Lost Time: Part 1 [Second Skyn]

by Boyes, Damien

  I steel myself and climb up into the Sküte and my stomach drops when it rocks on its single wheel to compensate. The Sküte waits while I slowly buckle myself in and when I give it my address it glides forward and up the ramp. The gyroscopes pull the pod forward to compensate for the momentum and I instinctively suck in a breath and brace myself on the dash.

  I have to get a hold of myself. It’s a Sküte. I’m perfectly safe.

  Nothing is going to happen.

  I roll up and out of the garage and the afternoon glare bakes instantly through the glass. April and it’s already summer. The AC rockets on and the windows dim.

  We glide through the open rear gate where the Purity Party-rallied protesters are waiting. They’re peaceful, but their homemade signs call me a Xero and a Sudo and a Bit-Head and a Freak and a bunch more words that all mean the same thing: that I’m less human than they are.

  The thing is, they might even be right.

  Across the street a loose association of people protest the Purity Party protesters. It’s nice to see someone’s on my side. There’s fewer of them, but least their signs are spelt correctly.

  We merge out into the commuter lane and pick up speed. My heart rate inclines noticeably and I squirm on the hard plastic bench, flinching as every car passes. Closing my eyes at anything bigger.

  I need to relax. Skütes are perfectly safe. Their accident rate in nearly 0%, but every time it makes a minor course correction I see myself helpless as the van rolls over us.

  Think about something else.

  I touch the dash let the feeds cycle. Union Forces are still dropping people for bots. Fate announced its 30th partner-country and the Ancestor Program will launch in Belarus next year, joining the other countries that have signed their citizens up for guaranteed virtual immortality instead of finding the budget to pay for life-extending reJuv. And Hawkson is pushing a consumer version of the 200/20 retinal implants the Special Forces guys were deploying with five years ago. At this rate, it won’t be long before you can get bit-head without having to pay for a whole new body too.

  More reminders of how much time I’ve lost. The world’s kept moving while I skipped over six months. It’s like time travel.

  Except this was a one-way trip.

  I flip off the feeds, summon my IMP and get it to call my parents.

  Talking to them should keep my mind off the pilot’s driving. Who knows, they might even be happy I'm not dead.

  StatUS-ID

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

  SysDate

  [17:24:26. Wednesday, January 15, 2059]

  I’m soaked. There’s a puddle of water on the Sküte’s floor. My side hurts. My neck hurts. Even with the heater on full blast I’m shaking. But I’m not cold.

  Connie died. I died. Was brought back to life as an echo of myself in a dingy basement—and narrowly escaped being killed again—all within the subjective span of about four hours. No wonder I’m shaking.

  The Sküte is overloaded with noise. A half-dozen feeds chitter at me from the windscreen display: scrolling text, flashing video, all of it fighting for my attention. The loudest feed is a barbarian with a laser eye, screaming at me to join the fight in Chronophase, the most popular virt universe in the mesh. I haven’t played in two decades, didn’t even know it was still around. I reach out my quivering hand to mute the feed, to give me some quiet to think, but the Sküte won’t let me. Tells me I don’t have an authorized payment method—access to my eyeballs is the price of the ride, and the barbarian keeps right on yelling.

  I do my best to ignore it, use the dash to log into my IMP and call up my dox. I’ve got no new messages, just the running accumulation of random news and stories from my pref-list. Stuff I can’t remember signing up for.

  I wipe those, pull up my history. Everything’s different. Nothing about the Service. Or the Forces. It’s mostly games and porn and feeds I’ve never seen before.

  I open my bank records and find a single account with a little over fifteen grand in it.

  And then I remember. I’m not me anymore. This isn’t my dox.

  It’s GibZ0n’s.

  Then I notice the date: January 15, 2059.

  I haven’t been dead a few months. It’s been more than a year.

  Silence descends as the ringing in my ears drowns out the ads. My head searches for possible explanations. How could I have been in storage for—what? Fifteen months?

  But nothing comes. It’s impossible.

  Second Skyn promised a six- to eight-month restoration window from the time of recovery. But I didn’t come back at Second Skyn, it’s been way longer than eight months, and I’m not even myself. I’m Gibson Gage, a person who doesn’t really exist.

  What the hell is going on?

  I try to log off Gibson and access my account, Finsbury Gage. But the Sküte politely declines my attempts. Encourages me to sit back, relax and be marketed to.

  How am I supposed to relax when I’ve been stripped of my life, my identity, and everything I’ve ever known? When I’ve been threatened. My parents threatened—

  Shit, the guy in the alley said he’d be looking up Mom and Dad next. I need to warn them.

  Public Digicom has an ad running in one of the smaller feeds, one that’ll let me make calls. I give it Mom’s info and the display zooms to show me a massive ad of a beaming couple sharing a coffee from different time zones through their livewalls before the connection goes through. I imagine the old computer screen on the kitchen table ringing like a rotary telephone as the connection attempts and Mom walks in to answer.

  The screen tells me the call is connecting and a moment later, my mother’s face blinks on. She looks old. Like she skipped ahead a decade, her features eroded by grief. She squints as though she doesn’t recognize me, opens her mouth to tell me I’ve got the wrong number.

  I start before she can speak. “Mom, listen to me—”

  She hisses a breath and her jaw tightens.

  “Mom, it’s me. It’s Finsbury. There was an accident and I—”

  “My son is dead,” she says, her voice flat, emotion tamped down.

  “No, Mom, I’m alive. You’re in—”

  The call drops and Petey the Owl thanks me for using Public Digicom.

  I try the call again, sit through another ad then let it ring. Just when I’m about to give up, my father answers. His hair is whiter than I remember, and his cheeks deeper, but he looks like himself. There’s sobbing in the background. He doesn’t let me speak.

  “I told you the last time never to call here again. Losing our son nearly killed us. I don’t know what kind of monster you are, or what you want from us, but you are not our son. Our son is dead. We buried him. I beg you, leave us with our grief.”

  “No, Dad—” I start but the call has already dropped.

  The muscles in my neck give and my head slumps forward into my hands. A sob bubbles up from my gut and escapes my lips.

  “Are you in distress, sir?” the Sküte asks in its cartoon voice. “Shall I alert medical personnel?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, my voice hoarse. I don’t want the Sküte calling in an emergency.

  I almost ring them back but don’t. It won’t do any good. They didn’t approve when Connie and I had told them about the Digital Life Assurance. As a matter of fact, they’d vehemently opposed restoration, tried to talk us out of it, and when they couldn’t, they cut dinner short and left us in the restaurant.

  I thought when they saw me, saw I wasn’t really gone, they’d have a change of heart. I’m their only child for fuck’s sake. You’d think that would be enough to overcome their prejudice. But I know them. They’ve made up their minds.

  They’d have had a funeral. Family and friends gathered at St. Paul’s up on the hill in Bancroft. Closed casket. Calla lilies. Mom on the piano while everyone sang ‘The Strife Is Over’ or ‘Going Home.’ ‘Amazing Grace’ for sure.

  Everyone back to the house for casseroles and sand
wiches and coffee out of Grandma’s giant silver urn.

  I probably have a headstone somewhere.

  As far as they’re concerned, their son is dead, and whatever I am now is nothing more than a shadow. A perversion of the person I was. A monster with their son’s voice.

  Maybe they’re right. But I can’t think about that now. I need to get them help.

  I should call Ray but he’s local. Mom and Dad are three hours north of here.

  I have the ad call Brooke MacIsaac at the Bancroft OPP station. Brooke’s not there and I end up routed to the duty officer, ask him to send someone out and check on Susan and Stephen Gage, that they might be in danger.

  When he asks who I am, I say a friend. He presses for more and I tell him I don’t know anything else, then cut the call. How am I supposed to explain anything? I barely know who I am right now.

  Then I try calling Ray. Maybe he’ll know what’s going on.

  I give the Sküte his credentials and sit through yet another ad before it comes back to tell me that Ray’s dead.

  The news hits me in the face and lands in my lap like a dead bird. I don’t know what to do with it. I’m too numb to even feel it.

  Connie’s gone. Ray’s gone. Mom and Dad might as well be.

  And I’m helpless to do anything about any of it.

  I don’t move for the rest of the trip. My body’s stopped quivering but my head has taken over, buzzing so hard I can’t see.

  It’s only when the cold air hits me I notice I’ve stopped moving and the door’s standing open.

  Finally. I’m home.

  StatUS-ID

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

  SysDate

  [18:22:16. Wednesday, April 10, 2058]

  My building lets me in the lobby but no further. I give my name and condo number three times, but my voice pattern’s different enough the security system thinks I’m a stranger. It tells me the elevator is off limits until a tenant authorizes me, and if that doesn’t happen within five minutes, the police will be called.

  Goddamit. I live here.

  I slap my palm against the manual reader next to the elevator but my g-scan fails with a low buzz. I have to start a security override with a broad-based bio/kin match that has me singing ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ then duck-walking in circles and a final ten-minute cognitive assessment before it accepts I am who I say I am and opens the elevator. While I’m supposed to look pretty much like I used to, neither my IMP nor my building seems to think so. Even my DNA isn’t what it used to be.

  Up on the twenty-third floor, I have a shorter version of the same argument with my front door.

  The lights come on as I enter. Everything is the same as it was six months ago, when Connie and I left for Mom and Dad’s, but the place seems somehow older, foreign. Cold and clean, like a shrine. Like no one’s lived here for years.

  There’s a whirring coming from the living room and I poke my head in. The two drones quietly dusting notice my presence and stop what they’re doing, hover out of the room past me, headed back to the housebot’s base. We only had one drone when we left. The bot must have upgraded itself and printed another while I was away.

  I follow the drones to a funky smell wafting from the kitchen, exit without bothering to figure out where it's coming from.

  With the drones shut down the silence is overwhelming. It presses in on me. I don’t know what to do with my eyes, everywhere they land drags up a memory of Connie: her rogues gallery of family photos adorning the hallway, the worn corner chair where she’d sit for hours, absorbed in her work, bookended with stacks of old journals and piles of warped eSheet, and the vials of skin cream formulation she was constantly adjusting and testing, trying to beat back the persistent skin irritation on her fingers that no doctor could ever diagnose.

  It’s the same in the bedroom. Our bed is unmade, the covers frozen where they were when we left them in disarray. The room still smells like her.

  I’m surrounded by her. This whole condo a testament to exactly how driven and organized she could be, while at the same time how spontaneous and outgoing. Life with her was never boring.

  Grief and anger surge through me. My stomach clenches and my head goes light and I have to grab the doorjamb to keep from falling. My skin beads with moisture, like the room temperature has shot up ten degrees.

  The tension in my gut pulls me back to my adolescence. I squeeze my eyes shut and memories flash that are at once clearer and more distant than before, like watching someone else’s home movies.

  I was an excitable kid. Before any special event in my life—birthdays, sleepovers, public-school presentations—anxiety would steadily collect in my bowels. I'd be on the toilet for hours at a time, feeling like I had to go but not producing anything. Whenever I was singled out or embarrassed, my cheeks would erupt. Sweat would flow like someone had opened a spigot. It made for a lonely childhood.

  I didn’t have many friends. Kept to myself. Spent my time reading and listening to Dad’s old music. But then I joined the army and all that changed.

  I open my eyes and blink them clear and catch a glimpse of the gold Union crest over the five-pointed star on the Medal of Valour Connie had dug out of my old army stuff and mounted in a display.

  I never thought I’d end up a war hero.

  Those first weeks in the Forces were disastrous. I didn’t want to be a soldier, but I was eighteen, hadn’t applied myself in school. The Bot Crash was coming, but no one was calling it that yet. We just knew that jobs were drying up and robots were everywhere. What else was I supposed to do without the grades or money for an education?

  Tensions were escalating in the ice-free Arctic and in resource-rich Africa and in deluged coastlines all over the world. I signed up for the only work going and was lucky to get it.

  I was forced to adapt, to grow up. Taught myself to calm my nerves, to ignore my emotions, to detach myself from the overactive nugget in my brain that wouldn't stop losing its shit over every little thing. Eventually, I become a model soldier, and less human at the same time. With the constant emotional noise on lockdown, decisions under stress became easier, distilled to risk vs. reward, acceptable losses. My snap decisions ended with people glassy-eyed under heavy pain-blocks or patched back together with printed muscle and quick-grown skin—or in a bag on a transport home.

  They gave me the medal for not dying in the wave of attacks after the satellites were taken out. I was on base, running drone support, and we were blind. I cobbled together a way to get the drones working again without the GPS to guide them, helped get our defences back up, helped repel the enemy. The assault lasted fifty-three hours. I didn’t sleep. Barely ate. Watched my friends die. I was terrified the entire time.

  It had been the worst experience of my life.

  Until yesterday, when I watched Connie die.

  My knees buckle and I sink to the floor, my back slumped against the wall. My chest heaves and I take a deep breath, fill my lungs with the faint tang of Connie’s perfume. I look up, searching for the angular red bottle I’d replace every Christmas, and spot it perched on Connie’s dresser, the silver cap off, waiting for her to return. The dresser’s surface is a shambles of jewellery and vials of make-up. She's perfectly organized—was perfectly organized—everywhere in her life, the lab, the office, everywhere. Except this square meter-and-a-half. Proof, she’d say, she wasn't terminally anal.

  We met after I left the Forces. She’d been working for her father, representing his pharmacological empire at a long-range industry-planning conference in Hawaii. I was running security for SinoPharm, the conference host. I’d been spending most of my time at SinoPharm’s headquarters in Shanghai, managing their mostly automated security team and between the company of bots, the endless traffic, and that sterile box in the sky I'd been living in, it was an easy call to assign myself a week of light duty on the beach. It was the closest thing I'd had to a vacation in four years.

  I noticed Connie th
e morning of the first day as she strode through the labyrinthine pool area flanked by two of her aides, shuffling armfuls of paper back and forth. Actual paper. She’d tease me about that later—that the first thing that attracted me to her was the dead trees she was carrying.

  I must have glanced at her dox along with the rest of the high-profile guests, but hadn't noted her. Then the breeze caught her auburn curls and they flicked back from her head like the trail of a comet.

  My bowels tightened immediately.

  I’d had girlfriends before, flings on leave. But never felt anything like that.

  I fell in a few dozen paces behind her, called up her profile on my lenzs, and then hung back as the ward installed at the rear entrance of the main auditorium recognized her and rolled aside to let her in. Around at the front, her name was headlining the list of speakers posted at the door.

  I stood at the back and watched her present to a packed house. Something about new drug treatments to prevent metabolic diseases. I barely understood her but it didn't matter. She was stunning. Confident. Making jokes about evolution and junk food. Playing with the crowd.

  Before she’d finished her presentation I’d already figured out a plan to meet her. That night we kept talking while the staff closed the hotel bar around us, then moved poolside to order breakfast and watch the sunrise.

  We left the island together. I resigned from SP and moved back to Toronto to be with her. Less than a month later, we were married.

  That was four years ago—or five now, I guess—our anniversary had been in February. Dead for six months in the world and less than a day in my head. Which one am I supposed to believe?

  I’ve seen things—done things—that haunt me to this day. Every one of those fifty-three hours will be with me forever, but I was able to come back from it. To rejoin the normal world.