Forty
FORTY
One month ago
Martim didn’t take any personal time after waking up in a new body. His client wouldn’t have, so neither could he.
The hardest part of the Process was going clean for three whole days, not even sleepstims, before recorp surgery.
At least he wasn’t expected to do anything other than safely detox during that time.
Uchi used his own ID to put Martim up in a private, five-star pre-recorp inpatient center where he was supervised all the time; he wasn’t even allowed to go back to his apartment.
“We have to make sure you’re in perfect shape. We don’t want anything to go wrong,” the director said, with caring concern. More importantly, he wasn’t going to give Martim any chance to change his mind. To lose his nerve and try to run.
The good thing about the misery of going through withdrawal was that it distracted him from thinking too hard about what was going to happen.
On the eve of the Process, the director ordered them a steak dinner.
Steak , of all things, not lab grown either, true meat from one of the few food-science facilities that offered private shipments to the wealthy.
Martim wished he had the appetite to enjoy it.
Uchi, however, waxed philosophic as he cut small cubes of meat, savoring the meal.
“There’s a quote from Epictetus that I think of often: ‘First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.’ Remember that from now on. I believe in you, Martim.”
You were made for this.
On the big day, Uchi hovered protectively by his atier’s bedside like the supportive father Martim had never had.
Before the synthtech doctor put him under, Martim’s heart was pounding so hard he thought he’d die of fear before he ever made it into the operating suite.
But when he opened his eyes twelve hours later, he felt fine.
Better than fine. There wasn’t any postsurgical pain or grogginess.
He’d felt worse after waking up from dental work.
His vision was better—as crisp and clear as imagery from a high-resolution camera, good enough for him to read the serial numbers on the monitoring unit overhead.
He could hear the beeping of machines and the footsteps of people coming and going in the hallway outside.
When he tried to move his hands and then his feet, they worked.
He felt warmth and pressure from the supportive foam under his body, but no discomfort.
When he stood up carefully, the first thing he noted, with pleasure, was that he was much taller.
The top of Dr. Lucan’s head had a bald spot he’d never noticed before.
Thea had to raise her chin to look up at him. “Is it really you in there, Martim?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” He nearly jumped at the sound of Uchi’s voice issuing from his mouth.
The bodyguard was the only person in the world who could relate to his situation, and even she took an uncomfortable step back. “This is really going to take some getting used to,” she muttered.
“Director Uchi… is he gone?” he asked.
Thea looked at Dr. Lucan, then back to Martim with regret. “Yes. I’m sorry. He wanted to make sure there was never a chance the two of you would be seen together.”
Martim waited for a reaction, some feeling of shock and grief to hit him, but everything was too strange and new. “What about my body? Can I see it?”
Dr. Lucan said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
Martim wasn’t sure either. “I want to see it,” he insisted.
Looking at his own corpse wasn’t as traumatizing as he’d thought it would be.
The synthtech surgeon had considerately closed up his skull, so he didn’t even look damaged.
I’m dead , Martim thought, but he didn’t feel dead.
He noticed, self-critically, that he’d let his original body get out of shape and put on extra weight.
Maybe the recorp drugs were modulating his emotions, but peering down at himself felt like standing in an empty apartment after moving out, feeling nostalgic but ready to move on, thinking back on all the time spent there while sighing about the paint job you never got a chance to fix.
When Dr. Lucan asked him if he wanted any special arrangements, he said no.
It wasn’t as if anyone else needed to mourn over his body.
The initial adjustment to second stage was like being in a roleplaying simgame.
The novelty of pretending to be his client carried Martim through the early days, especially since he didn’t feel fatigue or hunger.
Occasionally, he thought about food or drink, or reached for a boost or a sleepstim dose out of habit even though he didn’t need it anymore.
He wasn’t jonesing for a fix, didn’t feel shaky or sick or foggy-headed when he didn’t get one.
Whatever the doctors did to his brain during transplant was better than rehab.
After eighteen hours a day of occupying Sandbar Uchi’s chair, fielding congratulatory messages, answering questions and giving orders, and feeling like the best actor in the world, he was mentally if not physically fatigued.
Inside Uchi’s expansive three-level, high-rise residence, he consumed his nutrient gels, plugged himself into the shiny, newly installed machine that went through daily diagnostics and tune-ups, and knocked his brain instantly into sleep for four hours.
No more tossing and turning in sleepless anxiety, no more waking up to an alarm and feeling like he’d been run over by a truck.
In the morning, he’d open Uchi’s closet and grin at the cornucopia before him.
Custom-made wool suits and coats, real silk ties and scarves, cotton shirts, lableather shoes and boots. All of it fit perfectly.
This second life isn’t half bad , he thought. I could get used to this.
The horror began to set in after about seventy-eight hours, when the adjustment-aiding medications wore off.
Martim still felt as if he were playing a simgame, but one that had been going on for too long and that he couldn’t exit.
Seeing Sandbar Uchi’s square-jawed, craggy face in the mirror filled him with bewildered revulsion as he waited for the illusion to break.
Whenever he heard the director’s voice coming out of his mouth, he wanted to turn and look over his shoulder.
Sometimes, Martim felt as if he were floating above his artificial body, moving his arms and legs via remote control.
His limbs felt long and awkward and weirdly shaped.
When he remembered he wasn’t breathing and had no heartbeat, a sudden, cerebral panic would engulf him, but he felt oddly disconnected even from his own existential terror.
He would spend spells of thirty minutes or more just staring at his hands or into space, trying to feel something other than numb to the world.
He was a spirit possessing his client’s synthbody, the ghost in the machine.
He began wondering if he was real, if Dragonfly Martim had ever been a real person.
“I went through it, too,” Thea said. “PR3D.”
“PR3D?”
“Post-recorporalization depersonalization-derealization disorder. People who have time to prepare can supposedly get through it easier.”
“In other words, this is how some jarbrains lose their minds and never get them back.”
“That’s not going to happen to you. It gets worse before it gets better, but it does get better.
It did for me.” She looked him straight in the eyes—Fern Madison’s flecked hazel, Sandbar Uchi’s steel gray.
“You’re still yourself, even if it sometimes doesn’t feel that way.
And you’re doing great. Everyone thinks Sandbar Uchi made it through the Process with flying colors. You’d fool even me.”
Thea was the only one Martim could talk to about what he was going through.
In public, she treated him with the professional vigilance owed to her client, but to his surprise and gratitude, she kept watch over him even when no one else was around.
She answered his questions about being a jarbrain; she called him by his real name and assured him he wasn’t going insane.
She took away the stylus he tried to push through his own arm to see if he could make himself feel pain.
She reminded him of his old life and identity.
Martim had never thought of River Thea as warm or sympathetic, but the way she kept tabs on how he was doing without making a big fuss reminded him of Leanne, the only other person who’d ever really looked out for him.
He and Thea were two of a kind now. They occupied the only two 8G synthtech models in existence, alike in trauma and bound by conspiracy.
“You can take personal leave if you think it would help,” she told him. “A lot of jarbrains do it after they recorporalize. Just a week or two, that’s not unusual. No one would bat an eyelid.”
Martim shook his head. “The director wouldn’t take time off, not before the Board vote.”
The responsibility for helping Uchi prepare for the confirmation hearings would’ve fallen on his atier.
Martim had his past self to thank for being proactive enough to have already done a ton of work on that front, but he felt miserable whenever he thought of all the tasks and appointments on his schedule going unaddressed, all the messages going to his old ID and being returned as undeliverable. Where did people think he’d gone?
They think I’ve been fired. They think I’m a failure.
What made the deception even harder to stomach was the fact that if Uchi had fired him for being an underperformer, he wouldn’t have made any bigger deal out of it than he had when he’d dismissed his old friend Fox Wilson.
All day, Martim sat in meetings where he had to play the part of Sandbar Uchi to perfection, knowing any slipup might be noticed, and that meant publicly pretending that his own disappearance was of no major consequence.
Tide Sullivan was one of the first to visit in person to congratulate his old protégé.