rising. Little by little. Bit by bit.

  Her cheek twitches with the flicker of a smile. She knows I've noticed. Her hand drops to the seat between her legs.

  Neither of us says anything. We're enjoying these last few moments of quiet, content to be alone with each other for a few minutes before our lives resume and we’re back to scrawling quick notes in passing on the bathroom mirror.

  Visits home aren’t stressful exactly, but Mom has waited for a grandchild for thirty years and she's stopped hiding her impatience. She wants us to see a specialist, get the process underway already, but with the reJuv treatments keeping us all healthy there's no reason for heroic measures. Not yet at least. We want it to happen naturally. We'll keep trying the old fashioned way for another year or two, then we'll see.

  We've got time.

  I lean forward to pick some music and there's a welcome pressure on my thigh, a spreading warmth—Connie kneading my leg through the fabric of my jeans. She leans closer, strengthens her grip.

  Other than the double-sized AV up ahead—probably hauling a late harvest from one of the lake farms—the nav shows clear roads all the way down to the highway, not another car in sight. The way the pilot's been driving, we'll be past the big automated truck before the next bend and then it'll be easy-running for another thirty minutes. I’ll take over when we hit the outskirts of the city. Deserted country roads are one thing, but I don't trust the pilot in real traffic. I know what the stats are, autopilots versus human drivers, and I don’t care. We’re safer with my hands on the controls.

  Besides, at our age? Thirty minutes is way more than we’ll need.

  She reaches up, brushes the hair from her face. Her eyes catch mine and her dimples emerge as she spreads her lips without showing any teeth. It's a smile most people read as bashful. But I know it means she's about to get her way.

  Maybe this'll be the time we finally make it happen.

  The road rises, curving around a stand of thick trees that hang out over the asphalt. The AV is directly ahead, it’s articulated, high-backed cargo shell scrapes through the overhanging branches. The pilot accelerates, trusting the clear nav means it’s safe to pass, ignoring the double yellow that would have cautioned a human driver from overtaking around a blind corner.

  Connie leans in to kiss me.

  I move in to respond but the moment is interrupted by the AV’s flaring brake lights, two sudden scarlet strips slashing the windshield.

  The automated truck lurches ahead of us. Shuddering tires hiccup smoke on the asphalt. A warning tone sounds and the dash pulses amber. The pressure on my thigh tightens—Connie squeezing hard enough to hurt.

  It’s too late to brake. The restraints grab us tight against our seats and the pilot darts us into the oncoming lane, out and around the hard-braking AV. The truck swerves to the shoulder, catches gravel, fishtails.

  I flail at the dash for support as we whip out to avoid colliding with its rear-end, wishing I hadn't suggested an indirect route home. Wishing I’d reset the pilot from aggressive. Wishing I was driving.

  I brace for impact, but force my eyes to stay open and watch as we squeak past the AV’s bumper and glide back into our lane.

  We both exhale at the same time, our sighs of relief loud in the small cabin. My heart’s thrashing, my vision pixelated with adrenaline, but I start the process to disengage the pilot and retake control. Married time can wait.

  Connie tenses in her seat.

  A gasp—the last breath she’ll ever take—catches in her throat. I pull my eyes from the dash, realising only now why the AV jammed on its brakes and cut for the shoulder.

  Careening down around the bend, directly ahead of us, is the angular front end of an armoured TACvan.

  I get one hand on the wheel and manage to cover the pads, but there's no response. The pilot won't give me control, not now. It's just seen the van too.

  Bold letters scream at us from the windscreen, washing us in crimson light:

  IMPACT ALERT.

  This isn't a warning. It's a conclusion.

  The TACvan straddles the road, a six-wheeled kinetic missile rocketing toward us. I catch the barest glimpse of the driver’s face through the van’s narrow window, his features a blur, lost in shadow, and then he passes out of view, replaced by the imposing bulk of the massive military vehicle’s jutting front-end.

  I wrench the wheel in one, last desperate attempt to avoid what’s about to happen but it spins through my slippery fingers. All I can do is watch.

  Connie swallows a scream and her fingers bite deeper into my leg. I cover her hand with mine and in a squeeze try to tell her that everything will be okay. That I love her more than anything. That I’ll always be with her, just like we promised. Just like we planned.

  Even death won’t keep us apart.

  The bags deploy, blinding and choking, then the van hits with a dull plastic thunderclap that bursts with the ragged non-sound of sudden violence, heaves my organs into my ribcage, blasts us with shards of shattered windshield.

  In the time it takes to blink through the glass slicing at my face, the matte-black wedge of the TACvan's bumper is cleaving through the dust-choked cabin and a huge cabled tire is squeezing down on the front end of the car.

  Connie's mouth is wide, teeth bared, head thrown back, the tendons of her neck taut—but there’s no sound, nothing but a concussive drone in my head and then her lower half is gone, chewed up by the relentlessly churning wheel.

  I lunge out, try to grab her, but we're slammed from behind, compressed into the AV’s front end. I’m thrown sideways, helpless as the van bites down and charges through, churning composite and electronics and flesh as it passes.

  The car catches the road, spins me around to watch the van’s rear wheels bounce and regurgitate a ruin of bloody debris.

  In a second, every thing we had is gone. Everything we dreamed of chewed up and spat out.

  Connie is dead.

  Another half-turn and what’s left of the car flips, bounces with a hollow crunch. Something in my chest buckles. Pain spears through my abdomen. I barely feel it.

  Died screaming.

  The pain wracking by body is nothing, a sliver under the skin compared to the anguish that tears at my head and my heart and my stomach
and my bowels.

  The horizon rolls back around.

  A dark crunch. A smear of bright pink.

  The car bounces again and I'm weightless, somehow free of the restraints, free of the tumbling wreck, a ragdoll in the air with the autumn breeze cool on my cheeks, and then the earth rears up and slams into me. I rebound off the pavement and skid, dead-limbed. Bands of white pulse across my vision as my face scrapes off. The road grinds through my clothes, my skin, and deep into muscle before, finally, thankfully, I stop.

  More pain hits. Pain so intense it immediately loses meaning and evaporates. But the agony inside only grows, the fire of loss consuming me.

  I’m facing back the way we came now. The van’s gone. Already. Already gone. Connie.

  Everything.

  Gone.

  There’s a shoe nearby. Brown. Tread worn at the heel, foot still attached. Most of a leg too. Wearing jeans. My jeans.

  My leg.

  Connie's hand, bone and flesh raggedly severed above the wrist, clutches my thigh. Her wedding ring glitters in the sunlight.

  The sight of it sparks something cold in the fire of loss raging within me, condenses to a frigid knot of anger spiked with bitter hatred for the man who did this to us.

  For the man who took everything from us.

  I try to roll, to get to my feet and chase the van down, but my body is smeared out around me. I’m not going anywhere, not now. Not ever.

  I close my eyes, suck shredded breath, and hope death comes before the recovery team arrives.

  The world bleeds to white, but a blink later I’m back in the car, Connie’s terrified hand on my thigh, the van dead ahead, and the driver a wild-eyed blur through its narrow viewport.

  The van tears through Connie.

  Throws me from the mangled car.

  I bleed to white.

  And blink.

  Van.

  Connie.

  White.

  Blink—

  Van.

  Connie.

  White.

  Again and again I’m dragged through the last twenty seconds of my life until, after reliving Connie’s death over and over, with every intimate second of her torment seared into me, every subtle nuance of her final scream etched into my brain, and an anger for the man behind the wheel calcified into pure, concentrated hatred, something finally changes.

  StatUS-ID

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

  SysDate

  [10:23:03. Wednesday, April 10, 2058]

  Voices fade in.

  Voices superimposed over my death like a commentary track. Voices but no words, just faded phonemes jawing in the distance, a distance that all at once compresses and twists then grabs me by the stomach and yanks.

  I jolt, flail out, scrabbling to catch myself before I hit the ground and scrape my face off again. But this time the ground doesn’t come.

  Instead, I land in a pool of peace, my body suffused by liquid relaxation.

  “There's the hy-j,” a low voice says. “He's animate.”

  “SOMA's active and the psychorithm’s stable. Cortical function looks…good?” says another.

  The joyous sense of calm fades and my thoughts solidify.

  Psychorithm? I know that word.

  Why can’t I remember what it means?

  I’m groggy, like I just woke from a summer afternoon nap in a hot room. The inside of my head is brown and rumpled, my teeth too thick.

  I open my eyes. The lids unseal with a sticky pop and the world crawls into focus.

  The room is small and bare and smells of lavender-scented industrial sanitizer, the walls bleach-bright and unadorned. Beside me two flowers—one blue with a green stem, one green with a blue stem—sprout from a white vase on an otherwise empty table. A livewall at the foot of the bed glows like the mid-morning sun through a paper blind.

  Two men in turquoise cleansuits stand next to me, eyes twinkling beneath their full-face vizrs. They don't look like doctors. One of them's just a kid.

  I'm stretched out on my back, chest elevated, dressed in a thin white one-piece with a front seam. My feet are bare.

  My feet.

  Both of them.

  And then it all comes rushing back. There was an accident. I’m at Second Skyn.

  Connie.

  I need to find Connie.

  I launch myself out of bed but my body ignores me. Yelling at the techs barely gets my lips open, produces only a hushed wheeze. The older cleansuit notices the twitching, elbows the kid and flicks his head at me. The kid hesitates for a moment, flips up his vizr and shuffles closer.

  He inhales deeply. “Just relax, ahh—” he scrunches up his face and glances back over his shoulder “—what's this one's name again?”

  The older guy rolls his eyes up into his display. “Gage, Finsbury. 184-days post. AR fifty-eight. Male gendint.”

  “Right,” the kid says to himself, and then, “Mr…Gage, that is your name, correct? Finsbury Gage? Blink once if that’s correct.”

  Of course that’s my name. Who else would I be?

  Why are they playing these games?

  I just want to find my wife.

  “Sir?” the kid says, raising his eyebrows at me. “You are Finsbury Gage, yes? Can you blink for me?”

  I force my eyelids down and up.

  “Great,” he says with a practiced smile. “You can relax, you're at Second Skyn and perfectly safe. I’m happy to tell you your personality transfer was a complete success. The recovery team was able to capture your consciousness before it decayed, and we translated it into a stable psychorithm. You’ve been restored to a cortical prosthetic embedded in your new bioSkyn—just like the old you, only better. You’ll be up and around in no time. But first, I need you to follow this light for me. Can you do that?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, pulls a slender tab from a large hip pocket and ignites the tip.

  I stare straight up at him, ignoring the light. The tag on his chest reads William C. — Jr. Restoration Technician.

  “Qual whunf—” I scream. It sounds like a monkey coughing.

  I need to know what happened to Connie.

  But, I already do. The memory will be with me forever, replay every time I close my eyes. She couldn't have survived.

  No, Second Skyn was about surviving the unsurvivable. If there was any chance—

  The kid tech glances back over at his partner. He's paying no attention to us, lost in his veil of light.

  “Mr. Gage,” the kid says, his forced smile fracturing. “We need to run some final tests and you'll be good as new. Better even. Now please, if you could follow the light.”

  I leap at the ceiling, try to kick out with my legs, but nothing happens, which only pisses me off more. It’s now less about going anywhere than proving I can, but my body might as well be in a different room for all the success I have in controlling it. I concentrate on moving my fingers and only get my hands to writhe at my sides, like fish that have spent too long at the bottom of a rowboat.

  “Sir, please. Your Cortex is still syncing with your skyn's nervous system. Until it finishes, you're not going to have any real coordinated muscular function, and even after, you’re going to be unsteady on your feet for a few days. Right now, only your eyes will work.” I flail against the invisible weights on my limbs for another useless second before giving up. He looks relieved. “Ok, Mr. Gage? If you could—”

  I focus on the light. He waves it back and forth and I follow it with my eyes, he holds it still and I keep watching as it oscillates through twenty seconds of stepping colour. When the sequence finishes, the kid puts the tab back in his pocket and turns away.

  The other tech mumbles to himself as his eyes jig in the vizrlight. “Musculature, autonomous, limbic function, yeah, yeah, looks good.” He pauses as the display over his face scrolls through a series of green dots. “Diganics are…clean enough.” He pauses again as the display swaps to a ball of pulsating colour, flares erupting from its surfac
e in concentric pulses. The flares loop back on themselves, split and merge and dissolve, or shoot up to impact and scatter along the invisible sphere surrounding it. Like a constantly erupting rainbow supernova trapped in a marble.

  A thick red band gathers on the transparent sphere, shoots down and impacts the ball like a lightning strike.

  Those are my thoughts.

  As I think that, a blue streamer jets up, separates, and loops back to impact the glowing ball in three different places.

  This is really happening.

  What have I done?

  The tech continues, “Rithm reads…it’s frayed at the edges but stable enough. This one's good to go.” My thoughts blink off and he flips the screen up, reaches behind me, pulls something from the base of my neck and tosses it to the kid who fumbles with it before sliding it into a large pocket on the front of his cleansuit. “That's it for me—coffee time.”

  The kid takes a half step to follow. “Gene, I don’t—”

  Gene muzzles him with a raised finger. “Meet me in three forty-one when Sid shows, and you can tell her I told you to tell her that her break ended at ten-thirty. She's supposed to be here—” he angles his head at me “—when they wake up.” He stops on his way out. “And don’t you disappear on me again today. I don't care what anyone else tells you to do, you're mine. We got eight more to do I’m not staying late again. Lauren'll give me a—”

  The closing door cuts him off. The kid sighs, puts on his smile, steps back against the wall next to the door, flips down his vizr and hides in the shine. Maybe the pale doughiness of a freshly decanted skyn creeps him out too.

  “Where—” My voice rasps, but the noise sounds more like I intended. More like a word.

  The kid pretends he can't hear me. I take a deep breath and try again. It doesn't come out as much more than a hoarse bleat, but gets his attention. His vizr winks off.

  “Please, sir,” he says, shushing me with his tone like we're a couple arguing in public. “Your synaptic function still isn’t integrated, you could cause a fault and we'd have to reset your diganics and—” He catches himself. “Anyway, your Restoration Counsellor will be here any second now and she can answer your questions.”