“Here, take this, it’ll put the rosy back in your cheeks.” He handed the young man an oblong pill, and looked him up and down. He was pale, shaking and clearly in the throes of surrogate sickness.
“Groffle… kleghm… noble…” The boy uttered a few meaningless syllables. Tenison chuckled, an ugly sound, which was something he had never been aware of himself.
“Now, now, you’ve got to learn to crawl before you can sprint. I wouldn’t recommend speaking until we get to the language graft.”
He took the boy by his limp wrist and held his palm out flat. An impressive stretch of drool had made it from the boy’s mouth all the way to his knee before the motion of Tenison’s hand finally broke it. He put the pill in his hand and handed him a metallic mug, watching him handle it clumsily like an ape might do. He then helped him raise the pill to his mouth and tip the mug to his lips. The boy gave him an irritated look and jerked his hands away from the doctor, spilling half the contents of the mug.
“Fine, fine, you want to do it yourself. Be my guest.” He snorted involuntarily and swung around in his swivel chair to collect the chart from the desk behind him. He spun back around once he had the chart in hand to find that the boy had managed to get the pill down. Good, that meant he was no tourist and this one would be a quick procedure.
“This body doesn’t seem to be taking too kindly to your animus. It’s trying to reject it as we speak, much like it would a new heart, or liver. That pill will help it to integrate you much faster.”
He looked the boy in the eyes; they reflected pure, dumb, animal fear. The kind a dog would have after it’s been struck by a vehicle, and hasn’t quite realized yet, in flailing bloodied incomprehension, that two of its legs are broken. This was quite natural; he saw it a hundred times a day working as a slip conductor at the clinic.
“Now that pill should be working on you pretty quick, it’ll be forming neural connections between you and your new body as we go along. Soon you’ll begin to feel a little less like a newborn, and more like your old self, in a sense.”
He couldn’t help but wonder what kind of person was waiting to be unfurled into this new vessel. Up until a few moments ago it had been a complete mind-wipe. It was the ex-body of a convict sentenced to full personality jettison. In the classical days, the days before slipstreams, they would simply put those people to death; this was a much more frugal approach. Naturally this system of using convict bodies for vessels also meant that to reserve a body in a better universe, it would cost more money. This being because in universes with less crime, the demand for bodies became higher.
It really was a pointless venture, this early on in the fermentation process, to try to guess at the personality of a traveler to worlds perpendicular. They really were nothing but newborns at that point. Was this guy an opportunist? An atheist? A hobbyist? Or a nice guy that always finished last? Was he a witticist? A creative soul? Or a corporate busy body? One thing was for sure: to be able to afford the absolute best body in all of Cephlonius, he had to be loaded.
He scanned the chart. Calmin Ferxes: age 237. He had definitely done some body hopping in his time, at least a dozen times, judging from his age. That would make his job a lot easier.
“It says here your name is Calmin Ferxes. I’m Doctor Leer Tenison, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
He calculated that it would take at most about thirty minutes for those inert doe eyes to transform into something reflecting the depth and intelligence of a traveler almost two-and-a-half centuries exposed.
***
Confusion: utter, and terrifying. Who was she? Where was she? Why was she? As to who she was, at the very least she could deduce that she was probably a she, as this was one clear notion amidst the bubbles of incoherence that filled her frantic mind. As to where she was: it appeared to be an airport terminal that seemed on the constant verge of collapse. The walls shifted in and out of focus, jumping and mating with the other surroundings. She didn’t know how she had gotten there. She had vague memories of violence, but frighteningly enough none of defeat. It was suddenly clear that this was a dream, and something told her a memory as well. But this wasn’t her memory; somehow she was sure of that fact. But even more maddeningly, if this wasn’t her memory, then whose was it? Despite this nagging inconsistency something insisted that she had been there before, standing in that exact same spot, speaking with some woman who was somehow very important to her. The other woman, her name was Natsia, that’s right it was coming back to her; by the Gods was she ever gorgeous.
“I never stopped loving you.” she heard herself speaking, though not in any voice she would allow herself to recognize, incredulously, as she appeared to have no control over this dream memory. “In fact I’m loving you right now. You just can’t feel it.”
Natsia’s ever lovely almond eyes began to glisten, shimmering in the fluorescent lighting. Somehow, it was true; whoever this Natsia woman was, she was feeling very strong emotions towards her. The realization suddenly made her inexplicably sad before the dream autopilot took over again in full force.
“You see, I don’t think my love even works anymore,” She went on in a relentless monotone. A tear formed at the edge of Natsia’s eye, there rested in hesitance, then took the plunge down her exquisite cheek; she bit at her lip. She didn’t know why she wanted to hurt Natsia. In fact, she didn’t want to hurt her, she wanted nothing more than to wipe away her tear with her thumb and let her hand rest there as she looked into her eyes and kissed her upper lip. But then again, something about this memory was telling the truth with every part of itself.
“####, I always thought I was doomed more than anyone else in the wor—“ Natsia finally spoke, and her voice masked sonatas. However, this did not prevent her memory self from cutting her off cold.
“Let me give you an example,” that same relentless monotone, why? Natsia looked at the ground in defeat. It looked like she would take this one. “Like if my love were a puppy and it just loved peanut butter, which would be you—“
“####, please—“ What was that name? It was the second time she had called her that. Why couldn’t she make it out?
“And you constantly encouraged it every day to eat lots and lots of the stuff. Then, after you know it’s eaten it, you wait a couple of hours, and viciously beat him when he was no idea why—“
“####--“ there it was again, that same indistinguishable syllable.
“Pavlov. That’s what it’s called. Because it has to be premeditated and regimented just right, for the psycho-whatever to—“
“Just because you turned off your heart…” she let the statement fall to the same place where her gaze rested.
“You’re not related to him are you? Pavlov, I mean. Not the dog.” She didn’t see or expect the slap that came from Natsia. Partly because she had never been so entirely cruel to anyone to have them slap her like that, also because she doubted her dream memory self saw it coming either. She touched a hand to her cheek to savor the bitter sting of the blow, and was somehow unsurprised to feel the prickled sensation of a recent shave.
“I always thought I was the most doomed person to walk the Earth. So did you, which is why we were allowed to love each other for a time. We were happy once, being doomed together. But I found out a long time ago that you’re just too fucked,” she spat this word with particular vehemence, something shockingly out of character for her, “for nature to even allow. I can’t let you hasten my downfall.”
“Woof.”
“Goodbye, ####, I hope you find your heart again. It was the one thing you had going for you, you know. It was the only thing keeping the hounds from dragging you into hell.”
“Well seeing how it was you who disarmed me, I think you owe me some sort of weapon I can use to fend them off…”
He kept talking like that, as Natsia, beautiful sad flower of his sins, Natsia disappeared into the growing crowd wiping at her face with her head turned low. He just stood there, staring at a drinking fountain talking to himself bitterly like a complete fool. He couldn’t even follow her this time, as much as he wanted to. Natsia, whose eyes were like portals to beauty that couldn’t exist in heaven or on earth because they threatened God’s vanity. Natsia who was doomed only for having a beautiful soul, he—he loved her? But his love for anything had died long ago; he had proved that much on Titan. How was this even possible?
“Excuse me.” He turned to see a blurred woman standing behind him.
“What the hell? Lady, I can’t see you.”
“Yeah, no kidding; you’re a bit fuzzy yourself.” She waved a vaporous hand in front of his face.
“I’m… getting some strange feelings talking to you. What’s your name?”
“I think I remember now. It’s ####. Yours?”
“I’m ####.”
“Fantastic.”
***
“I’ve looked into it, Brellum, it seems like they could really use a man of my exact experience on this new thing in Cephlonius.”
They sat overlooking a majestic waterfall landscape. Peaks covered head-to-toe in cherry blossom trees made up their vista for as far as the eye could see. Petals fell and pirouetted around their faces in all shades of pink and magenta like some magnificently beautiful form of precipitation.
Brellum was an ape today. He pulled a tick from his armpit and put it between his teeth. He always had a propensity for outlandish avatars. Calmin, out of the small sense of narcissism that guided all of his thoughts and actions, was his very own self that day, and he sat sipping some tea that his mind tricked him into thinking tasted of white peony.
He was particularly proud of that body; the one he had owned for the last fifteen years. He could always afford top of the line vessels whenever he slipped. This was due to the fact that his skills as a wormhole operations supervisor and engineer guaranteed him a long and profitable career. Wormholes weren’t going anywhere, and so neither was his bank balance. And as far as his bank account extended, so did his opportunities for as long of a life as he saw fit.
“Well man, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to miss you.” Brellum articulated quite comically with his oversized ape mouth. “What’s it been, ten years?”
“Fifteen, actually.”
“What’s the job?”
“We’ve made contact with some Amish sorts.” Amish was Calmin’s way of referring to AMOs, which stood for Advanced Material Objectivists. They were wizards of thought, space, and time, and they didn’t much care for technology.
“How did that come about?”
“Oh you know, some fool slip conductor dialed in randomly, got stranded. Funny thing is, we haven’t come across any missing conductors yet.”
“Shit… So what’s this Cephlonius like?”
“It’s class A, like this one. It’s carbon based with the same basic strong and weak forces.”
“Good, good, those lower class universes can really do a number on your head.”
“I’ve never had the courage to try one on for size, to be honest.”
“It’s like a sim gone completely haywire, one you can’t jack out of until you’ve adapted to the insane rules enough to make your way around.”
Speaking of jacking out, Calmin looked at the time on his fabricated wristwatch; he had a function to attend in a half an hour.
“That does sound dismal.” Calmin replied absentmindedly.
“So what did Sari have to say about all this?”
“Her?” He looked up, and his eyes rolled upwards unconsciously for a brief second. “Oh, she’ll live. Unless she goes and does something childish like kill herself.”
Brellum the ape shook his head in mild admonishment, “You know, in some ways you really are the worst kind of person.”
“Now, now my old chum, you forget, I’m just old.”
***
She was doing it again, like any woman, or child would do. She was using her tears as a sort of weapon against him. Sari was quite beautiful, ordinarily. She was tall, and slim, but with a figure that impressed even Calmin in his cynical erudition. She kept her blonde hair short, which complimented her large eyes. She herself was only fifty-eight, and still only in her second body, which was aged about twenty-four years. Calmin’s current body was going on thirty-six, but seemed as though it was only twenty-four itself, a testament to the quality of vessels he permitted himself. He often wondered if she wasn’t magnificently ugly, originally, before she bought out that fantastic new body of hers. He knew that he was no prize some two hundred years ago before his first slip.
“We have a child, Calmin!” she assaulted him through her tears. He examined her coldly, and decided that her fits made her ugly, and undesirable. There was nothing more exasperating to him in his old age than the tears of a woman.
“Yes my dear, we have a child. But you can’t expect me to feel some sort of genetic attachment to the blasted thing, now can you?” he was referring to the fact that neither of them still had their original bodies.
“Blasted thing?” Sari blinked, she was not accustomed to this level of indifference. Finally it seemed to register, and she burst into tears again, burying her face in her hands.
Calmin sighed heavily, “You know dear, would it help you at all if I voided my bowels right here and now?”
“What are you talking about?” she cried in between sobs.
“No? Then I suggest you keep your own biological excretions to yourself.” How he detested the sight of a woman’s tears these days.
***
The body of Wyatt Mott, celebrated singer/songwriter and legendary front man for the band Sol Niger, is going on auction tomorrow. Instead of gaining popularity by conforming to traditional Doom-Core sensibilities, Sol Niger derived their main influences from classical psycho-metal bands such as Cardboard Penis, Gorifice, and Saints of Chafe, and over the course of the last thirteen years has gained quite a respectable following.
The story of Mott’s indictment and consequent mind-wipe, however, are a legend completely unto themselves. It began on the date of the release of their latest album, Generation FUBAR, when hundreds of thousands of suicides began sweeping the known galaxy. It was then discovered by pain staking trial and error that the cause of these acts was in fact the third track on the album, entitled Cockroach Da Vinci.
When questioned, Detective Himmler Ogunquit had this to say:
“Well it was obvious from all the tracks on the album that this one just got people off their feet… and out third story windows, under train tracks, to firing ranges…”
It appeared that Mott had managed to isolate certain subsonic frequencies that could “switch-off” the survival response mechanism in the listener’s brain. When asked how he accomplished such a feat, he could only respond:
“I heard it on the radio.”
To which top experts reply:
“Balderdash!”
Professor Kilgore Manoto had this to say:
“The idea that a simple machine could devise such an algorithm by pure chance is ludicrous to begin with. Not to mention the first law of Reciprocal Interface which states that an appliance may never bring harm to its symbiote counterpart. And if you would need any further proof that this spoiled little artist punk is lying, ask yourself this: why didn’t it force him to kill himself to begin with?”
Others have argued that the suicide frequency did not actually bring direct harm on the listeners, which would indeed poke a large hole in Manoto’s Reciprocal Interface argument, but that’s a debate for another time. Whatever the case may be, there is a federal recall on all copies of the album in question. Anyone caught with the album after the three month recall deadline will be mind-wiped.
On the brighter side, the auction of Mott’s body promises to be a spectacular event. Musicians from all walks of life are pouring in through slip clinics to get a shot at the body. When asked why he was planning on bidding at the auction, one man had this to say:
“The muscle memory in those fingers… and that voice! It’s a dream come true! I hope I can afford it!”
