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.
Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas Page 3