Lost Time: Part 1 [Second Skyn] Read online

  I can't wait a few more seconds. I need to know what happened to Connie.

  Now.

  “My wife—” My vocal cords rasp like they've been left out in the sun to cure. “Constance—”

  “Mr. Gage, I ahh—I really don't have that information. If you'll—”

  “Use—” I flick my eyes at the plastic screen wrapping his face. He’s got the accumulated knowledge of the world hovering in front his eyes, he sure as hell can tell me what happened to one of Second Skyn’s own clients. “—find her.”

  “Sir, Sid will be here any moment. Really should have been here when you woke up.”

  My head is pounding. “Where is my wife?”

  He wants to keep stalling, but calls back the vizrlight and with a few flicks of his eyeballs finds the answer I’m looking for.

  “I’m, sorry but I—I’m afraid your wife— She, died. Was irretrievable.”

  Irretrievable.

  Dead.

  Connie’s dead.

  I repeat the words in my head and a vision of her face, contorted in pain, invades my mind. A familiar flame of grief stokes in my belly. I know this. I watched it happen.

  And now I’m doing this without her.

  Restoration was her idea. I never got comfortable with the idea of converting my thoughts and feelings—everything I am—to packets of light bouncing around in a prosthetic mind. Encased in a body perfectly normal in every way, except that it was grown layer-by-layer in a lab somewhere. Like vat steak.

  Without Connie here, what’s the point in immortality?

  Before I can tell the tech I want him to erase my rithm and put my body back in the fridge, the door slides open and a tall, kinky-haired redhead breezes in. I can taste her perfume.

  She's got a package under her arm and a tab extended in her hand, no hiding behind an impersonal vizr for her. She drops the stuff on the bedside table and dismisses Jr. with a wave. He doesn't relay Gene's message.

  “Welcome back…” she says, hesitating for a beat before glancing over at her tab, “…Finsbury. My name is Sidi. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I got hit by a truck,” I croak.

  She pats my arm like she's heard it before. “Perfectly normal. Restoration can be overwhelming, but that's why I'm here—to help you get acquainted with your new self.”

  She waves her tab at the livewall at the end of the bed and the translucent light dissolves to mist. A Second Skyn logo emerges, burning away the fog in a bright blue and green blaze. “Today is April 10th. It’s a Wednesday.” The wall follows along as she speaks, illustrating her words. “You've been out for twenty-seven weeks—a hair over six months—”

  Out, she says. Like I've been asleep, peacefully dozing. Maybe on the couch after a big meal and one beer too many. Not having my mind pulled apart thought-by-thought, reassembled, and dumped into a sub-human body.

  But then, I suppose, out is less terrifying than dead.

  “—need you to answer a few questions for me, and we’ll get you settled into your new skyn. Think you’re up for it?”

  “Where is she?” I know where she is. She's dead. The kid just told me. Constance Gage is dead.

  “Who?” she asks, and checks her display. “Ah, of course—your wife.” She lays her hand back on my arm. “I’m afraid she was gone when the recovery team arrived, but I assure you they did everything they could. From what I understand, the trauma was…extensive.” I know this. I watched it happen. Over and over and over. I don't know why I need to keep confirming it—but deep down, I do. I know exactly why.

  Maybe if I keep asking, the answer will change.

  This all feels like it’s happening to someone else.

  “Her remains were claimed by—” she taps the screen “—Marshall Tripp.” She looks at me, impressed. “Not the Marshall Tripp?”

  I don’t answer, sink back into the bed. Dr. Marshall Tripp. He'd have blamed me for Connie's death. The under-educated soldier who had taken his little girl from him. Again. This time for good.

  Marshall and Vivian Tripp disliked me from the moment I was introduced as their son-in-law, and that was the high-point of our relationship. They tolerated my presence, but we all knew I was the tragic result of the only impulsive thing their daughter had ever done. It didn’t matter we made each other happy.

  “And the guy driving?” I ask.

  She squints at me and shakes her head. “I'm sorry, I don't have that information, but you'll be with us for a few hours of observation and you'll be able to find out anything you’d like to know yourself. I’m sure there’s a lot you’d like to get caught up with—I even brought a cuff to get you started.”

  She sets the cuff in the side table and it sits there like a warning. A small, innocuous oval, nothing to be scared of—except seeing the inside of my head. It’s meant to attach to my neck, right at the base of the skull. My skyn even came with magnetic anchor points to seep it securely in place, conveniently built right into the skeleton. It’d give my thoughts direct access to the link: the global internet and all the virtual digital realms and the full universe of content feeds. My IMP. Email. Everything.

  Why the hell would I want that?

  “Keep it,” I say. “There’s enough noise in my head already.”

  “That’s up to you, of course,” she pauses, rubs her chin, changes tack. “How about lunch? Kick that new digestive system of yours into action.” She smiles, her attempt at a joke. “I need to ask you a few questions, and then I’ll arrange for something as soon as we're through.”

  She immediately starts into a list of questions designed to make sure my personality hasn't scrambled in the transfer, that I'm still me. Whoever—whatever—that is.

  I hadn't even wanted the damned Digital Life Assurance and refused at first. We don’t—didn’t—argue much, but we did about this. Connie wanted it, and Constance Gage would not be denied. How could I say no? Her parents are rich and loved her more than they hated me, so they paid for our guaranteed immortality as a wedding present.

  I wonder how they reacted when they found out I’d be the only one coming back?

  “Bancroft. Parker. Mrs. Kessel. A cat, Loki.” I’m not paying attention, but it doesn’t seem to matter, my mouth is reciting the answers to her questions by itself. “Sergeant, Drone Ops, Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, Spruce Company, United NorAm Forces. Consultant, Redguard Risk Mitigation. Director of Security, SinoPharm. Detective, Homicide, Toronto Police Service.”

  Connie thought the Digital Life Assurance was the ultimate testament to marriage—together forever. We’d never be separated by an accident or genetic freak-out. She once said I’d made a career of dodging bullets, and she was right, cops die every day.

  After we’d gone through the endless tissue samples, background checks, structural brain-mapping, uncomfortably-detailed physical modelling and page after page of government documentation, as we were Sküting home, she kissed me and said now the only thing that could end us was us. She’d bought completely into living forever. To her, death was a matter of choice. She had grown up with it. It was her business. It was her father's business. They both believed a person was simply a sophisticated group of cells working in concert toward a common purpose, and what were cells but nature's haphazard, imperfect machinery. Tripp Pharma simply provided those cellular machines new instructions in convenient to swallow pill form.

  Having her consciousness inhabiting carbon and photons instead of carbon and chemicals was trivial to her, a more sophisticated version of an artificial heart or a corneal implant.

  She also believed that love and loss were different things, and one didn't need the other. That, when it came to it, we'd be able to outsmart nature. This never-ending optimism, the refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer and get shit done—it was one of the things I loved most about her.

  Even when she was wrong.

  “Penguin, towel, market,” I repeat. Sidi shows me a pen and a pocket watch. Holds up a blank piece of
paper, tells me to take it with my right hand, fold it in two and place it on my left thigh. My arm works when I reach out for the paper.

  She tells me to pick up the paper and write a sentence, any sentence, with the pen. I use my left hand and write I am disposable in a shaky scrawl. If it affects my score, she doesn't let on.

  She asks me if I remember the words.

  “Penguin. Towel. Market,” my mouth recites.

  She has me copy an image of interlocked pentagrams. Satisfied my artistic ability has made the jump to binary, she takes the paper back.

  “All done,” she says, and with that I'm human again. In the eyes of the Union, anyway. “If you’d like, I can help you get acquainted with your new Cortex. You don't have to try the more advanced features of the cuff yet, but how about we try accessing your Headspace?”

  I look down at my hands. My new, unlined, freshly baked hands. Hands that never have and never will cradle the small of Connie’s back as she pushes up on her toes and raises her lips to meet mine. “Thanks, but I’ll manage,” I tell her. Who wants to see themselves from the inside out?

  “You’re sure? We can get you customized in less than a half hour. I'll set you up an aspect and show you how to cast into the Hereafter. You can take a stroll down the Champes Elysees, feel the Parisian sun on your face without ever leaving your bed.”

  “One hundred percent sure,” I say. I don’t need something in else in my head to remind me I’m no longer human. I can take care of that myself.

  “What if we start slow? I brought an assortment of shyfts, why not try one out—there’s a Bliss in there, I’m told it’s very, very pleasant. Or a Pick-Me-Up, lighten your mood, get you energised and ready to explore your new life? Or even a simple Alcosoft, all the fun of drinking without the hangover? So Finsbury, what do you say?”

  If I’m refusing to wear a cuff, why does she think I’d be willing to shyft? To subject my head to a firmware update?

  “Is there a shyft that’ll help me forget any of this happened?”

  She winces a smile, but shakes her head.

  I sink back into the pillow and fix my eyes on the ceiling.

  “That’s fine,” she says. “Go at your own speed. When you’re ready, there’s an onboard walkthrough. Simply attach your cuff, and when the dots appear look at the green one and think about turning it blue. Then relax and enjoy yourself. I'll leave the cuff here for you, for when you're ready.” She isn’t listening. Running through her prepared notes. I’ll never use a cuff. “So, a few more things Finsbury, and then I'll give you some time to yourself. I'm required to inform you that under your employment contract with the Toronto Police Service, you need to be re-certified ‘Fit for Duty.’”

  I angle my eyes at her and she gives me a quick smile and dismisses it with a wave of her hand.

  “Don't worry, it's a formality. Someone will come by, give you a once over, no problem—your IMP has the details. The COPA rep will be in to get you registered and sort out your new bio/kin and update your StatUS-ID, and we'll get you lunch and you’ll be ready for discharge. Sound good?”

  Discharge? To where? To what?

  My life?

  My life doesn’t exist anymore. It was mangled under the wheels of a TACvan.

  So no, Sidi, it doesn’t sound good. How could it possibly?

  I swing my eyes back to the ceiling. Take a deep breath through my nose, exhale through my mouth. She takes that as her answer.

  As she leaves, checking her tab for details on the next client she'll help cope with the existential nuances of resurrection, she says. “If you need anything, just ask, and if I don't see you before you leave, enjoy your Second Skyn, Finsbury.”

  I don't see her again.

  StatUS-ID

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

  SysDate

  [15:03:34. Wednesday, January 15, 2059]

  Pain binds me.

  Pain so cold it burns, my last breath solid ice in my lungs. I try to kick free, to claw away the glacial weight, but I can’t move, can’t open my eyes. I hover in nothing, suspended in the frozen moment between life and death, my existence an agony of thought, until, all at once, I shatter.

  The pain slackens to a background ache as my body returns. I smell the mustiness in the air, feel the closeness of the room, hear jangled whirring and shuffling like a bot about to seize up.

  My eyelids yawn of their own volition and a face looms over me, its cheeks a charred forest, its breath hot wind on my face, its nostrils deep black caverns in the sky.

  A star erupts between us, seesaws through eons, until time stops. The star pauses overhead, shines through a flurry of shimmering rainbows. I can’t look away.

  And then I remember.

  Connie.

  There was a van. She couldn’t have survived.

  I couldn’t have survived.

  Which means—I’m at Second Skyn.

  If I made it, maybe she did too.

  I need to find her.

  The monstrous face races away, becomes an ordinary man. He grunts, digs a filthy fingernail into a scab on his scalp then taps his tab and shoves up off the bed. My head flops to the side.

  He brushes through the gauzy orange drape surrounding the bed and shuffles in dirty slippers to a bank of screens perched on a sagging kitchen countertop. Wood-patterned chipboard cupboards line the surrounding walls. A medpod stands open where the fridge would be. Cables run everywhere.

  The tech smudges something into his tab. The rest of the lingering pain drains away as the bed rises to a reclining position and I can see where I am—a run-down clinic jammed into a tiny basement apartment.

  No way this is Second Skyn. There’s been a mistake. I’ve come back wrong.

  I don’t belong here.

  I throw myself off the bed but nothing happens. I’m paralyzed. Trapped.

  I try to get his attention but still can’t move my lips, or force a breath—my lungs are operating on a regular in and out rhythm I can’t grab control of. Three count in, beat, four count out.

  I know I’ve died, that I must have been recovered, my thoughts transferred into a Cortex and a new body, but it wasn’t supposed to happen like this, waking scared and in pain in a dingy basement, all alone. I was supposed to be at Second Skyn, Connie next to me. Together forever, that was the deal.

  Instead, all I can do is lay here until someone decides different.

  Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe I’m still in storage and this is my simulated neurons sparking against orders. They said I wouldn’t dream, but who knows. There have been stories. Lifetimes lived in terrifying dream realities. People come out of storage, end up wrong. I focus on the rhythm of my breathing, resist the insistent panic.

  The tech pushes back through the curtain, jabs something in my side, returns to his terminal and sits for a moment before shoving his stool back and shambling out of the room, leaving me frozen in place with nothing but artificial light and the relentless in and out of my breath to mark the passing of time.

  I don’t know how long he’s gone, but when he returns he reeks of garlic and continues to ignore me.

  I’ve already run through my non-existent escape options and I’m in the midst of cataloguing the images I can conjure from the stains on the curtain when my fingers and toes begin to tingle. Then the tingling turns to flame.

  My breathing stops. My heart thumps like a cold diesel engine struggling to turn over. It hammers in my chest and my ears and my throat and then something catches and I choke in a breath and concentrate on getting air in and out of my lungs, never so grateful for the simple act of breathing.

  This isn’t a dream, it’s worse. It’s actually happening.

  I take a deep breath, in and out. Another. Pull my lips apart and try to speak. It comes out like a death rattle.

  But at least I can move.

  “Where’s my wife?” I ask. Comes out, Wh mu wf?

  The tech ignores me.

  “Hey.” Huh.
/>
  Nothing.

  “HEY.” That one’s clear enough.

  He doesn’t even so much as twitch.

  Fucker’s pretending he can’t hear me, had me locked up down here for who knows how long.

  I’m gonna force him to acknowledge me, even if I have to beat it out of him.

  I swing my legs out, shove myself off the bed and collapse in a heap on the sticky floor. That’s when I realise I’m naked.

  The tech sighs and yells something I don’t understand. Russian maybe. An exasperated female voice answers from somewhere outside the room.

  A moment later a young woman in a red and black tracksuit and bottle-blonde ponytail scowls into the room. Each of them takes an arm and they heave me back up to the bed, dump me in tangled pool of limbs. The tech leaves, muttering, and the woman scrapes the legs of the metal stool across the floor to my bedside, gazes at my naked skyn with the detached appraisal of a coroner.

  She licks her lips and says something in Russian. When I respond with a frown, she rolls her eyes and punches at her tab until her words make sense.

  “What is your name?” she asks, bored.

  “Where’s my wife?” My mouth turns it to an odd smear of consonants and drawn out vowels.

  “What is your name?” she repeats.

  “Finsbury Gage.”

  She looks down at her tab and furrows her narrow forehead. “No.”

  “It damn well is.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  What? My face still isn’t working properly, but my look of confusion must be clear enough, because she says, “This restoration isn’t authorized on that name.”

  “It has to be. It’s my name.”

  “Not if you want to stay in that body,” she says, voice dripping with impatience. “We will return to your name, maybe it will come to you. What is your hometown, mother’s maiden name, first grade teacher and your first pet?”